{"question_id": "20230120_0", "search_time": "2023/01/20/16:36", "search_result": [{"url": "https://www.usatoday.com/story/life/2015/01/21/cold-absence-heat/22116781/", "title": "There is no cold. Only absence of heat", "text": "Betsy Price\n\nThe News Journal\n\nYes, it's snowed a couple of times and snarled the roads and made schools change their schedules and created mayhem in grocery store aisles.\n\nYes, it's dropped to the single digits and everybody has been slogging around in coats, scarves and gloves.\n\nAnd, yes, it is winter officially.\n\nBut it's not cold.\n\nBecause there is no cold. Only absence of heat.\n\n\"There's cold in the same sense that there's dark. You can't open the door to a room and have the dark spill out. Dark is the absence of light,\" says Dr. David Goldberg, a Drexel University physicist. \"If you leave your door open when the air-conditioning is on, you're not letting the cold out. You're letting the heat in.\"\n\nThe idea that there is no cold is a fundamental building block in physics and thermodynamics. Kids study the concept in school, but it often fades into the haze of all the stuff they have to master to move on and up, when they're not praying for snow days so they can ditch class and homework entirely.\n\nTulasi Nandan Parashar, a post-doctoral researcher in physics and astronomy at the University of Delaware, explains the concept of heat by starting at the atomic level.\n\n\"Everything is made up of atoms – yourself, your desk, your belt, your cellphone,\" he says. \"And atoms vibrate very fast. If they are free to move, they move around very fast. If they are in a solid state, they shake around in that position. There's random shaking of liquids, gasses and movement. It's a form of energy.\n\n\"The more shaking we have, the more energy is emitted and we call it hotter, or it has temperature.\"\n\nOr heat.\n\nThere is a limit to that shaking, though: At absolute zero, at which point scientists believe all the motion of atoms ceases.\n\nBy international agreement, scientists always use the Kelvin scale to talk about absolute zero. The Kelvin scale starts there and has no negative numbers. If you are using the Fahrenheit scale, which America does, absolute zero would be – 459.67 degrees. In Celsius, it's – 273.15 degrees.\n\nAnd while scientists have never been able achieve that low, they've come with billionths of a degree. Parashar believes it may be impossible to reach.\n\nEven if scientists can't reach that point, there's plenty of good reason to keep trying to, Goldberg says. Materials act differently at that point, with metals flowing like liquids for one thing. Researchers believe computer chips made at that temperature could do much more than current chips.\n\nAnd one group that's really interested in absolute zero is the National Institute of Standards and Technology, which is charged with time keeping, says Goldberg. A cold atom, as it turns out, is the best atom to use to set the national atomic clock, which is what time is based on in the United States. It's that agency's job to tell us exactly how long a second is, for example.\n\nPart of Einstein's Theory of Relativity says that as things move around, their internal clock runs a little bit more slowly, he said. That makes it hard to get a precise read on exactly how much time is passing. So, to have the most accurate atomic block, it needs to be the coldest atomic clock, Goldberg says.\n\nWhile scientists are working on reaching absolute zero, physicists and others aren't even sure they know what the hottest temperature is that could reached in the universe. They know that the interior of suns blaze away at millions of degrees Fahrenheit, and they believe there were some massively hot moments after the Big Bang that created the universe.\n\n\"We can make guesses at what point our science would break down at being able to measure it,\" Goldberg says. \"Think of of a 1 with 32 zeroes after it as a degree. Just an incredible number. But hotter than that. We couldn't even know how to describe temperature at that point, that's such a ridiculous number. You might as well call it a gazillion.\n\n\"So, yes, there might be a hottest temperature, but we're so far away from being able to create hat, it's almost pointless to discuss it.\"\n\nEven though in the world of science, people tend to talk about things as losing heat rather than getting cold, both Parashar and Goldberg say it's no big deal that people say they feel cold.\n\nIt's all relative, Parashar says.\n\n\"All that means is that the random thermal energy in the current environment is less than what your body is used to, and your body feels that. It's a relative term. For some fish, for polar bears, it's normal. But our normal summer would be hot for a polar bear,\" he says.\n\nIt's also true that as with many terms in this world, the world cold means several things, Goldberg says.\n\n\"Cold is one of those words that's both a sensation and as you're rightly saying, the lack of thermal energy, the lack of heat. It's two different things,\" Goldberg says. \"You can certainly say it's dark out at night, but you can't say close the door, you're letting the dark in.\n\n\"It's just a way of thinking.\"\n\nCOLD TERMINOLOGY\n\nThe idea of cold affects a lot of normal expressions. It seems to have a lot of negative connotations.\n\n• A cold fish – Someone who is reserved and doesn't seem to want to be friendly.\n\n• Stone cold – Someone who is unfeeling. The phrase shows up in William Shakespeare's \"Henry V:\" \"Cold as any stone.\"\n\n• Cold comfort – Something that offers little reward or sympathy. Shakespeare used it in \"King John:\" \"I do not ask you much, I beg cold comfort; and you are so strait / And so ingrateful, you deny me that.\"\n\n• Blood run cold – Someone who is frightened.\n\n• Break out in a cold sweat – Someone who is frightened.\n\n• Cold cash –- Actual money.\n\n• Cold feet – Someone who is afraid of doing something.\n\n• Cold shoulder –- Someone who deliberately ignores another or severely curtails interaction with them. It first appeared in Sir Walter Scott's novel, \"The Antiquary.\"\n\n• Cold sober – Someone who is completely sober.\n\n• Cold turkey – Someone who just ends a habit. It was originally drug slang.\n\n• Come in from the cold – Someone who returns to safety or shelter.\n\n• In cold blood – Someone without feeling.\n\n• Cold day in hell – Something that will never happen or is highly unlikely.\n\n• Out cold – Someone who is unconscious.\n\n• Pour cold water on – Someone who tries to dampen enthusiasm for an idea.\n\nSONGS WITH COLD IN THE TITLE\n\nSo, just imagine some physics and quantum mechanics experts were trying to make these songs scientifically accurate: \"Absent From Heat as Ice?'\" or \"She's So Absent of Heat?\"\n\n• Foreigner's \"Cold As Ice\"\n\n• The Rolling Stones' \"She's So Cold\"\n\n• James Brown's \"Cold Sweat\"\n\n• Breaking Benjamin's \"So Cold\"\n\n• Rainbo's \"Stone Cold\"\n\n• Kix's \"Cold Shower\"\n\n• Def Leppard's \"Blood Runs Cold\"\n\n• Little Feat's \"Cold, Cold, Cold\"\n\n• Stevie Ray Vaughan's \"Cold Shot\"\n\n• Paula Abdul's \"Cold-Hearted\"\n\n• Foo Fighters' \"Cold Day in the Sun\"\n\nCOLD FACTS\n\n• Coldest laboratory: In 2000, a team from Helsinki University of Technology cooled a piece of the rare metal rhodium to a 10th of a billionth of a degree above absolute zero. That made the lab briefly one of the coldest places in the universe\n\n• Coldest place on Earth: The coldest temperature ever recorded is -128.56 Fahrenheit at Vostok station in Antarctica in 1983.\n\n• Coldest city: Yakutsk, the capital of the republic of Yakutia in the Russian Far East (formerly part of Siberia) has an average January temperature is about -40 Fahrenheit and it has dipped to -83.\n\n• Coldest in North America: At Snag airport, Yukon, Canada on Feb. 3, 1947, it was -81.4 Fahrenheit. An officer there said he could follow where people had been because their breath hung in the air for 15 minutes after they had left. The puffs sometimes froze and fell to the ground, where they smashed with a tinkle.", "authors": [], "publish_date": "2015/01/21"}, {"url": "https://www.cnn.com/2022/05/06/cnn-info/vicky-white-what-we-know-alabama-inmate-disappear/index.html", "title": "Vicky White: A respected officer turned into a fugitive who allgedly ...", "text": "CNN —\n\nAt 56, Vicky White was on the brink of retiring from an illustrious career as a corrections officer.\n\n“She was a model employee,” said Rick Singleton, the sheriff in Lauderdale County, Alabama, where Vicky White worked for nearly two decades.\n\n“All of her co-workers, all the employees in the sheriff’s office, the judges, all (had) the … utmost respect for her,” he said.\n\nWhite, who was the county’s assistant director of corrections, was so well respected that “some of the older guys looked up to her as a mother figure,” Singleton added.\n\nBut despite Vicky White’s stellar reputation, the jail boss apparently helped “mastermind” a plan to flee with inmate Casey White, the sheriff told CNN on Tuesday.\n\nAfter 11 days on the run, authorities found the pair Monday in Evansville, Indiana. Casey White was arrested. Authorities say they believe that Vicky White fatally shot herself. “We believe that she may have taken her own life,” said Dave Wedding, the sheriff in Vanderburgh County, Indiana.\n\nHere’s what we know about what led up to Vicky White’s apparent transformation and death:\n\nOfficials believe the pair had a ‘special’ relationship\n\nVicky White, a widow with no children, and Casey White, a 38-year-old convicted felon and murder suspect, had a “special relationship,” Singleton said last week.\n\n“We have confirmed through independent sources and other means that there was in fact a relationship between Casey White and Vicky White outside of her normal work hours – not physical contact – but a relationship of a different nature,” the sheriff said.\n\nHe said interviews with other inmates helped confirm a personal relationship between Casey White and Vicky White, who were not related. “We were told Casey White got special privileges and was treated differently while in the facility than the other inmates,” Singleton said.\n\nInmates said Casey White “was getting extra food on his trays” and “was getting privileges no one else got. And this was all coming from her,” Singleton said.\n\nConfirmation of the relationship came from “other sources outside the detention center,” according to Singleton.\n\nInvestigators have traced the relationship back to early 2020. Casey White, who had been serving a 75-year sentence in a state prison for a series of crimes in 2015, was brought to the Lauderdale County jail in 2020 for his arraignment on murder charges in the death of Connie Ridgeway.\n\n“As far as we know, that was the earliest physical contact they had,” the Lauderdale County sheriff said.\n\nAfter the arraignment, Casey White returned to state prison. But Singleton said the officer and inmate kept communicating by phone.\n\nCasey White was brought back to the Lauderdale County jail in February to attend court hearings related to his murder charges.\n\nLauderdale County District Attorney Chris Connolly said he was stunned that Vicky White may have been romantically involved with an inmate. “I never would have thought that in a million years,” said Connolly, who spoke with Vicky White almost every day for 17 years.\n\nHe said Vicky White was “the most solid person at the jail.”\n\n“I would have trusted her with my life,” he said.\n\nVicky White funded the escape after selling her house\n\nShortly before her disappearance, Vicky White sold her home for $95,550 – less than half the current market value. County records list the total parcel value of the property at $235,600.\n\nShe also purchased a 2007 Ford Edge, one of several vehicles the pair used to flee. The Ford was found abandoned in Williamson County, Tennessee, hours after the prison escape.\n\nVicky White purchased a 2007 Ford Edge before disappearing. From US Marshals Service\n\n“Clearly lots of planning went into this,” Connolly said.\n\nDuring her time on the run, Vicky White became a fugitive with an arrest warrant in her name. She was accused of permitting or facilitating escape in the first degree, identity theft and forgery.\n\nSingleton said he believes Vicky White “was basically the mastermind behind the whole plan.”\n\n“He (Casey White) was behind bars. He really couldn’t plan too much behind bars. Personally, I think she was the one to put the plan together,” the sheriff said.\n\nBut former FBI Assistant Director Chris Swecker said he believes Casey White may have manipulated Vicky White. “This is not terribly unusual, that you have this guard falling in love with a prisoner who’s probably groomed her over a period of time,” Swecker said.\n\n“So he obviously needed her. You would think someone with law enforcement experience – an assistant director of corrections in that county – would have thought a little bit farther down the line,” he said.\n\n“She obviously lost all judgment over the last few months or so.”\n\nShe talked about retiring and going to the beach\n\nThe day Vicky White disappeared was supposed to be her last day at work, Singleton said.\n\nShe had worked at the department for almost two decades and submitted her retirement paperwork at the end of April, though the retirement papers had not yet been finalized.\n\nSingleton said Vicky White had talked about retiring for three or four months prior to her disappearance. He said she talked about moving to the beach.\n\nBut Vicky White didn’t mention her retirement to her mother, Pat Davis, the mother told CNN affiliate WAAY.\n\nVicky White used her position as a boss to violate jail policy, sheriff says\n\nAs the second in command at the detention center, Vicky White used her position to execute the escape plan on April 29, Singleton said.\n\nVicky White said she was taking Casey White to a courthouse for a mental health evaluation and would then go get medical care because she wasn’t feeling well.\n\nAuthorities later discovered no hearing or evaluation was scheduled for Casey White that day. And Vicky White never arrived at the medical facility.\n\nVideo Ad Feedback Video shows the moment an Alabama inmate escaped 03:24 - Source: CNN\n\nVicky White violated jail protocol when she removed Casey White from the detention center by herself, Singleton said. The policy required Casey White to be escorted by two sworn deputies.\n\nHer patrol car was later found abandoned in a shopping center parking lot, less than a mile from the detention center.\n\nOfficials obtained video showing the patrol car the pair left in. The video shows the car stopped at an intersection eight minutes after it left the jail. The intersection is about two blocks from the shopping center parking lot where the car was later found abandoned, Singleton said.\n\n“It’s obvious from the evidence we have gathered that this was not – that he didn’t kidnap her or force her or anything as far as in the car once they left the facility,” Singleton said.\n\n“She scheduled the van transport that morning, made sure all the other armed deputies were out of the building and tied up in court. Knew the booking officer wouldn’t question her, the assistant director when she told her she was going to take him to court and drop him off with other employees,” the sheriff said.\n\n“She arranged – purchased the getaway car, she sold her house, got her hands on cash, she went shopping, bought clothes for him,” Singleton said Tuesday.\n\nNot ‘the Vicky White we know’\n\nLoved ones and former colleagues have been grappling with a barrage of emotions since Vicky White’s unexpected disappearance.\n\nDavis, Vicky White’s mother, told CNN last week that they last spoke on April 29 – the day Vicky White disappeared.\n\n“The whole thing has been a nightmare. I just want my daughter to come home. And to come home alive,” Davis said.\n\nDavis said she had no idea about her daughter’s plans to flee with an inmate.\n\n“She would come home after work, eat supper at my house, and pick up her dog. She’d walk her dog and that was her routine every day,” Davis said.\n\nSingleton said the Vicky White who fled with an inmate is not “the Vicky White we know.”\n\n“Vicky White was a member of our family. That’s why it was so hard in the first few days to grasp that she could actually do something like this because it was so out of character for her,” the sheriff said.\n\n“In spite of what she’s done, Vicky was a friend to every one of us,” he said. “It has been an emotional roller coaster for our employees.”\n\nCorrection: An earlier version of this story had an outdated value for Vicky White's home; the most recent value was $235,600. It also included the wrong age for Connie Ridgeway; she was 59 when she died.", "authors": ["Alaa Elassar Holly Yan", "Alaa Elassar", "Holly Yan"], "publish_date": "2022/05/06"}, {"url": "https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/columnists/dave-bangert/2018/04/05/bangert-waiting-climate-change-fake-news/490135002/", "title": "Bangert: Waiting for a climate change on 'fake news'", "text": "WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. – The end of snow. What about the time The New York Times reported that it wasn’t going to snow again in New York City?\n\n“That’s fake news,” came the voice, shouted Wednesday night from the back of the room in a standing-room-only portion of a packed Purdue Memorial Union North Ballroom. “I mean, it’s pushing an agenda.”\n\nThe pause that followed the question was awkward, for sure.\n\nBut it made the point, in its own way, about media trust and today’s consumers of news that C-SPAN founder Brian Lamb and Susan Page, Washington bureau chief for USA TODAY, already had been circling during an hour-long Q&A, part of the inaugural “Center for C-SPAN Conversation,” hosted by Purdue’s Center for C-SPAN Scholarship & Engagement.\n\nMinutes earlier, Lamb, a Purdue grad who turned C-SPAN into an unfiltered look at congressional action, had zeroed in on the state of the media coverage and media expectations in the age of Donald Trump, using Page’s reporting in print and frequent appearances on TV and radio broadcasts of various stripes as a baseline.\n\n“In all seriousness, I turn on Fox News and watch it and then I turn on CNN or MSNBC, they’re two different planets,” Lamb said. “It’s not just that they’re for or against. They’re just talking about two different worlds. … How can you go to all of them and still survive?”\n\nPage’s response: She considered herself more of a reporter and analyst than a commentator.\n\nStill …\n\n“So, I go on Fox and say what I think about things, and I get all this hate-Twitter from people who think I’m very liberal,” Page said. “Then, I go on MSNBC and I say exactly the same things I said on Fox, and I get all this hate-Twitter from people saying I’m very conservative. After MSNBC, they say I love Trump. After Fox, they say I hate Trump. And I’ve said the same thing on both channels.\n\n“They really are very different versions of the truth.”\n\nIn other words, it’s all in what we hear.\n\nBetter yet, it’s what we assume we hear and think we know.\n\nBangert:Rokita? Messer? Braun? No, Joe Donnelly says biggest opponent will be Koch Bros.\n\nAwards:Purdue’s Roxane Gay, best-selling author, awarded Guggenheim Fellowship\n\nBangert:A new mission, a new inventory for Lafayette’s perpetual garage sale\n\nAfter a few uncomfortable beats of not knowing what to say about the fake-news claims about snow-less Manhattan winters from now on, Lamb pressed ahead to other audience questions and comments, most of which continued to poke around at questions about media trust and presidential tweets about “fake news.”\n\nIn the back of the room, though, smartphones were humming, courtesy of that guest WiFi at Purdue.\n\nWait, The New York Times said it wasn’t going to snow again?\n\nWell …\n\nPublished Feb. 7, 2014, under an “Opinion” banner and a “The End of Snow?” headline, the piece by Porter Fox – features editor at Powder magazine and the author of “Deep: The Story of Skiing and the Future of Snow” – dissected the situation leading up to the Winter Olympics that year in Sochi.\n\nThe upshot: Test events in the Russian city had been canceled the February before because of 60-degree temperatures and browning slopes. That led to a study by a professor at the University of Waterloo in Ontario. The researcher supposed that, with an increase in the average global temperature of 7 degrees Fahrenheit possible by 2100, only six of the 19 cities that had hosted the Winter Olympics up until that point would be cold enough and snowy enough to host the games again in 2100.\n\nFox fretted about what warming patterns could mean for ski resorts in the U.S., based on similar models: For skiers, the prospects of disappearing snowpack and closed black diamond runs weren’t pretty.\n\nThat’s what the opinion piece, buy its global warming message or not, said.\n\nBut here’s what stuck, four years later, for that voice in the back of the North Ballroom: No more snow in New York City, says The New York Times.\n\nThere’s plenty of that to go around, really. And from both sides of the aisle.\n\nThe past week has been a bit of a case study, provided by Adam Wren, an Indianapolis-based writer who has been trolled on social media by those on the left since Politico published his March 30 piece, “My 72-hour safari in Clinton Country.”\n\n“I told them I had traveled here to take the political temperature of Clinton Country,” Wren wrote, setting up a supposed deep dive into a part of Brooklyn that turned out strong for Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election, looking for someone who regretted not voting for Trump. “This place, I explained, seemed to be the epicenter of liberal consensus.”\n\nIn the land “where card-carrying members of the East Coast elite shop for groceries,” he said high in the article, “I wasn’t welcome to roam a single organic-mango punctuated aisle unless under the supervision of a co-op member.”\n\nLesson No. 1: Satire is hard. (Wren got ripped, early and often, by those who weren’t in on the joke or simply thought it fell short.)\n\nLesson No. 2, as Fly-Over Country already knows: It’s not fun to be painted with the broad brush by a parachuting reporter on an anthropological mission into the heart of a red state.\n\nThere’s nuance in them, there hills … and plains and backroads and beat-up factories and whatever.\n\nIndiana wound up on a side of that broad brush again last week, when “Will & Grace” creator Max Mutchnick sent copies of John Oliver’s “A Day in the Life of Marlon Bundo” to every elementary school library in the state.\n\nOliver’s book – a parody of “Marlon Bundo’s Day in the Life of the Vice President,” by Mike Pence’s daughter, Charlotte, and his wife, Karen– turns the children’s story about the Pence family’s pet rabbit into an LGBT-themed story of love and tolerance. It also was some Grade A trolling of the vice president and his view on gays and lesbians.\n\nMutchnick’s explanation: “Mike Pence has had an enormous platform in Indiana, and as it relates to gay people, he’s used it to spread a message of intolerance. By donating these books, I hope to counter those efforts and provide positive role models and a story of inclusion for children in Pence’s home state.\"\n\nWhat title Mutchnick plans to send to the elementary schools of New York City, which produced Donald Trump, wasn’t immediately clear. Whether Mutchnick had a good read on Indiana, where Pence’s views had his re-election chances on the ropes in 2016 until Trump saved him, wasn’t immediately clear, either.\n\nI don’t know, maybe that’s what a four-year-old opinion piece in the New York Times about the potential death of the ski industry meant for the ingrained climate change denial harbored in the back of the Union ballroom.\n\nTwo different planets.\n\nWednesday night, Lamb and Page groaned over the numbers released this week in a Monmouth University poll, in which 77 percent of Americans believe traditional major TV and newspaper media outlets report “fake news” at least occasionally. That’s up 63 percent who believed that last year.\n\nThey asked themselves whether there were ways back to accept truths at a time both described as the most unusual in their long careers spent covering presidents.\n\nNeither had a solid answer, beyond more shoe leather spent trying to report, explain and put together pieces of what’s happening. Keep working to earn that trust.\n\nThat’s not going to be easy when trust depends more and more on which version of the truth people assume you’re telling.\n\nReach J&C columnist Dave Bangert at 765-420-5258 or at dbangert@gannett.com. Follow on Twitter: @davebangert.", "authors": [], "publish_date": "2018/04/05"}, {"url": "https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/border-issues/2021/01/22/biden-suspends-new-enrollments-under-remain-mexico-policy/3772380001/", "title": "Biden suspends new enrollments under 'Remain in Mexico' policy", "text": "NOGALES, Mexico — Horns blared from a speaker and filled the living room with banda music. Elena Ramirez kept a close eye on the stove, occasionally stirring the few dishes cooking on the burners.\n\nNext to her, Antonia Castillo improvised, using two large metal containers and a heavy strainer to make coffee, straining the boiling water from container to container over the sink.\n\n\"Ni que Starbucks ni nada,\" Ramirez said: Starbucks doesn't have anything on Castillo's coffee.\n\n\"Anytime before going out, she always says, 'Let's drink coffee.' I'm really gonna miss drinking coffee with her and sharing breakfast with her,\" Ramirez added.\n\nOn the menu for this morning: chilaquiles in a creamy red sauce, eggs scrambled in a tomato sauce, and beans.\n\nThe two women worked seamlessly around each other. They've had plenty of practice.\n\nCastillo fled violence in Honduras to seek refuge in the U.S., and has been in Nogales just under a year. U.S. border officials sent her with her 15-year-old daughter here, a city she had never set foot in before, under the Migrant Protection Protocols, also known as \"Remain in Mexico.\"\n\nRamirez arrived in Nogales two months later, fleeing violence in the Mexican state of Guerrero after she denounced a cartel member of assaulting her. She uses an alias out of fear that the people she fled will find her here.\n\nShe had also hoped to claim asylum in the U.S. But Ramirez and her 13-year-old son arrived here after President Donald Trump's administration shut down asylum processing at the border in a bid to stop the spread of COVID-19.\n\nWith nowhere to go and without any friends in Nogales, Ramirez turned to Castillo, who she met at a migrant aid center. At the time, Castillo had been living with two other Honduran women and their two children, who she had met on the journey to the border.\n\nA few weeks later, the four women and their children moved into an apartment on the city's north side, just a few blocks from the border fence that separates Nogales from its twin city in Arizona. They pay what they can, usually with money from relatives living in the U.S., who are willing to take them in if they make it to the country.\n\nCastillo and Ramirez have forged a close bond. As the two eldest in the group of nine — five women and four minors — living in the apartment, they have become motherly figures.\n\nThe two women have built a sense of community and family in a place far from home, and far from where they envision their future, in the United States.\n\n\"Each day is an adventure in this house, in this home. That's how we wait for asylum, thanks be to God,\" Ramirez said. \"At least right now, because at first, God had to tell me 'Look, here's your new family so you can have patience, because this will take a while.'\"\n\nAs President Joe Biden's administration considers what to do about the nearly 70,000 asylum seekers that the U.S. government sent to Mexico under the Migrant Protection Protocols, migrants such as Castillo are already thinking of a life beyond the hardships they face at the U.S.-Mexico border.\n\nThat also means having tough conversations and the possibility of saying goodbye to people, like Ramirez, who they have grown close to during their time in Mexico.\n\n\"I will miss her company a lot. Here we have ourselves; I tell her that we're like sisters,\" Castillo said.\n\n\"I would like to be able to meet up on the other side, all of us. Hoping that God will allow us to reunite and possibly give us the opportunity to even share a home on the other side,\" she added.\n\nPolicy was launched two years ago\n\nThe U.S. Department of Homeland Security, in partnership with the U.S. Department of Justice, rolled out the Migrant Protection Protocols on Jan. 29, 2019, at the San Diego-Tijuana border region. It was one in a series of tools that President Donald Trump's administration implemented to crack down on asylum and unauthorized immigration at the U.S.-Mexico border.\n\nTop officials such as former acting Homeland Security secretary Chad Wolf described it as a \"game-changer.\" An agreement with the Mexican government has allowed U.S. border officials to send back more than 70,000 migrants to Mexico under the program, according to an analysis by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University.\n\nOne year ago this January, the policy expanded to the entire southwestern U.S. border and the Department of Homeland Security began implementing it in Arizona. Since then, U.S. border officials have sent back 1,464 asylum seekers to Mexico through two Arizona border cities, San Luis and Nogales, government statistics showed.\n\nThat includes Castillo and the other two Honduran women, Maira Sanchez and Alejandra Ramirez (unrelated to Elena Ramirez). The Arizona Republic interviewed the three just days after the U.S. sent them to Nogales, Sonora, on Jan. 27, 2020.\n\nAlejandra Ramirez, 21, the youngest of the three, described the challenges in adapting to the frigid winter weather in the city. Her son Matias, just eight months old at the time, was recovering from a respiratory infection.\n\n\"My son was shaking from the cold earlier and I felt very bad, so I laid down next to him and he fell asleep,\" she said. \"But it has been difficult because where we lived it wasn't very cold, it's hot year-round.\"\n\nFast forward one year later, their situation, though still uncertain, has been a bit more stable as they've found a way to adapt, the three women told The Republic.\n\nOriginally, asylum seekers under \"Remain in Mexico\" were expected to attend their court hearings in U.S. border cities several weeks after they were sent back across the border. Alejandra Ramirez, Castillo and Sanchez traveled 340 miles to Ciudad Juárez for their first hearing in April, just as COVID-19 cases began to surge on both sides of the border.\n\nBy then, the U.S. government had frozen all court hearings for the Migrant Protection Protocols, so border officials gave them a notice with a new date. All hearings are postponed indefinitely, so there is a chance their upcoming hearing this March may be rescheduled again.\n\nMigrant and human rights advocates are pushing for the Biden administration to immediately rescind the Migrant Protection Protocols and parole asylum seekers waiting in Mexico to the United States.\n\n\"There is great suffering here, there's great vulnerability here, and danger. And as a country we said we wouldn't do that, and we're doing it very intentionally. A lot of effort went into orchestrating all that suffering,\" said Sara Ritchie with the Kino Border Initiative, a nonprofit migrant aid center based in the twin cities of Ambos Nogales.\n\nThat is the center where Castillo and Elena Ramirez met. They provide meals, warm clothes and legal services, among other things, to deported and northbound migrants.\n\n\"What we see that is happening is that the U.S. is not upholding its very own law, and I think that is being overlooked,\" she added. \"That is being ignored purposely. And I don't think a lot of people understand that.\"\n\nFor months, top officials in the Trump administration had warned against ending \"Remain in Mexico\" or any of the other border enforcement policies they have put in place.\n\nTrump himself reiterated those warnings during his final visit to the U.S.-Mexico border as president on Jan. 12.\n\n\"If our border security measures are reversed, it will trigger a tidal wave of illegal immigration, a wave like you’ve never seen before,\" Trump said, speaking next to the 30-foot wall installed by his administration in Alamo, Texas.\n\n\"This will be an unmitigated calamity for national security, public safety, and public health,\" Trump added.\n\nOn Biden's first day in office, the Homeland Security Department announced it would immediately stop sending asylum seekers to Mexico under the \"Remain in Mexico\" policy as of Jan. 21. But the department emphasized that would only apply to new enrollments in the program.\n\nHomeland Security officials also said they would keep all current restrictions at the border in place, for the moment. Additional details for asylum seekers already waiting in Mexico would be forthcoming, they said.\n\n\"All current MPP participants should remain where they are, pending further official information from U.S. government officials.\" the department said in a statement.\n\nOn his first day in office, Biden also announced a sweeping plan to reform the country's immigration system, including boosting immigration judges and funding to tackle the asylum application backlog and resources to address the root causes of immigration in Central America, where most of the participants of \"Remain in Mexico\" are from.\n\nJake Sullivan, Biden's incoming national security adviser, told Spanish news agency EFE in December that the administration would need time to develop the infrastructure at the U.S.-Mexico border to boost asylum processing and develop COVID-19 safety guidelines before allowing any individuals waiting in Mexico to be processed at the border.\n\nMigrants are looking to Biden for help\n\nUp until Biden's inauguration day, U.S. Customs and Border Protection, the country's border enforcement agency, had continued sending migrants back to Mexico under the Migrant Protection Protocols, even though hearings have been indefinitely frozen since March.\n\nAs of April, the first full month when COVID-19 restrictions on asylum at the border began, the U.S. government sent back at least 5,493 migrants to Mexico under the Migrant Protection Protocols, CBP statistics showed.\n\nData from TRAC showed that increasingly more of those migrants had been from Cuba, Venezuela and other parts of South America, although the program originally was intended for migrants from the Northern Triangle countries of Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador.\n\nGeovel Samá, 24, a Cuban migrant, was returned to Mexico through Arizona during the COVID-19 pandemic. He fled Cuba in November 2019 because his political activism against the government had led to increased repression.\n\nHe traveled to Nicaragua and then made his way north, across multiple countries, on his own. When he reached Mexico, he made his way in December 2019 to the border city of Sonoyta, across from Lukeville, because at the time they had not yet implemented \"Remain in Mexico,\" he said.\n\nSamá spent several months in the area waiting for an opportunity to claim asylum at the small port of entry. But he got stuck in Sonoyta when the U.S. government implemented pandemic restrictions at the border in March.\n\nThe city, which lies along a well-known drug- and human-smuggling corridor, presented lots of risks. During his time there, a group of men robbed him of his remaining money, Samá said. He filed a police report, and that allowed him to get a humanitarian visa.\n\nThe constant exposure to extortion and violence along Mexico's border cities is one of the main reasons why migrant advocates want the incoming Biden administration to immediately end \"Remain in Mexico.\"\n\nIn December, Human Rights First, a nonprofit human rights group, updated their list documenting instances of violence, kidnapping and extortion of asylum seekers sent to Mexico under the Migrant Protection Protocols in the past two years.\n\nThere are now over 1,300 entries. Kennji Kizuka, a senior researcher who helped compile the list remotely by reaching out to shelters, attorneys and migrants themselves, said the true number is much higher.\n\n\"The reason why we want to update it, of course, is to just have more up-to-date information about what happened to people,\" he said. \"But also in the hopes that the incoming administration will understand the gravity of the problems that they're facing, and in particular, just how dangerous the Migrant Protection Protocols have been.\"\n\nWary of those risks and the possibility that criminal groups would use force to recruit him, Samá said he crossed the border illegally into Arizona on July 10.\n\nHe walked for eight hours in the Sonoran Desert, when daytime temperatures hover over 110 degrees Fahrenheit, and without water, a situation that has contributed to the discovery of over 300 migrant remains in this particular stretch over the past 20 years, according to a mortality map managed by the nonprofit aid group Humane Borders.\n\n\"My intention was to find immigration, that is what I wanted,\" Samá said. \"But I walked a lot because where I crossed, I'm not sure if they couldn't see me, or if it was too far. So I kept walking up because I didn't want to stay and wait.\"\n\nA Pima County Sheriff's deputy eventually found him walking along a road and called the Border Patrol. He spent his 24th birthday in detention, he said. Agents sent him to Nogales under the Migrant Protection Protocols three days later.\n\nIn the city, the humanitarian visa he obtained after he was robbed has allowed him to work, and to apply for temporary residency in Mexico. Still, Samá said it's a struggle, and he depends on nonprofits like the Kino Border Initiative for support.\n\nOver the past few months, he has closely followed election developments on social media. Biden's victory, and his promises to end the Migrant Protection Protocols have given him hope.\n\n\"I hope God allows everything to go well and that he truly does everything he promised, because it's not just me, many migrants are struggling,\" he said.\n\nThat hope is shared by thousands of other migrants waiting along the U.S-Mexico border, even though that could lead to some difficult decisions in the lives they have built in Mexico in the meantime.\n\nOsbaldo Estupiñan Garcia also fled political repression in Cuba. U.S. border officials returned him to Nogales on Jan. 3, 2020, after he spent three months waiting for his chance to claim asylum. He was among the first migrants enrolled in the Migrant Protection Protocols in Arizona.\n\nOne year later, his life had changed drastically. He spoke to The Republic from the home he has shared for the past seven months with his girlfriend, who is from Nogales, and her two children.\n\nWith the prospect of leaving Mexico soon, Estupiñan Garcia and his girlfriend have started talking about their next steps. He remains committed to seeking asylum in the U.S. and helping his family back in Cuba. His girlfriend has started looking into getting a U.S. visa.\n\nAs he waits for his day in court, whether it's from his hearing scheduled for March or if Biden acts before then, he said he refuses to lose hope.\n\n\"You never lose the faith,\" he said. \"What does happen at certain times is that you feel demoralized. You think that it feels more difficult and farther away. You see the moment get farther away, but you know it's there, so you never lose faith.\"\n\nPandemic complicates ending policy\n\nAs the incoming Biden administration moves forward in its push to overhaul the nation's immigration system, COVID-19 will remain one of the biggest roadblocks to fully ending the Migrant Protection Protocols.\n\nHomeland Security officials made clear on Jan. 20 they would keep in place border restrictions, including Title 42. That policy has allowed the U.S. to turn back since March more than 393,000 migrants apprehended along the U.S.-Mexico border under an emergency authority from the U.S. Centers for Diseases Control and Prevention to prevent the spread of the virus, according to CBP.\n\nStates on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border are in particularly bad shape, as the spread of COVID-19 continues unmitigated. Border states such as Arizona, California and Texas on the U.S. side, and Sonora, Coahuila and Baja California in Mexico, continue seeing significant spikes in cases.\n\nCriteria set by the Homeland Security and Justice departments earlier in the pandemic called for the resumption of court hearings under the Migrant Protection Protocols once all 11 border states — four in the U.S. and six in Mexico — reduced the spread of the virus, which appears untenable given that infection rates continue rising.\n\nMark Morgan, the acting director for Customs and Border Protection, has been one of the most vocal critics of Biden's pledge to end the Migrant Protection Protocols. He told The Republic that resuming court hearings involved a challenging balance because of the virus.\n\n\"We need to look at what's happening globally with the pandemic, and so we need to be sure that the steps we're taking are methodical and thoughtful in balancing that very real issue with the global pandemic, but also the real issue that we need to reopen and start the process again,\" he said.\n\nAsylum seekers can check the status of their cases, or their next scheduled court hearing, online at the DOJ's EOIR Automated Case Information site, or by calling an information hotline.\n\nPending an overhaul of the program under Biden, CBP said that \"when conditions are deemed safe,\" the Homeland Security and Justice departments will issue a public notification at least 15 days before court hearings resume, with \"location-specific information\" for asylum seekers.\n\nMany migrant advocates are concerned that not all of the migrants sent to Mexico under the program will have the opportunity to have their day in court to make their claims for asylum.\n\nTRAC data showed that 27,000 asylum seekers under the program had been regularly attending their hearings before the pandemic restrictions, while 12,000 more are waiting for their first hearing.\n\nOthers have given up and gone back to the countries they were fleeing, or moved elsewhere in Mexico in search of better economic opportunities or more safety.\n\nAustin Kocher, a researcher with Syracuse University's Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, said he was concerned in particular about the quality of the data and information that the U.S. federal government keeps, which could cause asylum seekers to fall through the cracks.\n\nHe pointed to issues with the family separation policy at the border, where the lack of proper data kept hundreds of parents from being reunited with their children. Over the course of his work at TRAC, Kocher said he has found all kinds of sloppiness with data management.\n\n\"One of the just really widespread issues is the government just does not care right now about the quality of its own data, of its own record keeping,\" Kocher said, adding that it was a disservice to the public's right now what their government is doing.\n\n\"We don't know because so many of their record-keeping practices are either secretive, or they're sloppy. Or they're both, they're secretive and they're sloppy,\" he added.\n\nNico Palazzo, an attorney with Las Americas Immigrant Advocacy Center in El Paso, has similar concerns. He helps asylum seekers sent to Mexico under \"Remain in Mexico\" and says many of them either don't have access to the internet or don't know how to follow up.\n\nPalazzo, like other immigration attorneys, has been relying on social media apps such as Whatsapp to stay in touch with clients in Mexico because of pandemic restrictions and concerns. Since March, he has successfully paroled only one individual enrolled in the program into the U.S.\n\nPalazzo accused Trump of weaponizing the pandemic against asylum seekers and of creating a humanitarian crisis in border cities such as Juárez, which was also ravaged by virus. That has left many migrants in desperate situations, he added.\n\nMigrant advocates have put together recommendations for the Biden administration on how to wind down the program. One of the key points Palazzo is pushing is for the government to parole more asylum seekers and release them into the custody of relatives, rather than hold them in immigration detention centers.\n\n\"The fight against MPP has to be coupled against the mass detention of people who have committed no other crime than seeking asylum,\" Palazzo said. \"Yes, it's great to get people of out MPP. But putting them into a detention center is not the solution, putting families in family detention center is not the solution.\"\n\nActivists vow to keep pressure on Biden\n\nBack in their shared apartment in Nogales, Castillo and Elena Ramirez remained upbeat and optimistic as they sat down for the meal they cooked for the entire household.\n\nOnce everyone finished eating, they danced to punta — the traditional, percussion heavy music from Honduras — as Matias, now 20 months old, ran around the apartment, eliciting more laughter and smiles.\n\nChallenges and concerns persist. For one, the three Honduran women only have temporary status in Mexico. Sanchez, who was missing on that morning, and Elena Ramirez are the only one working. And COVID-19 remains a very real threat, on top of existing concerns over safety and security.\n\nThe four minors living in the house, the eldest of which is now 15 years old, have missed an entire year or school. Like other migrant families waiting in Nogales, they are unable to enroll their kids in school in Mexico.\n\nTheir hope is that their circumstances will change as Biden takes office.\n\nEven Elena Ramirez, who is not enrolled in the Migrant Protection Protocols because the program does not apply to Mexicans, could also see relief. Biden has pledged to end the metering policy under which she would have to wait months before getting an asylum screening.\n\n\"Truthfully, my sense of urgency, rather than being about me is more about my son. Because there are no opportunities here. By that I mean safety, which is what I've come here seeking,\" she said.\n\nAmid such hardship over the past year in Nogales, in addition to the close ties they have forged with each other, the women have found purpose.\n\nSanchez in particular has been active in advocacy work at the border. She helped organize and even spoke at several rallies in Nogales, calling on the Biden administration to resume asylum processing.\n\n\"It's important because we're helping ourselves, and because we make ourselves heard, in case they forget about us or they don't remember that they implemented this policy and they have us waiting here, separated from our families,\" she said. \"So through marches and through the work of reporters, we're making ourselves heard.\"\n\nNow that Biden has taken office as the new president of the U.S., Sanchez and the women she's grown close to vowed to keep the pressure on him until he keeps his word.\n\nHave any news tips or story ideas about the U.S.-Mexico border? Reach the reporter at rafael.carranza@arizonarepublic.com, or follow him on Twitter @RafaelCarranza.\n\nSupport local journalism. Subscribe to azcentral.com today.", "authors": [], "publish_date": "2021/01/22"}, {"url": "https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/columnists/mike-kelly/2019/06/17/rubin-carter-john-artis-what-really-happened-night/1419996001/", "title": "Rubin 'Hurricane' Carter: What really happened that night?", "text": "Editor's note: This column was first published in The Record's edition of Sunday, March 26, 2000.\n\nAlmost everyone agrees on this singular fact that tells so much, yet so little:\n\nThe killers fired their first shots without saying a single word.\n\nFrom there, the mystery that involves a man called \"Hurricane\" spread like cracks on a broken mirror.\n\nIt has been 34 years now, and people still can't agree on what happened at Paterson's Lafayette Grill. Did Rubin \"Hurricane\" Carter and John Artis brutally kill two people and fatally wound a third there on a June night in 1966? Or were Carter, then 29 and a well-known boxer, and Artis, 19 and a former high school track star who spent his days driving a delivery truck, unjustly imprisoned for most of two decades?\n\nBACK IN THE NEWS:Revisiting the Hurricane Carter murder case: Son resurrects his detective father's memoir\n\nTo study the original case records now is to walk a path littered with perplexing questions and strands of facts that have been woven into myth. At the same time, such a journey also reveals evidence that has never been challenged – and, yet, still contributes to the mystery.\n\nThat night, there were two gunmen. One carried a 12-gauge shotgun, the other a .32-caliber pistol — probably a 7-shot, German-made revolver, say police ballistics experts. Both were black. Both came in through the front door.\n\nIt was early in the morning of June 17, 1966, a Friday. The 3 a.m. closing time at the Lafayette Grill drew near.\n\nInside were three men and one woman, all white, all of them regulars at the tavern, long known as a quiet watering hole on the border between Paterson's working-class Lithuanian and black neighborhoods. The place had a television above the bar, a pool table in the middle of a checkerboard linoleum floor, and a kitchen that served up burgers and fries.\n\nTwo men nursed drinks as they sat on bar stools. On the wall above the bar and surrounded by musical-note decorations, a framed portrait photo of President John F. Kennedy looked down. Beneath Kennedy's photo sat a clock designed to look like a large pocket watch. Beneath that, crime scene photos show a shelf with three White Rose whiskey bottles nestled amid a cluster of gins, vodkas and other spirits.\n\nTo the right of the two men sat a lone woman, who got off work earlier than usual that night from her waitress job at a country club. The day before, she had managed some free time to go shopping with her pregnant daughter for baby furniture. On this night, she stopped by the bar on the way to her Hawthorne home to drop off a deposit for a trip to Atlantic City later in the summer.\n\n\"It was prom season, so she usually worked later,\" recalls the woman's daughter. \"She thought she was having an easier night, I guess.\"\n\nBehind the counter, by a cash register and a sign that announced Budweiser \"on tap,\" the bartender counted the day's receipts.\n\nPerhaps bartender Jim Oliver recognized the killers when they came through the front door from 18th Street. Maybe he just saw their guns and knew trouble was coming. Whatever his thoughts at that fearsome moment, police say, one of Oliver's last acts of life was to hurl an empty beer bottle at the killers.\n\nThe bottle smashed against the wall by the door. As Oliver turned to run the length of the bar, past an ice cooler and toward the overhead television set, a single shotgun blast from about seven feet away tore into his lower back, the 12-gauge round ripping open a 2-inch by 1-inch hole and severing his spinal column.\n\nOliver died instantly, police say. He was 51 and had volunteered to tend bar that night because his girlfriend — a widow named Betty Panagia, who owned the Lafayette and lived in Saddle Brook — had been putting in long hours as Oliver recovered from a recent hernia operation.\n\nAs Oliver fell, a $10 bill and four $5 bills scattered on the floor. The cash register drawer remained open.\n\nThe next to die was Fred Nauyoks. The killer with the pistol shot him.\n\nNauyoks, a 60-year-old machinist who had stopped by after working at a local factory before heading to his Cedar Grove home, took a .32-caliber bullet just behind his right ear. The lead slug plowed into his brain stem, killing him instantly, autopsy records say.\n\nNauyoks was well-known in the area as a billiard player, and his relatives remember that he went by two nicknames — \"Paterson Bob\" and \"Cedar Grove Bob.\" That night, Nauyoks' wife was in Michigan, visiting relatives. The next day, when she arrived home and was told of her husband's killing, grandson Tom Vicedomini remembers that she walked silently upstairs and donned a black dress.\n\nWith death arriving instantly, Nauyoks slumped on the bar, seemingly asleep, a cigarette still burning between his fingers when police arrived, his shot glass still standing on the bar next to cash to pay for his drink, his right foot still propped on the chrome leg of his bar stool.\n\nSeated two stools away, William \"Willie\" Marins, 42 and also a machinist, had been battling numerous health problems, including tuberculosis, police say. The Lafayette even kept a special glass for Marins to drink from so he would not spread tuberculosis to other customers.\n\nMarins, who lived nearby in Paterson, was also shot in the head by the man with the pistol. But he was lucky. The .32 slug hit him in the left temple and passed through his forehead near his right eye without killing him. He stumbled to the floor, and, he later said, played dead.\n\nHe would lose the use of his right eye, but could still describe the killers to police. He died in 1973 of causes unrelated to the shootings.\n\nThe woman was the killers' final target. And for her, court records indicate, one of the gunmen finally spoke.\n\nAs the others were shot, Hazel Tanis, 56, a waitress at Westmount Country Club in then West Paterson, was trying to hide near the front door.\n\n\"No,\" she cried, according to trial testimony from a witness in an upstairs apartment who heard a woman's scream as the man with the shotgun fired a blast into her upper right arm and shoulder.\n\n\"Finish her off,\" the man with the shotgun reportedly told his partner.\n\nAs Tanis slumped to the floor, the man with the .32-caliber pistol fired five shots at her from as close as 10 inches, hitting her four times — in the right breast, the lower abdomen, the vagina, and the genital area.\n\nMiraculously, Tanis would struggle to live another month before finally succumbing to an embolism. But during that time she would give police a description of the killers and, says her daughter, would tell in detail how she tried to beg for her life.\n\n\"'I'm a mother. I'm a grandmother. Please don't shoot me,'\" Tanis' daughter, Barbara Burns, now 55, recalls her mother telling her later in the hospital. Burns would later insist that her mother picked out mug shots of Carter and Artis, explaining: \"You don't look a man in the eyes and plead for your life and forget what he looks like.\"\n\nBut the police say Tanis chose photos of other men — hence, another thread of mystery.\n\nAt the hub of almost every aspect of the mystery, however, are Carter and Artis. That night, neither was able to provide an ironclad account of their whereabouts at the time of the Lafayette Grill killings.\n\nCarter, now 63 and a prisoners' rights activist in Canada, did not respond to numerous requests for an interview, although he has long proclaimed his innocence. Artis, 53 and a youth counselor in Virginia, reaffirmed his innocence in an interview, adding that \"my heart goes out\" to the victims' families \"but, simply stated: I'm not the one.\"\n\nMany police officers not only disagree with Carter's and Artis' not-guilty claims, but still resent being accused of railroading the two men. \"I would never be involved in framing anyone,\" said retired Paterson Deputy Police Chief Robert Mohl, 66, of Toms River, who was a detective in 1966 and played a key role in the case.\n\nThat night, cops surmise that the killers needed only a minute — maybe less — to unleash their fusillade on all the victims.\n\nLeft behind, according to the original police report, was $72 in Nauyoks' wallet, $51 in Tanis' white purse, $30 on the floor by Oliver's body, and cash in the register that \"appeared to be untouched.\" Police discovered months late that someone — but not the killers — removed cash from the register.\n\nAnd from there, other mysteries would spread like those haphazard mirror cracks — mysteries (and pieces of mysteries) that have endured for 34 years.\n\nNot even the precise time of the shootings is certain. All that's known is that someone — there is no indication whether the voice was male or female — telephoned the Paterson police headquarters at 2:34 a.m. with the message that \"people had been shot\" at the Lafayette Grill.\n\nWho were these two gunmen?\n\nWhat was their motive?\n\nWhy this bar, on this night, and these victims?\n\nIn a house a block away, the phone rang.\n\nFinally home, after a long day, a Paterson police detective with a name that bespoke a humorous irony for his profession picked up the receiver.\n\n\"It was headquarters,\" recalls Jim Lawless, now 72, retired, and living in Fort Pierce, Florida, after rising to the rank of deputy chief in the Paterson Police Department. \"They told me there was a shooting. I grabbed two guns and ran out the door.\"\n\nArmed with his .357 Magnum service revolver and a 9mm semiautomatic pistol, Lawless stepped through the front door of the Lafayette Grill only minutes later, not knowing what he might confront.\n\nThe lights were on, he recalls. Near one end of the bar, he remembers hearing Tanis groan in pain. Gazing across the room, past the pool table, Lawless noticed Nauyoks and Marins. Pools of blood dotted the linoleum. At Nauyoks' feet sat a spent shotgun shell.\n\n\"It was,\" said Lawless, \"like a slaughterhouse.\"\n\nBefore he had time to check behind the bar, Lawless heard the sirens of approaching police cruisers and an ambulance. Indeed, the scene was so gruesome that an ambulance technician would later testify that he slipped on the bloody floor. But the technician's testimony underscores a fact that has since come to hover over the killings: Cops were so lax in securing the crime scene that they were never able to detect whether the killers might have left footprints in the blood as they departed.\n\nWhat's more, police never took fingerprints at the crime scene, never photographed tire skid marks from the getaway car even though witnesses said the car screeched away, never took fingerprints from the spent shotgun shell that was found on the bar's floor.\n\n\"There was something really wrong,\" said Richard Caruso, a former Essex County sheriff's detective who was part of a team of investigators assigned by the Passaic County Prosecutor's Office to reexamine the killings in 1975. \"What's wrong with the physical evidence? How come they didn't take fingerprints?\"\n\nCaruso, now a lawyer in Brick Township and one of several members of the team who raised questions about the original police investigation, said he was eventually reassigned to \"cleaning up a file room.\" In an interview, he said prosecutors and police not only stonewalled attempts to examine the case with a fresh eye but deliberately manipulated evidence.\n\nThat night in June 1966, there was no second-guessing of the police. After Lawless entered the bar, other detectives arrived to take over.\n\nLawless had another important case to resolve — a killing in another bar that night. But at that moment, as he stood on the bloody floor of the Lafayette Grill, he did not know how the two shootings would eventually be linked in the minds of prosecutors.\n\nSix hours earlier and five blocks away from the Lafayette Grill, another bartender had been shot to death.\n\nThe death of Leroy Holloway, 48, the bartender-owner of the Waltz Inn, bore three distinct parallels to the Lafayette Grill shootings. Holloway was killed with a blast from a 12-gauge shotgun. The killer did not steal any money. And — perhaps most significant to prosecutors — Holloway's killer had a different skin color from his.\n\nHolloway was black. His killer was white.\n\nJim Lawless had spent much of the previous six hours collecting evidence and interviewing witnesses at the Waltz Inn. But unlike the Lafayette killings, the Waltz Inn case was relatively easy to wrap up.\n\nThe killer, Frank Conforti, 48, who had recently sold the bar to Holloway, had stormed into the Waltz Inn to confront Holloway about lax payments. Witnesses said Conforti and Holloway argued, and then Conforti left and went to his car.\n\nMinutes later, Conforti returned and without saying a word shot Holloway in the head, killing him instantly.\n\nPolice soon arrived, and escorted the handcuffed Conforti through a gauntlet of black residents to a waiting police car.\n\nConforti was eventually convicted of second-degree murder and spent almost 15 years in prison. \"I've lost track of him,\" said his lawyer, Joseph J. Vanecek of Wayne. \"But when he got out, he came by and thanked me.\"\n\nWhatever the motives, the clientele at the Waltz Inn and Lafayette Grill underscored a well-known fact of life in Paterson. Like much of America in 1966, Paterson was a city divided by color lines. When it came to taverns, whites had their neighborhood bars, like the Lafayette Grill, and blacks had theirs, like the Waltz Inn.\n\nThe Lafayette Grill was on what was considered a border of sorts, a line of streets and frame homes that was slowly being integrated by black and Hispanic residents. Lafayette bartender James Oliver was said to have excluded or discouraged black patrons, according to trial testimony.\n\nBut that may be more of an accident of social customs than an outright act of racism. Paterson police say the Lafayette Grill occasionally had black customers. Bill Panagia, 64 of South Hackensack, the son of owner Betty Panagia and an occasional bartender there, said he doubted there was a whites-only code, but \"every time I went in there, there were only whites.\"\n\nAdds John Artis: \"The Lafayette — the black contingent just didn't go there.\"\n\nTo go back 34 years in Paterson or many other American cities is to return to a time when America's racial crucible boiled with idealistic promise and fiery violence. Congress had passed landmark legislation to expand civil rights and social programs to eradicate poverty. But riots had erupted in Watts, Detroit — even in Paterson. And in Harlem, Malcolm X had been gunned down by three black men, one of whom was from Paterson. Newark's devastating riots were still a year away, the assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. two years down the road.\n\nIn Paterson that night, police immediately suspected that the shooting of whites at the Lafayette Grill might have been an act of revenge for Leroy Holloway's killing at the Waltz Inn. Their suspicions were not just based on a hunch, though.\n\nAfter Holloway was pronounced dead, his stepson, Eddie Rawls, went to police headquarters. Speaking to an officer, he wanted to know what was being done on his stepfather's case.\n\nThe officer told Rawls not to worry. But Rawls was not satisfied, according to trial and grand jury testimony. As he left the police station, Rawls reportedly shouted that if police didn't handle the case properly, he would take matters into his own hands.\n\nEddie Rawls was a bartender at the Nite Spot, a tavern just five blocks from the Lafayette Grill, on 18th Street. The Nite Spot was Rubin Carter's favorite hangout. The place even had a special \"champ's corner\" for the popular boxer.\n\nFor John Artis, the Nite Spot also was a favorite place to dance.\n\nFor prosecutors, this mere coming together of Rawls, Carter, and Artis became the basis for what they later called their \"racial revenge theory\" to explain the killings at the Lafayette Grill. For Carter and Artis, the theory would become one of the cornerstones of a decision by a federal judge in 1985 to free them from prison.\n\nIt was party night for Rubin Carter, and time to dance for John Artis.\n\nOn Thursday, June 16, Carter spent the day assembling boxing equipment and packing his rental car, a 1966 white Dodge Polara with blue and gold New York plates. He was scheduled to fight in August in Argentina against Juan \"Rocky\" Rivero, and this would be his last chance to let loose before training camp.\n\nCarter's boxing career had suddenly reached a plateau. After four years of success, Carter lost a 1964 fight for the middleweight title. He would win only seven of his next 14 fights, losing six and tying one.\n\nBy Monday, he planned to be at a former sheep farm in Chatham, where he would begin the harsh physical regimen of running, weight lifting, and boxing that he would need to put his career back on track.\n\nCarter had dinner at his Paterson home with his wife at about 5 p.m., then put on an outfit that surely would attract attention — black pants, red vest, and white sport coat. With his shaved head and bushy goatee, he was one of the most recognizable residents of Paterson.\n\nArtis was also looking to have a good time. Two years earlier — June 17, 1964 — he had graduated from Paterson's Central High School, with an offer of a track scholarship to Adams State College in Colorado. One of his best friends was also heading to Adams to play football.\n\nBut only five weeks after graduation, Artis' mother died of kidney disease. Artis, an only child, remembers being devastated. \"It was pretty difficult,\" he recalls. \"My father and I were trying to regroup.\"\n\nArtis put off college and got a job driving a truck for a local food deliverer. He played semi-pro football with the Paterson Panthers and kept in shape. But most nights, he headed for a club where he could show off his dancing skills. \"My nickname was 'Dancing Boy,'\" said Artis.\n\nBy 1966, he felt he was ready to try college. \"My mom only got to the third grade, and my dad only made it to the ninth grade,\" said Artis. \"I would be the first to go to college.\"\n\nPlus, Artis was worried about being drafted into the Army and being sent to Vietnam. He had recently lost his student deferment and had been reclassified as 1-A for the draft. If he went to college, he wouldn't be drafted.\n\nOn the night of June 16, Artis put on a light blue mohair sweater with his initials monogrammed on the breast, light-blue pants, and gold suede loafers.\n\nWhat happened with Carter and Artis over the next six hours is open to all manner of speculation — even today.\n\nCarter and Artis, a decade apart in age, knew each other — both acknowledge that. But both say they did not know each other well. Prosecutors, however, say the two had spent considerable time together before June 16.\n\nPaterson's current mayor, Marty Barnes, who knew Carter and Artis in the 1960s, said the two \"didn't really hang together.\" Of Artis, Barnes said, \"I always called him a wannabe. He was a little too young.\"\n\nBy 1966, Carter was well known in Paterson — and not just as a boxer. Like many black athletes, he had begun to speak out on race relations.\n\nIn 1963, Carter went to Washington, D.C., to demonstrate for civil rights and to hear Martin Luther King Jr.'s \"I Have a Dream\" speech. In 1965, however, Carter opted not to march with King in Selma, Alabama, because he feared he couldn't adhere to King's strategy of non-violence.\n\nPerhaps most controversial, however, was a 1964 profile of Carter in the Saturday Evening Post just before his middleweight title fight. Among other things, Carter reportedly suggested to a friend that they \"get guns and go up there and get us some of those police.\"\n\nPaterson police would remember that.\n\nCarter was at the Nite Spot tavern, according to trial testimony, when Eddie Rawls arrived with the news of his stepfather's murder.\n\nWhat happened next is open to speculation. Prosecutors insist that Carter started talking about guns that had been stolen from him a year earlier — and that he suddenly wanted to find them. Carter denies this.\n\nCarter notes, however, that after the news of the murder of Rawls' stepfather, many blacks talked of a possible riot or some sort of trouble — \"a shaking,\" as Carter described it in his grand jury testimony.\n\nWhat both sides agree on is that nothing even remotely resembling a riot took place.\n\nSometime between 2 and 2:30 a.m., Carter and Artis found themselves together at the Nite Spot. Artis said he needed a ride home and remembers Carter telling him he had to \"earn\" his ride — meaning that Artis would have to drive Carter home, too.\n\nArtis recalls that he nodded. Carter flipped him the keys to his white Dodge.\n\nWhat emerged next is a tale with two distinct plots — or, as U.S. District Court Judge H. Lee Sarokin said in his landmark 1985 decision overturning Carter's and Artis' convictions, \"two dramatically different versions of events\" with evidence that is \"often conflicting and sometimes murky.\"\n\nWhat is known is that within minutes after Paterson police arrived on the gruesome scene at the Lafayette Grill, they were told by witnesses that the killers had escaped in a white sedan with blue and gold license plates.\n\nA radio call went out to Paterson police cruisers to be on the lookout for a white car. But as with other bits of evidence, this radio call was framed by a simple problem: What time did the call go out?\n\nEven today, no one is entirely sure.\n\nPolice say that just after the 2:34 a.m. call to headquarters about a shooting, a police cruiser heading toward the Lafayette Grill spotted a white car with New York license plates, followed by a black car, speeding along 12th Avenue in a direction that might have been heading toward Route 4.\n\nInstead of turning the corner and chasing the cars, the cruiser took a roundabout route by the Passaic River in what police later explained was an attempt to cut off the white car near the Paterson-Elmwood Park border. When the police cruiser arrived at the border, no car was in sight.\n\nDrifting slowly down Broadway back into the center of Paterson, the cruiser, driven by Sgt. Theodore Captor, again saw a white sedan with New York plates — Carter's car, with Artis at the wheel. Another man, John Royster, who has been described in trial records as something of a local barfly, was in the passenger seat. Carter was in the rear, lying on the seat.\n\nCaptor, who recognized Carter, politely told the three men that there had been a shooting, and then let Artis drive away. Captor then headed to the Lafayette Grill, where witnesses told of a getaway car with blue and gold license plates and a distinctive butterfly design for the rear lights.\n\nCaptor says this description fit Carter's car. He and his partner returned to the streets to try to find it.\n\nAround 3 a.m., Captor found the car — this time, with only Artis and Carter inside — at Broadway and 18th Street. Other police cars pulled up, and Carter and Artis were ordered to follow a police convoy back to the Lafayette Grill, about 10 blocks away.\n\nAgain, here is where the tales by the prosecution and defense split into distinctive sets of facts.\n\nWitnesses, including shooting victim Willie Marins, described the gunmen as light-skinned, thin, black men, both about 6 feet tall, wearing dark clothing, and with one having a pencil-thin mustache.\n\nCarter is 5-foot-7, Artis 6-foot-1. Carter was stocky and muscular, Artis angular, but not thin. Both have dark skin. Neither had a pencil-thin mustache, but Carter had a thick goatee.\n\nAnd both were dressed in light-colored clothing.\n\nBut at the scene, police were interviewing two other witnesses who would play integral — and controversial — roles in the case.\n\nPatricia Graham Valentine, then 23, and a waitress at a delicatessen across town near the courthouse, lived in an apartment one floor above the Lafayette Grill. Valentine says that when she heard gunshots and a woman's voice scream \"no,\" she looked out the window and saw two black men escape in a white car. The other witness, Alfred Bello, also 23, told police he was on the sidewalk outside the bar when two black men left the Lafayette and sped away in a white car.\n\nCarter's car seemed to match Valentine's and Bello's descriptions of the getaway car — right down to the distinctive butterfly description of the taillight chrome that both reportedly gave to police. But, again, there was one important difference.\n\nValentine and Bello said the rear lights lit up across the back of the getaway car. The taillights on Carter's Dodge Polara had a butterfly chrome setting, but they lit up only on the edges, not across the back. Another type of Dodge — the Monaco — had across-the-back butterfly lights.\n\nThis distinction — and a later reference in grand jury testimony by Valentine to a Monaco — later prompted Detective Richard Caruso to wonder if police might have been coaching witnesses on the scene to frame Carter. Caruso even made note of his concerns in a secret file — later dubbed \"The Caruso File\" — that was a subject of a bitter legal fight after Carter and Artis were convicted again for the Lafayette Grill killings in 1976.\n\nThe file was never made public because Judge Sarokin stepped in and set Carter and Artis free. But Caruso agreed to talk about its contents, and The Record obtained affidavits corroborating his findings.\n\nAmong other concerns, Caruso believed Valentine had changed her testimony to the police — \"hardened it,\" in police lingo — to adapt her description of the getaway car to Carter's rented Dodge. What also struck Caruso as being especially odd was that the police never bothered to photograph tire skid marks even though Valentine and another witness told police the getaway car screeched as it sped away. If the police were able to obtain photos of tire tracks, they could have compared them to Carter's car, said Caruso.\n\nWhat's more, even though police said they searched Carter's Dodge, Caruso discovered that they did not test the carpet for possible bloodstains from the killing scene. Caruso also noticed that shooting victim Willie Marins, who failed to identify Carter — even after Carter was brought to the hospital where he was being treated — was, in fact, familiar with Carter's face and should have recognized him.\n\nAnd finally, said Caruso, when he and others tried to question Valentine and other witnesses, they discovered that a Passaic County prosecution detective, Lt. Vincent DeSimone, may have been coaching them in ways that would implicate Carter.\n\n\"There was even a code word that we had to use that would indicate that a witness would be free to talk to us,\" said Caruso. \"The code meant that we had been cleared by DeSimone.\"\n\nDeSimone died in 1979. But his son and others doubt that he engaged in such tactics. \"The people involved in the prosecution are people of the utmost integrity,\" said Passaic's current prosecutor, Ronald Fava. \"They would never do anything unethical, much less participate in a framing.\"\n\nThe questions of police tactics would soon come to dominate almost every syllable of testimony by the other witness police encountered outside the crime scene, Alfred Bello — in part because of what he was doing on Lafayette Street at 2:30 a.m. when he lived several miles away in Clifton.\n\nBello told police he was walking down Lafayette Street to buy a pack of cigarettes when he heard shots and saw two black men with guns leave the bar and jump into the white getaway car with blue and gold plates and butterfly taillights.\n\nActually, Bello later admitted that he was trying to burglarize a nearby warehouse with a partner, Arthur Bradley, when he went for cigarettes and saw the gunmen and getaway car. His actions — to defenders of Carter and Artis, anyway — beg this question: Why would someone interrupt a burglary to buy cigarettes?\n\nAsked in a recent interview, former Paterson Deputy Chief Robert Mohl has an answer: \"Are you a smoker? If you are, you understand when you get the urge.\"\n\nBeyond that, however, Bello's actions seem odd.\n\nAlso odd — or morbid — is what Bello did before police arrived at the Lafayette. Bello stepped over the bleeding bodies and took $62 from the cash register. When police learned of this theft, they would pressure Bello to tell more about what he knew of the gunmen — while also promising him leniency.\n\nIn the minutes after the shootings, Bello told police only that the gunmen were black. Two months later, complaining of threats by friends of Carter, Bello told then-Sergeant Mohl that the man with the shotgun was Carter. Bello also admitted to Mohl that he and Bradley later returned to the warehouse after the Lafayette killings and broke in.\n\n\"My father had no use for Alfred Bello,\" said James DeSimone of Wyckoff, the son of the detective who promised leniency to Bello in exchange for his testimony identifying Carter and Artis as the gunmen. \"Alfred Bello was in the wrong place at the wrong time.\"\n\nBut that night, with Carter and Artis on the scene of the killings, Bello was not identifying anything more than a getaway car that resembled Carter's Dodge. Carter's white jacket had no evidence of blood that might have spurted from the shooting victims. Neither did Artis' clothes. A police search of the Dodge at the scene turned up no guns, no bloodstains — nothing to indicate Carter and Artis were linked to the killings. Police never found the weapons.\n\nNonetheless, police ordered Carter and Artis to headquarters for questioning, this time by then-Lieutenant DeSimone.\n\nLooking back now, both sides in the case are still deeply split over whether police had any reason to be suspicious of Carter and Artis.\n\nCal Deal, a former reporter for The Herald-News of Passaic and Clifton, who covered the 1976 trial and befriended police and victims' families, now runs an anti-Carter website from his office in Fort Lauderdale, where he works as a graphics consultant for trial lawyers.\n\nDeal says he has traced the movements of Carter's car on the night of the shootings and concludes that Carter and Artis were the killers. \"If you study the evidence, it just makes sense,\" says Deal.\n\nOn the other side, Carter biographer James Hirsch says Carter's and Artis' movements actually prove their innocence. \"Rubin's behavior on that night is inconsistent with guilt,\" said Hirsch, a former Wall Street Journal reporter who shares royalties with Carter from his biography, \"Hurricane.\" \"If you believe that Carter did this, you have to believe that he and Artis would manage to get rid of the weapons and their bloody clothes, and casually drive around the streets of Paterson until police picked them up.\"\n\nHirsch contends that the expected behavior of killers would be to speed out of Paterson as quickly as possible — hence, the theory that police missed the real getaway car when they took a roundabout route to chase.\n\nNonsense, says Deal. \"What's the likelihood that there would be two white cars with blue and gold license plates in that part of Paterson at that hour?\"\n\nThe question still rings as lively today as it did 34 years ago.\n\nIt was just after 3 a.m. on June 17 when Carter and Artis arrived at Paterson police headquarters.\n\nBy 4 a.m., the two would be confronted by two pieces of damning evidence. Even though police searched Carter's Dodge at the Lafayette Grill, another search was conducted at police headquarters.\n\nIn the trunk, under some boxing equipment, police say they found an unused 12-gauge shotgun shell. On the floor of the front seat, they said, they found an unused .32-caliber cartridge.\n\nNeither the shotgun shell nor the pistol bullet would match those in the shootings, but the fact that they were the same calibers as the killers' weapons heightened police suspicions of Carter and Artis.\n\nBut Carter's and Artis' defense lawyers became suspicious for their own reasons. Although the police say they found the shotgun shell and bullet the night of the shootings, they did not log the items in as evidence until five days later. In later trials, the defense would suggest that the shotgun shell and bullet were planted by the police. \"Whatever happened to bag and tag?\" asked Fred Hogan, an investigator for the state Public Defender's Office, in referring to common police procedure to log evidence from a crime scene immediately and seal it in a plastic bag.\n\nHogan, who assisted Carter and Artis in their appeals, would later become a controversial figure himself. Prosecutors charged that he offered money to witnesses in exchange for their testimony — a charge that was never proven despite three grand jury investigations. Today, Hogan says he offered no money to witnesses. \"Absolutely not,\" said Hogan, still an investigator for the state Public Defender's Office. \"If I had done anything illegal or immoral or unethical, I would have been given two things — an indictment and a pink slip.\"\n\nBut that night, if police were suspicious of Carter and Artis, it's hard to fathom what happened in the hours after the shootings.\n\nPolice did not conduct paraffin tests to detect traces of burned gunpowder on the hands or clothes of Carter and Artis. Such tests were common in 1966, and in a June 29, 1966, appearance before a grand jury, Lieutenant DeSimone was asked why a test was not conducted.\n\n\"We do not have the facility to take a paraffin test at present,\" said DeSimone, adding that the authorities would have had to bring in an expert fairly fast before gunpowder residue had disappeared. Added DeSimone, \"With the time element, it would have proved naught.\"\n\nBut DeSimone and the police that day decided to bring in an expert to conduct lie detector tests.\n\nCarter and Artis were asked to take lie detector exams — and both agreed. Also, Eddie Rawls was brought to police headquarters for questioning and asked to take a lie detector test.\n\nEach side would later use the lie detector results — and immediate police reaction to them — to try to prove its case.\n\nIn a written report on the tests, obtained by The Record, Artis was said to have \"no knowledge\" of the Lafayette Grill shootings but had \"suspicions as to who was responsible.\"\n\nThe report, written by a polygraph expert brought in from the Elizabeth Police Department, said Carter did not participate in the killings \"but had knowledge as to who was responsible.\"\n\nEddie Rawls was the last to be tested. The report said that \"Rawls had done the shooting and/or had knowledge of it.\"\n\nWith Rawls, however, the report cautioned that the \"short test conducted on Rawls was not conclusive because of the fact that Rawls was in a state of fatigue.\"\n\nFive days later, Rawls was asked to take the test again, but he refused. Later, he would be implicated — but never charged — in trying to help arrange for witnesses to offer false alibis for Carter and Artis. He would also refuse to testify, telling prosecutors through his lawyer that if subpoenaed, he would cite his constitutional right against self-incrimination.\n\nWhat's more — and adding to the controversy — another polygraph report that turned up in 1976 tied Carter and Artis to the killings. Carter's and Artis' lawyers say the 1976 report is a forgery.\n\nRawls was never arrested, but that didn't ease suspicions. In the 1976 trial, Prosecutor Burrell Ives Humphreys said, \"Eddie Rawls is all over this case,\" and he theorized that Carter and Artis hid the weapons at Rawls' house.\n\nHumphreys and DeSimone were so convinced of Rawls' involvement that they obtained a court order in 1976 to dig up the grave of Rawls' murdered stepfather to see if the guns had been hidden in the coffin. No guns were found.\n\n\"He's probably a co-conspirator,\" said former Paterson Deputy Police Chief Robert Mohl, \"but I can't prove it.\"\n\nSaid Carter's biographer: \"Eddie Rawls is definitely the wild card.\"\n\nToday, Eddie Rawls' whereabouts are unknown.\n\nAlfred Bello and Arthur Bradley have also slipped from view.\n\nAfter testifying in 1966 that Carter and Artis were at the Lafayette Grill, Bello and Bradley both recanted their testimony to Fred Hogan in 1974 — thus setting in motion a series of legal steps that led to a new trial.\n\nIn the 1976 retrial, Bello withdrew his recantation and said Carter was at the scene with a shotgun. Bradley refused to testify again for the prosecution. In 1981, Bradley told a court that he had \"no memory\" of what happened that night in 1966 at the Lafayette Grill.\n\nCarter's and Artis' lawyers went on to other cases, including assisting on appeals with the Baby M surrogate mother case. Artis' first lawyer, Arnold Stein, became a judge.\n\nSeveral members of the prosecution teams also became judges — namely Humphreys, Vincent Hull, Ronald Marmo, and Fred Devesa.\n\nH. Lee Sarokin, the federal judge who set Carter and Artis free, retired and is now living in California. He told colleagues he inquired about playing himself in the recent film on the case, but was turned down by the movie producers.\n\nBefore he died in 1979, Vincent DeSimone wrote a memoir of his experiences in the case with a retired Paterson journalist. The memoir, which was never published, was titled \"The Media Meddlers.\"\n\nPatricia Valentine now lives in Florida, and recently released a statement through the anti-Carter website saying that there is \"absolutely no doubt in my mind\" that the car she identified 34 years ago on Lafayette Street was Carter's. \"Rubin Carter is an evil man in love's clothing,\" said Valentine.\n\nThe Lafayette Grill is now called Len's Place. Today, its clientele mostly reflects the neighborhood of Hispanics and other immigrants who have moved into Paterson.\n\nAfter the killings, the Panagia family never reopened the Lafayette Grill. Owner Betty Panagia refused to return, said her son, Bill Panagia. She died in 1984 of liver cancer.\n\nEach Christmas, Bill Panagia says he makes a special trip to a cemetery in Paramus and places a wreath on the grave of Jim Oliver, the bartender who took his mother's place that night at the Lafayette Grill.\n\n\"He was a very nice person,\" said Panagia.", "authors": [], "publish_date": "2019/06/17"}, {"url": "https://www.cnn.com/2022/05/07/us/austrian-climber-found-dead-alaska-intl/index.html", "title": "Matthias Rimml: Austrian climber found dead on the slopes of Mount ...", "text": "CNN —\n\nThe body of an Austrian climber who was last heard from a week ago has been found on the slopes of Alaska’s Mount Denali, authorities said on Friday.\n\nAn aerial search spotted the body of Matthias Rimml in the fall zone below Denali Pass, the National Park Service said. His body has not yet been recovered as authorities will rely on a ranger patrol that’s adapted to high altitude to facilitate the effort.\n\nThe 35-year-old was alone and was the first registered climber this season to attempt climbing the 20,310-foot peak, the tallest in North America.\n\n“Rimml likely fell on the steep traverse between Denali Pass at 18,200 feet and the 17,200-foot plateau, a notoriously treacherous stretch of the West Buttress route,” the NPS said in the news release.\n\nRimml, a professional mountain guide from Tirol, Austria, began his climb on April 27 from the 7,200-foot Kahiltna Basecamp.\n\n“Already acclimatized to altitude due to recent climbs,” Rimmi planned the climb alpine-style, according to the NPS, which means traveling fast with light gear. He planned to complete the climb in five days, though he was prepared with food and fuel to last him for 10 days.\n\nThe last known phone call he made was on April 30, when he was at about 18,000 feet on the West Buttress of Denali, officials said. He said he was tired, “but he was not in distress,” officials noted in the news release.\n\n“However, since his friend had been receiving periodic check-in calls from Rimml, he grew concerned after several days of silence and notified Denali mountaineering rangers the afternoon of May 3,” NPS officials said in a news release.\n\nThe temperatures on the upper slopes of Denali have been extremely cold over the past week, the park service said, hovering between daytime highs of -25 to -30 degrees Fahrenheit.\n\nIn total, 13 climbers have died in falls along that traverse, the NPS said. Most of those falls have occurred on the descent.\n\nDenali is located in south-central Alaska.", "authors": ["Paradise Afshar"], "publish_date": "2022/05/07"}, {"url": "https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2015/07/20/corrections-clarifications-archive/30417315/", "title": "Corrections & Clarifications: Archive", "text": "USA TODAY\n\nTo report corrections and clarifications, contact Standards Editor Brent Jones:\n\nPlease indicate whether you're responding to content online or in the newspaper.\n\nThe following USA TODAY corrections and clarifications were published between October 2012 and December 2014 :\n\nDecember 2014\n\nNews: A Dec. 19 article on Fidel Castro misstated the year of the Cuban missile crisis. It was 1962.\n\nMoney: A retired couple over 65 is granted a total standard tax deduction of $14,800 for tax year 2014. This was incorrect in a story Dec. 31.\n\nNews:An official with the Centers for Disease Control and Protection says that, while the flu vaccine does not provide complete protection against the H3N2 virus, it does guard against some portion of the strain. An earlier version of the following story misstated level of protection for the flu vaccine.http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation-now/2014/12/30/sickest-cold-flu-areas-cities-webmd/21052697/\n\nMoney: An earlier version of this story misstated the type of six-cylinder engine in early Ford Mustangs and Chevrolet Camaros. http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/cars/2014/12/27/reliable-collector-cars/20920739/\n\nNews: A prior version of the following story misstated how long Antonio Garcia-Crews was a political prisoner in Cuba. He spent 16 years in prison. http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2014/12/17/cuban-americans-react/20532429/\n\nLife: An article Dec. 12 about Sony Pictures Entertainment was accompanied by a photograph of an Amy Pascal who is not the Sony executive involved in the company's email hack. A correct photo of Sony's co-chair, Amy Pascal, accompanied a correction in a Dec. 19 edition.\n\nNews: A prior version of the following story misspelled the name of Rep. Darrell Issa. http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2014/12/16/chaffetz-oversight-hillary-clinton-benghazi/20497335/\n\nNews: The following story has been updated to include a paragraph that notes a challenge to the findings of the birth-defect study from Environmental Health Perspectives. http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2014/12/16/fracking-air-pollution-health-nrdc/20451639/\n\nSocial Media: A Dec. 16 tweet from the USA TODAY Twitter account labeled Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi as a Nobel Peace Prize winner. Modi has never won a Nobel Peace Prize.\n\nMoney: A graphic Dec. 16 incorrectly said that Honeywell warned its 2015 earnings would be lower than expected. Honeywell said it expects to earn $5.95 to $6.15 a share in 2015, the midrange of which was below the $6.11 average estimate among analysts, according to Thomson Reuters.\n\nLife: A previous version of the following story misidentified Kyle Sears. http://www.usatoday.com/story/life/music/ontheverge/2014/12/13/priory-weekend-on-the-verge/20095463/\n\nSports: The number of players from the Atlantic Coast and Big Ten listed on the USA TODAY Sports' All-American teams (first and second teams) was misstated in Dec. 12 editions. Each conference had 11 selections.\n\nMoney: A story Dec. 12 incorrectly stated the percentage change for Savita Subramanian's year-end 2015 price target for the broad Standard & Poors 500-stock index. Her target of 2200 will be roughly 8% higher from the Dec. 11 close of 2035.\n\nSports: An earlier version of the following story misstated what prosecutors can appeal against. http://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/olympics/2014/12/10/oscar-pistorius-verdict-appeal/20182933/\n\nNews: A State-by-State item Dec. 3 about the ideological spectrum among speakers selected for commencement ceremonies at Michigan State University misstated the city location for the college. It's in East Lansing, Mich.\n\nNews: A State-by-State item on Dec. 8 about plans to build a 19-mile biking and walking trail listed the wrong state for Colfax. The city is in Washington.\n\nUSA TODAY College: An earlier version of the following story did not include quoted information from sophomore Bob Nettleton that made clear his position with regard to the Ku Klux Klan. That information has been added to provide better understanding of his comments. http://college.usatoday.com/2014/12/08/kkk-display-frightens-students-on-uiowa-campus/\n\nOpinion: An earlier version of this story misstated the number of states that may lose subsidies under the King v Burwell Supreme Court case. The correct number is 36. http://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2014/12/04/obamacare-king-burwell-supreme-court-repeal-alternative-republicans-column/19922353/\n\nOpinion: An earlier version of the following column incorrectly stated the name and location of the hospital CHI Health St. Francis in Grand Island, Neb. http://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2014/12/08/hospital-cost-saving-efforts-umbdenstock/20055713/\n\nNews: A story on Pearl Harbor veterans being honored incorrectly quoted President Franklin D. Roosevelt's comments on Pearl Harbor. He said \"a date which will live in infamy.\"\n\nMoney: A previous version of the following story incorrectly punctuated B/E Aerospace's name and misspelled the location of its headquarters in Wellington, Fla. http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/business/2014/12/03/more-people-quitting-jobs/19482847/\n\nMoney: A breaking-news headline alert and tweet about a controversial Rolling Stone story on gang rape at the University of Virginia mischaracterized the magazine's handling of the story. http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/business/2014/12/05/rolling-stone-retracts-uva-story/19954293/\n\nNews: An earlier version of the following 5 Things to Know feature misstated the tree in the lighting ceremony tonight. http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2014/12/04/five-things-to-know-thursday/19788349/\n\nNews: An earlier version of the following story misspelled The Charleston Gazette. http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2014/12/02/west-virginia-shooting-victims/19773091/\n\nNews: A story Dec. 1 about repression in Egypt misidentified the president ousted 17 months ago. It was Mohamed Morsi.\n\nNews: An earlier version of the following 5 Things to Know feature misspelled Rosa Parks' first name. http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2014/12/01/five-things-to-know-monday/19703739/\n\nNovember 2014\n\nLife: A USA Snapshots graphic published Nov. 27 about Fitbit users who run on Thanksgiving morning vs. other November mornings, misspelled the company's name.\n\nSocial: The following USA TODAY Facebook post of a Brooklyn protest photo, shared by a Your Take contributor, misstated the location of Anthony Sganga's dorm. It is in Manhattan. https://www.facebook.com/yourtake/photos/a.10150856383596788.479226.323213251787/10152866257081788/?type=1&comment_id=10152866448196788&offset=0&total_comments=1\n\nNews: A Nov. 23 information graphic on OPEC members misidentified the country of Niger.\n\nOpinion: A cartoon by Gary Varvel on immigration, originally published by The Indianapolis Star, was removed from our website at the publication's request. Here is a link to the Indy Star's explanation to readers:http://www.indystar.com/story/opinion/columnists/2014/11/22/jeff-taylor-gary-varvel-thanksgiving-cartoon-immigration-opinion/19408509/\n\nNews: An earlier version of the following story overstated the length of time security guard robots could be seen on Microsoft's Silicon Valley campus. ​​ http://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2014/11/19/video-microsoft-robots/19267827/\n\nNews: A story on Bill Cosby, published Nov. 20 online and on the front page, misattributed to Melbourne's King Center forPerforming Arts the quote, \"While we are aware of the allegations reported in the press, we are only in a position to judge him based on his career as an entertainer and humanitarian.\" The statement came from Cosby's management team.\n\nMoney: An earlier version of the following story misidentified Target's Chief Financial Officer. His name is John Mulligan. http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/business/2014/11/19/target-third-quarter-earnings/19234337/\n\nSports: The USA TODAY Sports college men's basketball poll in Nov. 18 editions included an incorrect possible opponent for Duke. the Blue Devils could play either Stanford or UNLV in the Coaches vs. Cancer Classic.\n\nOpinion: A Nov. 13 Opposing View on climate change by Sen. James Inhofe, R-Okla., should have said that much of China's natural gas is very difficult to extract, not that China has no known gas reserves.\n\nNews: A previous version of the following story misstated the place of worship that reopened following the attack. http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2014/11/19/worshippers-synagogue-jerusalem/19260923/\n\nNews: An earlier version of the following story misstated the day of the week. http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2014/11/18/jerusalem-synagogue-attack/19207589/\n\nSports: An earlier version of the headline accompanying the following story misspelled Kevin Harvick's last name. http://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/nascar/2014/11/17/kevin-harvick-stewart-haas-racing-sprint-cup-championship/19190633/\n\nMoney: The 10-year Treasury note closed Nov. 10 at 2.36%, up 0.05. The Dow Jones industrial average fell 2.70 points Nov. 12. The information was wrong in Moneyline markets charts in Nov. 11 and Nov. 13 editions.\n\nLife: A story in Nov. 10 editions about the movie Foxcatcher inaccurately conveyed the timing of an interview then-college wrestler Tom Brands had with Team Foxcatcher. He interviewed about seven months after his career ended at Iowa.\n\nNews: An earlier version of the following timeline misstated the date of Michael Brown's funeral. http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2014/08/14/michael-brown-ferguson-missouri-timeline/14051827/\n\nSports: An earlier version of the following story reported incorrectly the timing of Tom Brands' interview with Team Foxcatcher. He interviewed about seven months after graduating. http://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/olympics/2014/11/09/foxcatcher-steve-carell-john-du-pont-dave-schultz-wrestling/18766319/\n\nMoney: An earlier version of the following column misstated the number of years the average U.S. 65-year-old man is now expected to live. http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/columnist/powell/2014/11/08/retirement-longevity-life-expectency/18600805\n\nSports : An earlier version of t he following story reported incorrectly the size of Federer's new larger racket. It is 98 inches. http://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/tennis/2014/11/09/roger-federer-atp-finals-novak-djokovic/18775381/\n\nSports: This following story was revised to correctly identify the DEA as the Drug Enforcement Administration. http://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/mlb/2014/11/05/alex-rodriguez-suspension-admits-peds/18561399/\n\nLife: An earlier version of the following report misidentified the actor playing Legolas. He is played by Orlando Bloom. http://www.usatoday.com/story/life/movies/2014/11/04/the-hobbit-the-battle-of-the-five-armies-sneak-peek/18450651/\n\nNews: An earlier version of the following profile of Sen.-elect Shelley Moore Capito incorrectly described her father, Arch Moore, Jr., as deceased. http://www.usatoday.com/longform/news/politics/elections/2014/11/05/new-senators-2014-elections/17781205/?utm_source=feedblitz&utm_medium=FeedBlitzRss&utm_campaign=usatoday-newstopstories\n\nNews: A story on Pope Francis and U.S. Catholics published in some editions on Nov. 2 quoted Philadelphia Archbishop Charles Chaput as saying that a recent Vatican conference on family issues produced \"confusion.\" The story did not include that Chaput said he believed confusion stemmed from news reports on the conference, not the conference itself.\n\nMoney: Michael Wolff's media column and an accompanying photo caption Nov. 3 about the restaurant Michael's steady media clientele misstated the year the Manhattan establishment opened. It was 1989.\n\nSports: An earlier version of the following story inaccurately listed the father of Wheeler junior guard Cameron Jordan. http://usatodayhss.com/2014/super-25-preseason-boys-basketball-rankings-teams-11-25\n\nNews: An earlier version of the following story misspelled the name of spectator Sam Raysby. http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2014/11/02/daredevil-chicago-skyscraper-wallenda/18388499/\n\nMoney: An earlier version of the headline accompanying this report did not make clear that lottery scams target Publishers Clearing House sweepstakes. http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/personalfinance/2014/11/02/scam-lottery/18256655/\n\nOpinion: An earlier version of the following column inaccurately described respondents in a Washington Post/ABC poll that found that more think the GOP is better suited than Democrats to tackle important issues. Those polled were likely voters. http://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2014/11/02/gop-win-senate-congress-agenda-expectations-party-2016-column/18386349/\n\nOctober 2014\n\nLife: An actor playing a character in the film Top Five was incorrectly identified in a calendar listing on a photo gallery published Oct. 31. Chris Rock plays the comedian/movie star in the film.\n\nNews: A Voices column Oct. 31 about a new Victoria's Secret ad provided incorrect attribution for the quote, \"You is kind, you is smart. You is important.\" The quote was delivered by Aibileen Clark in The Help.\n\nLife: An earlier version of the following report incorrectly identified Candi Tandy. She is George Tandy Jr.'s stepmother. http://www.usatoday.com/story/life/music/2014/10/27/studioa-george-tandy-jr-performs/17986519/\n\nOpinion: Richard Hahn's signature in a letter published with a Your Say package on Oct. 31 was incorrect. He lives in Sequim, Wash.\n\nNews: A Newsline item on the front page Oct. 28 mischaracterized the San Francisco Giants' situation. They were in position to win the World Series.\n\nNews: An earlier version of the following story incorrectly identified Robtel Neajai Pailey's citizenship status. http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2014/10/30/berlin-immigrants-ebola-racism-africa/18187819/\n\nLife: A story on HBO miniseries Olive Kitteridge, published Oct. 29, misstated the first name of Elizabeth Strout, the author of the book on which it's based. The story also misstated the starting time for a Nov. 2 episode, which begins at 9 p.m. ET/PT.\n\nNews: A story Oct. 27 about Republican efforts to retake the U.S. Senate should not have included North Carolina among the states President Obama carried in the 2012 election.\n\nTravel: In an earlier version of the following article, Brian Roberts' last name was misidentified. His band, Prime Movers was also misidentified. http://www.usatoday.com/experience/beach/florida/best-places-for-destination-weddings-in-florida/9968627/\n\nNews: An earlier version of the following report misidentified the first name of National Intelligence Director Gen. James Clapper. http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2014/10/27/airlines-security-threats-iata-icao-malaysia/18018391/\n\nNews: In some editions Oct. 24, an item in Newsline misidentified the position of Giants coach Tim Flannery. He is the third-base coach.\n\nNews: A previous version of the following report incorrectly stated in a graphic the number of square miles of the new state proposal. http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation-now/2014/10/22/florida-51st-state-south-florida/17705687/\n\nSports: An early version of the following story incorrectly quoted North Carolina chancellor Carol Folt. She characterized the incident as \"an inexcusable betrayal of our values and our mission and our students' trust.\" http://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/college/2014/10/22/north-carolina-academic-fraud/17717243/\n\nSports: A story in some Oct. 23 editions mischaracterized the treatment for Giants pitcher Matt Cain. He had elbow surgery to remove bone chips.\n\nNews: The \"5 things to know\" online feature on Oct. 22 misidentified the first name of Ebola czar Ron Klain.\n\nMoney: A Reviewed.com story Oct. 22 about induction cooktops misattributed the credit for an accompanying photo. The photo was supplied by Electrolux.\n\nMoney: An earlier version of the following report about pro golfers crafting a new beer product line misstated the size of the U.S. beer market. http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/business/2014/10/20/graeme-mcdowell-keegan-bradley-golf-beer/17498697/\n\nNews: A story about President Obama's intention to appoint Ron Klain as Ebola \"czar\" Oct. 17 mischaracterized his former firm. O'Melveny & Myers LLP is a Los Angeles law firm with an office in Washington, D.C.\n\nMoney: The subject line in an Oct. 20 Daily Briefing email newsletter misspelled the last name of Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella.\n\nNews: A story Oct. 20 understated the amount of money the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee plans to spend on radio ads targeted to black voters. The committee is spending $1 million on ads in North Carolina alone and millions more nationwide.\n\nSocial Media: An earlier USA TODAY tweet on Oct. 17 misstated the planet when commenting on a comet's near-miss route to Mars set for Oct. 19. https://twitter.com/USATODAY/status/523115831329189888\n\nLife: An earlier version of the following report gave the wrong start date for Cher's Dressed to Kill tour. http://www.usatoday.com/story/life/music/2014/10/14/five-to-see-live-bob-dylan-cher-stevie-wonder-usher-little-big-town/16644923/\n\nUSA TODAY College: An earlier version of the following report misattributed quotes and references to California State University student Quinn Western. They were provided by CSU senior Alyssa Banuelos. 15 Calif. community colleges to off bachelor degrees\n\nSocial Media: The following USA TODAY tweet misstated the first name of Walking Dead actress Melissa McBride:https://twitter.com/USATODAY/status/521671041014587393\n\nNews: An earlier version of the following article misstated the SPCA's role in removing the dog from the contaminated apartment. The SPCA was not involved. http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2014/10/12/dallas-ebola-health-worker-dog/17159727/\n\nMoney: An earlier version of the following report misstated media attribution when sharing who first reported news of Netflix's rate change for Ultra HD content. http://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2014/10/13/netflix-4k/17186909/\n\nSports: A preview of the Green Bay Packers-Miami Dolphins game in Oct. 10 editions included an incorrect reference to the Packers' schedule. They were coming off a break after an Oct. 9 night game.\n\nLife: A photograph of country singer Sam Hunt that appeared in the Oct. 12 issue of USA TODAY was incorrectly credited. The photograph was taken by Chase Lauer.\n\nNews: An earlier version of the following story contained an incorrect date for when Thomas Eric Duncan first visited Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital. http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2014/10/12/examining-the-nations-ebola-response/17059283/\n\nOpinion: An earlier version of the following column should have said that the gunman who fired at the White House in 2011 was captured and convicted, not that he was still at large. http://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2014/10/06/jonah-goldberg-secret-services-weakness-image-deterrence-column/16823219/\n\nMoney: An earlier version of the following report misstated the amount of Microsoft's bid for Yahoo in 2008. http://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2014/10/09/icahn-letter-apple-tim-cook/16961479/\n\nNews: An earlier version of the following story misstated the day of the Supreme Court gay marriage decision. http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2014/10/06/supreme-court-gay-marriage/16546959/\n\nOpinion: An earlier version of the following column should have said that the gunman who fired at the White House in 2011 was captured and convicted, not that he was still at large. http://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2014/10/06/jonah-goldberg-secret-services-weakness-image-deterrence-column/16823219/\n\nNews: An earlier version of the following report misstated the month of the 2002 NASA image. http://www.usatoday.com/story/weather/2014/10/04/california-drought-nasa-satellite-images/16675981/\n\nSports: An earlier version of the following tweet about Ole Miss and MSU playing as ranked teams for the fifth time in their history was deleted and reposted to include the word \"ranked.\" https://twitter.com/USATODAY/status/518142126157467649\n\nNews: Two tweets from @USATODAYhealth about Ebola were removed on Oct. 2 because they didn't meet USA TODAY's standards.\n\nMoney: The following image of the new Ford F-150 truck, used on USA TODAY branded social media accounts, misstated the part of the vehicle that's made of aluminum. It's the body of the truck. https://www.facebook.com/usatoday/photos/a.100797840666.101835.13652355666/10152294667020667/?type=1\n\nLife: A photo caption on the Oct. 2 Web to Watch column, showing Philip DeFranco is holding his son, Trey, misidentified the child.\n\nSeptember 2014\n\nOpinion: A Sept. 30 editorial on prescription opioids should have said that some narcotic painkillers, not most, have abuse-resistant properties.\n\nMoney: An earlier version of the following report misstated the location of IBM's headquarters. h ttp://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2014/10/01/ibm-new-york-startup-project/16477913/\n\nSports: A story in Sept. 29 editions about the Berlin Marathon incorrectly reported that second-place finisher Emmanuel Mutai had run the 2011 Boston Marathon in 2 hours, 3 minutes, 2 seconds. Geoffrey Mutai - no relation - had that time in Boston, and he did not run in Berlin.\n\nLife: An earlier version of the following report mischaracterized Denzel Washington's Academy Award nominations. He has won two acting Oscars, for Glory and Training Day. http://www.usatoday.com/story/life/movies/2014/09/28/the-equalizer-box-office/16378261/\n\nLife: The distributor of Jim: All Is By My Side is XLrator Media. A film listing Sept. 26 was incorrect.\n\nNews: An earlier version of the following post about National Coffee Day misstated the offer by Dunkin' Donuts. Guests there receive a free medium cup of hot Dark Roast coffee, with a limit of one per person. http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2014/09/29/five-things-to-know-monday/16411837/\n\nSports: A story in Sept. 25 editions on Jordan Spieth playing in the Ryder Cup had an incorrect year for Horton Smith's debut. He made his debut in 1929.\n\nLife: Due to an error in tabulating the Best-Selling Books List, the title Hemy, by Victoria Ashley, was omitted and should be listed as No. 42 on the list. Subsequently, titles ranked 43 through 150 drop one ranking. A corrected version of the list can be found online at http://www.usatoday.com/life/books/best-selling/\n\nSports: An article in Sept. 23 editions on East Carolina football included an incorrect location for the university. It is in Greenville, N.C.\n\nNews: An earlier version of the following report erroneously included Washington Police Chief Cathy Lanier among conference speakers. She did not attend. http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2014/09/23/holder-after-ferguson-address/16068563/\n\nSports: An earlier version of the following report misidentified Chad Johnson. http://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/nhl/bruins/2014/09/20/boston-bruins-preview-capsule-atlantic-division/15247479/\n\nMoney: An earlier version of this story misidentified Medtronic's proposed merger partner as Shire instead of Covidien in one reference to that deal. http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/business/2014/09/22/corporate-inversions-tax-hit/15330195/\n\nNews: A caption for an image that appeared in The Week in Pictures Gallery on Sept. 18 mischaracterized the type of NASA image shown of a black hole in the center of the galaxy M60-UCD1. The image was an illustration based on the combined observations from the Hubble Space Telescope and NASA's Gemini North telescope.\n\nMoney: A story Sept. 19 about powerful female CEOs misspelled the first name of IBM's Ginni Rometty.\n\nNews: A story Sept. 22 about the federal government's HealthCare.gov site provided incorrect attribution for the following pull-out quote: \"It's not going to be that bad, (but) neither is it going to be smooth and seamless.\" The comment, as noted in the story, came from Matt Salo, executive director of the National Association of Medicaid Directors.\n\nLife: An earlier version of the following post listed the wrong studio for ABC's upcoming show, Agent Carter. http://www.usatoday.com/story/life/tv/2014/09/19/supergirl-dc-comics-cbs/15882425/\n\nNews: A caption with a photo in a Sept. 18 Voices column on Scotland's independence referendum misidentified the flags displayed. They are the Union Jack.\n\nMoney: A story Sept. 18 on the new tablets and e-readers from Amazon incorrectly identified the size of the 6-inch Kindle Voyage.\n\nLife: An earlier version of the following Entertain This! post implied that the Gaye family initiated a lawsuit against Robin Thicke, Pharrell Williams and T.I. The family's suit was a countersuit. http://entertainthis.usatoday.com/2014/09/15/robin-thicke-was-high-on-vicodin-and-alcohol-while-recording-blurred-lines/\n\nLife: An earlier version of the following story misspelled the last name of Miss America 2014, Nina Davuluri. http://entertainthis.usatoday.com/2014/09/14/here-she-is-miss-america-2015/ ;http://www.usatoday.com/story/life/people/2014/09/14/miss-america-2015-crowns-winner-miss-new-york-kira/15650945/\n\nSports: An earlier version of the following USA TODAY Facebook post, published Sept. 12, included an incorrect image of Minnesota Vikings running back Adrian Peterson: https://www.facebook.com/usatoday/posts/10152254024170667\n\nMoney: A previous version of the following story and headline misstated the number of Hewlett-Packard subsidiaries that pleaded guilty in federal court to criminal violations of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. Only HP Russia pleaded guilty in court. Two other HP subsidiaries in Poland and Mexico admitted to criminal FCPA violations in April in separate agreements with the Justice Department. http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/business/2014/09/11/hp-russia-poland-mexico-bribery/15479533/\n\nNews: An earlier version of the following story, published in print and online, misstated what Hamas leaders said about the killing of three Israeli teenagers. The leaders said Hamas operatives kidnapped and murdered the trio but the leaders did not confess to ordering the killings. http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2014/08/28/body-found-israel-matches-missing-american-hiker/14751197/\n\nOpinion: A Sept. 9editorial on secret political donations misspelled the name of Craig Varoga, president of Patriot Majority USA.\n\nNews: An earlier version of the following report misidentified the title for Richard Falcone. http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2014/09/10/child-restraint-use-and-minorities/15340173/?utm_source=feedblitz&utm_medium=FeedBlitzRss&utm_campaign=usatodaycomnation-topstories\n\nLife: An earlier version of the following Entertain This! report listed the wrong date when sharing the death of Katie Couric's mom, Elinor Couric. She died on Sept. 4. http://usat.ly/Wmx6w6#sthash.w1WBxZ8g\n\nMoney: An earlier version of the following story misstated the duration of the passes, which is 49 days. http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/business/2014/09/07/olive-garden-never-ending-pasta-casual-dining-restaurants/15139803/\n\nMoney: The Ask Matt column regarding El Pollo Loco that ran Sept. 5 misstated the company's second-quarter revenue. The company reported revenue of $86 million.\n\nOpinion: A Sept. 2 column about military dogs incorrectly stated the mission of the group, K9s of the War on Terror, which awards a K9 medal for exceptional service.\n\nNews: Previous versions of the following story misstated the number of NATO countries bordering Russia. In addition to the three Baltic States —Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania — Norway shares a 122-mile border with Russia above the Arctic Circle, and Poland neighbors the Kaliningrad Oblast enclave . Obama Visit to Estonia Sends Message to Russians\n\nAugust 2014\n\nMoney: A story Aug. 28 about the cyber attacks on JPMorgan Chase and other financial institutions misstated the targets of a wave of similar attacks which has been ongoing since this spring. They include only numerous German and Swiss banks and the European Central Bank.\n\nMoney: An earlier version of this story wasn't clear on Mustang new engine option. http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/cars/2014/08/28/ford-mustang-building/14724219/\n\nNews: A previous version of the following story gave an incorrect date for the Medal of Honor ceremony for Lt. Cushing. No date had been set. The ceremony for two Vietnam veterans will be Sept.15. http://www.militarytimes.com/article/20140826/NEWS05/308260086/151-years-after-Gettysburg-Medal-Honor-recipient\n\nNews: An earlier version of the following online report incorrectly used a photo of an experimental aircraft. That image has since been removed. http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2014/08/26/american-surveillance-flights-syria/14607355/\n\nSports: A USA TODAY Twitter post about USC cornerback John Shaw's claim he saved his nephew was removed because the story had been updated by new developments at the time the tweet was shared, making the tweet inaccurate.\n\nLife: The character Mork, from the TV movie Behind the Camera: Mork & Mindy, was misidentified in an Aug. 12 photo as Robin Williams. The photo was of actor Chris Diamantopoulos in character as Robin Williams.\n\nNews: A USA NOW video about the beheading of U.S. journalist James Wright Foley was removed from the website because it contained the wrong location when referencing a three-year civil war. It should have said the war took place in Syria.\n\nSports: In an earlier version of the following report, a photo caption accompanying the story misstated the name of the stadium where Oregon Ducks quarterback Marcus Mariota runs a ball past Oregon State Beavers players. http://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/ncaaf/pac12/2014/08/20/oregon-ducks-quarterback-marcus-mariota/14325431/\n\nNews: An earlier version of the following report misstated Trader Joe's products that were affected by its recall. Only the store's raw almond butters were affected. http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation-now/2014/08/20/almond-peanut-butter-recall-trader-joes-whole-foods/14330325/\n\nLife: A previous version of the following story incorrectly identified which celebrities had signed a petition against the referendum. David Tennant and Susan Boyle did not sign the petition. http://www.usatoday.com/story/life/people/2014/08/17/scotland-independence-celebrities/14099825/\n\nOpinion: An editorial debate Aug. 15 about corporate tax \"inversions\" incorrectly stated that Fruit of the Loom was among several U.S. companies that shifted their tax addresses to foreign countries in the last decade. Fruit of the Loom moved its tax address abroad in 1998, but the company filed for bankruptcy protection the following year, and the new owners have paid corporate income taxes in the USA since 2002.\n\nOpinion: An editorial debate published Aug.15 should have noted that law enforcement on the scene in Ferguson, Mo., included not just the city police department but officers from numerous jurisdictions, chiefly the St. Louis County police.\n\nNews: A front-page story Aug. 15 about Iraqi Prime Minister Nourial-Maliki misstated his age. He is 64.\n\nMoney: A Reviewed.com story Aug. 12 about customized cellphone plans mischaracterized GPS navigation options offered by Virgin Mobile. Customers can purchase GPS navigation on a daily or weekly basis with data usage limits.\n\nMoney: A story in the Aug. 9 local edition about LG Electronics' new HDTV misstated what the acronym OLED stands for. It is organic light-emitting diode technology.\n\nMoney: A story in the Aug. 10 edition about retailers' credit cards incorrectly cited Home Depot's card as one of three with the highest rates. The three are Zales, Staples and Office Depot.\n\nMoney: An earlier version of the following tech report misstated Julia Lamaison's last name. http://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/personal/2014/08/07/netflix-online-video-favorites/13722953/?utm_source=feedblitz&utm_medium=FeedBlitzRss&utm_campaign=usatoday-techtopstories\n\nSports: An earlier version the following golf report misidentified the company Schneider Electric. http://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/golf/2014/08/06/willis-young-pga-championship-weather/13665373/\n\nTravel: An earlier version of the following report misstated the title for Hunter Biden. http://www.usatoday.com/experience/food-and-wine/news-festivals-events/whats-cooking-with-chefs-barbecue-canning-and-duels/13717671/\n\nNews: A Voices column Aug. 6 on Republicans facing backlash over immigration misstated the year of the last midterm election. It was 2010.\n\nLife: A tweet posted Aug. 6 on USA TODAY's branded Twitter account misspelled actor Peter Dinklage's last name. The photo used in the posting also was deleted because USA TODAY was not authorized to publish it on the social media platform.\n\nNews: A previous version of the following online article misconstrued the meaning of the police department's quote involving the penal code. http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation-now/2014/08/03/tortoise-family-alhambra-california-police/13559867/\n\nNews: An earlier version of the following online story incorrectly stated the number of new Ebola cases and the survival rate for those infected. http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2014/08/04/who-ebola-update/13578365/\n\nJuly 2014\n\nNews: A previous online headline about a Palestinian hospital in east Jerusalem was changed to make clear that the al-Makassed hospital is run by Palestinians.\n\nNews: A story July 28 on Gazans treated by a Jerusalem hospital misstated Abdel Rahman Bakr's age. He was born July 4.\n\nMoney: An earlier version of the following online report misstated the location of Belize. http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/business/2014/07/31/countries-near-bankruptcy/13435097/\n\nNews: An earlier version of the following online story misidentified the country's second tallest skyscraper. It is the Willis Tower. http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2014/07/31/chicago-shooting-bank-america/13408617/\n\nNews: A USA TODAY tweet about a coaches poll misstated the Florida State school name and was deleted. The error also appeared on Facebook, which was explained in a comment in the following link:https://www.facebook.com/usatoday/photos/a.100797840666.101835.13652355666/10152162564140667/?type=1\n\nMoney: An earlier version of the following Honda earnings report misstated Honda's expected profit for the fiscal year. http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/cars/2014/07/29/honda-earnings/13307527/\n\nLife: An interview July 30 with Eric Clapton contained an inaccurate quote about meeting the late JJ Cale. Clapton's correct quote: \"He showed me a guitar he had rebuilt.\"\n\nLife: A fashion story July 28 incorrectly included a 2014 Virgin Mobile FreeFest date. The festival is not taking place this year.\n\nNews: A story July 30 on Medicare's outlook included an incorrect number for the proposed annual cut to Medicare physician payments. The correct number is 20.9%.\n\nNews: An earlier version of the following report misstated the White House's 2015 funding request for the Central America Regional Security Initiative. http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2014/07/17/immigration-border-crisis-funding-central-america/12782931/\n\nNews: An item from Little Rock about Pulaski County jail's reopening should have been listed under Arkansas in the July 25 State-by-State.\n\nMoney: An earlier version of the following online auto story reported that the F-35 is grounded. Lockheed Martin, maker of the plane, says the grounding order has been lifted. http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/cars/2014/07/24/ford-mustang-eaa-oshkosh/13131889/\n\nNews: An earlier version of the following online story and headline about an Algerian plane disappearance misstated the status of an American ticketholder. The American was on the flight manifest but did not board the plane. http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2014/07/24/algerian-plane-disappears/13084329/\n\nMoney: An earlier version of the following report about AT&T earnings misattributed the quote from AT&T chief finance officer John Stephens about how the wireless company is transforming its business. http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/business/2014/07/23/att-q2-earnings/13053415/\n\nNews: A previous version of the following article misidentified the location of Auschwitz concentration camp. http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation-now/2014/07/23/selfie-auschwitz-concentration-camp-germany/13038281/\n\nNews: In a July 23 Newsline item on the front page, hedge fund manager Bill Ackman's name was misspelled.\n\nNews: A photo accompanying a story July 18 on the Israeli-Gaza conflict misidentified an Israeli weapon. It is a 155mm artillery.\n\nMoney: An earlier version of the following online story mischaracterized a deal Corinthian Colleges struck with the Department of Education. http://americasmarkets.usatoday.com/2014/07/18/doe-decides-corinthians-auditors-in-investigation/\n\nNews: In a story July 21 on Malaysia Flight 17, a quote about \"the sanctity of the crash site\" should have been attributed to Liow Tiong Lai, minister of transport for Malaysia.\n\nNews: A story about crash victim Shuba Jaya misidentified her father, Jeyaratnam Karuppiah, and a brother, Sugandran, in some editions.\n\nNews: The following online graphic, accompanying a story about venture capitalist Tim Draper's proposal to divide California into six states, was updated to correct geographic locations for Los Angeles and Anaheim, Calif:http://www.usatoday.com/interactive/5689917. The incorrect interactive map also appeared on USA TODAY branded social media accounts for Tumblr, Facebook and Twitter.\n\nNews: A story July 17 about new vials of biological materials found at the National Institutes of Health incorrectly stated the status of testing on some of those vials. The testing is continuing on four of the six vials labeled as containing smallpox virus.\n\nOpinion: Israel has identified two suspects in the June slaying of three Israeli teenagers, but it has not arrested them as stated in a July 15 editorial.\n\nOpinion: The following Instagram post misspelled Kareem Abdul-Jabbar's name. http://instagram.com/p/qUmfS-FTgd/?modal=true\n\nOpinion: An earlier version of the following column misstated the city Jose Antonio Vargas was en route to as he was detained by immigration officials. http://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2014/07/15/raul-reyes-jose-antonio-vargas-immigration/12687251/\n\nLife: Eduardo Sanchez and Daniel Myrick, co-directors of The Blair Witch Project, co-wrote and executive-produced the 2000 sequel Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2. A story July 14 mischaracterized their involvement in the sequel. It was directed by Joe Berlinger.\n\nNews: An earlier version of this report misspelled the name of venture capital firm Draper Fisher Jurvetson. http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation-now/2014/07/15/six-californias-tim-draper/12661161 /\n\nOpinion: In a July 11 editorial debate on congressional ethics, the byline of Opposing View writer Tom Spulak was misspelled.\n\nMoney: An earlier version of the following story misstated that the Lexus NX has Toyota's first turbocharged engine. http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/cars/2014/07/15/toyota-engines/12661961/\n\nNews: The aircraft in a photo accompanying a story July 10 on an island dispute in the East China Sea was misidentified. It is a propeller plane.\n\nNews: In a July 3 story on TheStar Spangled Banner, Prof. Don Hickey's workplace was misstated. He works at Wayne State College.\n\nNews: A July 11 column on veteran suicides misstated the rate of these deaths. In 2005, there were an average of 17 veterans suicides a day; now that figure has risen to 22 per day.\n\nMoney: The Test Drive column July 11 and some July 12 editions mistakenly characterized the sizes of the Volkswagen Golf GTI and much longer Honda Civic.\n\nOpinion: Due to an editing error, a July 11 Your Say misrepresented a Facebook comment by reader Bryant Steury. He intended to say that grassroots efforts to stop gun violence take back the streets of Chicago should get much more attention from the media, not that the gun violence should.\n\nMoney: An earlier version of the following report misspelled Simeon Siegel's last name. http://americasmarkets.usatoday.com/2014/07/11/old-navy-wins-at-summer/\n\nNews: A story July 7 about controversy efforts to protect the lesser prairie chicken incorrectly attributed a statement to Jay Lininger, a senior scientist at Center for Biological Diversity. The quotation is from Jason Rylander, a staff attorney for Defenders of Wildlife.\n\nLife: A July 8 Playlist misspelled the name of Boston rapper Cousin Stizz.\n\nNews: An earlier version of the following online story misstated the number of great white sharks in the Atlantic Ocean:http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation-now/2014/07/07/california-shark-attacks-great-white/12283761/\n\nMoney: A story published in July 5 and July 8 editions about the 2015 Acura TLX overstated the highway fuel-economy rating of models with V-6 engine and all-wheel drive. The correct highway mileage rating is 31 mpg.\n\nMoney: A story July 7 misstated the change in the number of part-time workers who preferred full-time jobs in June. The total increased by 275,000 to 7.5 million.\n\nNews: A headline July 7 misstated the increase in teen use of hookahs. It should have said hookah smoking among high school seniors rose to 21% in 2013, according to a University of Michigan survey.\n\nJune 2014\n\nOpinion: A column June 29 by DeWayne Wickham inaccurately asserted that Chris Chocola, president of the Club for Growth, had accused Mississippi Sen. Thad Cochran of promising blacks the protections of a big government in order to beat back a primary challenge from a Tea Party opponent backed by the conservative advocacy organization. Cochran won the open primary by attracting black Democratic voters alienated by his opponent.\n\nLife: The premiere episode of HBO's The Leftovers is available to stream free on Yahoo Screen until July 6. An item June 30 listed the wrong date.\n\nMoney: An item in a June 30 Moneyline column misreported a stock holding of investor Carl Icahn. He holds a 9.4% stake in Family dollar.\n\nNews: In some print editions June 26, the front page misstated the location of the NBA draft. The draft took place in Brooklyn, NY.\n\nNews: A previous version of the following video misstated the number of beaches. There are 35. http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2014/06/25/beaches-polluted-pollution-water-runoff-sewage-bacteria/11349409/\n\nSports: In some editions June 23, a photo caption with a story about the new NHL schedule misstated Dan Boyle's team affiliation. He recently had his rights traded and won't be with the San Jose Sharks when they open the season.\n\nMoney: A story June 19 incorrectly characterized the significance of the federal government's credit card settlement with GE Capital Retail Bank. It is the government's largest credit card discrimination settlement.\n\nSports: A player was omitted from the American Family Insurance All-USA high school boys golf team in June 18 editions. Sam Horsefield, a junior at Ridge Community (Davenport, Fla.), made the first team.\n\nLife: A story June 16 about TV shows featuring viruses misstated the location of a research center on the Syfy series,Helix. It's located in the Arctic Circle.\n\nSports: The following story was amended to delete a reference to World Cup viewer Lindsay Augustine's occupation. http://worldcup.usatoday.com/2014/06/16/united-states-usa-us-soccer-usmnt-fans-dc-jurgen-klinsmann/\n\nNews: An earlier version of the following story about Vice President Biden's trip to Latin America misspelled Colombia. http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2014/06/15/biden-guatemala-child-migration/10556985/\n\nLife: An Entertain This! June 16 story item about reports that Beyonce was expecting a second child was based on old information. The story has since been removed from our website. http://entertainthis.usatoday.com/2014/06/16/beyonce-reports-pregnant-baby/\n\nNews: A story about storm chasers published June 9 misidentified a man from California who has been chasing storms since 2009. His name is Tim Dolan.\n\nYour Take:An earlier version of the following story misstated the name of the contributor of the alligator wrestling photo. The photo was submitted, not taken by Jessica Fazende. A photo taken by Jessica Fazende has since been posted. http://www.usatoday.com/story/your-take/2014/06/13/take-5-alligator-honey-moon/10416257/ ​\n\nNews: An earlier version of the following interactive slide incorrectly identified the shooter. The gunman's name hadn't been released. http://www.usatoday.com/interactive/7833833\n\nUSA TODAY College: An earlier version of the following online story mischaracterized the disciplinary charges Brown University student Lena Sclove brought against a fellow student. The accused student was found responsible for \"sexual misconduct\" under the university's Standards of Student Conduct. He has not been charged with, or convicted of, rape or any other crime resulting from Sclove's complaint. The accused student voluntarily withdrew his petition to return to Brown and has issued this public statement rebutting Sclove's allegations. http://college.usatoday.com/2014/06/02/brown-university-allows-rapist-back-on-campus-faces-federal-complaint/\n\nSports: A caption with a photo in June 9 editions incorrectly identified military personnel attending the National-Padres baseball game. They are in the Marine Corps.\n\nMoney: A caption to a photo that ran with a story June 6 about the cattle industry in Kazakhstan misidentified the animal in the photo. It was a Hereford.\n\nTravel: An earlier version of the following online report misidentified the name and location of The Ritz-Carlton, Lake Tahoe: http://www.usatoday.com/story/experience/beach/california/2014/06/06/california-destination-weddings/10054819/\n\nNews: The original version of the following online story stated a Chinese man was stuck in South Korea because his son had made drawings on his passport. A story update included speculation that the photo was fake, which later was confirmed by The Wall Street Journal , citing an official from the Chinese embassy in Seoul. http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation-now/2014/06/02/chinese-passport-doodle-korea/9862473/\n\nYour Take: An earlier version of this story misstated the role of contributor Wayne Cragg. He was a passenger in the aircraft that landed on the glacier in Denali National Park.​ http://www.usatoday.com/story/your-take/2014/06/04/take-5-glacier-rivers-flags/9952301/?sf26938170=1 ​\n\nNews: An earlier version of this online report mischaracterized how the AMA will issue recommendations. This story also misstated the title for Phillip Rodgers. http://ux-origin.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2014/06/02/stateline-end-of-life/9867615/\n\nMay 2014\n\nMoney: The State of Colorado, working with Kaiser Permanente and UnitedHealth Plans, used social gaming to boost participation rates in programs that promote exercise and healthier diets by 650% last year. One such program is called Reach for the Peaks. A story on May 15 in how \"big data\" can improve healthcare misidentified the name of the program and a specific social tool.\n\nLife: An earlier version of the following online report misstated the location where Maya Angelou lived. It was Winston-Salem, N.C. http://www.usatoday.com/story/life/books/2014/05/28/maya-angelou-dies-at-age-86/9663497/\n\nMoney: A story May 23 about General Motors recalls should have said the U.S. total for 2014 through May 21 was 13.79 million. The story used an incorrect total initially provided by GM.\n\nOpinion: A May 23 Your Say package incorrectly stated the number of vehicles General Motors has recalled this year. It is 13.79 million.\n\nTravel: An earlier version of the video caption on the following online report misspelled Ben Schlappig's last name. http://www.usatoday.com/videos/travel/flights/2014/05/20/9341313/\n\nNews: An earlier version of the graphic with the following online report misstated the date of the Bunbury Festival. It takes place on July 12. http://www.democratandchronicle.com/story/news/nation-now/2014/05/15/music-festival-survival-guide-summer/9132553/\n\nSports: A news alert, based on an AP news report, was updated to correct Pittsburgh Penguins coach Dan Bylsma's employment status. The AP corrected its story, and the updated alert read as follows:Penguins fire GM; coach Dan Bylsma to be evaluated.\n\nNews: An earlier version of the following report on net neutrality, which appeared online and in print, misstated Netflix's deals with Comcast and Verizon. It paid to connect directly with the two Internet service providers. http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/usanow/2014/05/15/fcc-net-neutrality-rules/9116157/\n\nLife: An earlier version of the following online report misstated American Idol contestant Caleb Johnson's last name. http://www.usatoday.com/story/idolchatter/2014/05/14/american-idol-500th-episode/9105407/\n\nMoney: A photo accompanying a markets analysis May 14 about companies cutting research and development mistakenly depicted biopharmaceutical company Merck KGaA, which is based in Germany and is not the same Merck & Co. referenced in the story.\n\nLife: An earlier version of the following online report misspelled Manhattan character Glen Babbit's last name. http://www.usatoday.com/story/life/tv/2014/05/15/wgn-american-manhattan-photo-and-premiere-announcement/9103783/\n\nNews: The caption on a photo of a TOW missile that accompanied a story about Syria on Monday misstated where the missile was photographed. It was in Kuwait.\n\nNews: A May 12 story on passage of a referendum in eastern Ukraine mischaracterized it. The referendum called for secession from Ukraine, according to pro-Russian insurgents.\n\nNews: An earlier version of the following online report, which also appeared in some print editions, contained an incorrect figure for the number of soldiers depicted in the Marine Corps Memorial showing the U.S. flag being raised on Iwo Jima in World War II. The correct number is six. http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2014/05/11/arlington-cemetery-150th-anniversary-things-didnt-know/8410721/\n\nLife: Band leader Kay Kyser performed the song Alexander the Swoose. His name was misspelled in a story about actress Swoosie Kurtz in the May 6 newspaper.\n\nNews: An Associated Press world brief May 3 about Toronto Mayor Rob Ford misstated Toronto's rank in population. It is Canada's largest city.\n\nMoney: Satellite TV provider DirecTV has 20 million subscribers. A story May 2 was incorrect.\n\nApril 2014\n\nNews: A chart that ran with a story on April 30 about air pollution incorrectly spelled the name of Harford County, Md.\n\nMoney: A story April 30 about the housing recovery misspelled the last name of Ed Brady, owner of Brady Homes in Bloomington, Ill.\n\nSports: A 1A story April 29 about the Los Angeles Clippers' sponsors misstated the status of Anheuser-Busch and Amtrak. A-B's Bud Light is the official beer of the NBA. Amtrak's sponsorship deal with the Clippers expired at the end of the regular season.\n\nNews: An earlier version of the following report should have said that the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission discussed, but did not formally recommend, changing Medicare policy on drug reimbursements to the \"effective-but-cheaper\" rate. http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation-now/2014/04/24/drugmakers-lobbying-medicare-payments/8055901/\n\nMoney: An April 25 car review misstated the country where the Mercedes-Benz CLA45 AMG is built. It is built in Hungary.\n\nMoney: An earlier version of the following report misstated earnings results for General Motors. The company saw a net income gain. http://usat.ly/1ho4kmi\n\nNews: A photograph of Deandra Smith was incorrectly attributed in an earlier version of this story. The photo was provided by the Pulaski County Sheriff's Office. http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2014/04/22/fugitives-gun-background-checks/7959529/\n\nMoney: Self-employment expenses and interest on student loans are not itemized deductions reported on Form 1040 Schedule A. A chart April 14 was incorrect.\n\nMoney: An earlier version of the following online report, which was also published in the paper on April 17, incorrectly stated the major with the highest average starting salary. http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/personalfinance/2014/04/16/nace-job-outlook-class-of-2014/7771859/\n\nNews: An April 18 Voices column misstated Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott's first name.\n\nNews: An April 15 story on drug use by medical practitioners misidentified Art Zwerling. He is the former chief nurse anesthetist at Philadelphia's Fox Chase Cancer Center.\n\nSports: A caption with the following photo gallery about major league baseball player who have hit at least 500 home runs incorrectly identified the player in 17th place on the list. Jimmie Foxx is on the right side of the photo. http://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/mlb/2014/04/16/albert-pujols-on-verge-of-500-home-run-club/7764967/\n\nNews: An earlier version of the following report and accompanying video misnamed the Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center. http://usat.ly/1kuiPWC\n\nLife: An earlier version of the following report misstated who among Alan Thicke's relatives was placed under house arrest after being accused of murder in Bolivia last year. It was his wife's mother, Ruth Miriam Callau. http://www.usatoday.com/story/life/people/2014/04/15/alan-thicke-robin-and-paula-patton-strong-since-split/7751345/\n\nSports: The winner of the women's singles title in the Katowice Open tennis tournament was incorrect in April 14 editions. Alize Cornet defeated Camila Giorgi.\n\nNews: In the State-by-State Montana brief for April 14, the Bitterroot Valley was misspelled.\n\nNews: An earlier version of the following Oval post misstated the timing of this year's Boston Marathon. http://www.usatoday.com/story/theoval/2014/04/15/obama-boston-marathon-bombing-statement/7734229/\n\nNews: A story April 15 on aging right-wing extremists misstated the year Cross testified against Ku Klux Klan associates and other white supremacists. The trial took place in 1988. Also, a sentence describing Klan associates aging and splintering was incorrectly attributed to Mark Pitcavage of the Anti-Defamation League.\n\nNews: An earlier version of the following story contained an incorrect figure for the number of passengers who ride annually on U.S. ferries and other public watercraft. The Passenger Vessel Association says the correct figure is more than 200 million. http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2014/04/15/marine-safety-experts-say-house-dilutes-boat-safety/7737233/\n\nMoney: A previous version of the following story misidentified Sue Brennan. She is a spokesperson for the United States Postal Service and handles questions about operations. http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/personalfinance/2014/04/13/tax-returns-filing-digital-era/7432833/\n\nNews: An earlier version of the following story contained a photo of Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra concertmaster Margaret Batjer from LACO's recent \"Strad Fest LA\" event. The photo was replaced to be clear that neither Batjer, LACO nor Strad Fest LA were associated with this report. http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2014/04/07/old-violins-versus-new/7383707/\n\nMoney: A story April 9 about the Honda Fit should have made clear that the subcompact hasn't been significantly changed since 2008, two years after it was introduced in the U.S.\n\nMoney: The following online graphic was updated to correct the spelling of Charlottesville:http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/business/2014/04/06/americas-thinnest-city/7306199/\n\nMoney: On the second Tuesday of every month, Microsoft issues new security patches for its operating systems. A story on April 8 listed the wrong date.\n\nNews: The dateline for the State-by-State item for Arizona on April 4 was incorrect. It is Eloy.\n\nLife: An earlier version of the following report misstated the date David Letterman started Late Night:http://www.usatoday.com/story/life/tv/2014/04/03/david-letterman-cbs-retire/7266411/\n\nNews: The city of Benicia, Calif., was misspelled in April 3 State-by-State coverage, due to an error by The Associated Press.\n\nLife: A story April 2 about Captain America: The Winter Soldier misidentified Anthony and Joe Russo's previous credits. The brothers directed the comedy You, Me and Dupree and episodes of Arrested Development.\n\nSports: A story in some editions April 1 incorrectly stated the position of former baseball player B.J. Wallace. He was a pitcher.\n\nMarch 2014\n\nMoney: The 2013 compensation for Bank of America CEO Brian Moynihan rose 77% from 2012 when calculated using Securities and Exchange Commission guidelines, which require stock awards be counted in the year they were granted. A March 25 story in the paper used a different calculation.\n\nMoney: An earlier version of the following online report misspelled the last name of Johnathan Davis, co-founder and chief content officer of IBT Media:www.usatoday.com/story/money/business/2014/03/29/newsweek-ties-to-church-leader/7048895/\n\nMoney: The March 28 Test Drive column mistakenly identified a Mini Cooper model. The correct designation is Mini Cooper Countryman.\n\nSports: The salary for a Philadelphia Phillies player and the team payroll were misstated in some March 31 editions. Outfielder Tony Gwynn Jr. will make $900,000 this season, and the team's opening-day payroll is $179.5 million.\n\nNews: A video shared by Gannett broadcast partner KSDK, about Missouri resident Ronald White's account of meeting John F. Kennedy during the Cuban Missile Crisis, was removed because it mischaracterized White's affiliation with the Navy SEALs. White has shared with KSDK that he was a part of a Navy SEAL mission, but he is not a former SEAL.\n\nMoney: A Moneyline item March 28 about new plane orders from ANA, Japan's largest air carrier, incorrectly included a picture of a Japan Airlines plane.\n\nLife: Found in You and Forever With You by Laurelin Paige have appeared on USA TODAY's Best-Selling Books list. That information was incorrect in the March 27 Book Buzz.\n\nSports: The year of the Tennessee men's basketball team's last appearance in the NCAA Sweet 16 was incorrect in a story and a photo caption in the March 26 editions. Tennessee last made the Sweet 16 in 2010.\n\nNews: The Washington state highway swamped by mudslide on March 22 was misidentified in a March 26 story on the disaster. It is Highway 530.\n\nNews: A map in print Tuesday, also featured online http://www.usatoday.com/interactive/6872571/embed , accompanying a story on the missing Malaysian airplane misstated how many miles above Earth a satellite is positioned. It is 22,236 miles.\n\nNews: A previous version of the following online article incorrectly listed Washington, D.C.'s minimum wage. The current minimum wage in D.C. is $8.25 per hour in 2014, according to the Department of Labor :http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation-now/2014/03/24/minimum-wage-rent-affordable-housing/6817639/\n\nLife: The following USA WEEKEND report was updated to more accurately reflect examples of online trading sites to consider for eco loans. A site that is no longer in service was erroneously listed. http://www.usatoday.com/story/life/weekend/living/2014/03/21/10-best-tips-for-green-living/6387377 /\n\nLife: An earlier version of the following online report misstated the last name of contestant Danica McKellar: http://www.usatoday.com/story/life/people/2014/03/24/dancing-sends-two-stars-home-elimination-recap/6847559/\n\nMoney: A U.S. map accompanying a story March 24 on marijuana vaporizers misstated which states have legalized the use of marijuana for medical purposes. The following map has the correct information:http://www.mpp.org/assets/pdfs/library/Map-of-State-Marijuana-Laws.jpg\n\nMoney: A Test Drive column March 21 listed incorrect curb weights for models of the Mitsubishi Mirage. The range is 1,973 lbs. to 2,051 lbs.\n\nMoney: A photo caption accompanying a media column March 24 mischaracterized Mary Barra's time with General Motors. It should have said she became CEO two months ago.\n\nOpinion: A Forum column March 24 criticizing Malaysia's handling of the airliner crash referred incorrectly to the year that bloody rioting took place between Malays and the country's ethnic Chinese. It was 1969.\n\nNews: A story March 21 about medical exams administered to airline pilots misstated the frequency of tests for cargo pilots, who are tested as often as those at passenger airlines.\n\nNews: An article March 24 about military veterans succeeding in college misstated the last name of D. Wayne Robinson, president and CEO of Student Veterans of America.\n\nNews: USA TODAY writer James R. Healey's last name was misspelled in the March 21 Newsline item.\n\nMoney: A story on state pensions shortfalls in some editions March 21 contained two errors. It misidentified the location of the Mercatus Center. The Center is located at George Mason University. It also misstated the amount that net pension liability increased from 2011 to 2012. It went from $998 billion in 2011 to $1.2 trillion in 2012.\n\nMoney: In some March 20 editions, a 1B story on the basketball's March Madness misstated the ownership of Quicken Loans. The company is not a Berkshire Hathaway holding.\n\nNews: An earlier version of the following video misstated what happened to $6,637.94 in attorney's fees and costs granted to complainant Vanessa Willock. Willock and her attorneys waived the monetary award:http://www.usatoday.com/media/cinematic/video/6610981/\n\nLife: The March 17 Critic's Corner column misidentified the character Peggy (Rondi Reed) in the CBC comedy Mike & Molly. She is the mother of Mike (Billy Gardell).\n\nNews: An earlier version of the following story misidentified Marc Mauer in a photo. The current photo is Marc Mauer: http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2014/03/16/prison-population-cuts-democrats-republicans/6496675/\n\nNews: The following online post was updated to correct the names of authors of the RNC's \"Growth and Opportunity Project\" report: http://onpolitics.usatoday.com/2014/03/17/republicans-obama-diversity-ads-senate-priebus/\n\nNews: A March 11 SocialEyes video pointing to a Reddit question posed to fast-food workers was taken down because the story did not meet USA TODAY's standards.\n\nSports: A story in March 13 editions about Robinson Cano and the Seattle Mariners misstated utilityman Willie Bloomquist's contract status with the team. He signed a two-year, $5.8 million deal with the Mariners in the offseason.\n\nMoney: A March 11 Talking Tech with Jimmy Kimmel misidentified the sport of an athlete who was the source of an online prank. She was a member of the Olympic luge team.\n\nLife: A story March 11 about the biographic film about Jimi Hendrix, Jimi: All is By My Side, misstated the month the movie is set to be released. It will be in theaters in June.\n\nNews: In March 10 editions, a story about Americans abroad relinquishing their citizenship over taxes misstated the name of the tax rule. It is the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act, or FATCA.\n\nMoney: A story March 7 misstated the time frame for the bull market that was followed by the 2008 financial crisis and Great Recession. The correct period was 2002-2007.\n\nNews: A tweet about Toronto Mayor Rob Ford's gaffe regarding daylight saving time used an incorrect image of the politician. The tweet was removed to avoid confusion and tweeted again with a correct photo:https://twitter.com/USATODAY/status/442774277021249536\n\nLife: A March 4 profile of singer/songwriter Jhene Aiko left out the photographer's credit. The image was taken by Justin Jackson.\n\nMoney: A technology story March 6 about online commenting misspelled YouTube communications manager Matt McLernon's last name.\n\nNews: Sportscaster Brent Musburger's last name was misspelled in a March 4 1A photo caption.\n\nNews: Sen. Richard Durbin's position was incorrect in an earlier version of the following online report. He is majority whip: http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2014/03/05/debo-adegbile-senate-vote/6074443/\n\nNews: A March 4 story on traffic congestion gave the wrong time frame for hours wasted in traffic by motorists in the nation's 10 worst traffic cities. Motorists in those cities waste an average of 47 hours a year in traffic.\n\nFebruary 2014\n\nNews: A Feb. 27 Venezuela protest video and related photos of an attack on a woman by national guard officers were removed from a news story and social media posts. The Your Take content, submitted by a website user, violated USA TODAY's terms of service : http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2014/02/27/venezuela-violence-protests/5865025/\n\nNews: An earlier version of the following On Politics post misidentified Rep. Michele Bachmann, R-Minn. Bachmann is a member of the U.S. House, but has announced she will not seek re-election:http://onpolitics.usatoday.com/2014/02/21/john-mccain-hillary-clinton-bachmann-2016/\n\nMoney: The video accompanying the following story about the interconnect agreement between Netflix and Comcast could have been clearer in explaining that while Netflix downloads would result in a faster streaming experience for Comcast customers than before, Netflix receives no preferential network treatment under the agreement: http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/business/2014/02/23/netflix-comcast-deal-streaming/5757631/\n\nNews: An earlier version of the following graphic showing \"Road Salt in Demand this Season\" mislabeled Grand Rapids, Mich. when showing snow totals: http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2014/02/19/shipload-of-road-salt-set-to-dock-in-nj/5624281/\n\nSports: A list of Daytona 500 winners in Feb. 21 editions misspelled the surname of the 1969 winner. He was LeeRoy Yarbrough.\n\nSports: An earlier version of the photo caption accompanying the following online report misidentified Finland goalie Tuukka Rask: http://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/olympics/sochi/2014/02/22/usa-finland-bronze-medal-olympic-hockey-game/5725465/\n\nNews: The following Feb. 22 online report on hacking into retailers' customer records in 2013 should not have included Walmart: http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/business/2014/02/22/retail-hacks-security-standards/5257919/\n\nMoney: University of Southern California professor Karen North was misidentified in a Feb. 20 report on the Whisper app.\n\nNews: The photo caption on the following Facebook post was updated Feb. 23 to make clear that the aunt pictured performed CPR on her 5-month-old nephew:https://www.facebook.com/usatoday/posts/10201651089662207?stream_ref=10\n\nNews: On the Feb. 20 front page, the caption for the photo of Russian hockey player Anton Belov misidentified him. He was to the left of the American players.\n\nNews: General Motors spokesman Alan Adler's first name was incorrect in a Feb. 19 story on the Chevrolet Cobalt recall.\n\nNews: An earlier version of the following report about a \"kiss cam\" video that went viral misstated the university state where the hockey game took place. It was Minnesota:. http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation-now/2014/02/19/kiss-cam-university-minnesota/5602165/\n\nLife: A photo accompanying an earlier version of the following report, and subsequent social media posts, misidentified Devo guitarist Bob Casale: http://www.usatoday.com/story/life/music/2014/02/18/devo-guitarist-bob-casale-dead-at-61/5581671/?csp=fblife\n\nNews: A 1A story Feb. 17 on the cost of IRS customer service to taxpayers mischaracterized the purpose of a Scheduled D form. It's used for reporting profits on a stock sale.\n\nSports: An earlier version of the graphic comparing differences between Olympic and pro hockey in the following picture gallery incorrectly explained the NHL and Olympic time periods. The NHL and Olympic clocks both count down from 20 minutes to 0 per period: http://www.usatoday.com/media/cinematic/gallery/5278935/olympic-sports-explainers-in-pictures/\n\nSports: An earlier version of the \"Triple Lutz - triple loop\" graphic in the following picture gallery mischaracterized the direction of the skater's rotation: http://www.usatoday.com/media/cinematic/gallery/5278935/olympic-sports-explainers-in-pictures/\n\nSports: A baseball column on Feb. 17 identified the wrong site for Philadelphia Eagles fans throwing snowballs at a man in a Santa Claus suit. The 1968 game was played at Franklin Field.\n\nNews: A storm photo on the front page of the Feb. 13 issue should have been credited to Travis Long of The News & Observer in Raleigh, N.C.\n\nMoney: A Feb. 14 profile of Comcast CEO Brian Roberts misstated Comcast's ownership of the Philadelphia 76ers. The company sold the team in 2011.\n\nNews: The source for a Feb. 12 1A Snapshot on the vehicles \"attractive\" men drive was incorrect. It is Insure.com.\n\nNews: A Feb. 12 news alert about January health care enrollments misstated the percentage growth in health-care enrollments through federal and state exchanges in January. The increase was about 50% over prior enrollments, bringing the current total to 3.3 million, according to the Department of Health and Human Services.\n\nMoney: A Media column Feb. 10 incorrectly named the person noted for the theory of creative destruction, whereby capitalism is always making way for the new. It was economist and political scientist Joseph Schumpeter.\n\nSports: An earlier version of the following online report misstated the number of NBA championships won by the San Antonio Spurs in the past 17 years. The team has four wins:http://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/nba/spurs/2014/02/05/san-antonio-getting-healthy-danny-green-tiago-splitter-tony-parker-gregg-popovich/5235397/\n\nNews: An earlier version of the following online report misstated Catholics for Choice's position on premarital sex. The group has not issued a public opinion on the issue. http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2014/02/05/vatican-united-nations-report-sex-abuse-abortion/5227903/\n\nLife: A photo caption Feb.5 incorrectly listed the location for Nik Wallenda's \"skywire\" walk that aired on Discovery Channel last June. He crossed the Little Colorado River George outside Grand Canyon National Park.\n\nNews: A story Feb. 5 on Virginia's battle over same-sex marriage should not have included the state as part of the Deep South, which refers to Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi and South Carolina.\n\nMoney: A story Feb. 5 about watching the Olympics on your smartphone or tablet via NBC coverage misstated when you would be able to access certain event streams on demand. Most full-event replays and highlights will be available on demand immediately following their conclusion. However, full-event replays for some Olympic events will only be available around 3:30 p.m. ET, and highlights will not be available on demand until the event is shown to NBC's prime-time TV viewers.\n\nSports: Due to technical problems, the National Football League's Super Bowl ad \"We\" was not posted in the USA TODAY Ad Meter panel's voting hub and was not included in the ratings for the game ads. It can be viewed at admeter.usatoday.com.\n\nSports: A column on the Super Bowl in some Feb. 3 editions incorrectly categorized Malcolm Smith's interception return for a touchdown for the Seattle Seahawks. It was the fourth-longest pick-six in Super Bowl history.\n\nNews: An earlier version of the following online report should have made clear that former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was joking when referencing Fox:http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation-now/2014/02/02/hillary-clinton-super-bowl-twitter/5171833/\n\nJanuary 2014\n\nUSA TODAY College: Due to a technical error, an incorrect byline appeared on an earlier version of the following story. http://college.usatoday.com/2014/01/27/how-to-write-a-professional-bio-for-linkedin-twitter-more/\n\nNews: A Massachusetts item in the Jan. 29 State-by-State reporter misstated the cost of a planned Foxwoods resort casino in Fall River. It would cost $750 million.\n\nMoney: The LG G Flex smartphone has 2GB of RAM and 32GB of onboard storage. A review in the Jan. 29 edition misstated the amount of RAM in the phone.\n\nOpinion: A Jan. 22editorial on the Roe v. Wade anniversary should have made clear that a Texas law, which bans most abortions after 20 weeks of pregnancy, provides an exemption if the fetus has lethal abnormalities.\n\nNews: A Jan. 27 Online Today item about new stamp prices did not make clear that the increase in Forever Stamps is not forever. Any Forever Stamps you already have can still be used, whatever you paid for them. The cost of a new Forever Stamp has increased to 49cents for the next two years.\n\nNews: The following On Politics story about State of the Union seating misstated the title of Rep. Sander Levin. He is the ranking member on Ways & Means: http://onpolitics.usatoday.com/2014/01/27/the-state-of-the-union-is-contentious/\n\nNews: In a Jan. 24 State-by-State item for Colorado, the distance between Ouray and Silverton was incorrectly reported by the Associated Press. It's about 25 miles.\n\nNews: The following On Politics post was updated to correct Sen. McConnell's leadership title:http://www.usatoday.com/story/onpolitics/2014/01/26/mcconnell-senate-primary-kentucky-bevin-2014/4912629/\n\nNews: Two numbers were reversed in a Jan. 23 story about the USA TODAY/Pew Research Center Poll because of incorrect information provided by Pew. In the survey, 51% said people got rich more because they had more advantages than others; 38% said it was more because they worked harder than others.\n\nNews: An earlier version of the following On Politics post misspelled the last name of Democratic state Rep. John Bel Edwards: http://www.usatoday.com/story/onpolitics/2014/01/21/vitter-governor-lousiana/4717779/\n\nNews: The following online story was updated to clarify confusion between two sets of numbers in the report: http://ux-origin.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2014/01/20/davos-2014-oxfam-85-richest-people-half-world/4655337/\n\nNews: The dateline for the South Dakota State-by-State item Jan. 15 was incorrect. It should have been Sioux Falls.\n\nNews: Photo captions on the following online report have been updated to correct the spelling of Timothy Truong's name:http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2014/01/13/vocabulary-schools-online-competition-education-students-teachers/4455087/\n\nNews: The following online Texas oil information graphic was changed to more accurately illustrate the recovery stage of hydraulic fracturing: http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2014/01/15/texas-oil-boom-fracking/4481977/\n\nLife: An item in a Jan. 15 Lifeline column mischaracterized Ringo Starr and Paul McCartney's upcoming Grammy appearance. The singers will perform separately, the Recording Academy confirms.\n\nNews: The first name of James Hughes, a Rutgers University dean, was incorrect in a story Jan. 15 about the American Dream development near the site of the Super Bowl on Feb. 2.\n\nNews: A story Jan. 14 on the nuclear agreement with Iran misstated where the agreement was signed. It was Geneva.\n\nNews: A previous version of the video accompanying the following online story included a clip credited to TRUTH that is not a part of the TRUTH campaign, according to Legacy Foundation spokesperson Patricia McLaughlin. The Legacy Foundation is the national public health organization that funds and directs the TRUTH campaign:http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation-now/2014/01/12/surgeon-general-anniversary-smoking-television-commercials/4395273/\n\nNews: An earlier version of the following online report misidentified the campaign spokesman for Thom Tillis. He is Jordan Shaw. http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2014/01/13/obama-hagan-tillis-north-carolina-emergency-unemployment/4458969/\n\nMoney: A headline Jan. 13 mischaracterized the testimony of Frank DiPascali, a former chief financial aide to Bernard Madoff. DiPascali, who is a prosecution witness in the trial of five former Madoff employees, has testified that he is remorseful about his part in Madoff's investment fraud.\n\nMoney: A Jan. 13 story about the 2015 Ford F-150 incorrectly identified the material from which the frame is constructed. It is made from steel, using significant amounts of high-strength steel to cut the weight of the frame.\n\nNews: An earlier version of the following online report about GOP reaction to the N.J. bridge-traffic scandal involving Gov. Chris Chris Christie misstated which federal prosecutor was looking into the case. The U.S. attorney's office in New Jersey is conducting the preliminary inquiry: http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2014/01/12/christie-scandal-reax/4442019/\n\nTech: An article in a Jan. 10 special section on the Consumer Electronic Show incorrectly stated the type of technology used in a set of headphones. The correct technology in the HiFiMan HE-560 headphones is planar magnetic.\n\nNews: An earlier version of the following online graphic about Al-Qaeda growth in the Middle East incorrectly labeled Iraq:http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2014/01/07/al-qaeda-spread/4358845/\n\nNews: A story Jan. 8 about military pensions misstated how they are calculated. Years spent at military academies do not count toward time accumulated for pensions.\n\nMoney: A story Jan. 7 about community health centers starting for-profit insurance plans incorrectly described one Medicare plan operated by the nonprofit Care Oregon. That plan switched from for-profit to nonprofit status on Jan. 1. It was founded in part by community health centers, but has been independently owned since 1997.\n\nNews: Story highlights on an earlier version of the following online report misstated Rep. Gabrielle Giffords' status when a mentally ill man opened fire at a constituent forum in Tucson, Ariz. She survived the shooting:http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2014/01/08/giffords-shooting-anniversary-tucson/4371639/\"\n\n@USA TODAY: The following weather map, shown on USA TODAY's Jan. 7 Twitter page, failed to credit Scott Bateman, of Disalmanac.com, for inspiring the idea: https://twitter.com/USATODAY/status/420614581267206144\n\nNews: The online version of the following report misstated the title for Mark Goldstein, CEO and president of Entertainment Partners, a production management and payroll service company:http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/12/14/obamacare-hollywood-film-contractors-freelancers-healthcare/3883689/\n\nLife: The following online report about new Saturday Night Live member Sasheer Zamata mischaracterized quotes made by Amy Poehler and Tina Fey to The Hollywood Reporter. The two made the comments when casting was going on, but before Zamata had landed the job: http://www.usatoday.com/story/life/people/2014/01/07/celebs-react-to-snl-casting-news-sasheer-zamata-tina-fey/4356833/\n\nMoney: Doctors and hospitals will see decreases in their Medicare reimbursements if they haven't joined the Meaningful Use program by 2015. A story Jan. 7 on electronic medical records misstated the type of reimbursements that would be reduced.\n\nNews: A story Jan. 6 on a cancer research gift misstated Harvard University's role. The gift from Ludwig Cancer Center will let Massachusetts Institute of Technology focus on the problem of cancer's spread, or metastases. Harvard University will focus on cancer drug effectiveness.\n\nLife: A story Jan. 6 about the Palm Springs International Film Festival did not give the author's name. It was written by Bryan Alexander.\n\nNews: A story Jan. 2 on official residences for mayors misstated the first name of Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti.\n\nOpinion: A Jan. 2 editorial on military pensions misstated the annual premium for a Tricare family health policy. It rose from $460 a year to $549 for 2014, the first increase since 1995.\n\nMoney: A chart on 2B Jan. 2 incorrectly said the Dow Jones industrial average's 26.5% gain last year was the best annual gain since 1996. it was the best since 1995.\n\nMoney: Liz Ann Sonders is chief investment strategist at Charles Schwab. A story Jan. 2 incorrectly stated her title.\n\nMoney: A quote-out on page 2B Jan. 2 ran the wrong picture for Ann Miletti of Wells Fargo Advantage Funds.\n\nMoney: A story Jan. 2 on automated portfolio services misstated the annual fee charged by management service, Betterment. The service charges 0.35% of portfolios valued below $10,000, 0.25% of portfolios valued between $10,000 and $100,000 and 0.15% of portfolios worth more than $100,000.\n\nDecember 2013\n\nNews: The State-by-State item for Virginia on Dec. 31 misstated the name of the Harry F. Byrd Visitor Center at Shenandoah National Park. The erroneous information was provided by the Associated Press.\n\nMoney: A Dec. 24 Reviewed.com article incorrectly stated that Japan was the first country in the world to broadcast television in color. Japan was third in the world, but the first in Asia.\n\nNews: UPS spokeswoman Natalie Godwin's last name was misspelled in a 1A story Dec. 26 about delayed holiday shipments.\n\nLife: A review Dec. 24 incorrectly reported the date when the movie Lone Survivor opens nationwide. It expands Jan. 10.\n\nLife: A story Dec. 18 incorrectly identified the Fleetwood Mac album that singles Rhiannon and Say You Love Me appear on. The songs are from Fleetwood Mac; a live version of Rhiannon in included on the deluxe reissue of Rumours.\n\nMoney: An example in a story on minimum distributions for your IRA when you turn 70.5, years was incorrect. The story should have said: Here's a working example: You're single and just turned 70.5 years in 2013, with $500,000 in your IRA. IRS gives you a divisor of 27.4 for your next egg -- meaning you must withdraw $18,248 in the calendar year, or just shy of 3.7%.\n\nMoney: A Dec. 4 story about Akamai Technologies' acquisition of Prolexic names Danny Lewin and Tom Leighton as co-founders. It did not include others who played a role at the company's start. Among them: Jonathan Seelig and Randall Kaplan, who are listed as founders in a Jan. 14, 1999 press release announcing Akamai's establishment. Akamai says Lewin and Leighton founded the company and Seeling and Kaplan were part of its founding team.\n\nNews: A story Dec. 19 about Sen. Max Baucus to be named ambassador to China misstated future plans of House Ways and Means Chairman Dave Camp, R-Mich. His tenure as chairman expires next year, but he has not announced his retirement.\n\nLife: A photo of Leonardo DiCaprio at work with the World Wildlife Fund was incorrectly credited in the Dec. 19 issue. The photo was taken by the fund's Jan Vertefeuille.\n\nNews: A headline on a story Dec. 17 about vitamin research incorrectly attributed a statement that vitamins are \"a waste.\" The statement was from an editorial accompanying the new research.\n\nNews: The name of Paula Otto, director of Virginia Lottery, was misspelled in a story Dec. 17 about the Mega Millions drawing.\n\nLife: An obituary for actress Joan Fontaine that appeared in some Dec. 16 issues mischaracterized her family's Academy Award wins. Fontaine and sister Olivia de Havilland are the only siblings to win lead-acting Oscars.\n\nLife: A story on Dec. 10 about NBC's Community misstated the date John Oliver returns to the show. He will reappear in the new season's third episode, airing Jan. 9.\n\nNews: Owen Ullmann's byline was misspelled in a column Dec. 10 about a strategy for getting Social Security benefits. He is Managing Editor of the News section of USA TODAY.\n\nMoney: Best Buy and Sprint offer free phone service for 12 months to students who purchase certain phones, with no contract required. A story Dec. 6 incorrectly stated a contract requirement.\n\nSports: The number of points Florida State earned from the USA TODAY Sports Coaches Poll was listed incorrectly in the BCS standings in Dec. 9 editions. FSU earned 1,550 points.\n\nSports: The score of an NCAA women's tournament quarterfinal soccer match between Virginia and Michigan was incorrect in Dec. 2 editions. Virginia won 2-1.\n\nMoney: The last name of Mikael Thygesen, chief marketing officer for Simon Property Group, was misspelled in a front-page story Dec. 2 about holiday shopping.\n\nNovember 2013\n\nNews: A story Nov. 6 about World War II veterans living in Texas misstated Elmer Hill's rank among living veterans. He is one of the oldest living WWII veterans.\n\nNews: A large photo of a bowl of ramen, which accompanied a story Nov. 29 on top Japanese restaurants serving lower-quality food, was included to illustrate Japanese cuisine but may have left a wrong impression on some readers. The food dish and ramen shop where the photo was taken had no connection to the scandal reported in the article.\n\nNews: The description of the Green Line between Israel and the West Bank was misstated in a story Nov. 29 about Israeli settler farms. It is the Israeli-Jordanian armistice line from the 1949 Arab-Israeli war.\n\nNews: A story Nov. 22 about California's health insurance exchange did not make clear that the rate of 10,000 people a day who had filled out applications referred only to the month of November. The rate was lower in October, when the exchange first opened.\n\nMoney: The Nov. 22 Investing column gave an incorrect example about deducting appreciated stock. You must hold your stock for at least a year before you can deduct its full market value.\n\nOpinion: Because of an editing error, the Nov. 18 Opposing View on the Federal Reserve misstated the expansion of the Fed's balance sheet since the 2008 financial crisis. It is $3 trillion.\n\nSports: The TV ratings in Nov. 19 editions contained an incorrect comparison between the previous weekend's Georgia-Auburn football game and the Mississippi-LSU game in the same time slot on CBS last year. This year's ratings were up 46%.\n\nSports: A story in Nov. 18 editions about the Chicago Bears' overtime victory incorrectly identified their quarterback. He is Josh McCown.\n\nOpinion: A Nov. 11 editorial on abuse of painkillers overstated the number of hydrocodone prescriptions. According to government estimates, 136.7 million prescriptions for hydrocodone were dispensed in 2011, making it the most prescribed drug in America.\n\nMoney: A Test Drive column Nov. 15 about the 2014 Chevrolet Malibu with the 2.5-liter engine misstated the vehicle's government highway mileage rating. It's 36 mpg.\n\nNews: An In Brief item Nov. 8 misstated the skills rated by the Nation's Report Card. They are math and reading.\n\nMoney: A Reviewed.com story Nov. 7 about LED light bulbs misstated the city where Cree, the company that makes the bulb, is based. It is in Durham, N.C.\n\nNews: In a Nov. 6 State-by-State item for New Mexico, news from Arizona was incorrectly included.\n\nNews: San Diego's election to replace former mayor Bob Filner will be Nov. 19. Some editions Nov. 6 gave the wrong date.\n\nOpinion: A byline on a Nov. 6 column misspelled John D. Altenburg's surname.\n\nMoney: A story Oct. 5 misstated how much Johnson & Johnson agreed to pay in criminal fines and forfeitures as part of a $2.2 billion settlement with the federal government. The company will pay $484 million.\n\nNews: A story Nov. 1 about President Obama's judicial selections misstated Patricia Millett's rank among women who have appeared before the Supreme Court. She has argued the second-most cases.\n\nOctober 2013\n\nNews: An Oct. 14 story about declining teen driving misstated the year when the share of high school seniors who had a driver's license fell to 73%. It was 2010.\n\nNews: In an Oct. 31 State-by-State item from Maryland, news from Delaware was incorrectly included.\n\nMoney: An Oct. 30 Personal Tech column review of the new iPad Air should have listed the starting price of the Wi-Fi + Cellular model at $629. The article incorrectly listed the price.\n\nLife: The caption for a photograph with an Oct. 30 TV on the Web column misidentified a runway model as Alexa Chung.\n\nMoney: An Oct. 18 article should have said the 2014 Toyota Corolla is manufactured at Blue Springs, Miss., and in Canada. The article incorrectly identified the manufacturing site.\n\nNews: A story Oct. 28 about President Kennedy and West Virginia misstated the day of the week Lee Harvey Oswald was shot. It was a Sunday.\n\nLife: A year-end music preview Oct. 25 incorrectly characterized how Lady Gaga arrived at Interscope Records. The label picked her up as a songwriter after she met Interscope chairman Jimmy Iovine.\n\nLife: Worth Fighting For by Vi Keeland should have been ranked No. 23 on the Oct. 14 USA TODAY Best-Selling Books list. It was omitted due to a reporting error.\n\nLife: A story Oct. 21 misreported the year that Fox's Bones premiered. It was 2005.\n\nLife: A story Oct. 21 about bacteria in samples of breast milk bought online misstated the percentage of samples contaminated with streptococcus that were donated to a milk bank. Twenty percent were colonized with strep.\n\nNews: An Oct. 21 State-by-State item for New Mexico misstated the name of the Santa Fe New Mexican newspaper. The Associated Press provided the information.\n\nSports: The First World in some editions Oct. 10 incorrectly described the circumstance Cleveland Browns running back Willis McGahee commented about concerning a possible game against his former team, the Denver Broncos. It should have said in the AFC playoffs.\n\nMoney: A story Oct. 8 about places to retire incorrectly referred to the population of the town Pocatello, Idaho. The population cited was for the Pocatello metro area.\n\nSports: A photo caption Oct. 9 incorrectly described high school football coach Bob Ladouceur. He is not in the running for the usatodayhss.com top coach contest.\n\nSeptember 2013\n\nSports: An incorrect game summary from the Washington Redskins-Oakland Raiders game appeared in some Sept. 30 editions. The correct summary appears in the Oct. 1 issue, on page 9C.\n\nSports: A headline in some editions Sept. 25 misspelled the surname of Baltimore Orioles third baseman Manny Machado in a story about his leg injury.\n\nSports: A photo caption in the Sept. 17 issue misidentified the coach from the Jacksonville Jaguars talking to defensive end Andre Branch. It was defensive line coach Todd Wash.\n\nNews: A story Sept. 17 on women running for mayor in big cities misstated the name of former Baltimore mayor Sheila Dixon.\n\nNews: A Sept. 18 1A story about an IRS list of organizations screened for potential activity misstated the number of groups represented by the American Center for Law and Justice in a lawsuit against the IRS. The center represents 33 groups.\n\nLife: A story Sept. 16 on improvements in child obesity mischaracterized numbers representing average percentile declines on body mass index growth charts. BMI percentile averages fell slightly between 2005 and 2009.\n\nLife: The name of Malin Akerman, a star of upcoming ABC comedy Trophy Wife, was misspelled in a photo caption in the Sept. 13 fall TV preview.\n\nLife: Cassandra Kulukundis is the producer of the film The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby: Him and Her. A story Sept. 11 about the Toronto International Film Festival was incorrect.\n\nNews: In a 1A Snapshot that ran Sept. 4, the bar chart should have reflected that as of August 2013 fewer U.S. cities use red-light cameras that did in 2012.\n\nMoney: The $38,000 Full-size Sedan Challenge in Sept. 9 editions misstated the model year the 2013 Hyundai Azera was redesigned. It was 2012.\n\nLife: Feels Like Home, the album from Sheryl Crow to be released Sept. 10, was produced by Crow and Justin Niebank. Richard Bennett and Brad Paisley did not co-produce. Crow, who lives in Nashville, wrote many, but not all, of the songs, and she worked with a variety of collaborators. An item in the fall music preview Sept. 6 was incorrect.\n\nNews: An item from Sioux Falls in the Sept. 6 State-by-State roundup should have run under South Dakota.\n\nAugust 2013\n\nMoney: WPX Energy is a oil and natural gas exploration and production company. It was misidentified in a table that ran Aug. 22.\n\nSports: A USA TODAY Sports Images photo that ran on page 4C in the Aug. 23 edition was misidentified as being New York Yankee Ichiro Suzuki's 4,000th hit. The photo was from a different time in the at-bat.\n\nOpinion: An Aug 23 editorial about sexual harassment misidentified Chai Feldblum. She is a member of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission but is not its chairman.\n\nNews: A fatal crash-landing of an Asiana Airlines jet July 6 occurred at San Francisco International Airport. A story Aug. 23 about pilots and automated flight controls gave an incorrect name for the airport.\n\nNews: An item on the Aug. 22 front page incorrectly attributed a quote about Patriots quarterback Tim Tebow. The quote was from Hall of Fame coach Bill Parcells.\n\nMoney: An Aug. 21 story about new TiVo DVRs misstated the number of shows the Roamio Plus ($399.99) records simultaneously. It records six shows and stores 150 hours of HD programming.\n\nNews: A headline on an Aug. 20 1A story about state health insurance exchanges should have made clear that consumer sign-ups are projected and no one will use one until Oct. 1.\n\nLife: An incorrect photo was published Aug. 19 with a preview of rapper Juicy J's album Stay Trippy (out Aug. 27).\n\nNews: A note accompanying an Aug. 16 front page Snapshot graphic misstated how many homes a megawatt of solar energy can power for a year. The correct number is 164.\n\nLife: The first country-Western song nominated for an Academy Award was The Ballard of High Noon from 1952's High Noon. A story Aug. 13 about Glen Campbell was incorrect.\n\nMoney: A Moneyline item Aug. 14 about competing offers to buy Steinway Musical Instruments misstated the size of the higher offer from an investment firm now identified as Paulson & Co. Its bid was $38 a share, or $477 million. Steinway announced Aug. 14 that Paulson will pay $40 a share in a deal worth $512 million.\n\nNews: A story in the Aug. 2-4 weekend edition about the sentencing of Ariel Castro for kidnapping three women in Cleveland misstated who spoke for two of the women. Sylvia Colon spoke for her cousin, Gina DeJesus. Beth Serrano spoke for her sister, Amanda Berry.\n\nNews: The state-by-state news item for Oregon on Aug. 14 was mistakenly placed under Washington. The items for South Dakota on Aug. 12 were mistakenly placed under Iowa.\n\nOpinion: An Aug. 12 editorial on ObamaCare should have said most companies that offer health insurance to their employees had to begin including contraception coverage after Aug. 1, 2012, not Aug. 1, 2013.\n\nLife: A story Aug. 9 on AMC's Breaking Bad misattributed a comment about the show's protagonist. Kristine Weatherson, an assistant professor of media studies and production at Temple University, said: \"Flaws are compelling, and Walter is flawed to perfection. Uniquely unassuming, cancer-stricken, family-driven, middle-class Walter White looks uncannily like our next-door neighbor.\"\n\nLife: Andrea and Brian Pinkney, authors of Martin & Mahalia, are the parents of a teenage son and daughter. That information was incorrect in a story Aug. 8.\n\nNews: In a story Aug. 8 about insurance coverage for brain scans to help diagnose Alzheimer's disease, a quote was incomplete. Steven Pearson of the Institute for Clinical and Economic Review at the Massachusetts General Hospital said, \"The evidence in favor of beneficial effects of this test is among the weakest I have ever seen come before the Medicare Coverage Advisory Committee.\"\n\nNews: A story Aug. 5 about shark sightings misstated when the movie Jaws was released. It was 1975.\n\nNews: The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers provided incorrect information for a story Aug. 2 on the state-by-state page about a swim beach closed because of geese. The swim beach at the corps park on Norfolk Lake in Arkansas was closed over safety concerns involving a nearby marina, although geese are also a problem there, according to the corps.\n\nVideo: An Aug. 7 USA NOW video incorrectly stated details about the Obamas' vacation in Martha's Vineyard, from Aug. 10-18. The Obamas will stay in a 5,000-square-foot, four-bedroom house valued at $7.6 million, just a short distance off South Road, in Martha's Vineyard.\n\nOpinion: A national movement to raise the low wages of fast food workers to $15 an hour is not rooted solely in an effort to boost the federal minimum wage, contrary to an assertion in an Aug. 5 Forum column. Strikers are also pursuing state and local legislation and unionization.\n\nLife: A story Aug. 5 about the Brian Wilson/Jeff Beck tour incorrectly characterized Don Was' involvement in Wilson's upcoming film. Was is a musician on the album; Wilson is producing.\n\nJuly 2013\n\nSports: A 2C photo that accompanied a story about Los Angeles Dodgers head athletics trainer Sue Falsone in the July 30 edition misidentified the woman shown. The person was Nancy Patterson, a Dodgers assistant athletic trainer.\n\nLife: A story July 29 on children who have multiple sclerosis gave the wrong name of the hospital where Victoria Esselman was treated. She was treated at MassGeneral Hospital for Children.\n\nMoney: A story July 29 about spray-on bedliner plastic for pickups incorrectly referred to the measure of thickness of paint. It is in mils.\n\nLife: The Poisoned Pilgrim by Oliver Potzsch is No. 4 on USA TODAY's Best-Selling Books list, and Inferno by Dan Brown is No. 5. The top five list was incorrect in a July 24 Life USA Snapshot.\n\nNews: A July 22 page 2A appreciation of Helen Thomas misstated her history-making role at the White House Correspondents Association. She was the first female president of the group, which has previously admitted women as members.\n\nMoney: A 1B story July 23 about home sales misspelled the last name of David Zugheri, executive vice president of Envoy Mortgage.\n\nVideo: A USA NOW video for July 18 misstated the source of a mobile dating survey. It was conducted by ChristianMingle.com and Jdate.com. The video has been taken down from our site.\n\nNews: A story July 12 about the discovery of a \"blue planet\" orbiting a distant start misstated its distance from Earth. It is 372 trillion miles away. (So you might want to rethink your travel plans.)\n\nNews: Due to an editing error, the news for Arkansas was listed under Oklahoma in the July 15 State-by-State report.\n\nNews: A story on the George Zimmerman trial in some July 12 editions gave the incorrect date for the shooting of Trayvon Martin. It happened Feb. 26, 2012. A July 15 column gave an incorrect height for Trayvon. The autopsy report lists him at 5-foot-11.\n\nLife: A story July 12 on family camps had an incorrect name for syndicated newspaper columnist April Masini.\n\nNews: The headline on a health care law story on 2A July 11 misstated how much both sides are likely to spend on ads about the law by 2015. The correct amount is $1 billion.\n\nLife: A July 10 Listen Up review of Preservation Hall Jazz Band's album That's It! was attributed to the incorrect critic. The review was written by Brian Mansfield.\n\nMoney: Test Drive on July 5 should have said that all 2014 Acura MDX models have a selectable driving mode feature, but adjustable suspension no longer is offered.\n\nOpinion: A July 1 editorial on efforts to ban abortions starting 20 weeks after fertilization should have stated that the measure being considered in Texas would allow an exemption for \"severe fetal abnormalities\" that are \"incompatible with life outside the womb.\" Laws in Georgia and Louisiana have similar exemptions. Laws in nine other states, and a bill passed by the U.S. House, do not.\n\nJune 2013\n\nNews: A June 17 story on Iranian President-elect Hasan Rawhani misstated his previous position. He was a negotiator over Iran's nuclear program.\n\nMoney: A story June 25 incorrectly cited the amount of money for mortgage relief programs in the Independent Foreclosure Review settlement. It is $5.7 billion.\n\nMoney: Men's Wearhouse's founder and former executive chairman was misidentified in Moneyline June 25. His name is George", "authors": [], "publish_date": "2015/07/20"}, {"url": "https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/50-states/2019/06/19/lorax-tree-legend-butter-elmo-meth-squirrel-news-around-states/39602013/", "title": "News from around our 50 states", "text": "From USA TODAY Network and wire reports\n\nAlabama\n\nAthens: Investigators say a man kept a caged “attack squirrel” in his apartment and fed it methamphetamine to ensure it stayed aggressive. The News Courier reports authorities are seeking 35-year-old Mickey Paulk on multiple charges including possession of a controlled substance. Law enforcement was warned of the animal prior to executing a search warrant of the Athens home Monday. It’s illegal in Alabama to have a pet squirrel. Officials from the state’s Department of Conservation recommended releasing the animal, which deputies did successfully. A spokesman for the Limestone County Sherriff’s Office says there was no safe way to test the squirrel for meth.\n\nAlaska\n\nAnchorage: A major earthquake that rocked the state proved to be a trial run in its largest city for a new national wireless network dedicated to first responders. Anchorage Police Chief Justin Doll and other commanders had just signed on to test the FirstNet network on their personal cellphones when the 7.1 magnitude quake struck last year. After it caused widespread damage and knocked out phone lines, Doll says officials with FirstNet were the only ones who could communicate without problems. Public safety agencies nationwide are tapped into the network established by Congress in 2012 after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. It launched last year. The network is secure, encrypted and off limits to the public. It’s raised concerns among media advocates that the secrecy shields police from scrutiny.\n\nArizona\n\nPhoenix: The city is the largest in the nation that hasn’t yet issued body cameras to its police officers. The City Council voted in February to fund 2,000 body-worn cameras for patrol officers, but the cameras haven’t yet been rolled out. The controversial May 27 arrest of a couple at whom police yelled, cursed and pointed guns in front of their young children prompted a public apology from Mayor Kate Gallego and an assurance that the city would take measures to prevent similar encounters from occurring again. It also led to incorrect comments by other politicians and media outlets that the officers had turned off their cameras. Gallego said the city will distribute the body-worn cameras by the end of the summer.\n\nArkansas\n\nVendor: A Newton County hog farm operating in the Buffalo River watershed has agreed to cease operations, Gov. Asa Hutchinson announced last week. C&H Hog Farms of Vendor will close its doors later this year under a $6.2 million buyout agreement that was negotiated by Hutchinson and Department of Arkansas Heritage Director Stacy Hurst. The farm’s owners will retain ownership of the property but will grant the state a conservation easement, which will limit its future usage. Money for the $6.2 million buyout will come from the state and from nonprofit conservation group The Nature Conservancy. Hutchinson said Thursday that The Nature Conservancy will not pay more than $1 million toward the buyout, likely just about $600,000.\n\nCalifornia\n\nSan Diego: A century-old tree with a long trunk and bushy branches that some believe was the inspiration for fictional Truffula trees in Dr. Seuss’ “The Lorax” has fallen in a coastal park. Officials are investigating why the wind-swept Monterey cypress toppled in Ellen Browning Scripps Park last week, the San Diego Union-Tribune reports. According to local legend, the tree inspired the “The Lorax” by Theodor “Dr. Seuss” Geisel, who lived nearby and worked in an office with a sweeping view of the coastline. But there are no facts to back up the lore. His wife told the La Jolla Village News in 2012 that the idea for Truffula trees in the 1971 environmental fable came from an Africa trip. “He looked up at one of the (local) trees, and said, ‘That’s my tree. They’ve stolen my tree.’ So that’s where that came from,” Audrey Geisel said.\n\nColorado\n\nDenver: The state Supreme Court says proponents of a ballot initiative to eliminate constitutional limits on taxation and spending can proceed. The court ruled 5-2 in an opinion released Monday that elections officials erred in rejecting the proposed 2020 ballot initiative. The liberal Colorado Fiscal Institute wants to ask voters whether the 1992 Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights should be eliminated. TABOR is a voter-approved constitutional amendment that strictly limits the ability of Colorado government to raise taxes, issue bonds and increase spending without a vote of the people. The court ordered elections officials to certify the proposed repeal question so proponents can begin collecting voter signatures to put the question on the ballot.\n\nConnecticut\n\nHartford: An effort is underway to identify the remains of two unknown victims of a massive fire at a circus 75 years ago. The Hartford Courant reports that a judge hearing an exhumation request Monday asked for additional information and ordered public service announcements to be placed in two media outlets to make sure anyone with an interest in the exhumations has an opportunity to be heard. The July 6, 1944, fire in Hartford killed 168 and injured 682. Five victims remain unidentified and buried in a Windsor cemetery. State Chief Medical Examiner James Gill wants to compare the unknown victims’ DNA to that of Sandra Sumrow, the granddaughter of 47-year-old Grace Fifield, who was at the circus the day of the fire but was never seen again.\n\nDelaware\n\nWilmington: The Clifford Brown Jazz Festival will fill Rodney Square with live music for its 31st year starting Wednesday. The festival, an annual tribute to the late Wilmington jazz artist Clifford Brown, kicks off at 5:30 p.m. Wednesday with performances by Philadelphia trombonist Jeff Bradshaw, jazz drummer Jamison Ross and trumpeter Etienne Charles. Thursday will see Cuban jazz pianist Alfredo Rodriguez’s trio headlining. Friday’s lineup features the Philadelphia/New York-based Jenkins Project and New Orleans-born trumpeter Christian Scott aTunde Adjuah. The concert will be followed by a downtown block party from 10 p.m. to 1 a.m. On Saturday, performances include a headlining set by Grammy Award-winner (and former “Tonight Show” bandleader) Branford Marsalis. The free music festival wraps up Sunday. Go to cliffordbrownjazzfest.org for complete details.\n\nDistrict of Columbia\n\nWashington: The Metro is launching a two-year study of the transit system’s blue, orange and silver lines in order to meet the demands of a growing region, WUSA-TV reports. Metro is limited in terms of what it can do to meet ridership demands because of the lines’ configuration. All three lines merge onto one set of tracks at the Rosslyn tunnel, creating an hourglass design that limits the number of trains that can pass through at a given time. Any disruption in one line can create trouble for another, causing a cascade of delays and service issues across all BOS lines. Over the next two years, Metro is asking its riders, workers and community to get involved in the study and provide their feedback on its BOS lines.\n\nFlorida\n\nNew Port Richey: A stretch of road on the Gulf Coast that was adopted by the Ku Klux Klan 25 years ago is now being sponsored by a gay rights group. Pasco Pride recently adopted the stretch of Moon Lake Road in New Port Richey. WUSF in Tampa reports that the KKK adopted the 1-mile stretch of the road back in 1993. Pasco Pride President Nina Borders says she was unaware of the KKK’s previous sponsorship. As sponsors, Pasco Pride will clear trash from the stretch of road four times a year. Border says the change in sponsorship reflects how much the community located northwest of Tampa has changed in a quarter-century.\n\nGeorgia\n\nFort Valley: The idea behind The Peach Truck involved selling Georgia peaches from the farm directly to the consumer. The Telegraph reports that the truck now travels around the nation selling peaches in parking lots. Stephen Rose says he now sells about two semitrailer loads of peaches a day. All of the peaches come from Georgia growers. Rose says that social media marketing has been a key driver of the business. He says people go online to follow where the truck will be and line up by the hundreds to get 25-pound boxes of peaches. He says the peaches sold from The Peach Truck go from the orchard to the customer in two days or less.\n\nHawaii\n\nKailua: A local company hopes to build an underwater farm that can produce large quantities of edible seaweed. The Honolulu Star-Advertiser reports Kampachi Farms LLC is working to establish a farm to grow limu more than a mile off Kaiwi Point near Kailua on Hawaii Island. Limu is an ingredient in poke, a traditional Hawaiian dish of diced raw fish. Kampachi Farms is seeking state and federal permits to test growth of four native limu species on submerged lines by supplying the plants with nutrient-rich water from depths between 600 and 2,000 feet. An official says the operation 33 feet below the surface could potentially farm limu in quantities large enough for use as animal feed and biofuel.\n\nIdaho\n\nBoise: A federal wildfire forecaster says the state’s wet spring and below-average temperatures the past three months will likely mean a later start to forest fires, but rangeland fires could be a problem as grasses dry out. Bryan Henry of the National Interagency Fire Center said in a presentation before the Idaho Land Board on Tuesday that the state is mostly looking good at the moment. Idaho Gov. Brad Little and other Land Board members also received an update from state officials on how state firefighting equipment is being deployed, with much of it in the north to protect forests. The state also works collaboratively with Rangeland Fire Protection Associations that involve private ranchers. The state now has nine of them helping protect some 14,000 square miles.\n\nIllinois\n\nUrbana: An exhibit of unique typewriters, including one used by the founder of Playboy, has opened at the University of Illinois. The university’s Rare Book & Manuscript Library will feature typewriters used by Hugh Hefner and Roger Ebert. Both men were alumni of the university. Hefner’s Underwood Standard portable typewriter that he used in college and to write for Playboy is one of the main exhibits. It is on loan to the library after being sold at auction in December for $162,500. The typewriters used by poet Carl Sandburg and novelist James Jones are also featured. The exhibit “Writers & Their Tools: Parchment-Paper-Processors” opened Monday and ends in August.\n\nIndiana\n\nIndianapolis: A national report says opioid prescriptions in the state have decreased by 35.1% over five years. The American Medical Association Opioid Task Force 2019 Progress Report shows Indiana’s reduction in opioid prescriptions from 2013 to 2018 is 2 percentage points higher than the national average of 33%. Indiana Hospital Association President Brian Tabor said last week that the opioid epidemic has damaged “individuals, families and entire communities” in Indiana. “It’s encouraging to see tangible results of the collective efforts of the state, the Indiana General Assembly and the medical community” in encouraging responsible prescriptions of opioids, he said. A 2017 law passed by the General Assembly requires medical providers to write prescriptions for no more than a seven-day supply of an opioid when first prescribing to a patient.\n\nIowa\n\nDes Moines: This year’s Iowa State Fair butter sculpture will likely be a hit with the kids. Elmo and his friends from “Sesame Street” will be visiting the 2019 fair. Butter versions of characters from the iconic children’s show will be appearing next to the butter cow, fair officials said in a news release Monday. The show is celebrating its 50th anniversary this year. The butter sculptures will be on display in the John Deere Agriculture Building throughout the fair, which runs Aug. 8-18. The butter cow has been sculpted at the Iowa State Fair since 1911, according to the news release. Various companion sculptures have joined the butter cow since 1996, including the “American Gothic” couple, Elvis Presley, Harry Potter and other characters.\n\nKansas\n\nTopeka: The city is gearing up for a major music festival that had to be moved here because of flooding. The Topeka Capital-Journal reports that the 24th annual Kicker Country Stampede will be held Thursday through Saturday at Heartland Motorsports Park in Topeka. It typically is held at Manhattan’s Tuttle Creek State Park, but water levels have been high this spring. Plans for one Topeka-area road project and one highway project have been revised to ensure they don’t conflict with the expected rush of visitors. The event typically draws more than 170,000 people. Meanwhile, Shawnee County Sheriff’s Sgt. Todd Stallbaumer says the sheriff’s office is working with event staff on personnel needed for staffing the event. This year’s performers include Old Dominion, Jason Aldean and Jake Owen.\n\nKentucky\n\nOwensboro: Part of a bourbon warehouse in western Kentucky collapsed during a thunderstorm. The partial collapse of the O.Z. Tyler Distillery rickhouse was reported early Monday, according to news outlets. Master Distiller Jacob Call says about 20,000 barrels are stored at the location, and it appears that about 4,000 were affected. He says most barrels seemed intact. Call said engineers were heading out to try to determine what caused the collapse. It’s unclear if weather played a role. Officials say no one was hurt. A nearby road is closed while the cleanup continues. Another Kentucky bourbon barrel warehouse collapsed last year. Half of a warehouse collapsed at the Barton 1792 Distillery in Bardstown on June 22, 2018, and the other half came down two weeks later.\n\nLouisiana\n\nBaton Rouge: Some state archaeologists are spending three weeks with students at the Louisiana School for the Visually Impaired, including a mock dig for 26 students. Lt. Gov. Billy Nungesser said in a news release Wednesday that the program runs through June 28. It also includes pottery making and a field trip to the Louisiana Museum of Natural Sciences. The students range from first through 12th grade. Archaeologists generally use stakes and string to mark off a grid for digging. The students’ grid was made of wood. They put dirt from inside the grid into buckets, then sieved the dirt to find whether they’d turned up anything. The three-week program is a partnership between the school and the Louisiana Office of Cultural Development’s Division of Archaeology.\n\nMaine\n\nAugusta: Single-use plastic bags will be banned in grocery stores statewide by 2020, according to legislation signed by the governor Monday. Democratic Gov. Janet Mills signed the bill with the goal of limiting plastic pollution, House Democrats said. The ban will come into effect by April 22, 2020, which is Earth Day. Maine’s bill comes as municipalities and legislatures in many states have considered such bans. Maine will allow stores to charge at least 5 cents for recyclable paper or reusable plastic bags. In order to be permitted, plastic bags would have to withstand 75 repeated uses and be made from heavier plastic. The fee wouldn’t apply to restaurants. Plastic bag manufacturers say such bans will only lead to thicker, reusable bags in landfills.\n\nMaryland\n\nOcean City: This beach town’s favorite cat is continuing to grow in popularity with the release of a self-published book. Within the past year, Pip the Beach Cat has made a name for himself during his adventures in the resort town, garnering more than 15,000 followers on Facebook. When Pip wasn’t trekking the beaches, riding a paddle board or taking a dip in the ocean in recent months, he was working on a children’s book about things to do in Ocean City. “Pip’s Guide to Ocean City Vol. I,” narrated by none other than Pip himself, focuses on the favorite locations and activities of Pip’s owner Emily Meadows and her family. She says the book includes locations she wants the new generation of children to know about while still providing a nostalgia factor for adults who grew up in or visited Ocean City.\n\nMassachusetts\n\nBoston: The John F. Kennedy Presidential Library is celebrating the 50th anniversary of the first moon landing with a new app that helps users relive the 1969 launch of the Apollo 11 mission. The free app available now uses videos, images and audio recordings from the mission that on July 20, 1969, led to Neil Armstrong’s moonwalk. The JFK Moonshot app will take users from July 16 until July 20 on an augmented reality journey from the Earth to the moon, providing people anywhere in the world the opportunity to view 120 hours of real-time tracking simulation. The app also highlights Kennedy’s inspiration for the mission. In a landmark speech at Rice University in 1962, he challenged the nation to land a man on the moon within a decade.\n\nMichigan\n\nHell: A comedian and rapper boasted on Twitter on Monday that he purchased the town and renamed it “Gay Hell.” Elijah Daniel, in a stint as Hell’s “mayor,” said the move was sparked by U.S. embassies not being allowed to fly pride flags during Pride Month, an annual celebration of the LGBTQ community. Daniel tweeted: “ahead of pride month Trump’s administration put a ban on embassy’s flying pride flags. so as of today, I am now the owner of Hell, Michigan. I bought the whole town. And my first act as owner, I have renamed my town to Gay Hell, MI. The only flags allowed to fly are pride.” Hell is an unincorporated hamlet whose devilish name has made it a popular tourist attraction. Daniel reportedly paid $100 a day to become temporary “mayor” for three days. He also became the temporary mayor in 2017 and promptly banned all straight people from entering Hell.\n\nMinnesota\n\nSt. Paul: Eleven nursing homes in the state are on a list of facilities cited by federal officials for patterns of health and safety violations. The U.S. Senate Committee on Aging released a list of 400 nursing homes across the country that are in need of tighter oversight. The facilities were identified by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. The St. Paul Pioneer Press says two nursing homes in Rochester and Red Wing already receive twice the normal amount of inspections and risk losing federal funding if problems are not addressed. The 11 facilities identified for stricter oversight are just 3% of Minnesota’s nursing homes. The state has about 375 nursing facilities that serve 40,000 residents.\n\nMississippi\n\nVicksburg: A grant will buy a tract of land to help preserve a Civil War battlefield. The Vicksburg Post reports that the Mississippi Department of Archives and History is receiving nearly $110,000 from the National Park Service. The money from the American Battlefield Trust will purchase 58 acres at the Champion Hill Battlefield, about halfway between Vicksburg and Jackson. Vicksburg National Military Park Superintendent Bill Justice says the land is along a section of road that connected the parts of the Confederate line and later two parts of the Union line. The Battle of Champion Hill was part of U.S. Gen. Ulysses Grant’s successful effort to take Vicksburg. About 32,000 Union soldiers fought 23,000 Confederates on May 16, 1863. Confederate forces were crushed and retreated to Vicksburg.\n\nMissouri\n\nSpringfield: Dickerson Park Zoo is welcoming a new 8-year-old Asian elephant. The elephant, named Hugo, arrived Friday from the Endangered Ark Foundation, a private nonprofit and circus elephant retirement ranch in Hugo, Oklahoma. Hugo will be in quarantine for at least a month. He will then be introduced to Patience, a female elephant, and the zoo hopes they will someday be on exhibit together. Asian elephants are critically endangered. The zoo said in a news release that Hugo came to the zoo to increase the genetic diversity of the U.S. elephant population. Also this month, the zoo also welcomed a male baby giraffe and a black-and-white colobus monkey. A ring-tailed lemur was born April 10.\n\nMontana\n\nBillings: Federal data shows that ranchers in the state lost more than 37,000 cattle last winter when heavy snow piled up and lingered. The Billings Gazette reports the federal Livestock Indemnity Program paid out $11.1 million for the loss of 37,352 cattle in Montana in 2018. The U.S. Farm Service Agency says that’s more than four times the amount paid out for losses in the previous four years combined. Half of the deaths were in a swath of Montana across six counties blanketed by snow up to 30 inches deep. Ranchers and the Farm Service Agency acknowledge that there were more weather-related livestock deaths that didn’t qualify for compensation. The losses for this past winter, which included historically cold temperatures, haven’t been calculated yet.\n\nNebraska\n\nOmaha: Schoolteacher Nancy Monen had an unusual guest come to her residence earlier this year hoping to see the “little room” off the upstairs master bedroom. The famous man and his adult children were enchanted by the small sunroom and the rest of the 101-year-old house where they’d lived six decades ago. And before he left, the dad scribbled something on the arched door of the little room: “The birthplace of Buffett Associates May 1956.” He signed his name, Warren E. Buffett. It paid off for Monen – who, for the first time a few months later, rented her residence to a trio attending the Berkshire Hathaway annual meeting, often called the Woodstock of Capitalism. Monen reaped $3,000 and is considering hiking the fee next year to spread the wealth to a charity, the Omaha World-Herald reports. “I’m crazy not to capitalize on that,” Monen said. “Warren would want me to.”\n\nNevada\n\nLas Vegas: The city is launching a reality show on streaming services that will tell behind-the-scenes stories about how the government navigates local issues. Las Vegas officials announced Monday that the show “Inside Vegas” will premiere Thursday and be available on Roku, Amazon Fire, Apple TV and the city’s GoVegas app. The show’s first season includes three episodes detailing a massage parlor suspected of prostitution, a nonprofit in trouble with police, and the city’s grappling with party houses and short-term rentals. The show will be produced by the city’s communications office.\n\nNew Hampshire\n\nConcord: The state isn’t ready to legalize recreational marijuana use, but it is close to expanding options for those who use it for medical reasons. Several bills related to the therapeutic use of cannabis have been sent to Republican Gov. Chris Sununu. One would allow physician assistants to authorize the use of the drug for patients. Another would allow patients and designated caregivers to grow marijuana plants at home. The House passed a bill legalizing recreational use in April, but the Senate later voted to delay action on it. Other bills that would expand the qualifying conditions for medical use also were retained in committee.\n\nNew Jersey\n\nFreehold: This borough’s council unanimously passed a resolution Monday stating that Freehold and Peralejos de las Truches, a town of about 175 in Spain, are now “twin” cities. The Spanish locale is heavy on fans of Bruce Springsteen, a native of Freehold. “His message is received across the globe, and we’re happy that this little town has reached out to Freehold Borough,” Mayor Nolan Higgins says. A representative for the Spanish town contacted Higgins via email in April requesting a “twinning” designation. It named Springsteen an “Adopted Son” of Peralejos in 2014 and gave the Boss a plaque stating the recognition at a 2016 E Street Band concert in Madrid, Jose Maria of Peralejos said in his communications with Freehold. The Spanish town hosts the annual “Greetings from Peralejos” Springsteen festival in August.\n\nNew Mexico\n\nLos Alamos: Federal officials will be offering tours of portions of the Manhattan Project National Historical Park next month. The National Park Service has teamed up with Los Alamos National Laboratory and the National Nuclear Security Administration to organize tours during a weekend in July. Registration is on a first-come, first-served basis. Each day will consist of two tours of 25 people each, each lasting three hours. Not all sites that make up the park are open to the public. Visitors will see Pond Cabin, which served as an office for the scientists who were studying plutonium; a bunker used to protect equipment and staff during explosives testing; and the building where a deadly plutonium accident took place. Officials say more tours will be planned later this year.\n\nNew York\n\nNew York: Officials say they’re assigning an extra 500 police officers to the city’s transit system amid a jump in fare evasion and assaults on workers. Gov. Andrew Cuomo said Monday that officers will be deployed to high-ridership subway stations and bus routes, as well as locations with increased levels of staff assaults. The Metropolitan Transportation Authority says assaults reported by employees increased by 15.2% from 2013 to 2017. The agency says lost revenue from fare evasion jumped from $105 million in 2015 to $225 million in 2018. Manhattan District Attorney Cy Vance Jr., who stopped prosecuting most subway fare evasion cases last year, says his office will contribute $40 million to the policing effort. Under a revised policy, the NYPD now issues summonses to most fare evasion suspects instead of arresting them.\n\nNorth Carolina\n\nStatesville: The city has voted against the flying of really big flags, holding its ground against a reality TV star’s huge Stars and Stripes. News outlets report the Statesville City Council voted down changes to the flag ordinance Monday night. That means flags in Statesville must be no larger than 25 feet by 40 feet, roughly half the size of the American flag that Marcus Lemonis has unfurled outside his Gander RV company. Statesville has asked a court to order Gander RV to comply or pay a $50-per-day fine. Lemonis runs Camping World and stars on “The Profit” on CNBC. He says the flag is staying. He’s said he’ll go to jail for contempt of court to protect his constitutional rights.\n\nNorth Dakota\n\nBismarck: Some north Bismarck residents are complaining about calcium deposits in water from their faucets at home. Bismarck’s director of utility operations, Michelle Klose, says the problem has been identified in at least 64 mainly newer homes on the outskirts of the city. The Bismarck Tribune reports that Klose says the residue does not present a health risk. Greg Wavra, administrator of the North Dakota Drinking Water Program, says that Bismarck’s water meets the requirements of the federal Safe Drinking Water Act and that calcium buildup should not be a cause for alarm. The city says magnesium heating rods may cause the deposits and suggests that homeowners switch to aluminum heating rods and lower the temperature of water heaters to mitigate the problem.\n\nOhio\n\nColumbus: A state lawmaker has introduced legislation that would require school districts to name a valedictorian and a salutatorian. The House bill introduced by Republican state Rep. Niraj Antani, of Miamisburg, comes after Mason High School in southwestern Ohio decided it will stop awarding those academic honors. Many schools traditionally have bestowed the valedictorian title on the graduating student with the highest cumulative grade-point average. The salutatorian title has often gone to the student with the second-highest average. The Columbus Dispatch reports Antani says the gist of the legislation is that “academic competition is good.” The bill allows districts to set criteria for selecting valedictorians and salutatorians. Some Ohio education groups oppose any state bill mandating decisions they say should be made at the local level.\n\nOklahoma\n\nOklahoma City: The state Pardon and Parole Board says nearly 750 prisoners applied in the first four months of the year for their sentences to be commuted. Justin Wolf, the board’s general counsel, says this is about twice the number of applications submitted by the end of April last year. Wolf tells The Oklahoman that more than 560 inmates applied for commutations last month alone. Commutation is a form of clemency intended to correct an unjust or excessive sentence. A measure that took effect in 2017 made some drug and property crimes misdemeanors, not felonies. Agency officials say the bump in applications might be because Gov. Kevin Stitt last month signed legislation directing the board to speed up commutations for those whose crimes have been reclassified as misdemeanors.\n\nOregon\n\nSalem: All seven of the state’s public universities will raise tuition for the 2019-2020 school year, with officials citing increased costs and less money than expected from legislators. The hikes range from 2.33% at Western Oregon University in Monmouth to 9.9% at Ashland’s Southern Oregon University. Gov. Kate Brown had made education a priority of this session, repeatedly saying that she wanted to create a “seamless system of education from cradle to career.” The Democrat expressed disappointment that higher education wasn’t involved in a $2 billion increase for K-12 schools that legislators approved earlier this year, and she has continued to push the Legislature to increase university budgets to avoid tuition increases higher than 5%. Legislators recommended a two-year higher education budget of $836.9 million. That is $100 million more than last biennium, though schools like the University of Oregon said they needed at least $120 million more to keep tuition increases below 5%. The University of Oregon, one of the state’s largest public universities, will raise tuition 6.91% next school year.\n\nPennsylvania\n\nHarrisburg: Gov. Tom Wolf is vetoing budget-season legislation to substantially ramp up taxpayer support for private and religious schools. In Wolf’s veto message Tuesday, he questioned why Pennsylvania should expand a tax credit that subsidizes private institutions while the state’s public school system remains underfunded. The Democratic governor also criticized the tax credit program as lacking accountability, saying little is known about its educational quality or the middleman groups that can withhold 20% of the money. The Republican-controlled Legislature passed the bill over Wolf’s objections amid budget discussions. Just four Democrats voted for it. It would have nearly doubled the Educational Improvement Tax Credit to $210 million annually. The program effectively lets corporations and business people direct tens of millions in tax dollars to favored private and religious schools.\n\nRhode Island\n\nProvidence: The state has received a $2.8 million federal grant to boost efforts to bring an Amtrak stop to Rhode Island’s main airport. The Consolidated Rail Infrastructure and Safety Improvements grant was announced by U.S. Sens. Jack Reed and Sheldon Whitehouse and U.S. Reps. Jim Langevin and David Cicilline, all Democrats. The state Department of Transportation will use it to pay for further planning efforts between the state and Amtrak. Currently, T.F. Green Airport is connected to Providence and Boston by the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority’s commuter rail line. Amtrak stops in Providence, Kingston and Westerly, Rhode Island. The delegation says adding Amtrak service to the airport in Warwick could position the state to attract new investment, create jobs, and enhance transportation options for residents and visitors.\n\nSouth Carolina\n\nFlorence: Civil War cannons that sat on the bottom of the Pee Dee River for 150 years are now restored and on display at a veterans center in Florence. The cannons are from the Confederate ship Peedee, which was built to break the Union blockade of the South, but its cannons were tossed into the river in 1865 and the ship scuttled as Union troops approached. University of South Carolina archaeologists recovered the cannons in 2015, and scientists at the Warren Lasch Conservation Center in North Charleston have spent four years restoring the cannons. The cannons belong to the U.S. government. The Florence County Museum agreed to display them at the Florence County Veterans Center to honor how all veterans’ sacrifice to serve in wars.\n\nSouth Dakota\n\nRapid City: The murder of a pharmacist who was raped and strangled in her home in a South Dakota city more than half a century ago has been solved with the use of DNA technology and genealogy databases, police said. Investigators believe Eugene Carroll Field killed 60-year-old Gwen Miller in 1968 when he was a 25-year-old living in Rapid City, Detective Wayne Keefe said at a news conference Monday. He said there was enough evidence to charge Field with first-degree murder, but he died in 2009. It is “a little surreal” to finally identify the killer after 51 years and up to 5,000 hours of work, Keefe said. The motive remains unknown. “Today, there’s a slight celebratory mood because the case has been solved,” Police Chief Karl Jegeris said. “But I assure you, the fact of how horrific this crime was wears heavy on each and every one of our hearts.”\n\nTennessee\n\nManchester: A group that partners with musicians on voter registration efforts says the 1,390 voters it signed up at Bonnaroo represent its all-time high for one festival. A news release from HeadCount says it has registered almost 600,000 voters at 7,500 concerts and music festivals since 2004. Bonnaroo ran from Thursday through Sunday. HeadCount says it wants to register more than 200,000 voters by the 2020 presidential election. A new Tennessee law set to take effect in October allows fines and potentially jail time for voter registration workers who don’t follow new rules. Tennessee will likely be the first state imposing fines for submitting too many incomplete registration forms. HeadCount Director of Engagement Tappan Vickery says she hopes the group can keep providing its services without risking fines or prosecution.\n\nTexas\n\nCorpus Christi: High school and college students can get their feet wet in marine animal care with a new career exploration program at the Texas State Aquarium. The Animal Science Exploration Program for high school students is set for June 27, from 5 to 7 p.m., and the college-oriented event will take place July 25, from 5 to 7 p.m. Each program is $120 per participant, or $60 for aquarium members. A parental escort is required for participants 17 and younger. Admission for an escort is $10 each, or free for one member. During both events, students will learn about potential aquarium jobs, including careers as a marine biologist, aquarist, animal nutritionist, water quality specialist, professional diver and enrichment specialist. The students will then move on to hands-on activities, including helping to feed sea turtles.\n\nUtah\n\nSalt Lake City: A government watchdog will investigate whether the U.S. Interior Department broke the law by making plans to open lands cut from a national monument in the state by President Donald Trump to leasing for oil, gas and coal development, a pair of Democratic congressmembers said Monday. The Government Accountability Office’s investigation into whether Interior violated the appropriations law by using funds to assess potential resource extraction in the lands cut from the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument is the latest chapter in a long-running saga over the sprawling monument created in 1996 on lands home to scenic cliffs, canyons, dinosaur fossils and coal reserves. Trump slashed the monument by nearly half in 2017 following a contentious review by former Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke of monuments around the country.\n\nVermont\n\nJohnson: A nonprofit group trying to fight opioid addiction plans to turn a former Catholic church into a recovery center. Vermont Public Radio reports that Greg and Dawn Tatro recently purchased the closed St. John the Apostle Church on behalf of Jenna’s Promise, an organization named for their daughter who died of an overdose in February. Greg Tatro said he plans to build a full-service health care center on the site and will host “sober parties” there to bring together people in recovery and families from the local community. He said the next steps are to talk with the neighbors, work on fundraising and start developing plans for a sober house.\n\nVirginia\n\nRichmond: A three-dimensional “LOVE” artwork will be traveling around the state this summer to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the “Virginia is for Lovers” slogan. The artwork unveiled Thursday in Richmond will travel to Virginia Welcome Centers for “50 Years of Love” events so travelers can take their photos with it. It was created by artist Melanie Stimmell Van Latum and unveiled by the Virginia Tourism Corporation. The slogan was created in 1969 by the Richmond-based advertising agency Martin & Woltz Inc., now known as The Martin Agency. Other events planned to mark the anniversary include a 50-mile bike ride on the Virginia Capital Trail on Sunday. Additional events will be held at breweries, wineries and parks throughout Virginia.\n\nWashington\n\nSeattle: Members of the Lummi Tribe, along with activists and scientists, launched the Salish Sea Campaign this weekend to save the southern resident orcas and restore their home. KCPQ-TV reports the campaign calls for an impact study on stressors to the Salish Sea caused by humans. It also wants to end new stressors like Navy underwater weapons tests until the Salish Sea is healthier. The tribe says it will measure the sea’s health by the number of salmon using 1985 levels as a baseline. Lummi Nation elder Raynell Morris says that “our relatives under the sea are telling us they need help.” The Lummi Nation’s plan to bring back Lolita the orca was also showcased. The killer whale was captured off Puget Sound in 1970 and taken into captivity.\n\nWest Virginia\n\nCharleston: The West Virginia House of Delegates has pushed a sweeping Republican education proposal one step closer to passage. Lawmakers on Tuesday advanced the plan to allow the state’s first charter schools, setting it up for a full vote in the GOP-controlled chamber Wednesday. If approved, the bill would then head to the Senate for consideration. Education unions and Democrats oppose the measure. They argue that it’s similar to a wide-ranging Senate bill that has led to massive teacher protests at the Capitol. The House bill, among other things, would cap the number at charter schools at 10. The legislature is currently in a special session after failing to agree on education measures before the regular session ended in March. Teachers are packing the statehouse to rally against the House bill.\n\nWisconsin\n\nMadison: A new group is forming to push for ending a University of Wisconsin System tuition freeze and more state funding for UW-Madison. Badgers United launched Monday. The board of directors includes former Major League Baseball Commissioner Bud Selig, a UW-Madison alumnus. John and Tashia Morgridge, alumni who have donated millions of dollars to the campus, also sit on the board. Republican lawmakers have kept tuition rates for in-state students frozen since 2013. The GOP-controlled Joint Finance Committee in May approved a proposal in Democratic Gov. Tony Evers’ budget that extends the freeze for another two years. Evers’ budget called for $127 million in additional state aid for the system, but the committee cut that back to $58 million. System President Ray Cross called the reduction a “kick in the shins.”\n\nWyoming\n\nRiverton: The Wyoming Department of Health has released details on its plan for affordable air ambulance services in the state. The department’s Franz Fuchs says the proposal seeks to decrease the cost of air ambulance services and increase the availability of the service in Wyoming. Under the agency’s proposed plan, the state would determine the number and location of air ambulance bases with the goal of providing the best coverage and response time. Companies would bid to become the state’s Medicaid provider for the service. An attorney for one air ambulance company criticized the proposal, asking how many patients will be required to take ground ambulances. The plan met with mixed reactions from state lawmakers on the Interim Labor, Health and Social Services Committee last week.\n\nFrom USA TODAY Network and wire reports", "authors": [], "publish_date": "2019/06/19"}, {"url": "https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/50-states/2019/09/16/fugitive-pig-proverb-library-sodium-warnings-news-around-states/40155777/", "title": "News from around our 50 states", "text": "From USA TODAY Network and wire reports\n\nAlabama\n\nGuntersville: People in a rural area are raising concerns about the use of “chicken sludge” as fertilizer on farm fields as the state considers new rules on how such products can be used. Julie Lay says the sludge from a poultry processing plant created an overpowering stench when it was applied to a neighbor’s farm fields. Lay says flies also invaded her property in Marshall County. Al.com reports she says the material had a “crust” and chicken feathers. Lay was among several residents who spoke out recently at an Alabama Department of Environmental Management public hearing. The agency is considering new rules on how biosolids – solid material left over from wastewater treatment operations and chicken processing plants – can be used as a fertilizer.\n\nAlaska\n\nHomer: Two young harbor seals are back where they belong after being rehabilitated through the Alaska SeaLife Center’s Wildlife Response Program and released into Kachemak Bay. Dozens of people gathered at Bishop’s Beach on Sept. 5 to watch as the two seals – Ugashik “Uggy” and Charley Fritz – were released into the waters of Kachemak Bay in Homer by SeaLife Center staff and volunteers, the Homer News reports. Uggy was found neglected by her mother May 29 on a beach near McNeil Canyon, and Fritz was found neglected by his mother on a beach near Homer on May 12, according to an information sheet provided by the SeaLife Center. At that time, both were estimated to be only a week to two weeks old, says Jane Belovarac, curator for the Wildlife Response Program.\n\nArizona\n\nPhoenix: Residents with overdue library books might want to wait a bit before bringing back their borrowed copies of the current bestsellers. Starting in November, Phoenix’s public library system will join a growing number of libraries around the United States that have dropped overdue book fees, becoming the nation’s largest metropolis to dump the fines. Phoenix City Librarian Rita Hamilton said the unanimous City Council decision would allow the system comprised of 17 libraries to ensure “that access to our resources is as equitable as possible.” The Phoenix system has been charging 20 cents per item per day, which can add up quickly into dollars owed, an extra expense some families cannot afford. Phoenix’s move is part of a worldwide trend by libraries to eliminate fines the American Library Association considers “a form of social inequality.”\n\nArkansas\n\nLittle Rock: The state’s attorney general is seeking to move lawsuits challenging a measure giving the prison director authority to determine an inmate’s competency to be executed to federal court. Attorney General Leslie Rutledge on Thursday filed notice to move the lawsuits by death row inmates Bruce Ward and Jack Greene from Jefferson County Circuit Court. The state Supreme Court in November struck down an earlier version of the mental competency law. Legislators this year approved a reworked version of the law, and the inmates are seeking to have it overturned. Rutledge’s filing says federal courts have jurisdiction because the inmates argue the new law violates the U.S. Constitution. Arkansas has no executions scheduled and lacks the drugs needed for its lethal injection process.\n\nCalifornia\n\nFresno: California authorities have captured an emu after the flightless fugitive led officers down a highway. The Fresno Bee reported Friday that the bird was apprehended following a brief pursuit by California Highway Patrol officers. Authorities say officers responded to a report that an ostrich was wandering along the right-hand shoulder of U.S. Highway 99 northwest of Fresno. Authorities say Madera County Animal Services took the bird into custody uninjured. Officers say they do not know whether the emu escaped a nearby farm or a moving vehicle. Animal experts say the flightless native Australian birds can sprint at up to 30 mph and trot quickly for longer distances. Emus are the second-largest birds in the world behind ostriches.\n\nColorado\n\nFort Collins: More than 40 boats gathered at Inlet Bay Marina on Friday and linked together to form a circle, planning on remaining in formation until Sunday. The event, known as the “Ships Wheel,” is a yearly tradition for the boaters of Horsetooth Reservoir to celebrate the end of summer together. The event was created by Inlet Bay Marina owners Glen and Nancy Werth. “It’s an end-of-year celebration. It’s definitely the highlight of the year,” says Anthony Robbins, a Ships Wheel participant. Robbins says those participating strive to create a safe, positive and family-friendly atmosphere in the reservoir, which he says hasn’t always had the best reputation. During the event, those in the wheel hang out on their boats all weekend, eating and sleeping.\n\nConnecticut\n\nHartford: A group of prison inmates has asked a federal judge for bottled drinking water, alleging the tap water at the Osborn Correctional Institution is tainted with bacteria found in sewage. The inmates are seeking a temporary injunction as part of a larger lawsuit that accuses the state of exposing them to hazardous materials such as PCBs and asbestos. They allege numerous inmates have become ill with bacteria known as helicobacter pylori, which is typically water-borne and caused by sewage entering the water supply. Affidavits filed by 38 inmates and former inmates at Osborn described discolored water that smells of feces and contains floating particles. They also say prison staff routinely bring in bottled water to drink and provide to therapy dogs. The state denies the allegations.\n\nDelaware\n\nWilmington: Three fatal shootings in less than 12 hours in the state’s largest city mean it has already surpassed its number of dead or injured shooting victims for all of 2018. Wilmington Police report two men ages 24 and 26 were shot Friday morning in a residential area and later died. Police say earlier Friday a 36-year-old woman also was shot and died. Their names haven’t been released, and the deaths are under investigation. The woman was the 78th shooting victim of the year, matching the number recorded in all of last year. The total was exceeded with the shootings later Friday. This year 16 people have been killed in Wilmington shootings, compared to 19 in all of 2018.\n\nDistrict of Columbia\n\nWashington: Greta Thunberg, the Swedish teenager who helped spark a youth-driven push for climate change, has come to Washington. On Friday, Thunberg and about 1,500 protesters, many of them schoolchildren, marched and chanted near the White House. Thunberg, who is 16, gained international attention by inspiring protests and school strikes demanding immediate actions to avert environmental catastrophe. Her activism has drawn a passionate following of children essentially challenging their elders to take action. Last month, Thunberg crossed the Atlantic Ocean in a solar-powered boat, landing in New York City on Aug. 28. She is in Washington for several days of rallies and lobbying efforts in advance of a global climate strike declared for Sept. 20.\n\nFlorida\n\nWellington: It took 22 years, but a missing man’s remains were finally found thanks to someone who zoomed in on his former neighborhood with Google satellite images and noticed a car submerged in a lake. Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office spokeswoman Teri Barbera says the skeletal remains were of William Moldt, who went missing in 1997. Barbera says a previous resident of Wellington was checking his former neighborhood on Google Earth when he saw what looked like a car in the lake. The former resident contacted a current homeowner, who used a drone to confirm it was a white car. Deputies then found the remains. The National Missing and Unidentified Persons System says Moldt went to a nightclub in November 1997 but didn’t appear intoxicated when he left alone.\n\nGeorgia\n\nDecatur: U.S. Sen. Johnny Isakson says he’s demanding answers from the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs after a woman says her father was bitten more than 100 times by ants at a veterans’ home in Decatur. Isakson says he was horrified and “downright maddened” after Laquna Ross told WSB-TV she found her father, Joel Marrable, with swollen, red bumps all over his body when she visited him at the nursing home near Atlanta last week before his death. Marrable, an Air Force veteran, had cancer. The Atlanta Veterans Affairs Health Care System said in a statement that it was told the ants were affecting patients. It said all of the bedrooms at the Eagle’s Nest Community Living Center have been cleaned, and a pest control company is monitoring conditions.\n\nHawaii\n\nHonolulu: Gov. David Ige says he and other state employees received death threats amid the heated debate over building a giant telescope on the state’s highest peak. Ige disclosed the threats as he and his Cabinet members held a news conference Friday asking people on all sides of the issue to be careful with their language. Attorney General Clare Connors played a voicemail recording in which an unidentified man told a state employee, “I hope you die.” She showed reporters a social media post offering a $5,000 reward for the identity of a law enforcement officer involved in last week’s demolition and removal of a small wooden house built by demonstrators near the camp where they are blocking the telescope’s construction. “I hope that we can all agree that putting a bounty on the head of law enforcement officer is disturbing and deeply concerning,” Connors said.\n\nIdaho\n\nBoise: A panel of lawmakers formed to monitor how federal laws affect the state’s sovereignty and report back to the Legislature has created three subcommittees to examine federal lands, education, and health and welfare. Republican Rep. Jason Monks, co-chair of the Committee on Federalism, says the federal lands subcommittee is not a repeat of an interim committee from several years ago that ran up big attorney fees while trying to find a way for the state to take control of federal lands. He says the purpose of the Committee on Federalism created by the Legislature earlier this year is to find ways for the state to work more effectively with the federal government, and the breadth of that challenge is better met by forming subcommittees.\n\nIllinois\n\nOregon: The first steps in repairing a century-old landmark known as the Black Hawk statue are finally underway. Workers began erecting scaffolding last Monday around the 48-foot-tall statue in Lowden State Park in northern Illinois’ Ogle County. Sauk Valley Media reports Quality Restorations Inc. of Wood Dale was scheduled to begin the repair work last spring, but cold, wet weather thwarted that work. The 108-year-old monument has spent most of the past five years beneath a plastic covering to protect it from harsh weather. State budget troubles delayed a promised $350,000 matching state grant for the repairs, but that funding was finally secured over a year ago. The Black Restoration team obtained the remaining $225,000 needed for the project. The cost of repairs will approach $1 million.\n\nIndiana\n\nIndianapolis: The state is getting a $2.1 million federal grant to explore ways of reducing its high rate of pregnancy-related deaths. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention will provide the State Department of Health with more than $420,000 a year for five years to improve Indiana’s ability to collect data about pregnancy-related deaths and devise ways to combat them. The Indianapolis Business Journal reports the state has the nation’s third-highest rate of deaths of women while pregnant or within one year of their pregnancy’s end. The national maternal-mortality rate is 20.7 deaths per 100,000 births, but Indiana’s rate is 41.4 deaths per 100,000 births, according to the United Health Foundation. Only two other states scored worse: Georgia and Louisiana.\n\nIowa\n\nRed Oak: The Coyote Johnson Muscle Car Auction at the Montgomery County Fairgrounds on Saturday marked the event of the summer in southwestern Iowa, the big reveal of a storied collection of cars the public had long awaited. The massive event saw an entire community come out to witness a newly minted legend and see up close the treasure trove of classic American machines that Bill “Coyote” Johnson had kept hidden away for decades. The existence of Johnson’s hoard, more than a hundred in total, was revealed in April. Its existence was a revelation, a previously unknown monument to mid-century auto engineering. VanDerBrink Auctions sold off nearly 100 vehicles in about three hours.\n\nKansas\n\nHutchinson: The Kansas State Fair will reevaluate its gun policy this fall because concert security concerns could conflict with state law that allows gun owners to carry their weapons openly. The Wichita Eagle reports that the fair had to screen concertgoers at the Sept. 7 Billy Currington performance because he required it in his contract, and the show was delayed while everyone and their bags were checked. Fair Manager Robin Jennison says the fair will likely have to employ that kind of security more often if it wants to continue booking top acts because such requirements are becoming common.\n\nKentucky\n\nFrankfort: The state’s chief justice says the drug court program has failed to keep up with surging demand for its treatment services while the state struggles with addiction woes. Chief Justice John D. Minton Jr. told lawmakers Friday that he’ll seek funding to expand drug courts. He told a legislative panel that drug courts and similar specialty courts are serving fewer than 2,500 people at a time when Kentucky faces its worst drug epidemic in history. Minton says that’s not even “scratching the surface of the need.” Drug courts provide court-supervised treatment so people can stay out of jail. Participants take part in counseling and education programs and must undergo drug tests.\n\nLouisiana\n\nNew Orleans: Two Swiss women have recreated Homer Simpson’s gourmandizing tour of the Big Easy, snarf for snarf, finger-wiggle for finger-wiggle. Biz New Orleans reports it took Janine Wiget, of Zurich, and Katrin von Niederhausern, who now lives in Stockholm, a week to duplicate the segment, which covers 54 restaurants in 1 minute, 27 seconds. The side-by-side video created by the 30-year-old illustrators and graphic designers has attracted more than 1 million views since it was uploaded Aug. 23. The women duplicate every action and camera angle in the sequence from “Lisa Gets the Blues,” which first aired April 22, 2018. Tourism officials are delighted. New Orleans Tourism Marketing Corp. president and CEO Mark Romig says it’s priceless publicity.\n\nMaine\n\nBangor: A man who caused a standoff that ended with him being shot three times and his home destroyed by a police explosive has sued law enforcement officials. Dixmont resident Michael Grendell argued police didn’t wait for a negotiator trained to handle mental health crises and failed to obtain a proper warrant to use a bomb. The Bangor Daily News reports 62-year-old Grendell sued Wednesday in federal court in Bangor. Eighteen state police members and one member of the attorney general’s office are defendants. A spokesman for the attorney general’s office declined to comment on the lawsuit. Grendell filed a notice in December saying he would seek $120 million in damages. Last year, he was sentenced to probation and a suspended jail term on charges including criminal threatening with a dangerous weapon.\n\nMaryland\n\nAnnapolis: A state panel on school construction has approved more than $13 million for portable air conditioning systems in Baltimore County schools. The money approved by the Interagency Committee on School Construction on Thursday will bring portable air conditioning systems to four of the county’s seven schools that still don’t have air conditioning: Dulaney High School, Lansdowne High School, Bedford Elementary School and Catonsville Center for Alternative Studies. Comptroller Peter Franchot, who has pushed for years as a member of the Board of Public Works to bring air conditioning to schools that don’t have it, says there’s finally some good news, on a day when some schools were closed in the Baltimore area due to excessive heat.\n\nMassachusetts\n\nPlymouth: The state has received more than half a million dollars in federal grant money to help workers at the now-shuttered Pilgrim Nuclear Power Station find new jobs. U.S. Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Edward Markey and U.S. Rep. William Keating, all Democrats, said the grant will help the state provide services like career planning, comprehensive assessments, resume writing and job placement to workers who were laid off earlier this year. The Plymouth plant, which produced electricity for 46 years, employed about 580 people in May. That number is expected to be about 270 by March 2020, according to plant operators. Last month the plant was sold to a private company for decommissioning. It was the state’s last nuclear power plant.\n\nMichigan\n\nDetroit: The Tidal streaming service has selected five Motor City-based artists as the first winners of a million-dollar grant program to boost music careers. The platform announced Friday that Tidal Unplugged’s inaugural group consists of Emma Guzman, Laurie Love, Olivia Millerschin, Raye Williams and Sam Austins. They were chosen among thousands of applicants. The winners will get, among other things, a monthly stipend, professional training, access to recording and creative resources, and promotional support. They also will produce three songs each that will premiere on the streaming service and perform at a showcase later this year. Tidal officials say they aim to expand the program to other areas of the country.\n\nMinnesota\n\nDuluth: Authorities say a fire that destroyed a historic synagogue doesn’t appear to have been a hate crime. Duluth Police Chief Mike Tusken said Sunday that 36-year-old Matthew James Amiot, of Duluth, was arrested Friday in the fire last week at the Adas Israel Congregation, in the city’s downtown. Tusken says he has no reason to believe the fire was a hate crime, although the investigation is ongoing. Police are recommending that prosecutors charge Amiot with first-degree arson. Duluth fire Chief Shawn Krizaj says the blaze started outside the synagogue and spread into the building. No accelerants were found. According to its website, the Adas Israel Congregation is an Orthodox/High Conservative Jewish congregation with 75 members. Eight of 14 Torah scrolls, the holy books of Judaism, that were in the synagogue were saved.\n\nMississippi\n\nHattiesburg: The wood-frame home where a washerwoman lived as she scrimped to create a scholarship fund has been moved to a museum district honoring African American accomplishments. The Hattiesburg home of the late Oseola McCarty was placed in a tax sale in 2017. The Hattiesburg American reports the local convention commission bought it. Late last month, the home was moved a few blocks from its original site. It will be restored and turned into a museum. McCarty attended school until the sixth grade and washed clothes for a living, saving money to help students needing financial assistance. She was 91 when she died in 1999. She left about $150,000 to the University of Southern Mississippi, and the Oseola McCarty Endowed Scholarship was created.\n\nMissouri\n\nIndependence: A worker has found what’s believed to be a Civil War cannonball lodged in a Kansas City area tree that he was hired to take down. KMBC-TV reports the small cannonball fell out as the worker was chopping the diseased tree on the grounds of the Overfelt-Johnston house. The house was used as a hospital during the First Battle of Independence, which was fought across the street in 1862. Fourteen people were killed and 18 wounded as nearly 800 mounted Confederates overpowered the 350 men of the town’s federal garrison. Property owner Randall Pratt says a cannonball also was found when the property was restored in 1980. That cannonball, which had been shot into a wall, is in a county museum. Pratt plans to keep the latest find at the home.\n\nMontana\n\nBillings: The state’s greater sage grouse population has fallen more than 40% over the past three years, mirroring recent declines across the U.S. West for the bird species for which federal officials rejected protections in 2015. State wildlife officials estimate there were about 44,000 ground-dwelling sage grouse in Montana this spring. Sage grouse once numbered in the millions but have seen their range that stretches across portions of 11 states diminished by oil and gas drilling, wildfires, grazing and other pressures. Weather can affect populations from year to year, and wildlife officials say those short-term cycles are most directly responsible for the recent declines. Montana’s drop from almost 78,000 grouse in 2016 was traced to an extreme drought in eastern parts of the state in 2017, says Catherine Wightman with Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks.\n\nNebraska\n\nLincoln: The state government collected more tax revenue than expected in August. The Department of Revenue announced Friday that the state received a net total of $462 million last month, which is nearly 5% higher than its official forecast of $441 million. The department says net sales-and-use and miscellaneous taxes came in higher than expected, as did net corporate and individual income taxes. Net tax collections are also higher than expected in the current fiscal year that began July 1. The forecast was set in April by the Nebraska Economic Forecasting Advisory Board. The board’s projections help lawmakers and the governor determine how much money they have available for the state budget.\n\nNevada\n\nLas Vegas: An innkeeper selling tickets for campers this week in a tiny desert town is being threatened with legal action by the originator of the “Storm Area 51” internet hoax over the “Alienstock” name. A Las Vegas attorney representing 20-year-old Matty Roberts sent a cease-and-desist letter Thursday telling Little A’Le’Inn owner Connie West to pull the plug on events West says she’s still planning for Thursday through Sunday. West didn’t immediately respond Friday to telephone and email messages. She told the Las Vegas Review-Journal she’s still “full steam ahead” with vendors, merchandise and musical acts. Roberts broke with West last week and says he’ll appear at a party venue in downtown Las Vegas on Thursday – the night before the Life is Beautiful music and art festival begins a few blocks away.\n\nNew Hampshire\n\nConcord: State education officials are moving ahead with Gov. Chris Sununu’s plan to help students earn high school diplomas and college degrees at the same time, at no cost to their families. Sununu, a Republican, first announced his goal for the New Hampshire Career Academy program in January. Modeled after a privately funded partnership between Great Bay Community College and Spaulding High School in Rochester, the new statewide program also provides participants with guaranteed job interviews. Sununu signed an agreement Friday with the state’s education commissioner and chancellor of the community college system to set up the program. Commissioner Frank Edelblut said the program creates a new pathway for students, who will get career-ready educations and a head start in the job market.\n\nNew Jersey\n\nAtlantic City: The governor has signed a bill allowing the Golden Nugget casino to accept bets on most National Basketball Association games. Texas billionaire Tilman Fertitta owns the casino – and also owns the NBA’s Houston Rockets. When New Jersey lawmakers legalized sports betting last year, a provision in the law banned team owners from placing or accepting bets on any games involving their sport. It was directly aimed at the Golden Nugget and enacted over protests that Nevada regulators allow Fertitta’s casinos to take bets on pro basketball games as long as they don’t involve the Rockets. The bill Murphy signed Friday brings New Jersey in line with regulations in Nevada and Mississippi, which also allow Fertitta’s casinos to handle NBA bets that don’t involve the Rockets.\n\nNew Mexico\n\nAlbuquerque: Health officials say the state had more suicides in 2018 than any other year in at least two decades. According to data provided by the state’s Department of Health, 535 people died by suicide last year. That a rate of 24.8 per 100,000 residents and represents a 6.7% increase over the state’s 2017 suicide rate. Mental health experts told the Albuquerque Journal the 2018 numbers represent the highest suicide rate on record in New Mexico since the state began consistently keeping track in 1999. According to an analysis released by the Violence Policy Center, New Mexico had the fourth-highest suicide rate in the nation in 2017 at 23.51 per 100,000 people. Authorities say there’s an association with firearm ownership and firearms use and deaths connected to suicide.\n\nNew York\n\nNew York: Gov. Andrew Cuomo says a multimillion-dollar initiative will restore aquatic habitats around the state. Cuomo announced the program Saturday as officials released thousands of juvenile shellfish at New York City’s Hudson River Park. The governor says the “Revive Mother Nature” initiative is the most aggressive in the country and will reintroduce millions of oysters to New York waterways. Cuomo also announced $2.8 million to restore marine habitat in New York Harbor and to expand the Soundview Park oyster reef in the Bronx River. Saturday’s event was part of an effort to create 4 acres of enhanced habitat off the Hudson River Park for 5 million to 10 million oysters. Lt. Gov. Kathy Hochul says the program is designed to combat climate change and advance the state as a world-class fishing destination.\n\nNorth Carolina\n\nPittsboro: Police officers and barricades were in place as people for and against the removal of a Confederate monument stood on opposite sides of the street Saturday. Media outlets reported demonstrations were helds near the Chatham County Courthouse, where the monument has stood for more than a century. Chatham’s commissioners voted 4-1 in August to ask a United Daughters of the Confederacy chapter to have a plan by Oct. 1 to remove the statute. The county let the UDC install the statute in 1907. Without a plan, the county will declare it a public trespass by Nov. 1, making it eligible for removal. Monument supporter Barry Isenhour said the statue respects American veterans, but opponent Robert Finch said it was installed to intimidate the black community.\n\nNorth Dakota\n\nFargo: A highly publicized North Dakota Air National Guard flight to bring an infant’s heart to a waiting transplant patient in California more than 30 years ago is set to be showcased. The flight of the F-4 Phantom, a supersonic fighter, took place in December 1986 after a Lear jet flown from California to Fargo to pick up the heart broke down in cold weather. The flight took place on emergency orders from North Dakota Gov. George Sinner, who died last year. The pilot, current North Dakota Air National Guard Brig. Gen. Bob Becklund, flew the golf ball-sized organ to Stanford Medical Center. KFGO radio reports that the heart recipient, now 33, lives in the San Francisco area. The “Heart Flight” display will be unveiled this month at the Fargo Air Museum.\n\nOhio\n\nSandusky: The state’s U.S. senators want Congress to rename a NASA research facility after astronaut Neil Armstrong. Republican Rob Portman and Democrat Sherrod Brown introduced legislation Thursday to honor the Ohio native by renaming the NASA Plum Brook Station in Sandusky. Portman says he raised the idea with Armstrong in 2012, a year before the astronaut’s death. The senator says Armstrong, the first man to walk on the moon, wasn’t comfortable with the attention it would bring. Portman says he has since spoken with NASA and Armstrong’s family, and they support renaming the facility. Brown says it would be a fitting tribute given Armstrong’s contributions as a test pilot and astronaut.\n\nOklahoma\n\nStillwater: A public memorial is planned at Oklahoma State University to honor the late T. Boone Pickens, who donated hundreds of millions of dollars to his alma mater during his lifetime. Pickens died Wednesday in Dallas at age 91. OSU says the university will honor Pickens on Sept. 25 at Gallagher-Iba Arena in Stillwater. Pickens said last month in his annual letter to Oklahoma State fans that he checked with the school and learned he had donated $652 million over the years, with much of it going to athletic facilities. The school’s football stadium was named for Pickens in 2003 after he made a $70 million donation, which included $20 million set aside for a stadium expansion. A funeral service is also planned for Thursday in Dallas, where Pickens lived.\n\nOregon\n\nSalem: The 2020 election season is officially underway in the state. Thursday marked the first day for major party or nonpartisan candidates to file declarations of candidacy with the secretary of state’s office. One of the top state races is for that role, secretary of state, the second-highest statewide office after the governor and currently held by a Republican. Filing their papers as Democratic candidates were Jamie McLeod-Skinner, who in 2018 unsuccessfully tried to unseat Rep. Greg Walden, who is from a U.S. congressional district that voted overwhelmingly for Donald Trump in 2016; and state Sen. Mark Hass. Secretary of State Bev Clarno urged Oregonians to run for an office. Her office said there have been few candidates in recent elections, which means voters have not had many options.\n\nPennsylvania\n\nPhiladelphia: A new rule has gone into effect in the city requiring chain restaurants to post warning labels next to menu items that are high in salt. Warnings will be shown for any menu item that has more than 2,300 milligrams, which is the recommended sodium total for an entire day. Restaurants with 15 or more locations were required to post the warnings under the new regulation by Saturday. The legislation was signed by Mayor Jim Kenney last fall after City Council passed the requirement in 2018. Philadelphia Health Commissioner Dr. Thomas Farley says the labels can help customers make healthier food choices. Officials say Philadelphia has one of the highest rates of hypertension and premature deaths due to heart disease. Eating too much sodium plays a big factor.\n\nRhode Island\n\nProvidence: The state’s congressional delegation says a federal infrastructure grant will help replace and upgrade 11 bridges on a busy stretch of Interstate 95. The delegation visited the Northbound Providence Viaduct on Friday to celebrate the $60.3 million from the Infrastructure for Rebuilding America Grant Program. U.S. Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, a Senate Environment and Public Works Committee member, helped design the program to meet Rhode Island’s need for funding for large infrastructure investments. The Rhode Island Democrat says a 55-year-old viaduct will be transformed into modern throughway. It carries about 220,000 vehicles daily. Construction is scheduled for late next year. Financing will come from several federal and state sources.\n\nSouth Carolina\n\nColumbia: This little piggy should have stayed home. The State reports that for the fourth time, Leroy – a Vietnamese pot-bellied pig – wandered over to Brennan Elementary School in Columbia, leading officials to slap McGregor Wallace with citations for owning a pig within city limits and having a fugitive pet. Wallace is scheduled for a court appearance in October. Wallace says Leroy is his emotional support animal meant to help him deal with PTSD from domestic trauma. Wallace says he got Leroy several months ago to replace a standard pig that grew too big. He says Leroy is clever and knows how to open the home’s gate when Wallace isn’t home. The pig also can open the refrigerator. The 7-month-old swine is now at Columbia’s animal shelter.\n\nSouth Dakota\n\nSioux Falls: An organization promoting the separation of church and state is putting up billboards in three cities to protest the state’s new law that requires all public schools to post the motto “In God We Trust” in a prominent location. The billboards from the Freedom From Religion Foundation show “In God We Trust” carved into Mount Rushmore and the four presidents saying, “There goes the neighborhood.” The drawing is from Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist Steve Benson. The billboards will be up for a month in Sioux Falls, Rapid City and Pierre. The foundation’s president, Annie Gaylor, says its members are concerned about the law, which she says is misguided. Gaylor says the motto, adopted during the Cold War, is outdated and divisive.\n\nTennessee\n\nKnoxville: The University of Tennessee’s marching band is jumping on the anti-bullying bandwagon. The band briefly wore a T-shirt based on a design by a boy who was teased at school over the design and then offered a scholarship at the university. On Thursday, Tennessee officials offered the fourth grader a four-year scholarship beginning in the fall of 2028 if he chooses to attend Tennessee and meets admission requirements. The boy’s story went viral last week after his teacher posted on Facebook that the student’s peers mocked a T-shirt he designed for his school’s “college colors” day. After the post gained attention, the University of Tennessee’s VolShop website created its own Tennessee shirt featuring the boy’s design. School officials say over 50,000 shirts have been presold. Proceeds benefit STOMP Out Bullying.\n\nTexas\n\nDallas: A federal judge has approved an agreement that will require the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to make a recommendation by May 2021 on whether the lesser prairie chicken should be federally protected as a threatened or endangered species. The agreement was reached Thursday between the federal agency and three conservations groups: the Defenders of Wildlife, the Center for Biological Diversity and WildEarth Guardians. The groups sued the federal government in June to force it to make a designation for the lesser prairie chicken and its habitats. Once a designation is proposed, there will then be a public comment period followed by a final determination made later by Fish and Wildlife. The agency also could decide that no federal protections should be provided for the bird, which listed as threatened in 2014, but a federal court overturned the designation.\n\nUtah\n\nLayton: State Republican leaders refused Saturday to erase a bylaw to deny ballot spots for candidates who collect voter signatures instead of winning approval from the party’s caucus-convention system. The State Central Committee voted 68-40 to erase the bylaw, short of the two-thirds majority required for a bylaw change. The Salt Lake Tribune reports the bylaw threatened to keep Republican candidates off the 2018 ballot because of a state law allowing both paths. Then-Party Chairman Rob Anderson responded by declaring the bylaw illegal and refusing to oust any candidate, and Republican Lt. Gov. Spencer Cox had said then he’d certify candidates who used either qualifying method. Current party Chairman said Saturday that he won’t ignore the bylaw but that the party will do what’s necessary to get on the 2020 ballot.\n\nVermont\n\nBurlington: Proverbs have been developed for centuries around the world, from “Strike while the iron is hot” to “Been there, done that.” They’re spread by writings, word of mouth and, nowadays, social media. The vast amount of them is evident in a new, unique library at the University of Vermont. It’s the collection of UVM Professor Wolfgang Mieder, thought to be the world’s premiere paroemiologist. The extensive library of nearly 9,000 volumes ranges from proverb collections including German, Chinese, Turkish and Hungarian to thousands of books and dissertations and includes Mieder’s own writings. Among his favorite proverbs is “Different strokes for different folks” because he says that “it tells you to realize that people have different priorities, different thoughts, different ideas.”\n\nVirginia\n\nRichmond: Virginia’s attorney general says couples planning to get married in the state will not have to disclose their race on their marriage application. The Richmond Times-Dispatch reports clerks were notified of the change in an email late Friday, about a week after three couples filed a federal lawsuit challenging the state requirement. Democratic Attorney General Mark Herring wrote that circuit court clerks must ask people seeking a marriage license their race, but couples can decline to answer the question. Herring says clerks should issue a marriage license regardless of whether an applicant answers the question. The lawsuit says one county provided a list of more than 200 potential races to a couple who questioned the requirement. It included “American,” “Aryan,” “Moor” and “Mulatto.”\n\nWashington\n\nSpokane: The state may seem ultraliberal, but voters in one of its deeply conservative areas have re-elected a Republican six times who thinks communists and atheists will destroy the U.S. Now Matt Shea faces a legislative investigation and calls for his resignation following media reports he was in a chat group discussing surveillance on progressives. Shea is also a major proponent of splitting Washington into two states, with Eastern Washington becoming the state of Liberty. The Army veteran hosts a weekly “Patriot Radio” show on the American Christian Network and on Facebook Live in 2017 complimented members of Team Rugged, a group that one member said provides special forces-type gun training for young men so they can “be effective in Christian warfare.” Shea didn’t respond to interview requests.\n\nWest Virginia\n\nCharleston: Education officials say they’ve found a problem with the state’s school system – many students aren’t showing up to class. The West Virginia Department of Education released a report Thursday saying that more than 38% of schools did not meet attendance standards in the 2018-2019 school year. In a statement, schools superintendent Steven Paine didn’t give a reason for the high level of absences but said he looks forward to working with counties and local school boards to address the problem. The report also says a fifth of students statewide are considered chronically absent, meaning they missed 18 or more days of the school year.\n\nWisconsin\n\nMadison: A media company that owns television stations in the state is partnering with a longtime farm charity on a live 18-hour telethon to raise money for struggling farmers. Quincy Media and Farm Aid have scheduled the event for Friday. It will include anchors and reporters from WKOW in Madison, WAOW in Wausau, WXOW in La Crosse, WQOW in Eau Claire and KBJR in Superior. A news release says volunteers will be answering phones throughout the day collecting donations to provide support, emergency relief and other resources for family farmers in the region. Farm Aid’s annual music festival is scheduled for Saturday at Alpine Valley Theatre in East Troy. The lineup includes Willie Nelson & Family, Dave Matthews & Tim Reynolds, Neil Young, John Mellencamp and Bonnie Raitt, among others.\n\nWyoming\n\nLaramie: Fifty years after 14 black football players were kicked off the University of Wyoming football team for considering a protest, eight of them returned to campus to commemorate the anniversary as the school takes another step toward reconciliation. University officials unveiled a plaque Friday at War Memorial Stadium commemorating the so-called Black 14. The event capped five days of ceremonies and discussions about the infamous dismissal of all the university’s black players in 1969. The players wanted to protest racism, but head coach Lloyd Eaton would have none of the idea – and was backed up by the university’s board of trustees and Gov. Stan Hathaway. He lit into them about coming from fatherless families and said they would only be accepted by traditionally black colleges if they weren’t at Wyoming, they said. The healing and reconciliation is not complete for some of the men who came back to campus this week. Some say they struggled for years after they were labeled as members of the Black 14.\n\nFrom USA TODAY Network and wire reports", "authors": [], "publish_date": "2019/09/16"}, {"url": "https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/50-states/2019/12/11/feral-hog-hunting-coral-restoration-west-nile-research-news-around-states/40798331/", "title": "Feral hog hunting, coral restoration: News from around our 50 states", "text": "From USA TODAY Network and wire reports\n\nAlabama\n\nFlorence: A college is asking people to quit using plastic confetti as a photo prop on campus. The scenic University of North Alabama is a popular spot for photo shoots in Florence, but school officials say some of those sessions are leaving behind plastic confetti that’s shot into the air. Birds and other animals can mistake the little pieces for food, and biology professor Jake Dittel told the TimesDaily the confetti can kill wildlife. “We’re trying to encourage our staff, students, faculty, and our university community and guests to think about how to help us maintain this beautiful campus and keep it environmentally friendly,” said Brenda Webb, who chairs the Department of Physics and Earth Science. Confetti also is winding up in a large fountain that’s sometimes used as a photo backdrop. That forces workers to turn off the water to clean out a filter.\n\nAlaska\n\nAnchorage: A federal agency awarded the state a $35.8 million federal grant to support earthquake disaster recovery efforts, officials said. The Department of Housing and Urban Development awarded the funds in response to the damaging quake that struck parts of south-central Alaska on Nov. 30, 2018, KTVA-TV reports. The HUD Community Development Block Grant-Disaster Recovery Program helps communities rebuild after natural disasters and prepare for future ones, officials said. This is the first time Alaska has received funds through the program, officials said. Alaskans affected by the 7.1 magnitude quake have received nearly $130 million in assistance through the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the Small Business Association, officials said.\n\nArizona\n\nFlagstaff: Researchers at Northern Arizona University’s Pathogen and Microbiome Institute lab are studying mosquitoes from Maricopa County as part of a DNA-mapping effort that could help finds ways to target the West Nile virus. Leading the research, NAU evolutionary biologist Crystal Hepp is trying to trace the virus back to its source. Her team pulverizes hundreds of frozen mosquitoes into a clear liquid soup from which they can extract DNA, then strings together the DNA information. This is vital information for the state’s fight against West Nile virus, which infected over 170 residents in 2019 and was responsible for the deaths of 17 people. Most of those cases came from Maricopa County. Using genetic analysis, Hepp is zeroing in on West Nile hot spots that can potentially be fogged with pesticides.\n\nArkansas\n\nConway: A Canada-based mass timber manufacturer in which Walmart has invested says it’s spending $90 million to open a plant in Arkansas, the company’s first in the United States. Structurlam Mass Timber Corporation announced it will purchase, retrofit and equip a former steel plant in Conway and create 130 new jobs at the facility. The plant, set to open in mid-2021, will source softwood lumber from Arkansas-grown southern pine trees. Walmart will be the first customer of the facility and plans to use more than 1.1 million cubic feet of Arkansas-grown and Arkansas-produced mass timber in its new home office campus in Bentonville. The company says the new location will meet the demand in the U.S. for mass timber. The Arkansas Economic Development Commission says the project is receiving $1.5 million from an incentive fund, as well as tax refunds and rebates.\n\nCalifornia\n\nSacramento: The state is fining the nation’s largest pharmacy health care provider a record $3.6 million for failing to redeem deposits on bottles and cans at some of its locations, regulators said Monday. The California Department of Resources Recycling and Recovery, better known as CalRecycle, said its investigation found that 81 of CVS Pharmacy’s 848 retail stores in California refused to redeem the recyclables or pay a required $100 daily fee as an alternative. CalRecycle filed the enforcement action last week, and CVS can seek a hearing if it wants to contest the fine. Department spokesman Lance Klug said it’s the largest enforcement action ever against a retailer for failing to redeem recyclables. One of CalRecycle’s most vocal critics praised the department’s action as a good first step to helping prop up the recycling industry.\n\nColorado\n\nDenver: The University of Colorado Boulder’s media college announced Monday that it will stop funding its student-run news outlet. The Denver Post reports the university plans to end funding for the CU Independent at the end of the school year. The university says the student news website will become fully independent from the College of Media, Communication and Information. The school says it plans to launch a student multimedia enterprise with more faculty leadership next fall. CU Independent Editor-in-Chief Rob Tann says the student-led publication plans to continue with an independent news site despite the challenges of a competing new venture and the loss of university funding. CU Independent is currently funded by the media college and gift funds and is assisted by a staff student-media manager.\n\nConnecticut\n\nHartford: The state has a new online portal that will allow notaries to handle their licensing needs with a few keyboard strokes. Democratic Secretary of the State Denise Merrill unveiled the portal that allows notaries to apply for new state licenses, renew active licenses and reinstate expired licenses. All licenses will then be delivered by email to the notary within three business days. “Allowing notaries public to apply for new licenses and renew old licenses online makes the process simpler, easier and faster,” said Merrill, who likened the change to online voter registration. “Allowing notaries to apply online removes barriers and makes becoming and remaining a notary more convenient.” Notaries serve as an official, impartial witness and are used to sign off on various documents.\n\nDelaware\n\nDover: A small, struggling private college is seeking money from the state for the third time this year. Wesley College submitted a request Friday for $3.2 million, news outlets report. Lawmakers and officials approved $2 million from a state fund earlier this year. The school also received permission to use more than $1 million in renovation funding for the former Dover Public Library for operational purposes. The money had been granted to ensure the federal government would continue to provide students with financial aid. Delaware’s Office of Management and Budget has said it wouldn’t give the institution any more money without a long-term financial plan from the college. In June, the U.S. Department of Education placed the school on a monitoring list over concerns about its “financial responsibility.” The institution has seen declining enrollment and revenue in recent years, according to news outlets.\n\nDistrict of Columbia\n\nWashington: Public housing residents and advocates took their demands to the doorstep of the D.C. Housing Authority on Monday, demanding that no residents are evicted as part of the agency’s 20-year transformation plan. “Living every day in public housing, there’s a threat of homelessness in everybody’s heart,” Karen Settles of Stoddart Terrace in Southeast told WUSA-TV. Public documents said her building will be demolished and redeveloped as part of DCHA’s Transformation Plan, rehabilitating 14 properties across the city. During Monday’s rally, public housing advocates said some residents withholding rent in protest of moldy living conditions could be evicted. But public housing officials have insisted nobody will be evicted. Even still, public housing advocates said residents are at risk. “They are absolutely evicting people,” said Aja Taylor of Bread for the City, which organized Monday’s rally.\n\nFlorida\n\nKey Largo: Federal officials announced plans Monday to raise $100 million to fund projects to restore seven significant coral reef sites in the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary. “Mission: Iconic Reefs” calls for restoring nearly 70 acres of the Florida Reef Tract, one of the largest strategies ever proposed for coral restoration, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. NOAA officials said the organization will work with partners to secure public and private funds. “We have identified some iconic reefs here in the Keys that we want to help restore,” sanctuary superintendent Sarah Fangman said. Since the 1970s, tropical cyclones, heat-induced coral bleaching, cold snaps and disease events have reduced coral coverage in the Keys. Outbreaks of stony coral tissue loss disease, first noticed off Miami in 2014, have spread as far as Cozumel, the Caribbean region, and have baffled marine biologists.\n\nGeorgia\n\nSavannah: A 160-year-old church believed to be the oldest black church in the United States and built by enslaved Africans has been restored to a version of its former glory. A fresh coat of paint covers the freshly carpeted First African Baptist Church, which also had its bell tower fixed, water-damaged ceilings repaired and stucco replaced, the Savannah Morning News reports. It cost nearly $600,000 to repair numerous issues, the Rev. Thrumond Tillman says. The church, a National Historic Landmark, was organized in 1773, according to its website. The sanctuary was completed in 1859. Some historic pieces were left untouched during the restoration, such as pews the church says are carved with West African Arabic script, one of the earliest forms of writing. The original sanctuary still is dotted with holes that allowed runaway slaves to breathe as they traveled along the Underground Railroad and stopped at the church, according to the newspaper.\n\nHawaii\n\nHonolulu: The City Council has passed a single-use plastics ban that will be the first in the state to include all plastic containers used for food sales and service. The council voted Wednesday in favor of the measure that is expected to be signed by Mayor Kirk Caldwell and fully enacted by 2022. Food vendors would be prohibited from providing plastic utensils and plastic foam plates, cups and other containers beginning Jan. 1, 2021, officials said. The ban would add other plastic food ware and begin applying to non-food-purveying businesses starting Jan. 1, 2022, officials said. Businesses that do not adhere to the law face fines of up to $1,000 a day, although exemptions could be issued if they cannot find reasonable, non-plastic replacements. Environmentalists have highlighted the food-industry plastics that can be found littering Oahu’s streets and waterways.\n\nIdaho\n\nBoise: A biennial state survey of youth shows fewer teens say they are being bullied, smoking cigarettes or having sex, but the number of kids who have seriously considered suicide remains at a 10-year high. The State Department of Education released the 2019 Idaho Youth Risk Behavior Survey last week. It included more than 1,200 high school students in 45 schools across the state. Nearly 40% of students reported they feel sad or hopeless. About 22% of students reported they had seriously considered suicide – the same rate as reported in 2017 and the highest in the past decade. Reports of bullying, smoking and sexual activity all dropped to the lowest levels recorded in the past decade. Nearly half of the students surveyed said they had emailed or texted while driving a car in the past 30 days.\n\nIllinois\n\nChicago: Federal officials are investigating whether the Chicago Cubs’ ongoing $1 billion renovation of Wrigley Field provides adequate wheelchair access. The Cubs have filed a notice of the review in Chicago federal court, where the team is defending itself against a lawsuit filed by a wheelchair user who alleges the stadium’s seating doesn’t meet Americans with Disabilities Act standards and is actually worse than before the renovation. The Chicago Tribune reports that a team attorney wrote in a letter to the judge that the Cubs believe the renovation has “significantly increased” accessibility in the 105-year-old stadium, but the team is halting plans to install more accessible seating before the 2020 season, calling it prudent to wait for federal officials to conduct the review.\n\nIndiana\n\nTerre Haute: Starting in January, Indiana State University will offer a new teacher licensure program to train educators to work with students who are deaf or hard of hearing. The Indiana State Board of Education approved the Deaf/Hard of Hearing program last week, the Tribune-Star reports, and it will be offered through the university’s Blumberg Center, part of the Bayh College of Education. According to the Council for Education of the Deaf, there is a national crisis in deaf education due to a significant shortage of qualified teachers. “The shortage of teachers available to meet the needs of the deaf/hard of hearing is critical,” said Carol Wetherell, director of the Blumberg Center. “We’re anxious to get more people on board.” The program will be a seven-course program to be completed over the course of two years. It’ll be offered through distance education, with some face-to-face instruction.\n\nIowa\n\nCedar Rapids: A judge on Monday sentenced a local man to 14 years in prison after he was convicted of having his cousin try to hijack an internet domain from another man at gunpoint. U.S. District Court Judge C.J. Williams sentenced Rossi Lorathio Adams II, 27, to the federal prison term following his conviction April 18 of one count of conspiracy to interfere with commerce by force, threats and violence. Adams was the founder of social media company State Snaps, whose followers often used the slogan “Do It For State!” He repeatedly tried to buy the domain doitforstate.com from another Cedar Rapids man, but the owner refused to sell. In 2017, Adams convinced his cousin, Sherman Hopkins Jr., to break into the domain owner’s house. During a struggle, Hopkins and the domain owner were shot, but both survived. Hopkins was sentenced last year to 20 years in prison.\n\nKansas\n\nWichita: A former police officer who wounded a 9-year-old girl when he fired at her family’s dog is immune from criminal prosecution and can’t be sued, a judge ruled. Judge Kevin O’Connor issued his ruling last month in Dexter Betts’s case, although it wasn’t available in public court records until Friday. The Sedgwick County district attorney’s office filed a notice of appeal, The Wichita Eagle reports. Betts had been charged with aggravated battery in the Dec. 30, 2017, shooting in which a bullet fragment ricocheted off the floor and hit the girl. Officers went to the family’s home when the girl’s mother reported her husband was threatening to hurt himself. The family’s attorney says the dog only went up to the officer and barked. The girl and dog were not seriously injured. Betts’s lawyer asked the judge to dismiss the case, arguing he had legally fired his weapon in self-defense and was entitled to immunity.\n\nKentucky\n\nFrankfort: Democrat Andy Beshear was sworn in as governor early Tuesday during a private ceremony just after midnight in the Governor’s Mansion. Beshear, 42, follows in the footsteps of his father, Steve Beshear, whose two terms as governor preceded the single four-year term of Republican Gov. Matt Bevin. They are the first father-son duo to serve as governors in Kentucky history. The middle-of-the-night swearing is customary in Kentucky, to ensure continuity at the head of state government. Andy Beshear showed he was his own man during this year’s campaign, even while embracing some of the same proposals – including increased access to health care and legalization of casinos – that his father had championed. The official transfer of power preceded a full day of inaugural events Tuesday, including a worship service, a parade and a public swearing-in ceremony on the Capitol steps.\n\nLouisiana\n\nNew Orleans: The Louisiana Supreme Court building, a sprawling landmark in the French Quarter, was formally named in memory of late Chief Justice Pascal Calogero Jr. in a Tuesday ceremony. The Legislature voted in June to name the building that houses the high court after Calogero, the court’s longest-serving justice, who died last year. The building now named for Calogero is four-story marble behemoth that fills a block of the French Quarter near the Mississippi River. It was completed in 1910, according to Tulane University’s School of Architecture. The high court moved to a more modern building in 1958, and the Quarter building fell into disrepair. A move to restore the building and return the court there ended in 2004. Calogero considered the restoration among his administration’s most important achievements, according to a 2018 obituary by the court.\n\nMaine\n\nWaterville: An independent state authority that deals with housing issues says it has been awarded nearly $4 million in federal low-income housing tax credits for several projects. MaineHousing director Daniel Brennan says the tax credits are an important way to spur development of affordable housing in the state. The projects are in Portland, South Portland, Bangor and Waterville. MaineHousing says the tax credits will generate more than $37 million from private investors. That money, along with $3 million more from MaineHousing, is expected to create or preserve 317 housing units. One of the projects is the first phase of the redevelopment of a historic textile mill in Waterville. Another is the preservation of public housing units in Portland.\n\nMaryland\n\nBaltimore: Six former inmates claim in a federal lawsuit that the state’s prison system fails to comply with the Americans with Disabilities Act. The Baltimore Sun cited allegations in the lawsuit Tuesday that included prison guards making a one-legged man walk into the showers with no support. The case was filed in U.S. District Court in Baltimore. The inmates allege a culture of noncompliance with the ADA and indifference by prison guards. The inmates are suing the Maryland Department of Public Safety and Correctional Services and a number of prison officials. The Attorney General’s Office is defending the Department of Public Safety and Correctional Services along with its employees. A spokeswoman declined to comment to The Sun, citing the ongoing nature of the case.\n\nMassachusetts\n\nBoston: The plan to modernize the area public transit system’s fare collection technology is expected to cost more and take years longer to implement than originally thought, agency officials say. Plans to have the technology installed by 2021 have now been pushed back to 2024, and the cost is expected to jump from $700 million to perhaps $1 billion, officials at the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority told The Boston Globe on Monday. “It’s going to be much more of a gradual transition than was originally envisioned,” said Laurel Paget-Seekins, the MBTA’s assistant general manager for policy. The new system would allow riders to pay using a smartphone or contactless credit card, to speed up the boarding process and improve fare collection.\n\nMichigan\n\nDetroit: When the U.S. Census Bureau starts counting people in Motor City next year, obstacles are bound to arise. The city has tens of thousands of vacant houses, sparse internet access and high poverty – factors that will make it the toughest community to tally. Other Rust Belt towns that have lost population and cities in the Sun Belt with large numbers of immigrants and transplants will pose similar challenges in the coast-to-coast headcount, an Associated Press analysis of government data found. Detroit’s recent resurgence has led to refurbished downtown buildings, new boutique hotels and an invigorated arts community. But the renaissance has done little for some residents who live in persistent poverty and harbor lingering mistrust after decades of racial upheaval. About 86% of Detroit’s population lives in hard-to-count neighborhoods, by far the largest proportion of any major U.S. city, the AP analysis found.\n\nMinnesota\n\nSt. Paul: The state is on track to meet the project implementation deadlines for replacing the state’s troubled driver and vehicle registration system known as MNLARS, the Office of the Legislative Auditor reported Tuesday. However, the auditor’s report found some minor risks to completing the project on time and on budget, and it said managers should address them soon. The most serious involved requirements added by the 2019 Legislature for researching alternate ways of determining vehicle licensing fees and for exploring self-service licensing, title and registration capabilities. Moving ahead on those ideas could mean delays and higher costs, the report said. The review said another risk is that moving and converting data from the old Minnesota Licensing and Registration System system to the new Vehicle Title and Registration System could prove challenging.\n\nMississippi\n\nOxford: Lafayette County is shifting back to voting on paper ballots. The Oxford Eagle reports county supervisors are seeking bids for new voting machines. Since 2007, the county has used touchscreen machines, but the bids call for machines that would electronically count paper ballots. Supervisor Kevin Frye said that if there’s ever a question about the outcome of an election, workers could retrieve paper ballots and count them by hand. Of Mississippi’s 82 counties, 12 are now using paper ballots, said Bill Lowe of voting-machine company Election Systems & Software. Those include Hinds, Harrison, Madison and DeSoto counties, four of the six most populous counties in Mississippi. Lowe said machines sold by his company will scan ballots once they have been filled out, letting voters know if they didn’t vote in any races or voted too many times in a race.\n\nMissouri\n\nSpringfield: Feral hog hunting in the Mark Twain National Forest has been curtailed, but limited opportunities to kill the damaging animals are emerging on state land. After weighing a change for more than a year and receiving more than 1,000 public comments, the U.S. Forest Service announced Saturday that it will only allow hunters to kill wild hogs if they come across them while hunting turkey and deer. Hunters must have proper deer and turkey permits to qualify for the exception to the new ban. In response, the Missouri Department of Conservation announced Monday that it was writing new rules that will mirror those adopted by the Forest Service. The department currently bans all hog hunting practice on its lands, saying it is more effective to trap and kill large groups of the animals than allow hunters to try to shoot them. The department says shooting scatters the hogs.\n\nMontana\n\nGreat Falls: The National Defense Authorization Act, which contains an amendment giving federal recognition for the Little Shell Chippewa Tribe, cleared a congressional conference committee Monday, bringing optimism from the state’s federal delegation that the bill will finally pass. Reuters reports the U.S. House of Representatives and Senate Armed Services Committees said they reached an agreement on the $738 billion spending bill for the Department of Defense, considered a must-pass piece of legislation, after months of negotiations. “I am almost without words – the magnitude of this moment,” Little Shell Chair Gerald Gray said Monday night. “Maybe our ancestors are smiling because now our future generations will not have to take up this same battle we have fought for decades.”\n\nNebraska\n\nLincoln: Dozens of bronze headstone flower vases have been stolen from a cemetery. Police said the theft of 40 vases was reported Saturday at Lincoln Memorial Park. Each vase was valued at $50, so the loss is estimated at $2,000, police said. In October, about a dozen vases were also stolen from the cemetery. Police said the thief might try to sell the vases at pawn shops or scrap yards. They asked that anyone with information call police.\n\nNevada\n\nReno: Police are expanding the use of technology to automatically read license plates in an effort to reduce gun violence. The City Council approved the expanded use of devices and associated software to track license plates despite critics’ concerns it could be used to secretly monitor the movement of law-abiding citizens. “We want our dangerous criminals off the streets, and that is what this grant is focused on,” Police Chief Jason Soto told the council. A visiting professor at the University of Nevada, Reno who specializes in mass surveillance technology was among those raising concerns about the potential for abuse. “Your neighbors would find that really creepy if you were sitting down writing down everyone’s comings and goings,” said David Maass, who recently joined UNR’s Reynolds School of Journalism through a partnership with the Electronic Frontier Foundation.\n\nNew Hampshire\n\nConcord: The state released a set of guidelines Tuesday to help law enforcement agencies better handle hate crimes in the wake of recent debate about racism in the mostly white state. The protocols from the attorney general’s office call on departments to designate one staffer responsible for coordinating the handling of an alleged bias or hate crime. That person will also work with the attorney general’s civil rights unit and the relevant county attorney to determine how to respond to such crimes. Hate crimes are also supposed to be reported to the FBI each year. The protocols come almost two years after the attorney general’s office created a civil rights unit, which among other things investigates violence or discrimination based on race, religion, sexual orientation or disability. The unit was created in the wake of the near-hanging in 2017 of an 8-year-old biracial child.\n\nNew Jersey\n\nNew Brunswick: NJ Transit and Amtrak have started working on a new railyard to provide a safe place to store trains along the Northeast Corridor during severe weather. The expansion of County Yard and the Delco Lead Storage and Inspection Facility Project along the New Brunswick and North Brunswick border will provide storage capacity for 444 vehicles. The project comes after Hurricane Irene in 2011 and Superstorm Sandy in 2012 flooded the Hoboken Yard and Terminal and the Meadows Maintenance Complex, damaging equipment. The project also includes an inspection facility for light maintenance of cars and equipment and to aid the inspection of trains prior to their return to service following severe weather.\n\nNew Mexico\n\nSanta Fe: A contractor overseeing operations at a national laboratory lost track of 250 barrels of waste in the past year, an annual report on hazardous waste violations says. Triad National Security LLC had 19 violations of its permit from the New Mexico Environment Department after the contractor mislabeled and improperly stored waste containers at Los Alamos National Laboratory, the Santa Fe New Mexican reports. Newport News Nuclear BWXT Los Alamos, which is managing a 10-year cleanup of waste generated at the lab, was cited 29 times. The barrels filled with low-level radioactive waste and other hazardous materials were shipped to a waste plant in Carlsbad without tracking, regulators said. The records still listed the waste at the lab, inspectors said.\n\nNew York\n\nAlbany: The state is planning to allow more local health centers and clinics to offer needle exchanges in hopes of reducing the number of opioid overdoses and deaths. The state Health Department approved the emergency regulations last month. New York has two dozen sites that trade dirty syringes for clean ones, and Democratic Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s administration wants to expand that number. The new rules will allow LBGTQ centers, local health departments and other facilities to apply to offer such a service. New York’s health department plans to spend $250,000 for syringes, disposal containers, gloves and alcohol pads. State health officials say 3,224 New Yorkers died from overdoses in 2017, up from 1,074 in 2010. Experts also point to spiking HIV rates linked to dirty syringes.\n\nNorth Carolina\n\nHatteras: The power line that provides electricity to an Outer Banks island will be replaced with an underground cable next year. The Cape Hatteras National Seashore issued a permit to Tideland Electric Membership Corp. to replace an overhead pole line that’s the only source of electricity for the 1,385 electrical customers on Ocracoke Island, officials said in a news release Monday. The underground cable will connect to the existing underwater power line between the two islands. The 1.75-mile power line is being replaced because of erosion at the south end of Hatteras island and washouts on the road that have increased in recent years, officials said. Construction is expected to take about two months.\n\nNorth Dakota\n\nDickinson: The state’s final medical marijuana dispensary is set to open this week. The eighth dispensary is expected to open in Dickinson on Friday. Jason Wahl, director of the Division of Medical Marijuana, says opening the final dispensary is a milestone for the program. The state has issued more than 1,850 identification cards to qualifying patients, Wahl said. North Dakota is the first in the nation to add an electronic card option for patients, caregivers, and agents of dispensaries and manufacturing facilities. Other dispensaries are located in Bismarck, Devils Lake, Fargo, Jamestown, Grand Forks, Minot and Williston. For a qualifying patient or designated caregiver to enter the display area of a dispensary, they must have their registry identification card.\n\nOhio\n\nColumbus: The official portrait of former Gov. John Kasich was unveiled Monday at a packed Statehouse event. The Republican governor held office from 2011 through 2018. The Capital Square Review and Advisory Board presented the portrait in the atrium of the Ohio Statehouse in Columbus. Senate President Larry Obhof and Gov. Mike DeWine praised Kasich for his service and, in particular, for overseeing the state’s recovery from the Great Recession. Kasich was the state’s 69th governor and a longtime former congressman. Kasich’s portrait was painted by John Seibels Walker, known for portraiture in the style known as the “Grand Manner.” The painting depicts the down-to-earth Kasich in an open suit jacket and tie in front of the Ohio Holocaust and Liberators Memorial on the Statehouse’s South Plaza. Kasich championed the memorial, finished in 2014.\n\nOklahoma\n\nOklahoma City: Attorneys for Johnson & Johnson have appealed an Oklahoma judge’s order for the company to pay $465 million to address the state’s opioid crisis. The company argues in an appeal filed Monday that the judge misapplied the state’s public nuisance laws in reaching his decision. The company also maintains that the award should be reduced by $355 million to offset pretrial settlements between the state and two other drugmakers. “Without explanation, the court found Janssen liable for the entirety of a complex crisis implicating a multitude of criminal, governmental and medical actors,” attorneys wrote in a summary of the case. Janssen is the company’s pharmaceutical subsidiary. The state of Oklahoma also plans to appeal the judge’s order, arguing that the $465 million it was awarded would only cover one year of its cleanup plan.\n\nOregon\n\nNewport: State shellfish managers say the opening of the commercial Dungeness crab season will be further delayed until at least Dec. 31 along the entire Oregon coast, as testing shows crab are still too low in meat yield in half the areas along the coast. The World reports the ocean commercial Dungeness crab season in Oregon generally opens Dec. 1 but can be delayed to ensure a high-quality product and to avoid wastage of the resource. The Oregon Dungeness Crab Commission said crab quality testing in late November and early December showed many areas within the tri-state region still did not meet the criteria for an opening. The delayed opening will allow for crab to fill with more meat. Commercial Dungeness crabbing is Oregon’s most valuable fishery.\n\nPennsylvania\n\nNazareth: A man whose home was destroyed in a September fire has raised $18,000 to thank the firefighters who extinguished the flames and tried to save his dog. John Pequeno started an online fundraising campaign for nine departments that responded to the fire at his home in Upper Nazareth Township, outside Easton. The campaign exceeded his initial goal by $3,000. Firefighters repeatedly ran into Pequeno’s burning home to try to save his Yorkshire terrier, Marshall, who died while hiding under a couch, according to The (Allentown) Morning Call. Firefighters returned to help him salvage whatever he could from the wreckage. Each fire department that responded will receive $2,000.\n\nRhode Island\n\nProvidence: Rhode Island’s secretary of state has announced the launch of a free online resource to explore and compare centuries of data from state and federal census records. Secretary of State Nellie Gorbea said the “Count Me In!” data tool was launched to supplement an exhibit about the history of the census at the Rhode Island State Archives. The exhibit runs through March at the archives on Westminster Street in downtown Providence. The online tool provides customizable, real-time visualizations of census data from 1708 through 2010 for every Rhode Island municipality, Gorbea said. She said it’s a way to see how communities have grown and changed over time, as well as a reminder that the upcoming 2020 census will shape the state’s future. A gallery reception for the exhibit is planned for 6 p.m. Thursday. It’s free and open to the public.\n\nSouth Carolina\n\nCayce: Gov. Henry McMaster says he wants to give a $3,000 raise to all the state’s nearly 53,000 teachers in next year’s budget. The raise will cost $211 million and should propel the average South Carolina teacher’s salary into the top 25 in U.S. states and about $2,500 over the Southeast average, McMaster said Tuesday as he announced his proposal. The raise is one of several bold steps the state can continue to take to improve its education system and keep it a strong place to do business, he said. The $3,000 raise, if approved, would boost the minimum teacher salary in the state to $38,000 – a 9% increase over this year. The average teacher in the state currently makes about $53,000 and would see a nearly 6% raise. The highest-paid teacher in the state’s biggest school district in Greenville County would see about a 3.5% raise on their roughly $85,000 salary.\n\nSouth Dakota\n\nSioux Falls: Crews will use sound cannons to scare away geese in the city starting this week. Sioux Falls Animal Control is trying to scare off thousands of geese migrating into the area, agency Supervisor Julie DeJong says. Thousands of birds start searching for new open-water areas as ponds and lakes in rural South Dakota freeze over. Geese flock to the Big Sioux River in Sioux Falls during the winter. Crews will use sound cannons to scare geese from areas near the Sioux Falls Regional Airport, the Sioux Empire Fairgrounds and at a golf course. Flying geese can cause damage to airplanes by striking windshields or being sucked into engines. This year, people around the fairgrounds will hear sounds similar to fireworks or shotguns, DeJong says. The sounds come from “crackle shells” and screamer pistols that officers will be using this year. The cannons will go off several times a day.\n\nTennessee\n\nKingston: The Tennessee Valley Authority started removing asbestos-contaminated material last week that was unearthed during construction near its Kingston Fossil Plant. Officials at the utility have said they do not know where the material came from, but it could be part of an old burn pit. It was discovered in September while digging to create a new landfill for coal ash disposal. The asbestos requires a special permit for disposal. TVA got the permit from the Tennessee Department of Environment and Conservation on Dec. 3, TVA spokesman Scott Brooks says. The permit says up to 22,000 cubic yards of material will be removed, including up to 40 cubic yards of asbestos-containing material. The Kingston plant was the site of a massive coal ash spill in 2008. TVA is the nation’s largest public utility, serving 10 million people in parts of seven Southeastern states.\n\nTexas\n\nAustin: The city school district’s school closure plan perpetuates long-standing policies of racial and economic segregation, targeting vulnerable and historically underserved communities, according to a report by the district’s chief equity officer released Monday. Stephanie Hawley, the chief equity officer, completed the 20-page report in advance of the 6-3 board vote three weeks ago to shutter four elementary campuses, but district officials did not share it with board members until last week. Hawley told board members before the vote that the plan was what “21st-century racism looks like.” Hawley describes in the report a plan that was flawed early on, excluding affected teachers, principals and communities and that has led to deep mistrust of the school district.\n\nUtah\n\nSalt Lake City: The state is set to become the latest to allow immigrant “Dreamers” to practice law under a proposed rule issued Monday by the Utah Supreme Court. The rule came after a request last year by two women who earned law degrees from Utah universities but couldn’t practice law because they aren’t legal residents of the United States. They are part of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, an initiative implemented during former President Barack Obama’s administration that allows young people brought to the U.S. illegally as children to remain in this country. The rule in Utah won’t take effect until a monthlong public comment period closes. The Utah Supreme Court said in a statement that it found it has the authority to create the rule after consulting with the state bar, law professors, the state attorney general and the state legislative research counsel.\n\nVermont\n\nMontpelier: The state plans to hold a new round of weekends, beginning this Friday, aimed at helping tourists who enjoy visiting Vermont move to the state full time. The four “Stay-to-Stay Weekends” will be held Dec. 13-16 in Newport and at Jay Peak; Feb. 21-24, 2020 in Brattleboro, and at Mount Snow; Feb. 21-24, 2020, in Bennington and at Bromley Mountain; and March 13-15 in Rutland and at Killington. It’s part of an effort to expand the state’s workforce. The weekends include a reception hosted by a local chamber of commerce or community group. Visitors get to explore the region and meet with local employers, realters, professionals and community leaders. The program, which was launched last year, has hosted more than 200 people this year, and to date, 15 have moved to Vermont.\n\nVirginia\n\nRichmond: The state has nearly 500 sites available for factories or distribution centers to be built, but only 30 of them are marketable as Virginia competes with other states for big economic development deals, according to a new study presented by the Virginia Growth and Opportunity Board on Monday. The Richmond Times-Dispatch reports many sites lack the necessary land-use approvals or environmental reviews and other work necessary for construction within 18 months. Stephen Moret, the Virginia Economic Development Partnership president and CEO, says that “another state has a better shot” than Virginia at landing big economic development projects without those kind of sites. Moret says the study is the first of its kind in the country to catalog every potential development site of 25 acres or larger.\n\nWashington\n\nSeattle: New research from the University of Washington indicates communities beneath flight paths at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport are exposed to a special type of pollution caused by aircraft emissions. The university, in a release, described the study as the first to identify the unique signature of aircraft emissions in the state. KING-TV reports the study did not look at potential health effects associated with exposure. But Michael Yost, professor and chair of the Department of Environmental and Occupational Health Sciences, says in the release that the findings create opportunities for follow-up research. The study was produced in partnership with the Legislature and the Port of Seattle as part of an effort to better understand the pollution footprint in industrial zones.\n\nWest Virginia\n\nCharleston: Food producers who want to be listed in a state directory have until the end of the week to join the program and be included. The directory will feature the stories of West Virginia Grown members and the things they produce, the state Department of Agriculture said in a news release. It is planned for publication in March. Companies may apply for West Virginia Grown status anytime but must apply by Friday to be included in the printed directory, the state Department of Agriculture said in the release. Members can use the West Virginia Grown logo and are included in Agriculture Department marketing and business reference activities. There is no cost to join, but products must be made in West Virginia or have at least 50% of their value added within the state.\n\nWisconsin\n\nMadison: Pay raises for state employees are scheduled for a vote next week by a special legislative committee. The panel of legislative leaders is set to meet Dec. 18 to act on the pay plans, Assembly Speaker Robin Vos’s office said Tuesday. The Legislature’s budget committee approved the pay plans, but they must also win approval by another committee comprised of Vos and other legislative leaders. Democrats had been calling on Republicans to set the meeting so the raises can go into effect in January as planned. State workers are slated to receive a 2% general wage increase in each of the next two years. Employees at the University of Wisconsin System and on the Madison campus are also to receive the same increase. Democratic Gov. Tony Evers is also proposing that state employees’ minimum wage be set to $15 an hour starting June 7.\n\nWyoming\n\nLaramie: The state on Tuesday marked the 150th anniversary of becoming the first government in the U.S. to give women the unrestricted right to vote. Wyoming, whose motto is the Equality State, was still a territory when Gov. John Campbell signed legislation granting women’s suffrage Dec. 10, 1869. The U.S. Constitution had left the issue of suffrage to the states, and Wyoming’s bill passed five decades before the 19th Amendment instituted the right across the U.S. Laramie’s Louisa Gardner Swain became the first woman to vote in a Wyoming election the following year.\n\nFrom USA TODAY Network and wire reports", "authors": [], "publish_date": "2019/12/11"}]}
{"question_id": "20230120_1", "search_time": "2023/01/20/16:36", "search_result": [{"url": "https://www.cnn.com/2022/06/18/us/juneteenth-federal-holiday-what-to-know-cec/index.html", "title": "What to know about Juneteenth now that it's a federal holiday | CNN", "text": "CNN —\n\nDespite Juneteenth’s storied history, the holiday was largely overlooked by non-Black Americans until recent years.\n\nThe momentum of the Black Lives Matter movement propelled Juneteenth into the national spotlight, building on a decades-long push by activists and leaders to get recognition for the landmark occasion. Last year, Juneteenth became the latest federal holiday in the US – the first to be approved since Martin Luther King Jr. Day in 1983.\n\nWith Juneteenth now a national holiday, many public and private sector employees enjoy an extra day off from work while brands and corporations capitalize on the event with celebratory marketing campaigns. But there’s much more to Juneteenth than a long weekend and branded products.\n\nAs Black Americans continue to face the same challenges and inequities that inspired so many to take to the streets in 2020, it’s worth reflecting on the history behind the holiday.\n\nIt celebrates the end of slavery\n\nJuneteenth – also known as Juneteenth Independence Day, Freedom Day and Emancipation Day – commemorates the end of slavery in the United States.\n\nA blend of the words June and nineteenth, it marks June 19, 1865: the day that Union Army Maj. Gen. Gordon Granger rode into Galveston, Texas, and issued General Order No. 3, proclaiming that the enslaved African Americans there were free.\n\n“The people of Texas are informed that, in accordance with a proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all slaves are free,” the order read. “This involves an absolute equality of personal rights and rights of property between former masters and slaves, and the connection heretofore existing between them becomes that between employer and hired labor.”\n\nFreedom for the enslaved people of Galveston, Texas, came two-and-a-half years after President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, which couldn’t be enforced in areas under Confederate control. It also came about two months after Confederate General Robert E. Lee surrendered to the Union Army at Appomattox Court House, Virginia – an event generally considered to be the end of the Civil War.\n\nHow it’s celebrated\n\nWhat began as an informal celebration of freedom by locals in Galveston eventually grew into a wider commemoration of the end of slavery as African Americans in Texas moved to other parts of the country. Today, many African Americans mark Juneteenth with parties, parades and gatherings with family and friends.\n\nTexas became the first state to make Juneteenth a state holiday in 1980. In addition to it being a federal holiday, all 50 states and Washington, DC, recognize Juneteenth in some form.\n\nAs Juneteenth has made its way into the mainstream, some activists and leaders point to the systemic inequities that Black Americans continue to face, such as the racial wealth gap, disproportionate incarceration and longstanding health disparities. One coalition of civil and human rights groups, in particular, is acknowledging the holiday by installing a pan-African flag in front of the White House and calling for a commission to study reparations.\n\nAs many of those calling for widespread changes suggest, observing Juneteenth might then be an opportunity to reflect on how far the nation has come – and how much further there is to go.", "authors": ["Harmeet Kaur"], "publish_date": "2022/06/18"}, {"url": "https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2022/09/02/what-is-labor-day/7960694001/", "title": "What is Labor Day celebrating? How did the federal holiday begin?", "text": "For many Americans, Labor Day means the end of summer and beginning of the school year.\n\nBut the holiday really celebrates the social and economic achievements of American workers.\n\nOregon was the first state to pass a law recognizing Labor Day in the late 19th century.\n\nLabor Day for many Americans is a three-day weekend that marks the end of the summer and the start of the school year.\n\nNowadays, the holiday might be celebrated with anything from swimming at a beach or pool, grilling, or watching the first college football games of the season. But, how did the holiday come about?\n\nAccording to the U.S. Department of Labor, the holiday is observed the first Monday in September to celebrate the social and economic achievements of American workers.\n\nThe holiday is rooted in the late nineteenth century, when labor activists pushed for a federal holiday to recognize the many contributions workers have made to America’s strength, prosperity, and well-being.\n\nWhat's open and closed on Labor Day? What to know about post offices, schools, bank hours\n\nGrilling your food wrong could be risky this Labor Day weekend:How to prepare it safely\n\nWhen did Labor Day become a federal holiday?\n\nBefore it became a federal holiday, Labor Day was recognized by labor activists and individual states.\n\nOregon was the first state to pass a law recognizing Labor Day, on February 21, 1887, and that year four more states – Colorado, Massachusetts, New Jersey and New York – passed similar laws.\n\nThe Labor Department says by 1894, 23 more states had adopted the holiday, and on June 28, 1894, Congress passed an act making the first Monday in September of each year a legal holiday, and President Grover Cleveland signed it into law.\n\nWhat stores are open on Labor Day? Store hours for Walmart, Target, The Home Depot; Costco is closed\n\nHow did Labor Day start?\n\nThe Labor Department says it's not entirely clear who is the founder of Labor Day, but two workers can make a solid claim to its origins.\n\nAccording to the Labor Department's website, some records show that in 1882, Peter J. McGuire, general secretary of the Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners and a co-founder of the American Federation of Labor, suggested setting aside a day for a \"general holiday for the laboring classes\" to honor those \"who from rude nature have delved and carved all the grandeur we behold.\"\n\nBut McGuire's place in Labor Day history has not gone unchallenged.\n\nMany believe that machinist Matthew Maguire, not McGuire, founded the holiday.\n\nRecent research seems to support the contention that Maguire, later the secretary of Local 344 of the International Association of Machinists in Paterson, New Jersey, proposed the holiday in 1882, while serving as secretary of the Central Labor Union in New York.\n\nAccording to the New Jersey Historical Society, after President Cleveland signed the law to create a national Labor Day, the Paterson Morning Call published an opinion piece stating that \"the souvenir pen should go to Alderman Matthew Maguire of this city, who is the undisputed author of Labor Day as a holiday.\"\n\nPerhaps showing there were no hard feelings, both Maguire and McGuire attended the country’s first Labor Day parade in New York City that year.\n\nEditor's note: A version of this story was first published in 2021.\n\nHitting the road for Labor Day weekend? Here's how much gas costs in your state", "authors": [], "publish_date": "2022/09/02"}, {"url": "https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2020/01/16/mlk-day-martin-luther-king-jr-holiday-monday/2838025001/", "title": "MLK Day: How Martin Luther King Jr. Day became a federal holiday", "text": "Corrections & clarifications: A previous version of this story misstated the name of Coretta Scott King.\n\nOn the third Monday of January every year, the federal government closes up shop for a day to honor civil rights hero Martin Luther King, Jr. — who was assassinated in Memphis on April 4, 1968.\n\nBut the road to Martin Luther King, Jr. Day was fraught. It didn't become a federal holiday until 1986, nearly 20 years after it was introduced to Congress, per the King Center. Even then, it faced an upward battle for all states to recognize the holiday, only getting nationally recognized in 2000.\n\nTo this day, it collides in Alabama and Mississippi with Robert E. Lee Day, which honors the Confederate general, in Alabama and Mississippi.\n\nWhile the nation recognizes King as an \"icon for democracy\" today, in the 1960s and 1970s, he was still a controversial figure, according to Michael Honey, an American historian and professor of humanities at University of Washington, Tacoma.\n\n“This was the first holiday around a national figure who is not a president, and who is African American,” Honey said. “Many in Congress did not want to recognize an African American that was thought of as a troublemaker by some in his day.”\n\nHow did Martin Luther King Jr. Day come to be a federal holiday?\n\nOn April 8, 1968, Rep. John Conyers, D-Mich., introduced legislation for a federal holiday, according to The King Center.\n\nThe next year, on Jan. 15, 1969, annual ceremonies commemorating King's birthday were launched by The King Center in Atlanta. It called for nationwide ceremonies and began working to gain support for the holiday.\n\nTimeline:The life of Martin Luther King Jr.\n\nMartin Luther King Jr. quotes:10 most popular from the civil rights leader\n\nIn the 1970s, support for a national Martin Luther King Jr. holiday grew. Several states, including Illinois, Massachusetts and Connecticut, become the first states to enact statewide King holidays, but Congress failed to act on a national level, according to The King Center.\n\n\"The campaign to get the holiday started almost immediately after he was killed, and people worked on it for a long time before it happened,” said Honey, who wrote \"Going Down Jericho Road: The Memphis Strike, Martin Luther King's Last Campaign.\"\n\nIn 1979, President Jimmy Carter called on Congress to vote on the King Holiday Bill. Not everyone was on board, and the bill was defeated by five votes in the House in November 1979.\n\nDespite years of setbacks, King’s widow, Coretta Scott King, continued to fight for approval of the holiday and testified before Congress multiple times.\n\nHow does Stevie Wonder factor into the history of MLK Day?\n\nFollowing the defeat of the bill, Stevie Wonder released \"Happy Birthday,\" in support of enacting a national Martin Luther King Jr. holiday, according to The King Center.\n\nThe song became a hit, and in the early 1980s, Wonder worked with Coretta Scott King to gain support for the national holiday, according to the King Center.\n\nIn 1982, King and Wonder delivered a petition with 6 million signatures in favor of the holiday to the speaker of the House.\n\nWhen did MLK Day become a holiday?\n\nOn Nov. 3, 1983, President Ronald Reagan signed a bill marking the third Monday of January, as Martin Luther King Jr. Day, according to the center. The holiday was to begin in 1986.\n\nIn January 1986, the first national Martin Luther King Jr. holiday was observed. According to the center, by this time, 17 states had already enacted King holidays.\n\nIf King's birthday is Jan. 15, why is MLK Day on the third Monday in January?\n\nYou can thank the Uniform Monday Holiday Act for that, according to the Department of Labor. The bill was signed into law by President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1968, and originally designated that three federal holidays – Memorial Day, Veterans Day and Washington's birthday – would fall on Monday, according to the bill. It also recognized Columbus Day as a federal holiday. Years later, Veterans Day was returned to its original date of Nov. 11.\n\n50 years later:For those at Lorraine Motel when MLK was killed, what does it mean to witness martyrdom?\n\nThe act was meant to \"enable families who live some distance apart to spend more time together\" and allow federal employees time to travel, Johnson said in a 1968 statement.\n\nSo, while King's birthday is Wednesday, Jan. 15, this year, it is celebrated like some of the other floating holidays under the Uniform Monday Holiday Act.\n\nContributing: Mary Bowerman, USA TODAY", "authors": [], "publish_date": "2020/01/16"}, {"url": "https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2022/05/27/memorial-day-history-explained/9931640002/", "title": "What is Memorial Day and why do we celebrate it in the US?", "text": "No, Memorial Day isn't about a long weekend road trip, backyard barbecue or sales. The real meaning of the national holiday is much more somber.\n\nOriginally called Decoration Day, Monday's holiday honors all soldiers who died during service to the nation.\n\nMemorial Day was declared a national holiday through an act of Congress in 1971, and its roots date back to the Civil War era, according to the U.S. Department of Veterans’ Affairs.\n\nUnlike Veterans Day, Memorial Day honors all military members who have died in while serving in U.S. forces.\n\nAhead of this year’s holiday, here are some Memorial Day facts you might not know:\n\nWhat is Memorial Day and why do we celebrate it?\n\nThe origins of the holiday can be traced back to local observances for soldiers with neglected gravesites during the Civil War.\n\nThe first observance of what would become Memorial Day, some historians think, took place in Charleston, S.C., at the site of a horse racing track that Confederates had turned into a prison holding Union prisoners. Blacks in the city organized a burial of deceased Union prisoners and built a fence around the site, Yale historian David Blight wrote in The New York Times in 2011.\n\nThen on May 1, 1865, they held an event there including a parade – Blacks who fought in the Civil War participated – spiritual readings and songs, and picnicking. A commemorative marker was erected there in 2010.\n\nOne of the first Decoration Days was held in Columbus, Mississippi, on April 25, 1866 by women who decorated graves of Confederate soldiers who perished in the battle at Shiloh with flowers.\n\nOn May 5, 1868, three years after the end of the Civil War, the tradition of placing flowers on veterans’ graves was continued by the establishment of Decoration Day by an organization of Union veterans, the Grand Army of the Republic.\n\nGeneral Ulysses S. Grant presided over the first large observance, a crowd of about 5,000 people, at Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia on May 30, 1873. The orphaned children of soldiers and sailors killed during the war placed flowers and small American flags atop both Union and Confederate graves throughout the entire cemetery.\n\nThis tradition continues to thrive in cemeteries of all sizes across the country.\n\nUntil World War I, Civil War soldiers were solely honored on this holiday. Now, all Americans who’ve served are observed.\n\nAt least 25 places in the North and the South claim to be the birthplace of Memorial Day. Some states that claim ownership of the origins include Illinois, Georgia, Virginia, and Pennsylvania, according to Veterans Affairs.\n\nDespite conflicting claims, the U.S. Congress and President Lyndon Johnson declared Waterloo, New York, as the “birthplace” of Memorial Day on May 30, 1966, after Governor Nelson Rockefeller's declaration that same year. The New York community formally honored local veterans May 5, 1866 by closing businesses and lowering flags at half-staff.\n\nWhat is the difference between Memorial Day and Veterans Day?\n\nMemorial Day and Veterans Day both honor the sacrifices made by U.S. Veterans but serve different purposes.\n\nVeterans’ Day, originally called “Armistice Day,” is a younger holiday established in 1926 as a way to commemorate all those who had served in the U.S. armed forces during World War I. Memorial Day honors all those who’ve died.\n\nVeterans Day is observed on Nov. 11 to signify the Armistice that ended combat in World War I in 1918.\n\nAfter World War II, Armistice Day's purpose broadened and changed in 1954 to recognize those who have served in all American wars.\n\nWhat's open and closed on Memorial Day?:What to know about mail delivery, store hours\n\nWhy is Memorial Day in May?\n\nThe day that we celebrate Memorial Day is believed to be influenced by Illinois U.S. Representative John A. Logan, who was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives as a Democrat in November 1858, and served as an officer during the Mexican War.\n\nIt is said that Logan, a staunch defender of the Union, believed Memorial Day should occur when flowers are in full bloom across the country, according to the National Museum of the U.S. Army.\n\nCongress passed an act making May 30 a holiday in the District of Columbia in 1888, according to the U.S. Congressional Research Service.\n\nNow Memorial Day is observed as the last Monday of May.\n\nIn 2000 The National Moment of Remembrance Act – which created the White House Commission on the National Moment of Remembrance and encourages all to pause at 3 p.m. local time on Memorial Day for a minute of silence – was signed into law by Congress and the President.", "authors": [], "publish_date": "2022/05/27"}, {"url": "https://www.cnn.com/2022/01/09/uk/queen-elizabeth-ii-platinum-jubilee-intl-scli-gbr/index.html", "title": "Queen Elizabeth II's Platinum Jubilee: Palace reveals how Queen's ...", "text": "CNN —\n\nThis year is set to be a landmark one for Britain’s Queen Elizabeth II.\n\nIt is her Platinum Jubilee – marking 70 years since the Queen first took the throne in 1952 and making her both the longest-reigning British monarch and the longest-serving female head of state in history.\n\nTo celebrate the unprecedented anniversary, a number of events will take place throughout the UK over the year – culminating in a four-day national bank holiday weekend from Thursday June 2 until Sunday June 5, known as the Jubilee Weekend.\n\nThe holiday itself will include a variety of public events and community activities, as well as “national moments of reflection” on the Queen’s 70 years of service.\n\nThe upcoming celebrations will be the Queen’s first jubilee without her husband, Prince Philip, who died in 2021.\n\nThe monarch’s private estates – including Sandringham House and Balmoral Castle – will also join in with Jubilee themed events.\n\nOne of the initiatives due to take place as part of the celebrations is known as the “Platinum Pudding” celebration – a nationwide baking competition seeking out a new dessert dedicated to the Queen. UK residents aged 8 and over will be invited to create a recipe and the finalists will be judged by a panel including famed baker Mary Berry, Monica Galetti and the Buckingham Palace head chef Mark Flanagan.\n\nThe winning recipe will then be made available to the public ahead of the Jubilee Weekend.\n\nOther events planned to mark the occasion include the “BBC Platinum Party at the Palace” – a live concert which promises to bring together some of the world’s biggest entertainment stars to celebrate significant moments from the Queen’s reign.\n\nOn Thursday June 2, more than 1,500 towns, villages and cities throughout the UK and its overseas territories will light a beacon to mark the Jubilee. The capitals of Commonwealth countries will also light beacons – even as sentiment towards the British monarch in the Commonwealth now differs throughout different nations.\n\nThe Jubilee Weekend celebrations will also see “Big Jubilee Lunches” take place across Britain, including flagship events in London and at Cornwall’s Eden Project – where the idea for the lunches originated.\n\nA Platinum Jubilee Pageant will also be held, in which artistic performers, dancers, musicians, military personnel, key workers and volunteers will unite to tell the story of Queen Elizabeth II’s reign in a festival of creativity. It will take place in London and will include street arts, theater, music, circus, costumes, and visual technology.\n\nThis pageant will involve a “River of Hope” section that will comprise 200 silk flags that will process down The Mall – the road in London that leads to Buckingham Palace – like a river. School children are invited to create a picture of their hopes and aspirations for the planet over the next 70 years.\n\nThe artwork for the flags will be focused on climate change and incorporate the children’s messages for the future.\n\nThe pageant will take place on June 5, the last day of the Platinum Jubilee Weekend celebrations, as the events marking the monarch’s historic 70-year reign draw to a close.\n\nCNN has launched Royal News, a new weekly dispatch bringing you the inside track on the royal family, what they are up to in public and what’s happening behind palace walls. Sign up here.", "authors": ["Hannah Ryan Max Foster", "Hannah Ryan", "Max Foster"], "publish_date": "2022/01/09"}, {"url": "https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2021/10/11/indigenous-peoples-day-everything-you-need-know-holiday/6087138001/", "title": "Indigenous Peoples' Day: Everything you need to know about the ...", "text": "What started in 1977 as a day of respect at a discrimination conference has now become a national holiday honored by President Joe Biden.\n\nIndigenous Peoples' Day, which honors Native American history and culture, falls on the calendar the same day Columbus Day, first recognized as a national holiday in 1934 by President Franklin D. Roosevelt.\n\nColumbus Day has prompted political debate in states, cities and municipalities around the U.S., especially in the past decade, with many favoring Indigenous Peoples' Day instead.\n\n“For generations, Federal policies systematically sought to assimilate and displace Native people and eradicate Native cultures,” Biden wrote in the Indigenous Peoples’ Day proclamation. “... We recognize Indigenous peoples’ resilience and strength as well as the immeasurable positive impact that they have made on every aspect of American society.”\n\nWhat is Indigenous Peoples' Day?\n\nIndigenous Peoples' Day is a holiday that celebrates and honors Native American peoples and commemorates their histories and cultures.\n\nThe celebrating of an Indigenous Peoples Day took root at an international conference on discrimination sponsored by the United Nations in 1977. South Dakota was the first state to recognize the day in 1989, and the cities of Berkeley and Santa Cruz, California, followed.\n\nHoliday:8 thoughtful ways to celebrate Indigenous Peoples Day\n\nPresident Biden:First president marks Indigenous Peoples' Day with presidential proclamation\n\nIn 1990, the International Conference on Discrimination Against Indigenous Populations in the Americas, sponsored by the United Nations, began to discuss replacing Columbus Day with Indigenous Peoples' Day.\n\nCalifornia and Tennessee observe Native American Day in September, not conflicting with Columbus Day.\n\n“For over 500 years, Indigenous people have been fighting for their survival, land and rights,” Les Begay, a Diné Nation member and co-founder of the Indigenous Peoples’ Day Coalition of Illinois, said at a rally Monday in Chicago. “Each October, when Columbus is honored, it further diminishes and erases Native people, their history and their culture.”\n\nBiden commemorated Indigenous Peoples' Day. What does that mean?\n\nOn Friday, Biden issued the first presidential proclamation of Indigenous Peoples’ Day.\n\nThe president's proclamation serves as the most significant boost yet to efforts to refocus the federal holiday celebrating Christopher Columbus toward an appreciation of native peoples.\n\nBiden also issued a proclamation of Columbus Day on Monday, Oct. 11, which is established by Congress.\n\n“Today, we also acknowledge the painful history of wrongs and atrocities that many European explorers inflicted on Tribal Nations and Indigenous communities,” Biden wrote. “It is a measure of our greatness as a Nation that we do not seek to bury these shameful episodes of our past — that we face them honestly, we bring them to the light, and we do all we can to address them.”\n\nWhat states and cities celebrate Indigenous Peoples' Day?\n\nOver a dozen states and more than 130 local governments have chosen to not celebrate Columbus Day altogether or replace it with Indigenous Peoples' Day. Many states celebrate both. Eleven U.S. states celebrate Indigenous Peoples' Day or a holiday of a similar name via proclamation, while 10 others treat it as an official holiday. The 10 states that observe the holiday via proclamation are Arizona, California, Iowa, Louisiana, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, North Carolina, Virginia, Wisconsin, plus Washington, D.C.\n\nAnd the 10 that officially celebrate it are Alabama, Alaska, Hawaii, Maine, Nebraska, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Oregon, South Dakota and Vermont.\n\nSome tribal groups in Oklahoma celebrate Native American Day in lieu of Columbus Day, with some groups naming the day in honor of their individual tribes.\n\nMore than 100 cities have replaced Columbus Day with Indigenous Peoples' Day, including Seattle, Los Angeles, Boston, Denver, Phoenix and San Francisco.\n\nIs Columbus Day gone? Why is it controversial?\n\nThough some groups argue that Columbus Day, which is still a federal holiday, celebrates Italian American heritage, many say the holiday glorifies an exploration that led to the genocide of native peoples and paved the way for slavery.\n\nAlthough Columbus is credited as the \"discoverer\" of the New World, millions of people already inhabited the Americas. Columbus made four expeditions to the Caribbean and South America over two decades, enslaving and decimating populations and opening the floodgates of European colonization.\n\nMany groups have called for the removal of monuments to Columbus, as well as to Confederate generals.\n\nColumbus Day celebrations date back to 1792, when New York City celebrated the 300th anniversary of Columbus' landfall. President Franklin D. Roosevelt proclaimed Columbus Day a national holiday in 1934 – one of 10 official federal holidays.\n\nAre businesses closed Monday?\n\nMost banks and post offices in the country are closed on Monday, with the day being recognized as a federal holiday.\n\nAlso closed are any agencies or institutions operated by the government, such as libraries, federal offices, and DMVs.\n\nWhile locally owned businesses are up to the owner, supermarkets and most drug stores are open. Same goes for staples Target, Walmart, Stabucks and Dunkin' Donuts.\n\nNational parks are also open.\n\nContributing: Grace Hauck, Associated Press, Times Record News", "authors": [], "publish_date": "2021/10/11"}, {"url": "https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2022/06/17/why-juneteenth-federal-holiday-all-not-just-black-folks/9654900002/", "title": "Why Juneteenth is a federal holiday for all, not just Black folks", "text": "DC residents have been commemorating Juneteenth long before it became a federal holiday in 2021.\n\nThe DC Council is considering a bill to set up a commission to coordinate annual Juneteenth events and educational programs throughout the year.\n\n“It is a national holiday for all Americans, not just Black people,\" said one Juneteenth event organizer.\n\nWASHINGTON – Charles Hicks, known as “Mr. Black History,” remembers hosting Juneteenth events in the 1980s at the main public library in the heart of downtown.\n\nThe event showcased poetry, music, panel discussions and activities helping Black residents trace their family history. It started with about 15 people, but over the years grew to as many as 300 packed in the library's lobby.", "authors": [], "publish_date": "2022/06/17"}, {"url": "https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2022/10/09/when-what-is-columbus-day-indigenous-peoples-day/8185066001/", "title": "What is Indigenous Peoples Day? Is it offensive to celebrate ...", "text": "Last year President Biden made Indigenous Peoples Day a federal holiday\n\nColumbus Day is still celebrated, although it's controversial and declining\n\nNative American experts see the holiday as an act of respecting past suffering more than celebration\n\nThe second Monday of October has been a national holiday for close to a century, but this will be only the second year that Indigenous Peoples Day has held that designation.\n\nLast October, President Joe Biden signed the first presidential proclamation of Indigenous Peoples Day, a commemoration-turned-holiday that began in 1977 to honor Native American history and culture. That presidential stamp of approval was the most significant boost to date of efforts refocusing a federal holiday that for decades celebrated Christopher Columbus' discovery of America.\n\nAlthough few Americans are arguing with the notion of being off work come Monday, Columbus Day and Indigenous People's Day have prompted political debate in states, cities and municipalities around the U.S., especially in the past decade, with some pushing against change and others favoring Indigenous Peoples Day instead.\n\nHistory of Halloween: How well do you know the holiday?\n\nWhat's everyone talking about?Sign up for our trending newsletter to get the latest news of the day\n\nWhat is Indigenous Peoples Day?\n\nThe celebrating of an Indigenous Peoples Day took root in 1977 at an international conference on discrimination sponsored by the United Nations. It's grown as a day to honor Native American peoples and commemorates their histories and cultures. South Dakota was the first state to recognize the day in 1989, and the California cities of Berkeley and Santa Cruz followed.\n\nIn 1990, the International Conference on Discrimination Against Indigenous Populations in the Americas, sponsored by the United Nations, began to discuss replacing Columbus Day with Indigenous Peoples Day. California and Tennessee observe Native American Day in September, not conflicting with Columbus Day.\n\nScott Stevens, the director of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Program at Syracuse University, said Indigenous Peoples Day is about resilience of what past cultures have endured as much as it is about honoring heritage.\n\n\"It is the recognition of our survival and, in many cases, resistance and even flourishing,\" Stevens told USA TODAY. \"There still are a lot of social and economic problems that Indigenous communities experience. There's also this idea that American Indians and Native Americans, that we're all one people. But we have diversity and our cultures are vastly different. One thing we all have in common is that our ancestors suffered because of American colonialism, so it serves as an opportunity where we can turn to each other in unity.\"\n\nHow and where is Indigenous Peoples Day celebrated?\n\nWhat states and cities celebrate Indigenous Peoples Day?\n\nOver a dozen states and more than 130 local governments have chosen to not celebrate Columbus Day altogether or replace it with Indigenous Peoples Day. Many states celebrate both. Eleven U.S. states celebrate Indigenous Peoples Day or a holiday of a similar name via proclamation, while 10 others treat it as an official holiday. The 10 states that observe the holiday via proclamation are Arizona, California, Iowa, Louisiana, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, North Carolina, Virginia, Wisconsin, plus Washington, D.C.\n\nAnd the 10 that officially celebrate it are Alabama, Alaska, Hawaii, Maine, Nebraska, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Oregon, South Dakota and Vermont.\n\nSome tribal groups in Oklahoma celebrate Native American Day in lieu of Columbus Day, with some groups naming the day in honor of their individual tribes.\n\nMore than 100 cities have replaced Columbus Day with Indigenous Peoples Day, including Seattle, Los Angeles, Boston, Denver, Phoenix and San Francisco.\n\nStevens said that Indigenous Peoples Day being federally recognized paves way for more allies and a space for Americans to educate themselves on a deeper level, as adults, about atrocities throughout U.S. history.\n\n\"Having a federal holiday can serve as less of a celebration but more so a recognition to past and present experiences,\" Stevens said. \"I see (Indigenous Peoples Day) as an opportunity to have more critical discussion about our American history, more than what people learn in the fourth grade about the first Thanksgiving and Pocahontas.\n\n\"Having a day recognized or having critical discussion is not anti-American. What's anti-American is self-censoring what we've been through,\" he said.\n\nWhat's open, closed on Indigenous Peoples' and Columbus Day?:What to know about mail delivery, bank hours\n\nIs it offensive to celebrate Columbus Day?\n\nLast year when Biden issued the proclamation for Indigenous Peoples Day, he also issued a proclamation of Columbus Day, established by Congress and first recognized as a national holiday in 1934 by President Franklin D. Roosevelt.\n\nIn his 2021 speech, Biden praised the role of Italian Americans in U.S. society, but also referenced the violence and harm Columbus and other explorers of the age brought about on the Americas.\n\n\"We also acknowledge the painful history of wrongs and atrocities that many European explorers inflicted on tribal nations and Indigenous communities,” Biden said. “It is a measure of our greatness as a nation that we do not seek to bury these shameful episodes of our past – that we face them honestly, we bring them to the light, and we do all we can to address them.”\n\nThough some groups argue that Columbus Day, which is still a federal holiday, celebrates Italian American heritage, many say the holiday glorifies an exploration that led to the genocide of native peoples and paved the way for slavery.\n\nStevens said celebrating Columbus Day is outdated because of the cyclical and residual hurt caused from the past: \"To have had American colonialism looked at throughout history as not being a problem and celebrated as a good thing is deeply problematic to any of us who live in a (Native-American) community or reservation.\"\n\nStevens argued some Americans have a tendency to ignore that Native Americans were \"forced to be assimilated into Euro-American culture,\" and hold a misconception that Indigenous communities are only \"set in the past.\"\n\n\"We're a minority of three percent in a land that in 1491 was one hundred percent ours,\" Stevens said.\n\nAlthough Columbus is credited as the \"discoverer\" of the New World, millions of people already inhabited the Americas. Columbus made four expeditions to the Caribbean and South America over two decades, enslaving and decimating populations and opening the floodgates of European colonization.\n\nMany groups have called for the removal of monuments to Columbus.\n\n\"For over 500 years, Indigenous people have been fighting for their survival, land and rights,” Les Begay, a Diné Nation member and co-founder of the Indigenous Peoples Day Coalition of Illinois, said last October. “Each October, when Columbus is honored, it further diminishes and erases Native people, their history and their culture.\"\n\nWhen was Columbus Day established?\n\nColumbus Day celebrations date back to 1792, when New York City celebrated the 300th anniversary of Columbus' landfall. President Franklin D. Roosevelt proclaimed Columbus Day a national holiday in 1934 – one of 10 official federal holidays.\n\nEditor's note: A previous version of this story published in 2021.", "authors": [], "publish_date": "2022/10/09"}, {"url": "https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2021/06/14/flag-day-2021-when-is-it-holiday-history/7682351002/", "title": "What is Flag Day 2021 and is it a federal holiday? What's open?", "text": "Stuck between Memorial Day and the Fourth of July, Flag Day often gets overlooked.\n\nPerhaps not completely ignored, but Flag Day isn't celebrated as much as other holidays associated with our nation's beginnings.\n\nThe holiday was established by President Woodrow Wilson on May 30, 1916 but failed to be recognized as a federal holiday when it was not included in the 1968 Uniform Holiday Act.\n\nLegislation signed by former President Harry Truman in 1949 proclaimed Flag Day as a national holiday, but it never made the federal list.\n\nLast week, President Joe Biden declared June 13, 2021 the start of National Flag Week and directed officials to display the flag on all federal government building this week.\n\nWhen is Flag Day 2021?\n\nFlag Day is on June 14 every year. In 2021, Flag Day is on Monday.\n\nWhat is the meaning of Flag Day?\n\nIt is the day, 244 years ago, when Congress commemorated Betsy Ross' creation of the Stars & Stripes as our national flag.\n\nThe flag has looked different throughout those years, of course, 27 variations, actually, as America grew through the colonies to the 50 states represented in the white stars today.\n\nNeed an American flag replaced?:This Comcast worker has helped replace over 400 tattered American flags\n\nIs Flag Day a federal holiday?\n\nNo. Flag Day is not considered to be a federal holiday, but Pennsylvania is the only state that recognizes it as a legal holiday.\n\nNew York recognizes the second Sunday of June as Flag Day.\n\nIs mail delivered on Flag Day?\n\nYes. Since Flag Day is not a federal holiday, mail should be received just like any other day.\n\nAre banks, schools open on Flag Day?\n\nYes. Much like the mail, students who are still in school should still have class and banks should be operating like any other day since Flag Day is not a federal holiday.\n\nOther Flag Day facts and history\n\nOther interesting facts about the American Flag can be found at the National Flag Foundation website, including:\n\nThe Red, White and Blue: Red symbolizes hardiness and valor, white symbolizes purity and innocence and blue represents vigilance, perseverance and justice.\n\nToday's design: A 17-year-old high school student, Robert G. Heft, of Lancaster, Ohio, submitted the design in a contest in 1958, chosen from more than 1,500 submissions by President Dwight Eisenhower.\n\nTo the moon: Several flags have made the trip to the moon, not just the one placed by Apollo 11's Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin. Additional Apollo missions, 12, 14, 15, 16, and 17, also featured an astronaut placing a flag on the moon.\n\nContributing: Asha Gilbert, USA TODAY", "authors": [], "publish_date": "2021/06/14"}, {"url": "https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2021/06/16/juneteenth-federal-holiday-senate-house-vote-pass-june-19/7631404002/", "title": "Ready to celebrate our new national holiday? Here comes Juneteenth", "text": "What wasn't even a state-recognized holiday just one year ago will — suddenly — be celebrated as the newest federal holiday when it rolls around again this Saturday.\n\n\"Juneteenth\" — June 19 — was unanimously voted a federal holiday by the Senate on Tuesday. The measure to pass a Juneteenth National Independence Day passed the House by a large margin Wednesday. On Thursday afternoon, President Joe Biden signed it into law.\n\n\"Today we consecrate Juneteenth for what it ought to be, for what it must be, a national holiday,\" Biden said before picking up a pen and signing into law America's newest national holiday at 4:04 p.m. EDT.\n\nBoth New Jersey, which made Juneteenth a state observance on Sept. 10, and New York, which made Juneteenth a state holiday on Oct. 14, were ahead of the curve in recognizing the holiday. So was Bergen County — which leaves Randy Glover, producer of the county's Juneteenth Celebration in Overpeck Park on Saturday from noon to 6 p.m., feeling good about himself and his colleagues.\n\n\"They decided to do this without knowing it would be a national holiday,\" Glover said. \"This puts the county on a good footing.\"\n\nThis Saturday's event, done in cooperation with the Bergen County NAACP and other county entities, is liable to be bigger and more important than anyone had imagined.\n\n\"I'm excited because a lot of people will get an opportunity to experience what we're offering,\" Glover said.\n\nThe joy is mixed with other feelings.\n\nJuneteenth, celebrated since 1866 as a day of African American freedom, has become a flashpoint in the Black Lives Matter era.\n\n\"This is a day, in my view, of profound weight and profound power,\" Biden said Thursday. \"A day in which we remember the moral stain and the terrible toll that slavery took and continues to take … At the same time, I also remember the extraordinary capacity to heal and hope and emerge from those painful moments and a bitter, bitter version of ourselves, to make a better version of ourselves.\"\n\nThe movement to get Juneteenth declared a national holiday has been building for years.\n\nBut now that it has arrived — passed by a Congress that has been unable to pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Act, and at a time when some states are trying to restrict how history is taught, and the extent to which racial injustice can be acknowledged — some have expressed cynicism about the timing. Crumbs, they say. A sop to silence the critics. Biden acknowledged this in his signing speech, when he talked about the movement to restrict voter access. Glover can sympathize with such skepticism.\n\n\"We have another holiday to celebrate who we are and what we are,\" he said. \"But equality always seems to be left out of the equation. So we don't have voting rights, but we have another day to go shopping.\"\n\nEven so, the federal government recognizing Juneteenth is no small thing.\n\nIt's the first new federal holiday added to the calendar since Martin Luther King Day in 1983. \"They have not amended the calendar for 30 or 40 years,\" said Deborah Evans, vice chair of the board of directors for the National Juneteenth Observance Foundation. That's what their organization had been pushing for since 1994. Their petition bears 1.5 million signatures\n\nAnd rightly so, said Wayne Bass, grand marshal of this year's Juneteenth celebration in White Plains, New York (held virtually, because of COVID, on the 12th).\n\n\"I think there should be recognition by the United States government that we have made significant contributions to the nation as a whole,\" Bass said.\n\nThe \"teenth\" of Juneteenth — as many in the U.S. have only started to learn — is June 19, 1865. That was the day Union Maj. Gen. Gordon Granger arrived in Galveston, Texas, to inform the residents kept as slaves that they were free. Had been, since Jan. 1, 1863.\n\nCelebration:17 North Jersey events celebrating Juneteenth this weekend\n\nJuneteenth, in other words, celebrates people who were free but didn't know it. Which might make it the most American holiday of all.\n\n\"We have it, within ourselves, to be the democracy we should have always been,\" Glover said. \"By taking this opportunity to be clear about what the past was, we can start celebrating the future.\"\n\nJuneteenth was a big thing last year — the year of George Floyd and Black Lives Matter. It's a bigger thing now.\n\nBy the time Congress got around to its historic vote this week, all but one state in the union — South Dakota — had recognized Juneteenth in some way (Hawaii signed its bill just this week). Some states, like New Jersey, simply marked the day with proclamations, educational programs and so on.\n\nSeven states — Texas, Massachusetts, Virginia, Washington, Oregon, New York and Pennsylvania — recognized Juneteenth as a state holiday. State employees were to have the day off, schools were to be closed. Five of those seven states enacted the legislation within the last year.\n\nAmong the private companies that had been giving their employees paid Juneteenth leave: Nike, Mastercard, Uber, Best Buy, Target, J.C. Penney, the NFL, The New York Times, The Washington Post and Gannett.\n\nSome have likened Juneteenth to an African American Fourth of July. But it's more than that, Evans said. Juneteenth, rightly considered, is a continuation of Independence Day — the sequel to Liberty and Justice for All.\n\n\"We say Juneteenth completed the cycle of freedom,\" Evans said. \"Fourth of July freed the country from the British. Juneteenth freed all the people. This is a completion.\"\n\nNot that there's anything wrong with the Fourth of July. Fireworks, hot dogs, Sousa — all very nice.\n\nBut some Americans have always felt July 4 didn't quite tell the whole story. And not just this year. That feeling is actually a very old one.\n\n\"What, to the American slave, is your Fourth of July?\" Frederick Douglass thundered, famously, to a crowd in Rochester, New York, in 1852.\n\n\"I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim,\" Douglass said. \"To him, your celebration is a sham, your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity … [They] are, to him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy — a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages.\"\n\nThat feeling has not gone away.\n\n\"Juneteenth is becoming more well known because of Black Lives Matter,\" said Mofalc O. Meinga of Jersey City, president of the Frederick Douglass Juneteenth Celebration Inc., which staged its first Juneteenth event in 2000.\n\n\"There are events popping up all over,\" said Meinga. His group, a Jersey branch of the National Juneteenth Observance Foundation, has been doing ceremonies around the state this month: two flag-raisings in Jersey City so far (on the first and the fifteenth), another in Trenton at 4:30 p.m. Friday (co-sponsored by the African American Cultural Collaborative of Mercer County) and a motor caravan through Linden on the 19th, at 11:30 a.m.\n\n\"Our mission is to bring all Americans together to celebrate our common bond of freedom,\" Meinga said.\n\nGetting popular:Juneteenth is more popular than ever. This year's celebrations come amid a culture war.\n\nEverything old is new\n\nJuneteenth is both one of the oldest and one of the newest holidays on the calendar. Old in terms of its origins. New in terms of its national profile.\n\nIt was first celebrated in Texas on June 19, 1866 — one year after the event it commemorates. That, by the way, was more a symbolic than an actual milestone: there were people held as slaves in Delaware and Kentucky even after June 19, 1865.\n\nUnder various names — Jubilee Day, Freedom Day, Emancipation Day — Juneteenth was celebrated in the Southwest and the South over the next century. In 1938 it was recognized by proclamation in Texas: \"Whereas, June 19, 1938, this year falls on Sunday…[I] do urge all members of the Negro race in Texas to observe the day in a manner appropriate to its importance to them,\" proclaimed Gov. James V. Allred.\n\nBut Juneteenth never gained much traction in the North. And by the 1960s civil rights era, some came to see it as old-fashioned. So depending on where you grew up, Juneteenth might be a blowout celebration. Or it might get you a blank look.\n\n\"I went to private school, so that was not on my radar,\" Glover said. \"The nuns were not so into Juneteenth.\"\n\nBy the late 1960s, interest began to revive: June 19 became the \"solidarity day\" of the 1968 Poor People's Campaign of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. In 1979, Texas made it a state holiday — the first state to do so. And as populations in the U.S. became more mobile, they brought Juneteenth with them.\n\n\"Juneteenth is not something that has been adequately appreciated in the Northeast,\" said Pastor Eddie Spencer IV of Mount Calvary Baptist Church in Englewood. He grew up in Burlington; he heard about Juneteenth from his roommate at Virginia Union University in Richmond — a Texan.\n\nThese days there is much more regional mixing. So word is getting out.\n\n\"it depends on who you interact with,\" Spencer said. \"In certain areas, for instance Essex County, you find a lot of people from Georgia, Florida, Tennessee and possibly Alabama. When you get into areas like Jersey City you come into contact with people from Mississippi. There are not a whole lot of Texans here, historically. But now with the boom of businesses going global, you can run into people from Texas.\"\n\nBy 1994 there was a National Juneteenth Observance Foundation. By 1997, it had a flag — the national (copyrighted) Juneteenth Flag, designed by Ben Haith of Massachusetts. Red, white and blue, with a great star erupting out of the middle.\n\n\"It's the bursting star of freedom,\" said Steve Williams, president of the National Juneteenth Observance Foundation. \"The new horizon is the blue. The red is the ground soaked with the blood we shed for this country, from the middle passage to the current day.\"\n\nThe stories of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and other victims of the past year have made Juneteenth seem newly important. People wanted to learn about it.\n\n\"Each year, you go through a period where you have to explain what Juneteenth is,\" Bass said. \"This is one of the first years where people understand it. It seems there was some more clarity of the last year, and understanding, and interest in it.\"\n\nBut no one changed the game like former President Donald Trump, when he scheduled a rally for June 19, 2020, in Tulsa, Oklahoma, site of the worst race massacre in U.S. history (marking its own 100th anniversary this year). In the resulting uproar — eventually the date was changed — Juneteenth was suddenly on everybody's radar. \"I made Juneteenth very famous,\" Trump boasted.\n\n\"The fact that he had planned it in Tulsa lets you know he had no clue,\" Meinga said. \"Until someone told him it was not a good idea.\"\n\nThe Tulsa Race Massacre:100 years later, TV goes where textbooks won't\n\nMany ways to celebrate\n\nEveryone knows how you celebrate July Fourth. Bottle rockets, barbecues, bunting. But how do you celebrate Juneteenth? In the Northeast, it varies from community to community.\n\nThere might be a raising of the Juneteenth flag. There might be a reading of the Emancipation Proclamation, or of General Order No. 3, the original announcement Major General Granger read to the enslaved populations of Galveston and their former masters on June 19, 1865:\n\n\"The people of Texas are informed that, in accordance with a proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all slaves are free. This involves an absolute equality of personal rights and rights of property between former masters and slaves.\"\n\nOther towns are doing more elaborate things.\n\nSaturday's event at Overpeck Park, produced by Glover's Tri-Arc Community Development Corporation, will include food and entertainment. An invocation by traditional African drummer Pernell Bess will be followed by a jazz trio featuring veteran players Abel Mireles (tenor sax), Radam Schwartz (organ) and Bernard \"Pocket\" Davis (drums) and the funk band The Total Eclipse. The amphitheater in the Ridgefield Park section is where it all happens.\n\n\"This is a big public event. It's big for Bergen County,\" Glover said.\n\nThe Bergen County NAACP (which will be presenting lifetime achievement awards), the county executive's office, the county Parks Department and Bergen Community College are all co-presenting. Several other local organizations will have a presence, including Hackensack Meridian Hackensack University Medical Center, Holy Name Medical Center and New Bridge Medical Center. Vaccinations will be offered on-site.\n\n\"The mere fact that all these Bergen County entities are joining in is a game changer,\" Glover said.\n\nIt means that Juneteenth has, in this area at least, arrived.\n\n\"It's probably more relevant now than in previous years, because of the tumultuous times we are in politically,\" Glover said. \"When you look at voting rights being restricted in the South, and the other things that are happening, you're talking about disenfranchisement on a national level. Now it's going to be a misdemeanor to give somebody some water? Black people are fighting for the same things as Martin Luther King, Malcolm X and the Panthers, all these groups that fought to bring us forward.\"\n\nIn Yonkers, New York, the urgency of the times demanded a three-day celebration.\n\nOn Friday, the Pan-African Flag will be raised at City Hall, and a Juneteenth King and Queen will be proclaimed. On Saturday, in Trevor Park & Playground on Ravine Avenue, there will be educational symposiums, a musical tribute to rapper DMX (a native of neighboring Mount Vernon), youth talent and award shows. On Sunday in the park, an outdoor unity worship service will be followed by a summer stage full of live performers and live bands. There will be vendors and food.\n\n\"We try to balance the story so it's not all jubilee, but it's still a celebration of our freedom from chattel slavery,\" said Robert Winstead, president of the Yonkers African American Heritage Committee, which has produced the event since 2015. It grew out of an African American heritage festival the group has been doing since 1975.\n\n\"We just thought it would make a lot of sense to join that to the national Juneteenth celebration,\" Winstead said. \"It gives us more context.\"\n\nJuneteenth, however it's celebrated, is a joyful, welcoming event. It originated with, and is specifically pertinent to, African Americans — but it can be celebrated by people of all backgrounds.\n\nOnly it does ask something of us: a willingness to fully acknowledge American history. The bad, as well as the good. That's the only way all of us — the whole country — can move forward. Together.\n\n\"There's been this sweeping-under-the-rug mentality,\" Spencer said. \"And after all these years, no one wants to admit we've run out of rug.\"\n\nCelebrate: Juneteenth events in New Jersey\n\nCelebrate: Juneteenth events in Westchester\n\nJim Beckerman is an entertainment and culture reporter for NorthJersey.com. For unlimited access to his insightful reports about how you spend your leisure time, please subscribe or activate your digital account today.\n\nEmail: beckerman@northjersey.com\n\nTwitter: @jimbeckerman1", "authors": [], "publish_date": "2021/06/16"}]}
{"question_id": "20230120_2", "search_time": "2023/01/20/16:36", "search_result": [{"url": "https://www.cnn.com/2022/10/29/asia/south-korea-halloween-cardiac-arrest-intl/index.html", "title": "Seoul Halloween crush: South Korean authorities investigate after ...", "text": "Seoul, South Korea CNN —\n\nSouth Korea is searching for answers after Halloween celebrations in the capital Seoul turned into one of the country’s worst disasters, with authorities declaring a national mourning period as they investigate how a chaotic crush left at least 151 people dead.\n\nTens of thousands of costumed partygoers – mostly teenagers and young adults – had poured into the popular nightlife neighborhood Itaewon to enjoy South Korea’s first Halloween celebration since it lifted Covid restrictions such as crowd limits and face mask rules.\n\nBut the festivities descended into chaos, with photos and videos on social media showing huge crowds crammed into a narrow alley. Eyewitnesses described partygoers being packed so tightly together it was difficult to move around or even breathe.\n\nBefore the crush, crowd numbers built in Seoul's popular nightclub district Itaewon, October 29, 2022. Courtesy Suah Cho\n\nSuah Cho, 23, described walking through an alley when “suddenly, some people started pushing each other, and people were screaming.” The screaming went on for 15 minutes, she said, adding: “It was just panic.”\n\n“Some people were going forward and some people were going backward, and then just they were pushing each other,” she added. She was able to escape into a building along the alley, where she watched the disaster unfold. She said some people had told her that “people were climbing the building to survive.”\n\nAuthorities are still investigating what caused the incident, but Choi Seong-bum, chief of the Yongsan-gu Fire Department, said it was a “presumed stampede” and that many people fell, injuring at least 82.\n\nThe dead included at least 19 foreign nationals, including people from Iran, Norway, China and Uzbekistan, he said. One Thai national is among the dead, the Thai Foreign Ministry said.\n\nCrowds are seen in the popular nightlife district of Itaewon in Seoul on October 30, 2022. Jung Yeon-je/AFP/Getty Images\n\nThe chaos of Saturday turned into shock and grief across the country on Sunday. Many victims’ families have gathered at a nearby center in Itaewon, where officials are compiling the names of the dead and missing as they race to identify bodies.\n\nSo far, more than 90% of those killed have been identified, said Minister of Interior and Safety Lee Sang-min in a briefing on Sunday. He added that about 10 people can’t be identified because some are under the age of 17 – too young to carry a national ID card – and others are foreigners.\n\nBut many remain missing, with families left anxiously calling hospitals and visiting morgues. By 2 p.m. local time on Sunday, Seoul authorities had received more than 3,580 missing persons reports, said the city government.\n\nRelatives of missing people weep at a community service center on October 30, 2022 in Seoul, South Korea. Chung Sung-Jun/Getty Images\n\nOne mother, Ahn Yeon-seon, told South Korean news agency Yonhap her 19-year-old daughter had gone out to celebrate with her boyfriend for one of their last dates before he left for mandatory military service.\n\nSeveral hours after the couple left, her daughter’s boyfriend called crying, saying she had been “under a pile of people for over an hour and that he’d tried to pull her out but couldn’t,” Ahn said, according to Yonhap.\n\nSince then, Ahn has been searching hospitals for her daughter, waiting for confirmation of what happened to her. “I’ll just keep searching,” she told Yonhap.\n\nAnd, though the government has launched an investigation and promised new measures to prevent similar incidents from happening again, questions are emerging about how such a disaster could have occurred at all.\n\nCho, the 23-year-old who escaped the crush, said she saw no police or officials trying to control the crowd before the crush began. Even after they arrived later in the night, the sense of confusion and panic continued.\n\n“The police officer was screaming, but we couldn’t really tell that was a real police officer because so many people were wearing costumes,” she said. “People were literally saying, ‘Are you a real police officer?’”\n\nInvestigation and recovery\n\nAuthorities received the first emergency calls of people being “buried” in crowds at 10:24 p.m. in Seoul (9:24 a.m. ET). As the news broke, Yonhap reported that some people had suffered from “cardiac arrest,” with others reporting “difficulty breathing.”\n\nHowever, officials said there were no gas leaks or fires on site.\n\nLee Sang-min, Seoul’s interior and safety minister, said on Sunday that “a considerable number of police and security forces” had been deployed to another part of Seoul on Saturday to deal with protests there.\n\nMeanwhile in Itaewon, the crowd had not been unusually large, he said, so only a “normal” level of security forces had been deployed there.\n\nBut as the disaster unfolded, it prompted a massive response. More than 1,700 emergency response forces were dispatched on Saturday night, including 517 firefighters, 1,100 police officials, and about 70 government workers.\n\nSocial media videos showed police had taped off an area where people were performing compressions on other partygoers lying on the ground as they waited for medical help. Others showed people dressed in Halloween costumes lying on the street and on stretchers as first responders rendered aid and ambulances lined up to take away the injured.\n\nSouth Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol convened an emergency meeting in the early hours of Sunday, and later visited the scene to receive briefings from emergency officials.\n\nAddressing the nation, he called a national period of mourning “until the handling of the accident is concluded.” Prime Minister Han Duck-soo later said the period of mourning would end at midnight of November 5.\n\n“A tragedy that should not have happened occurred in the middle of Seoul last night on Halloween,” Yoon said. “I pray for those who died in an unexpected accident and hope that the injured will recover quickly.”\n\nHe also said the disaster would be investigated, with measures put into place to ensure similar incidents never happen again.\n\n“We will have relevant ministries such as the Ministry of the Interior and Safety conduct emergency inspections not only for Halloween events but also for local festivals and thoroughly manage them so they are conducted in an orderly and safe manner,” Yoon said, adding that a “multi-purpose emergency system” would support both the injured and the families of the dead.\n\nVideo Ad Feedback This narrow street was the scene of deadly incident in Seoul 02:16 - Source: CNN\n\nAlso on Sunday, Prime Minister Han Duck-soo said the government would provide a fund for families of the deceased and injured. It will operate “a funeral support team and respond fully to the treatment of the injured,” and provide psychological treatment for those affected, he said.\n\nThe government will also “actively consult with diplomatic offices to ensure there is no shortage of support,” Han said.\n\n“Our country has a history of overcoming disasters with all citizens united in one mind,” he said, adding: “I earnestly ask all the people to join so that we can overcome sorrow and rise again.”\n\nThe government has declared the district of Yongsan-gu, where Itaewon is located, a special disaster area.\n\nThe Seoul Metropolitan Government said it would set up a joint memorial altar at Seoul Plaza Monday morning, with another joint memorial altar in Itaewon.\n\nForeign nationals among the dead\n\nPeople fly into Seoul from all over Asia to celebrate Halloween in Itaewon, and this year’s event was seen as a welcome return of festivities after the pandemic. Hotels and ticketed events in the neighborhood had been booked solid ahead and large crowds were expected.\n\nOne eyewitness, Sung Sehyun, said the space was like a “jammed subway,” and that he had to push his way through the throng earlier in the night to get clear of the busy streets.\n\n“I was lucky to get through (but an) hour later, I heard people got killed. Because people got stamped on … and people got jammed together,” he said\n\nJuliette Kayyem, a disaster management expert and national security analyst for CNN, said the city’s density – and how common crowds are in Seoul – may have played a role in the tragedy.\n\nRescue teams work at the scene where dozens of people were injured during a Halloween festival in Seoul, South Korea, October 29, 2022. Kim Hong-ji/Reuters\n\n“People in Seoul are used to being in packed spaces, it’s possible they might not have been fully alarmed by the packed streets,” she said. “Panic is always a factor, and there is a danger of being too used to being in crowded spaces.”\n\nIt’s hard to pinpoint what might have triggered the crush – but authorities “would have anticipated high numbers … before Saturday night,” she added. “There is a responsibility on the part of the authorities to be monitoring crowd volume in real time, so they can sense the need to get people out.”\n\nAround the world, leaders sent their condolences to South Korea and those affected by the disaster.\n\n“Jill and I send our deepest condolences to the families who lost loved ones in Seoul,” US President Joe Biden wrote in a statement. “We grieve with the people of the Republic of Korea and send our best wishes for a quick recovery to all those who were injured.”\n\nEmergency services treat injured people on October 30, 2022, in Seoul, South Korea. Chung Sung-Jun/Getty Images\n\nThe United States government is ready to provide South Korea with “any support it needs,” White House National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan wrote on Twitter Saturday. One US citizen was injured in the crush, authorities said.\n\nBritish Prime Minister Rishi Sunak tweeted: “All our thoughts are with those currently responding and all South Koreans at this very distressing time.” In tweet written in French and Korean, President Emmanuel Macron said “France is by your side.”\n\nItaewon, once shunned by locals as a seedy, red light district, has transformed into one of Seoul’s top party venues. Known for its nightlife and trendy restaurants, the neighborhood comes to life at night.\n\nIt is also home to Seoul’s thriving Muslim and gay communities, and is located near a US army base.", "authors": ["Gawon Bae Paula Hancocks Sophie Jeong Jessie Yeung Will Ripley", "Gawon Bae", "Paula Hancocks", "Sophie Jeong", "Jessie Yeung", "Will Ripley"], "publish_date": "2022/10/29"}, {"url": "https://www.cnn.com/2022/03/21/china/china-plane-crash-guangxi-intl-hnk/index.html", "title": "Chinese airliner carrying 132 people crashes in southern Guangxi ...", "text": "Editor’s Note: Read the latest update on this story here – No survivors found after China’s worst air disaster in more than a decade, state media says\n\n\n\nCNN —\n\nA China Eastern Airlines jetliner carrying 132 people crashed in the mountains in southern China’s Guangxi region on Monday afternoon, according to the country’s Civil Aviation Administration (CAAC).\n\nThe Boeing 737 was en route from the southwestern city of Kunming to Guangzhou when it lost contact over the city of Wuzhou. On board were 123 passengers and nine crew members, CAAC said in a statement posted online.\n\nChina Eastern Airlines confirmed those details and said it had activated emergency procedures, including a line for emergency assistance for family members.\n\nRescue efforts are underway at the scene of the crash, but there were no immediate details on the possible cause or the number of casualties.\n\nChina Eastern offered its condolences to those who were killed in the incident, without confirming any death toll.\n\n“The cause of the plane crash is still under investigation. The company expresses its sorrowful condolences to the passengers and crew members who died in this plane crash,” the airline said in a statement.\n\nA piece of wreckage from China Eastern Airlines Flight MU5735 is seen in this photo, released by the Xinhua News Agency on March 21. Xinhua/AP\n\nBoeing said in a statement: “Our thoughts are with the passengers and crew of China Eastern Airlines Flight MU 5735. We are working with our airline customer and are ready to support them.”\n\nThe company added that it is in contact with the US National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) and that its technical experts are ready to assist in the CAAC investigation.\n\nLater Monday, the NTSB said it “appointed a senior air safety investigator as a U.S. accredited representative to the investigation,” which will be led by the CAAC.\n\nBoeing, engine manufacturer CFM, and the US Federal Aviation Administration will also be involved in the probe, the NTSB said. This arrangement is standard for aviation incidents involving a US-designed Boeing aircraft that occur in other countries.\n\nChina Eastern staff wait to lead the relatives of those on board the crashed flight MU5735 to a special area at Guangzhou Baiyun International Airport, the destination of the flight, on Monday. JULIEN TAN/FCHNA/FeatureChina/AP\n\nChinese President Xi Jinping instructed the country’s emergency services to “organize a search and rescue” operation and “identify the causes of the accident,” state media reported.\n\n“After the accident, President Xi Jinping immediately made instructions to start the emergency mechanism, organize search and rescue, and properly deal with the aftermath,” state broadcaster CCTV said.\n\nSudden descent\n\nThe aircraft lost contact with emergency services before “suddenly descending” around 2:19 p.m., Chinese government officials and state media reported Monday.\n\n“A China Eastern plane (flight number MU5735) lost contact at 2.15 pm … Rescue teams are on the way to ground zero, and rescue work is being laid out in order,” the Guangxi Emergency Management Department said in a statement.\n\nGoogle\n\nThe plane’s altitude dropped from 8,869 meters (29,098 feet) to 1,333.5 meters (4,375 feet) in the span of three minutes, state news agency China News Service reported, citing VariFlight, a Chinese technology company that provides civil aviation data services.\n\nHours after the accident, CCTV reported that the airline was grounding all its Boeing 737-800s and that the aircraft currently in the air would “not carry more flights after landing.”\n\nCCTV also reported that rescue efforts could be hampered by bad weather and limited accessibility to the site.\n\nHeavy rescue equipment was unable to reach the scene – which lacks electricity – as it is surrounded by mountains on three sides and accessible only through a narrow path, CCTV said, citing the Guangxi Wuzhou fire department.\n\nSeparately, Guangxi Meteorological Bureau warned that the rescue effort could be hindered by an incoming cold front that would see heavy rainfall and a temperature drop in Tengxian County, where the crash site is.\n\nEyewitness describes falling plane\n\nIn an interview with state media outlet Beijing Youth Daily, an eyewitness described seeing a plane “falling directly from the sky in front of him around 2 p.m.”\n\n“The plane fell vertically from the sky. Although I was very far away, I could still see that it was a plane. The plane did not smoke during the fall. The fire started after it fell into the mountain, followed by a lot of smoke,” the witness, who was only identified by his surname, Liu, said.\n\n“My heart was thumping. I immediately informed friends about the situation, that this area is dangerous and not to come nearby,” Liu continued.\n\nIn a separate interview with China News Service, a resident from Molang village in Tengxian county – close to the scene of the crash – reported seeing “wings and pieces of the plane, as well as pieces of clothing hanging from trees.”\n\nThe witness – whose name was not published – told state media he drove his motorcycle to the crash site after hearing “a huge explosion” around 2:40 pm to “see if he could participate in the rescue.” The onlooker added that the accident caused “about 10 acres of fire,” according to his visual estimates.\n\nVideo showing what appears to be a plane falling nose first from the sky circulated widely on Chinese social media Monday, before being picked up and published by state media.\n\nFootage posted online and shared by state media outlet People’s Daily show plumes of smoke billowing from a mountainous, forested area. Another clip shows what appears to be wreckage from the plane on a muddy mountain path.\n\nThe colors on the Boeing and China Eastern Airlines websites were changed to black and white in China, as a sign of respect in response to the crash.", "authors": ["Yong Xiong Lizzy Yee Wayne Chang", "Cnn'S Beijing Bureau", "Yong Xiong", "Lizzy Yee", "Wayne Chang"], "publish_date": "2022/03/21"}, {"url": "https://www.cnn.com/2022/11/17/football/qatar-2022-world-cup-migrant-workers-human-rights-spt-intl/index.html", "title": "Migrant workers helped build Qatar's World Cup tournament, now ...", "text": "CNN —\n\nKamal was standing outside a shop with other migrant workers, having finished yet another grueling working day, when he and – he says – a few others were arrested this August. Without explanation, the 24-year-old says he was put into a vehicle and, for the next week, kept in a Qatari jail, the location and name of which he does not know.\n\n“When they arrested me, I couldn’t say anything, not a single word, as I was so scared,” he told CNN Sport, speaking at home in southern Nepal where he has been working on a farm since being deported three months ago.\n\nKamal – CNN has changed the names of the Nepali workers to protect them from retaliation – is one of many migrant workers wanting to tell the world of their experiences in Qatar, a country that will this month host one of sport’s greatest, most lucrative, spectacles – the World Cup, a tournament which usually unites the world as millions watch the spectacular goals and carefully-choreographed celebrations.\n\nIt will be a historic event, the first World Cup to be held in the Middle East, but one also mired in controversy. Much of the build-up to this tournament has been on more sober matters, that of human rights, from the deaths of migrant workers and the conditions many have endured in Qatar, to LGBTQ and women’s rights.\n\nKamal says he has yet to be paid the 7,000 Qatari Riyal bonus (around $1,922) he says he is entitled to from his previous employers, nor 7,000 Riyal in insurance for injuring two fingers at work.\n\n“I wasn’t told why I was being arrested. People are just standing there … some are walking with their grocery [sic], some are just sitting there consuming tobacco products … they just arrest you,” he adds, before explaining he could not ask questions as he does not speak Arabic.\n\nA worker is seen inside the Lusail Stadium during a stadium tour on December 20, 2019, in Doha, Qatar. Francois Nel/Getty Images\n\nDescribing the conditions in the cell he shared with 24 other Nepali migrant workers, he says he was provided with a blanket and a pillow, but the mattress on the floor he had to sleep on was riddled with bed bugs.\n\n“Inside the jail, there were people from Sri Lanka, Kerala (India), Pakistan, Sudan, Nepal, African, Philippines. There were around 14-15 units. In one jail, there were around 250-300 people. Around 24-25 people per room,” he says.\n\n“When they take you to the jail, they don’t give you a room right away. They keep you in a veranda. After a day or two, once a room is empty, they keep people from one country in one room.”\n\nUsing a smuggled phone, he spoke to friends, one of whom, he says, brought his belongings – including his passport – to the jail, though he says he was sent home after the Nepali embassy had sent a paper copy of his passport to the jail. CNN has reached out to the embassy but has yet to receive a response.\n\n“When they put me on the flight, I started thinking: ‘Why are they sending workers back all of a sudden? It’s not one, two, 10 people … they are sending 150, 200, 300 workers on one flight,’” he says.\n\n“Some workers who were just roaming outside wearing (work) dress were sent back. They don’t even allow you to collect your clothes. They just send you back in the cloth you are wearing.”\n\nKamal believes he was arrested because he had a second job, which is illegal under Qatar’s 2004 Labour Law and allows authorities to cancel a worker’s work permit. He says he worked an extra two to four hours a day to supplement his income as he was not making enough money working six eight-hour days a week.\n\nQatar has a 90-day grace period in which a worker can remain in the country legally without another sponsor, but if they have not had their permit renewed or reactivated in that time they risk being arrested or deported for being undocumented.\n\nHe says he received paperwork upon his arrest, which Amnesty International says would likely have explained why he was being detained, but as it was in Arabic he did not know what it said and no translator was provided.\n\nLaborers rest in green space along the corniche in Doha, Qatar, on June 23. Christopher Pike/Bloomberg/Getty Images/FILE\n\nA Qatari government official told CNN in a statement: “Any claims that workers are being jailed or deported without explanation are untrue. Action is only taken in very specific cases, such as if an individual participates in violence.”\n\nThe official added that 97% of all eligible workers were covered by Qatar’s Wage Protection System, established in 2018, “which ensures wages are paid in full and on time.” Further work was being done to strengthen the system, the official said.\n\nSome workers never returned home\n\nWith the opening match just days away, on-the-pitch matters are a mere footnote because this tournament has come at a cost to workers who left their families in the belief that they would reap financial rewards in one of the world’s richest countries per capita. Some would never return home. None of the three Nepali workers CNN spoke to were richer for their experience. Indeed, they are in debt and full of melancholy.\n\nThe Guardian reported last year that 6,500 South Asian migrant workers have died in Qatar since the country was awarded the World Cup in 2010, most of whom were involved in low-wage, dangerous labor, often undertaken in extreme heat.\n\nThe report did not connect all 6,500 deaths with World Cup infrastructure projects and has not been independently verified by CNN.\n\nHassan Al Thawadi – the man in charge of leading Qatar’s preparations – told CNN’s Becky Anderson that the Guardian’s 6,500 figure was a “sensational headline” that was misleading and that the report lacked context.\n\nA government official told CNN there had been three work-related deaths on stadiums and 37 non-work-related deaths. In a statement, the official said the Guardian’s figures were “inaccurate” and “wildly misleading.”\n\n“The 6,500 figure takes the number of all foreign worker deaths in the country over a 10-year period and attributes it to the World Cup,” the official said. “This is not true and neglects all other causes of death including illness, old age and traffic accidents. It also fails to recognize that only 20% of foreign workers in Qatar are employed on construction sites.”\n\nIt has been widely reported that Qatar has spent $220 billion leading up to the tournament, which would make it the most expensive World Cup in history, though this likely includes infrastructure not directly associated with stadium construction. A spokesperson for the Supreme Committee for Delivery & Legacy (SC) which, since its formation in 2011, has been responsible for overseeing the infrastructure projects and planning for the World Cup, told CNN that the tournament budget was $6.5 billion, without expanding on what that cost covered.\n\nEight new stadiums rose from the desert, and the Gulf state expanded its airport, constructed new hotels, rail and highways. All would have been constructed by migrant workers, who – according to Amnesty International – account for 90% of the workforce in a near-three million population.\n\nAn aerial view of Al Janoub stadium at sunrise on June 21 in Al Wakrah, Qatar. David Ramos/Getty Images\n\nSince 2010, migrant workers have faced delayed or unpaid wages, forced labor, long hours in hot weather, employer intimidation and an inability to leave their jobs because of the country’s sponsorship system, human rights organizations have found.\n\nHowever, the health, safety and dignity of “all workers employed on our projects has remained steadfast,” a statement from the SC read.\n\n“Our efforts have resulted in significant improvements in accommodation standards, health and safety regulations, grievance mechanisms, healthcare provision and reimbursements of illegal recruitment fees to workers.\n\n“While the journey is on-going, we are committed to delivering the legacy we promised. A legacy that improves lives and lays the foundation for fair, sustainable and lasting labour reforms.”\n\nLast year, in an interview with CNN Sport anchor Amanda Davies, FIFA President Gianni Infantino said that while “more needs to be done,” progress had been made.\n\n“I’ve seen the great evolution that has happened in Qatar, which was recognized – I mean not by FIFA – but by labor unions around the world, by international organizations,” said Infantino.\n\n‘It was difficult to breathe’\n\nWe are, unusually, writing about a World Cup in November because the competition had to be moved from its usual June-July slot to Qatar’s winter as the heat is so extreme in the country’s summer months – temperatures can reach around 43 degrees Celsius (109 degrees Fahrenheit) in June – that playing in such conditions could have posed a health risk to players.\n\nHari is 27 years old and, like many of his compatriots, left Nepal for Qatar as his family – he was one of five siblings with just his father at home – desperately needed money, primarily to eat. Since 2013, Nepal’s government-mandated minimum wage has been set at $74 a month, according to minimum-wage.org. He says that his monthly wage in Qatar was 700 Rial a month ($192).\n\nAfter moving to Qatar in 2014, he worked in four places during his four-year stay: at a supermarket, a hotel and airport, but the most difficult job, he says, was in construction when he had to carry tiles up buildings “six to seven stories above” in overbearing heat, plus lay pipelines in deep pits.\n\n“It was too hot,” he tells CNN. “The foreman was very demanding and used to complain a lot. The foreman used to threaten to reduce our salaries and overtime pay.\n\n“I had to carry tiles on my shoulder to the top. It was very difficult going up through the scaffolding. In the pipeline work, there were 5-7 meters deep pits, we had to lay the stones and concrete, it was difficult due to the heat. It was difficult to breathe. We had to come upstairs using a ladder to drink water.\n\n“It never happened to me, but I saw some workers fainting at work. I saw one Bengali, one Nepali … two to three people faint while working. They took the Bengali to medical services. I’m not sure what happened to him.”\n\nDuring his time in Qatar, government regulations generally prohibited workers from working outdoors between 11:30 a.m. and 3 p.m. from June 15 to August 31. He said one company he worked for followed these rules.\n\nHe added: “At some places, they didn’t have water. Some places, they didn’t provide us water on time. At some places, we used to go to houses nearby asking for water.”\n\nIn this photo taken in May 2015 during a government organized media tour, workers use heavy machinery at the Al-Wakra Stadium being built for the 2022 World Cup. Maya Alleruzzo/AP/FILE\n\nWorking long hours in extreme heat has, some non-governmental organizations believe, caused a number of deaths and put lives at risk in Qatar.\n\nIn 2019, research published in the Cardiology Journal, exploring the relationship between the deaths of more than 1,300 Nepali workers between 2009 and 2017 and heat exposure, found a “strong correlation” between heat stress and young workers dying of cardiovascular problems in the summer months.\n\nThe government official told CNN that there had been a “consistent decline” in the mortality rate of migrant workers, including a decline in heat stress disorders, “thanks in large part to our comprehensive heat stress legislation.”\n\n“Qatar has always acknowledged that work remains to be done, notably to hold unscrupulous employers to account,” the government official added. “Systemic reform does not happen overnight and shifting the behavior of every company takes time as is the case with any country around the world.”\n\n‘Heat does not typically injure on its own’\n\nNatasha Iskander, Professor of Urban Planning and Public Service at New York University, tells CNN that heat can kill “in ways that are confusing and unclear.”\n\n“Fatal heat stroke can look like a heart attack or a seizure. Sometimes, heat kills through the body, amplifying manageable and often silent conditions, like diabetes and hypertension, and turning them into sudden killers,” she explains.\n\n“As a result, Qatar, in the death certificates that it has issued after migrant construction workers have collapsed, has been able to push back against the correlation between heat stress and deaths and claim instead that the deaths are due to natural causes, even though the more proximate cause is work in the heat.”\n\nDetermining the number of workers injured by heat is even harder, she says, because many injuries may not become apparent until years later, when migrants have returned home and young men “find that their kidneys no longer function, that they suffer from chronic kidney disease, or that their hearts have begun to fail, displaying levels of cardiac weakness that are debilitating.”\n\n“Heat does not typically injure on its own,” she adds. “Workers are exposed to heat and heat dangers through the labor relations on Qatari worksites. The long hours, physically intense work, the forced overtime, the abusive conditions, the bullying on site all shape how exposed workers are to heat. Additionally, conditions beyond the worksite also augmented heat’s power to harm – things like poor sleep, insufficient nutrition or a room that was not cool enough to allow the body to reset after a day in the heat. In Qatar, the employer housed workers in labor camps, and workers as a matter of policy were segregated to industrial areas, where living accommodations were terrible.”\n\nForeign laborers working on the construction site of the Al-Wakrah football stadium, one of Qatar's 2022 World Cup stadiums, walk back to their accomodation at the Ezdan 40 compound after finishing work on May 4, 2015, in Doha's Al-Wakrah southern suburbs. Marwan Naamani/AFP/Getty Images/FILE\n\nAccording to Amnesty International, Qatari authorities have not investigated “thousands” of deaths of migrant workers over the past decade “despite evidence of links between premature deaths and unsafe working conditions.” That these deaths are not being recorded as work-related prevents families from receiving compensation, the advocacy group states.\n\nIn its statement, the SC said that its commitment to publicly disclose non-work-related deaths went beyond the requirements of the UK’s Health and Safety Executive Reporting of Injuries, Diseases and Dangerous Occurrences regulations (RIDDOR), which defines and provides classification for how to document work-related and non-work-related incidents.\n\nThe statement added: “The SC investigates all non-work-related deaths and work-related fatalities in line with our Incident Investigation Procedure to identify contributory factors and establish how they could have been prevented. This process involves evidence collection and analysis and witness interviews to establish the facts of the incident.”\n\nAmnesty International’s Ella Knight told CNN Sport that her organization would continue to push Qatar to “thoroughly investigate” deaths of migrant workers, including past deaths, to “ensure the families of the deceased have the opportunity to rebuild their lives.”\n\nBarun Ghimire is a human rights lawyer based in Kathmandu whose work focuses on the exploitation of Nepali migrants working abroad. He tells CNN that the families he advocates for have not received satisfactory information on their loved ones’ deaths. “Families send out healthy, young family member to work and they receive news that the family member died when they were sleeping,” he says. In a separate interview, he told CNN last year: “The Qatar World Cup is really the bloody cup – the blood of migrant workers.”\n\nLast year, Qatari legislation was strengthened regarding outdoor working conditions, expanding summertime working hours during which outdoor work is prohibited – replacing legislation introduced in 2007 – and additionally putting into law that “all work must stop if the wet-bulb globe temperature (WBGT) raises beyond 32.1C (89.8F) in a particular workplace.” The regulations also mandate annual health checks for workers, as well as mandatory risk assessments.\n\n“We recognize that heat stress is a particular issue in the summer months in Qatar,” a Qatari government official said. “In May 2021, Qatar introduced a requirement for companies to conduct annual health checks for workers, as well as mandatory risk assessments to mitigate the dangers of heat stress. Companies are expected to adopt flexible, self-monitored working hours where possible, adjust shift rotations, enforce regular breaks, provide free cold drinking water and shaded workspaces, and adhere to all other guidelines with respect to heat stress outlined by the Ministry of Labour.\n\n“Every summer, Qatar’s labor inspectors carry out thousands of unannounced visits to work sites across the country to ensure that heat stress rules are being followed,” the official added. “Between June and September 2022, 382 work sites were ordered to close for violating the rules.”\n\nWorkers walk to the Lusail Stadium -- one of the 2022 Qatar World Cup stadiums -- in Lusail on December 20, 2019. Hassan Ammar/AP\n\nIskander said a heat point of 32.1C WBGT was “already dangerous.”\n\n“Working at the physical intensity that construction workers do in Qatar for any amount of time at that temperature is damaging to the body,” she explained.\n\n“The regulation relied on the assumption that workers would be able to self-pace and rest as needed whenever they experienced heat stress. Anyone who has ever spent any amount of time on a Qatari construction site knows that workers have no ability to self-pace.”\n\nKnight adds: “The fact investigations into migrant workers deaths are often not happening precludes the possibility of greater protections being implemented because if you don’t know what is really happening to these people how can you then implement and enforce effective measures to increase their protection?”\n\nFor the majority of his time in Qatar, Hari said he felt sad. He would watch planes take off during his six months tending the airport gardens and question why he was in the country. But he had paid 90,000 Nepali rupees ($685) to a Nepali recruitment company that facilitated his move. He was also told, he says, by the company he had joined that he would have had to pay 2,000 to 3,000 Riyal ($549-$823) to buy himself out of his contract.\n\nHis friends, he said, counseled him as he continued to work long, lonely days for, Hari says, not enough money to live and save for his family. Amnesty International says many migrants pay high fees to “unscrupulous recruitment agents in their home country” which make the workers scared to leave their jobs when they get to Qatar.\n\nNow, he is a father-of-two, and work is plowing fields in Nepal as a tractor driver, but Hari hopes one day to work abroad again, his heart set on Malaysia. “I don’t want my children to go through what I did. I want to build a house, buy some land. That’s what I am thinking. But let’s see what God has planned,” he says.\n\n‘Our dreams never came true’\n\nSunit has been back in Nepal since August after working just eight months in Qatar. He had expected to be there for two years, but the collapse of the construction company he worked for meant he and many others returned with money still owed to them, he says. He struggles to find work in Nepal, meaning feeding his two children and paying school fees is difficult.\n\nHe had dreamed of watching World Cup matches from the rooftop of the hotel he had helped build. One of the stadiums – the name of which he does not know – was a 10-minute walk from the hotel. “We used to talk about it,” he says of the World Cup. “But we had to return, and our dreams never came true. The stadium activities were visible from the hotel. We could see the stadium from the hotel rooftop.”\n\nIn helping construct the city center hotel, the name of which he doesn’t remember, he would carry bags of plaster mix and cement, weighing from 30 to 50 kilos, on his shoulders up to 10 to 12 floors, he says.\n\n“The lift was rarely functional. Some people couldn’t carry it and dropped it halfway. If you don’t finish your job, you were threatened saying the salary would be deducted for that day,” he says. “The foreman used to complain that we were taking water breaks as soon as we got to work. They used to threaten us saying: ‘We will not pay you for the day.’ We said: ‘Go ahead. We are humans, we need to drink water.’\n\n“It was very hot. It used to take 1.5 to two hours to get to the top. I used to get tired. I used to stop on the way. Then proceed again slowly. Yes, the supervisors used to yell at us. But what could we do?”\n\nHe says he had paid an agent in Nepal 240,000 Nepali rupees (around $1,840) before leaving for Qatar. He says he has filed a case with the police about the agent as he had been unable to fulfill his two-year contract, but there have been no developments. He says the owners of the company he worked for in Qatar were arrested because they did not pay laborers. The company did not immediately respond to CNN’s request for comment, neither did it respond to questions from the Business & Human Rights Centre, an advocacy group, about protests over unpaid wages.\n\nQatar has expanded its airport, constructed new hotels, and rail and highways over the last decade. Britta Pedersen/picture alliance/Getty Images\n\nFor a month, he says, he was in his accommodation with no work or money to buy food – he borrowed to eat – so he and his fellow workers called the police, who brought food with them.\n\n“The police came again after 10-15 days and said we have arrested the company people. (The police) distributed food again,” he says. “They told us the company has collapsed and the government will send all the workers back home.”\n\n“I’m extremely sad,” he adds. “I mean, it is what it is. Nothing would change by regretting it. I get mad (at the company) but what can I do? Even if I had tried to fight back, it would have been my loss.”\n\nThe SC said it has established what it claims is a “first-of-its-kind” Workers’ Welfare Forum, which it said allowed workers to elect a representative on their behalf and, when companies failed to comply with the WWF, it steps in, demands better and alerts the authorities.\n\nSince 2016, the SC said 69 contractors had been demobilized, 235 contractors placed on a watch list and a further seven blacklisted. “We understand there is always room for improvement,” the statement added.\n\n‘Expertise and heroism’\n\nQatar, a peninsula smaller than Connecticut and the smallest World Cup host in history, is set to host an estimated 1.5 million fans over the month-long tournament, which begins on November 20. There are already reports of accommodation concerns for such a vast number of visitors.\n\nThe spotlight is no doubt on this Gulf state, as has progressively been the case since it was controversially awarded the tournament over a decade ago – though Qatari officials have previously “strongly denied” to CNN the allegations of bribery which has surrounded its bid.\n\nSuch attention has brought about reforms, significantly dismantling the Kafala system which gives companies and private citizens control over migrant workers’ employment and immigration status.\n\nIn Qatar, migrant workers can now change jobs freely without permission from their employer. But Knight adds: “Another aspect of the Kafala system, the criminal charge of absconding still exists, and this, along with other tools that are still available to employers, means that, fundamentally, the power balance between workers and employers, the imbalance remains great.”\n\nKnight says unpaid wages is still an issue as the wage protection system “lacks enforcement mechanisms,” while she also says employers can cancel a worker’s ID at a “push of a button,” meaning they risk arrest and deportation. Additionally, labor committees intended to help workers are under-resourced and “lack the capacity to deal with the number of cases that are coming to them.”\n\nMigrant laborers work at a construction site at the Aspire Zone in Doha on March 26, 2016. Naseem Zeitoon/Reuters/FILE\n\nGhimire agrees that there have been a few positive changes to employment laws but adds that it is “more show and tell.”\n\n“Many workers who work in construction are untouched, so there’s still exploitation going on,” he tells CNN.\n\nQatar’s government official told CNN work remained to be done but that “systemic reform does not happen overnight, and shifting the behavior of every company takes time as is the case with any country around the world.\n\n“Over the last decade, Qatar has done more than any other country in the region to strengthen the rights of foreign workers, and we will continue to work in close consultation with international partners to strengthen reforms and enforcement.”\n\nHuman Rights Watch’s #PayUpFIFA campaign wants Qatar and FIFA to pay at least $440 million – an amount equal to the prize money being awarded at the World Cup – to the families of migrant workers who have been harmed or killed in preparation for the tournament.\n\nFamilies of workers who have died face uncertain futures, HRW says, especially children. Those who survived and returned home, cheated of wages or injured, remain trapped in debt, it says, “with dire consequences for their families.”\n\nGhimire says compensation is key, but so too is making the world aware of what has taken place to make this tournament happen.\n\n“People are concerned about clothing brands, and the meat they eat, but what about mega events? Isn’t it time we ask how this was possible?” he asks.\n\n“Everyone who will watch should know at what cost this was even possible and how workers were treated. Players should know, sponsors should know.\n\n“Would it be the same situation if it was European workers dying in Qatar? If it was Argentinean workers, would Argentina be concerned about playing?\n\n“Because it’s migrant workers from poor south Asian countries, they’re invisible people. Forced labor, death of workers, while making a World Cup is unacceptable. As a football fan, it makes me sad; as a lawyer, it makes me really disappointed.”\n\nEarlier this month, Qatar’s Labor Minister Ali bin Samikh Al Marri rejected the prospect of a remedy fund.\n\nA Qatar government official said the country’s Workers’ Support and Insurance Fund was “effective in providing compensation for workers and their families” with the fund reimbursing workers with more than $350 million so far this year.\n\nIn terms of the SC’s efforts to ensure repayment of recruitment fees, as of December 2021, workers have received $22.6 million, with an additional $5.7 million committed by contractors, according to FIFA.\n\nLast month, FIFA’s Deputy Secretary General Alasdair Bell said “compensation is certainly something that we’re interested in progressing.”\n\nA general view shows the exterior of the Al-Thumama Stadium in Doha -- one of eight stadiums that will host World Cup matches KARIM JAAFAR/AFP/AFP via Getty Images\n\nIt has been widely reported that FIFA has urged nations participating in the World Cup to focus on football when the tournament kicks off.\n\nFIFA confirmed to CNN that a letter signed by FIFA President Gianni Infantino and the governing body’s secretary general Fatma Samoura was sent out on November 3 to the 32 nations participating in the global showpiece but would not divulge the contents. However, a number of European federations have issued a joint statement saying they would campaign at the tournament on human rights and for a migrant workers center and a compensation fund for migrant workers.\n\nThe motto for Qatar’s bid team in 2010 was ‘Expect Amazing.’ In many ways, this year’s World Cup has replicated that maxim.\n\nAs NYU’s Iskander says: “One of the things that is not really covered in the coverage of the World Cup and the coverage of this enormous construction boom is the expertise and heroism of the workers who built it.\n\n“They built buildings that were unimaginable to everyone, including the engineers and designers, until they were built. They performed acts of bravery that are unsung. They operated at levels of technical complexity and sophistication that are unparalleled. And yet their contribution to building the World Cup is really rarely featured, downplayed.\n\n“They are represented, generally speaking, as exploited and oppressed. And it’s true that they have been exploited and oppressed, but they are also the master craftsmen that built this Cup, and they are enormously proud of what they have built.”\n\nHosting this tournament has undoubtedly put Qatar under the global spotlight. The question is whether the world can enjoy watching what the migrant workers built, knowing the true cost of this billion-dollar extravaganza.", "authors": ["Aimee Lewis Pramod Acharya Sugam Pokharel", "Aimee Lewis", "Pramod Acharya", "Sugam Pokharel"], "publish_date": "2022/11/17"}, {"url": "https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2022/03/21/chinese-airliner-crashes-133-people-board-state-media-says/7117959001/", "title": "No survivors found among 132 people in China plane crash ...", "text": "More than 18 hours after a Chinese airliner carrying 132 people crashed into a mountainous area in the southern province of Guangxi, no survivors have been found as the search continued Tuesday, Chinese state media reported.\n\nThe Boeing 737-800, operated by China Eastern Airlines, crashed Monday afternoonwith 123 passengers and nine crew members on board, according to the Civil Aviation Administration of China.\n\n“Wreckage of the plane was found at the scene, but up until now, none of those aboard the plane with whom contact was lost have been found,\" state broadcaster CCTV said Tuesday morning.\n\nThe plane crash is China's worst air disaster in a decade.\n\nThe crash sparked a large fire, big enough to be seen on NASA satellite images, that was later extinguished. State media reported late Monday that forecast rain and the mountainous terrain at the crash site might complicate search efforts. Only debris from the wreckage had been found, according to rescuers who spoke to state-run Xinhua News Agency.\n\nChinese President Xi Jinping called for an \"all-out effort\" in the rescue operations and for any potential safety hazards to be investigated.\n\nKNOW THE NEWS: Sign up for the Daily Briefing morning newsletter.\n\nThe crash occurred near the city of Wuzhou in Teng county. According to aviation officials, the plane was traveling from Kunming in the western province of Yunnan to Guangzhou in the coastal province of Guangdong. The flight took off at 1:11 p.m. local time and was scheduled to arrive at 3:05 p.m., but air traffic controllers lost track of the plane around 2:15 p.m., according to China Daily.\n\nData from the flight-tracking website Flightradar24.com shows the China Eastern Airlines flight traveling at about 30,000 feet before it suddenly dropped. The airplane was traveling at its cruising altitude speed of 523 mph, according to the data.\n\nHundreds of firefighters and rescue crews from nearby departments were dispatched to the scene, according to the state-run China Daily. Video shared by People's Daily, another state media source, showed smoke billowing from the side of a mountain.\n\nThe U.S. National Transportation Safety Board said it had appointed an American senior air safety investigator as a U.S. accredited representative to the investigation.\n\nLATEST UPDATES FROM UKRAINE:Russia tells US envoy that Russian-American relations are on the verge of rupture\n\n'Everyone went to the mountains'\n\nChina Daily reported that a village official with the surname Zhou told the Chutian Metropolis Daily newspaper that the plane had \"completely disintegrated\" and that he did not see any remains.\n\nThe New York Times reported, citing the state-owned China News Service, that a resident from the village of Molang with the last name Liu rode to the crash site to help with rescue efforts but did not see any remains.\n\n\"Everyone went to the mountains,\" Tang Min, who operates a restaurant near the site, told the Agence France-Presse news agency.\n\nPhotos at the airport in Guangzhou, where the plane was to arrive, showed a section set aside for relatives of the people aboard the flight. China Daily reported the airline set up special working groups in its response to the crash, including one dedicated to family assistance.\n\nBoeing 737-800 involved in the crash\n\nChina, along with North America and Europe, is one of the world's top three air travel markets. China Eastern, based in Shanghai, is one of the country's top airlines, serving 248 destinations domestically and internationally.\n\n\"The cause of the plane crash is still under investigation, and the company will actively cooperate with relevant investigations,\" the airline said in a statement Monday, according to The New York Times. \"The company expresses its deep condolences to the passengers and crew members who died in the plane crash.\"\n\nBoeing said in a statement it was aware of the reports of the crash and \"working to gather more information.\" The company's shares fell more than 4% in afternoon trading in New York.\n\nIn an email to employees sent Monday afternoon, Boeing CEO David Calhoun said the company has been in communication with customer and regulatory authorities since the accident, and offered the support of technical experts to the investigation led by Chinese authorities.\n\n\"We are deeply saddened by the news of the accident involving a China Eastern Airlines 737-800 airplane. The thoughts of all of us at Boeing are with the passengers and crew members on Flight MU 5735, as well as their families and loved ones,\" Calhoun said in a statement.\n\nThe Boeing 737-800 was delivered to China Eastern Airlines in June 2015 and has flown for more than six years. The aircraft debuted in the 1990s, and Boeing has made more than 5,200 of the commercial planes. The company delivered the last of the series to China Eastern in 2020.\n\nState media reported that all of China Eastern's fleet of 737-800s were ordered grounded. China has more 737-800s than any other country – nearly 1,200 of the planes, and if other Chinese airlines ground the plane, it “could have a significant impact on domestic travel,” said aviation consultant IBA.\n\nIn January 2020, Iran's paramilitary Revolutionary Guard accidentally shot down a type of 737-800 flown by Ukraine International Airlines. All 176 people on board were killed.\n\nIRAN PLANE CRASH:History shows shooting down of passenger airplanes were often mistakes\n\nThe aircraft is different from the 737 Max model, which was grounded worldwide after two fatal crashes in recent years. China cleared that model of plane to return to service, pending modifications to the aircraft, the South China Morning Post reported. The 737 Max has not flown in China in three years.\n\nChina's most recent previous fatal civilian airline accident occurred in 2010 when a Henan Airlines flight crashed while landing in fog in Yichun in Heilongjiang province. Forty-four of the 96 people aboard were killed, and the pilot was sentenced to three years in prison.\n\nIn 2004, a China Eastern flight from Baotou in Inner Mongolia crashed into a lake shortly after takeoff, killing 55 people.\n\nThe U.S. Federal Aviation Administration said in a statement Monday it was aware of the reports of the crash. \"The agency is ready to assist in investigation efforts if asked,\" the FAA said.\n\nContributing: Dawn Gilbertson, USA TODAY; The Associated Press", "authors": [], "publish_date": "2022/03/21"}, {"url": "https://www.cnn.com/2022/06/22/asia/afghanistan-khost-earthquake-intl-hnk/index.html", "title": "Afghanistan earthquake: More than 1,000 people killed after ...", "text": "CNN —\n\nAfghanistan was rocked by its deadliest earthquake in decades on Wednesday when a magnitude 5.9 earthquake struck the country’s east, killing more than 1,000 people and wounding many more, according to a regional official.\n\nThe humanitarian disaster comes at a difficult time for the Taliban-ruled country, currently in the throes of hunger and economic crises.\n\nThe shocks hit at 1:24 a.m. local time on Wednesday (4:54 p.m. ET on Tuesday) around 46 kilometers (28.5 miles) southwest of the city of Khost, which lies close to the country’s border with Pakistan, according to the United States Geological Survey (USGS).\n\nA man sits on the debris of a building after an earthquake in Paktika , Afghanistan on June 22. The magnitude 5.9 quake struck during the early hours of Wednesday near the city of Khost and the death toll has risen to over 1000 people. Sayed Khodaiberdi Sadat/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images Men stand around the bodies of people killed in an earthquake in Gayan village, in Paktika province, Afghanistan, on June 23. Ebrahim Noroozi/AP An Afghan man looks for his belongings amid the ruins of a house damaged by an earthquake in Bernal district, Paktika province, on June 23. Ahmad Sahel Arman/AFP/Getty Images A man carries supplies in an area affected by the earthquake in Gayan, Afghanistan, on June 23. Ali Khara/Reuters A child stands besides a house damaged by an earthquake in Bernal district, Paktika province, on June 23. Ahmad Sahel Arman/AFP/Getty Images Afghan people set up tents as a temporary shelters amid the ruins of houses damaged in the earthquake in Paktika province, Afghanistan, on June 23. Ahmad Sahel Arman/AFP/Getty Images Afghan men search for survivors amidst the debris of a house that was destroyed by an earthquake in Gayan, Afghanistan, on June 23. Ali Khara/Reuters A Taliban fighter stands guard next to a helicopter in Gayan, Afghanistan, on June 23. Ali Khara/Reuters An Afghan man stands besides a door of a house damaged by an earthquake in Bernal district, Paktika province, on June 23. Ahmad Sahel Arman/AFP/Getty Images Members of a Taliban rescue team return from affected villages following an earthquake in Bernal district, Paktika province, on June 23. Ahmad Sahel Arman/AFP/Getty Images A man stands near debris of a building after the quake shakes border provinces of Paktika, Afghanistan on June 23. Sayed Khodaiberdi Sadat/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images A Taliban military helicopter flies over an earthquake-damaged area in the Paktika province, on June 23. Ahmad Sahel Arman/AFP/Getty Images Children sit near their home that has been destroyed in an earthquake in the Spera District of southwest of the city of Khost, Afghanistan, on June 22. AP People help in search and rescue operations amid the debris of a building after the earthquake in Afghanistan on June 22. Sardar Shafaq/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images A villager collects his belongings from under the rubble of his home that was destroyed in the earthquake in Afghanistan on June 22. AP An injured victim of the earthquake receives treatment at a hospital in Paktia, Afghanistan, on June 22. Stringer/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock Afghans evacuate wounded people in the province of Paktika, eastern Afghanistan, on June 22. AP Search and rescue operations continue after the earthquake on June 22. Sayed Khodaberdi Sadat/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images Taliban guards outside the district hospital where victims of the earthquake were brought in Paktia, Afghanistan, on June 22. Stringer/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock An old man sits near his house that was destroyed in the earthquake on June 22. AP An ambulance assists earthquake victims on June 22. Stringer/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock People queue up in a line to donate blood for the earthquake victims being treated at a hospital in Paktika, Afghanistan, on June 22. Ahmad Sahel Arman/AFP/Getty Images A girl stands near a house that was damaged by the earthquake on June 22. AP People sit outside a tent after their house was damaged in the earthquake on June 22. AP In photos: Deadly earthquake hits Afghanistan Prev Next\n\nThe quake registered at a depth of 10 kilometers (6.2 miles), according to USGS, which designated it at yellow alert level – indicating a relatively localized impact.\n\nMost of the deaths were in Paktika province, in the districts of Giyan, Nika, Barmal and Zirok, according to the State Ministry for Disaster Management.\n\nThe death toll stands at more than 1,000 and at least 1,500 people have been injured “in Gayan and Barmal districts of Paktika province alone,” Mohammad Amin Hozaifa, head of Paktika province’s information and culture department, told CNN in a phone call Wednesday.\n\nThe official expects the number of casualties to rise as search and effort missions continue.\n\nIn this photo released by state-run news agency Bakhtar, Afghans evacuate the wounded following the quake in Paktika province, eastern Afghanistan. AP\n\nIn neighboring Khost province, 25 people were killed and several others were injured, and five people were killed in Nangarhar province, the disaster management authority said.\n\nPhotos from Paktika province, just south of Khost province, show houses turned to rubble with only a wall or two still standing amid the rubble, and broken roof beams.\n\nNajibullah Sadid, an Afghan water resources management expert, said the earthquake had coincided with heavy monsoon rain in the region – making traditional houses, many made of mud and other natural materials, particularly vulnerable to damage.\n\n“The timing of the earthquake (in the) dark of night … and the shallow depth of 10 kilometers of its epicenter led to higher casualties,” he added.\n\nA team of medics and seven helicopters have been sent to the area to transport injured people to nearby hospitals, Afghanistan’s Ministry of Defense said in a tweet on Wednesday.\n\nThis comes as almost half the country’s population – 20 million people – are experiencing acute hunger, according to a United Nations-backed report in May. It is a situation compounded by the Taliban seizing power in August 2021, which led the United States and its allies freezing about $7 billion of the country’s foreign reserves and cutting off international funding.\n\nThe situation has crippled an economy already heavily dependent on aid. Following the chaotic US withdrawal from Afghanistan last year, its economy has gone into freefall with the World Bank forecasting in April that a “combination of declining incomes and increasing prices has driven a severe deterioration in household living standards.”\n\nMany of the areas' traditional houses are made of mud and other natural materials, making them vulnerable to damage. Abdul Wahid Rayan\n\nThe earthquake hit at 1.24 a.m. about 46 kilometers southwest of the city of Khost. Pajhwok Afghan News\n\nThe Taliban held an emergency meeting on Wednesday to organize providing transportation to the injured and material aid to the victims and their families, Taliban spokesperson Zabiullah Mujahid said.\n\nPrime Minister Mohammad Hassan Akhund called the meeting at the country’s Presidential Palace to instruct all relevant agencies to send emergency relief teams to the affected area, Mujahid said in a tweet.\n\n“Measures were also taken to provide cash assistance and treatment,” Mujahid said and added that agencies were “instructed to use air and land transport for the delivery of food, clothing, medicine and other necessities and for the transportation of the wounded.”\n\nAfghanistan’s Deputy Minister of State for Disaster Management, Mawlawi Sharafuddin Muslim, said Wednesday that “the Islamic Emirate will pay 100,000 AFN ($1,116.19) for the families of those who were killed in the earthquake and 50,000 ($558.10) will be paid to families of those injured.”\n\nThe government also highlighted the need for foreign aid.\n\n“Islamic Republic of Afghanistan calls for the generous support of all countries international organizations individuals and foundations to provide and deliver urgent humanitarian aid,” a press statement from the country’s diplomatic missions read.\n\nIn a tweet on Wednesday, the World Health Organization (WHO) said its teams were on the ground for emergency response, including providing medicine, trauma services and conducting needs assessments.\n\nBut a WHO official told CNN’s Eleni Giokos that logistics were stretched. “All of the resources have been mobilized, not just from the nearby provinces but also from Kabul including medical supplies, medics, nurses, health workers, ambulances and emergency officers who are trained in dealing with such situations,” said Alaa AbouZeid, emergencies team lead and incident manager at WHO’s Afghanistan office.\n\n“The situation is still evolving, and we are pushing more resources as the situation needs,” he said. “The resources are overstretched here, not just for this region, but we are expecting the situation to evolve in the coming hours.”\n\nAccording to to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (UNOCHA), heavy rain and wind is “hampering efforts with helicopters reportedly unable to land this afternoon.”\n\n“Immediate needs identified include emergency trauma care, emergency shelter and non-food items, food assistance and WASH [water, sanitation and hygiene] support,” said the UNOCHA in a statement published Wednesday.\n\nAfghan Red Crescent Society volunteers help people affected by the eartquake in Giyan district. Abdul Wahid Rayan/Twitter\n\nPakistan’s Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif extended his condolences and an offer of support in a tweet on Wednesday. “Deeply grieved to learn about the earthquake in Afghanistan, resulting in the loss of innocent lives,” he wrote. “People in Pakistan share the grief and sorrow of their Afghan brethren. Relevant authorities are working to support Afghanistan in this time of need.”\n\nIndia expressed “sympathy and condolences to the victims and their families,” according to a tweet by the spokesperson of the Indian Ministry of External Affairs on Wednesday.\n\nPope Francis said he was praying “for those who have lost their lives and for their families,” during his weekly audience on Wednesday. “I hope aid can be sent there to help all the suffering of the dear people of Afghanistan.”\n\nAfghanistan has a long history of earthquakes, many of which happen in the mountainous Hindu Kush region that borders with Pakistan.\n\nIn 2015, a quake that shook parts of South Asia killed more than 300 people in Afghanistan, Pakistan and India.\n\nMore than 1,000 people died in 2002 after two earthquakes in the Nahrin region of northwestern Afghanistan. A powerful earthquake struck the same region in the 1998, killing about 4,700 people, according to records from National Centers for Environmental Information.", "authors": ["Masoud Popalzai Jessie Yeung Ehsan Popalzai Tara John", "Masoud Popalzai", "Jessie Yeung", "Ehsan Popalzai", "Tara John"], "publish_date": "2022/06/22"}, {"url": "https://www.cnn.com/2022/09/02/asia/pakistan-floods-climate-explainer-intl-hnk/index.html", "title": "Pakistan floods: What you need to know | CNN", "text": "CNN —\n\nMore than one third of Pakistan is underwater, according to satellite images from the European Space Agency (ESA), as deadly floodwaters threaten to create secondary disasters.\n\nVideo Ad Feedback See volunteers use bedframe to rescue people from deadly floods 01:19 - Source: CNN\n\nFood is in short supply after water covered millions of acres of crops and wiped out hundreds of thousands of livestock. Meanwhile, aid agencies have warned of an uptick in infectious diseases, leaving millions vulnerable to illness caused by what the United Nations has called a “monsoon on steroids.”\n\nMore than 1,100 people have died from the floods since mid-June, nearly 400 of them children, while millions have been displaced, according to Pakistan’s National Disaster Management Authority (NDMA).\n\nPakistan, which was already grappling with political and economic turmoil, has been thrown into the front line of the human-induced climate crisis.\n\nHere’s what you need to know.\n\nWhy are the floods so bad?\n\nPakistan’s monsoon season usually brings heavy downpours, but this year’s has been the wettest since records began in 1961, according to the Pakistan Meteorological Department\n\nTorrential monsoon rainfall – 10 times heavier than usual – has caused the Indus River to overflow, effectively creating a long lake, tens of kilometers wide, according to images from the ESA on August 30.\n\nIn the southern Sindh and Balochistan provinces, rainfall has been 500% above average as of August 30, according to the NDMA, engulfing entire villages and farmland, razing buildings and wiping out crops.\n\nPakistan is responsible for less than 1% of the world’s planet-warming gases, European Union data shows, yet it is the eighth most vulnerable nation to the climate crisis, according to the Global Climate Risk Index.\n\nAnd it’s paying a hefty price – the South Asian country faced dramatic climate conditions this year, from record heat waves to destructive floods – as the climate crisis exacerbates extreme weather events.\n\nHomes are surrounded by floodwaters in Jaffarabad, a district of Pakistan's southwestern Balochistan Province, on September 1, 2022. Zahid Hussain/AP\n\nUN Secretary General António Guterres has warned the world is “sleepwalking” into environmental destruction.\n\n“South Asia is one of the world’s global climate crisis hotspots. People living in these hotspots are 15 times more likely to die from climate impacts,” Guterres said on August 30.\n\n“As we continue to see more and more extreme weather events around the world, it is outrageous that climate action is being put on the back burner as global emissions of greenhouse gases are still rising, putting all of us – everywhere – in growing danger,” he added.\n\nPakistan is also home to more glaciers than anywhere outside the polar regions. But as the climate warms, it’s becoming more vulnerable to sudden outbursts of melting glacier water.\n\nWhat has been the damage so far?\n\nPakistan’s Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif said on August 30 the floods were “the worst in the country’s history” and estimated the calamity had caused more than $10 billion in damages to infrastructure, homes and farms.\n\nMore than 33 million people have been affected, or about 15% of the population, according to Pakistan’s climate change minister Sherry Rehman on August 25. More than 1 million homes have been damaged or destroyed, while at least 5,000 kilometers of roads have been damaged, according to the NDMA.\n\nVideo Ad Feedback Deadly flash floods wipe out critical bridge in Pakistan 02:31 - Source: CNN\n\nFloods have impacted 2 million acres of crops and killed more than 794,000 heads of livestock across Pakistan, according to a situation report from the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs on August 26.\n\nMore than 800 health facilities have been damaged in the country, of which 180 are completely damaged, leaving millions of people lacking access to health care and medical treatment, as reported in many affected districts, according to the World Health Organization (WHO).\n\nHow is it impacting people in Pakistan?\n\nPakistan is facing twin food and health crises brought by the unprecedented floods.\n\nAccording to charity Action Against Hunger, 27 million people in the country did not have access to enough food prior the floods, and now the risk of widespread hunger is even more imminent.\n\nThe Alkhidmat Foundation distributes food bags at a makeshift camp in Sindh Province, Pakistan on September 1, 2022. Asif Hassan/AFP/Getty Images\n\n“Our priority right now is to help save and protect lives as waters continue to rise. The scale of these floods has caused a shocking level of destruction – crops have been swept away and livestock killed across huge swathes of the country, which means hunger will follow,” said Saleh Saeed, chief executive of the Disasters Emergency Committee, a United Kingdom-based aid coalition.\n\nVideo Ad Feedback Climate crisis doesn't care about caste or creed, says Pakistani diplomat 12:41 - Source: CNN\n\nPrime Minister Sharif said on August 30 that people were facing food shortages and the price of basic items such as tomatoes and onions had “skyrocketed.”\n\n“I have to feed my people. Their stomachs cannot go empty,” Sharif said.\n\nThe WHO has also classified Pakistan’s worst floods on record as an emergency of “the highest level,” warning of a rapid spread of disease due to the lack of access to medical assistance.\n\nWHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus on August 31 warned of new outbreaks of diarrheal diseases, skin infections, respiratory tract infections, malaria and dengue in the aftermath of the floods, while a litany of waterborne diseases also posed health risks.\n\nNewborn babies lie in their beds after their homes were hit by floods in Sindh Province of Pakistan, on September 1, 2022. Fareed Khan/AP\n\nWhat is being done?\n\nA National Flood Response and Coordination Center has been set up as the country reels from the flooding, according to Pakistan’s Prime Minister.\n\nThe United Nations has launched a $160 million appeal aiming to reach 5.2 million of the most vulnerable people in the country, while the WHO also released $10 million to treat the injured, deliver supplies to health facilities, and prevent the spread of infectious diseases.\n\nThe Pakistan Army rescues people affected by the floods in the hard-hit Sindh Province on September 1, 2022. Adeel Abbasi/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images\n\nTwo Chinese military planes carrying tents and other flood aid landed in Karachi on August 30, according to the Consul General of China to Karachi. China has pledged $14.5 million in aid to Pakistan, while the UK government also announced a contribution of 1.5 million pounds ($1.73 million) for relief efforts.\n\nPrime Minister Sharif told CNN on August 30 the country was in talks with Moscow over importing wheat without breaching Western sanctions imposed over Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.\n\nSharif said that while Pakistan had secured 1 million metric tons of wheat amid the global shortage, the country will now need more due to the impact of the floods on the agriculture sector – which accounts for almost 40% of employment, according to World Bank data.", "authors": ["Kathleen Magramo"], "publish_date": "2022/09/02"}, {"url": "https://www.cnn.com/2022/03/22/china/china-eastern-airlines-plane-crash-tuesday-intl-hnk/index.html", "title": "China Eastern Airlines plane crash: No survivors found after air ...", "text": "CNN —\n\nNo survivors of a China Eastern Airlines plane crash have been found after a second day of search efforts, Chinese investigators said late Tuesday.\n\nIn China’s worst air disaster in more than a decade, the Boeing 737-800 – carrying 132 people – crashed Monday afternoon in a remote, mountainous region in the south of the country as it flew from Kunming to Guangzhou.\n\nCommunications with the crew could not be established in the final moments before the airliner crashed, Chinese air crash investigators said at a Tuesday news conference.\n\n“The flight took off from Kunming at 1:16 p.m. and was flying normally. At around 2:21 p.m., it arrived over Wuzhou city of Guangxi province. The ground station noticed that the plane had a sudden altitude change, and then it lost communication with the plane, before the plane eventually crashed,” said Sun Shiying, a representative for China Eastern Airlines.\n\nThe aircraft had passed pre-flight checks and the nine crew members were qualified and healthy, added Sun.\n\nThe cause of the crash is not yet clear, an official from the Civil Aviation Administration of China (CAAC) said. “The investigation team will spare no effort to collect evidence from all parties and focus on search,” said the CAAC official.\n\nInvestigators still haven’t located the plane’s black boxes, state broadcaster CCTV reported Tuesday, and are facing difficult terrain and poor weather.\n\nRescuers head to the site of a plane crash on March 21 in China's Tengxian County. Jiang Hui/VCG/Getty Images\n\nThe black boxes are flight data and cockpit voice recorders which could hold crucial clues to how the disaster unfolded.\n\nThe probe into the cause of the crash will be “very difficult,” warned investigators, due to how severely damaged the plane is.\n\nPhotos and videos posted by state media show giant plumes of smoke rising above the mountains following the crash. Search and rescue crews wade through the thicket, scattered with debris and plane parts. Wallets, ID cards and fragments of a phone were among personal belongings strewn on the ground, China Youth Daily reported.\n\nIn the minutes before the disaster, the plane had been at a cruising altitude of 29,000 feet (about 8,900 meters), according to flight tracking data from FlightRadar24. Then, the jet nosedived so quickly that it plunged more than 25,000 feet (7,600 meters) in under two minutes.\n\nSecurity footage from a mining company near the crash site shows what appears to be a plane hurtling toward the forest, nearly vertical in its rapid fall. CNN cannot independently confirm the authenticity of the video, or that the aircraft is China Eastern Flight 5735 – but the steep decline matches the flight tracking data.\n\nWitnesses reported seeing a fiery explosion, airplane parts and clothing tangled in the trees, and swathes of the woods aflame.\n\nOne item retrieved from the crash site, a handwritten note describing the significance of traditional jade jewelry, was photographed and spread widely online. The jewelry signifies “a complete life, a smooth career, family happiness, inner peace … which outlines people’s expectations of life,” the note read – prompting messages of mourning on Chinese social media.\n\nRelatives of passengers on China Eastern flight MU5375 at the holding area of Guangzhou Baiyun International Airport on March 22. NOEL CELIS/AFP/Getty Images\n\nOn Monday evening, relatives of the passengers gathered in the Guangzhou airport, waiting for any news of their loved ones as authorities launched an investigation into the crash.\n\nDue to the apparent speed of the crash, there is little chance anyone on board survived or that there will be clear remains left to identify, said David Soucie, a former safety inspector at the US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA).\n\nInvestigation and search operation\n\nChinese President Xi Jinping issued a rare statement within hours of the crash, ordering the country’s emergency services to organize a search and rescue operation, and to identify the cause of the crash.\n\n“The fact that the President made such a pronounced and quick response to this tells me that they’re taking it very, very seriously,” Soucie said.\n\nAfter several plane crashes in the 1990s and 2000s, China made a series of sweeping safety improvements. Monday’s disaster is the country’s first deadly commercial air crash since the 2010 Henan Airlines disaster, which killed 44 of the 96 people on board.\n\nHundreds of rescuers were deployed to the China Eastern crash site on Monday, and continued their work through the night. Footage showed police and emergency workers making their way through mountain paths in the dark, wielding flashlights. Other teams, including medical staff and firefighters, are seen working under tents, preparing supplies and surveillance drones.\n\nRescuers set up lighting equipment at the site of a plane crash on March 21 in China's Tengxian County. He Huawen/VCG/Getty Images\n\nBut they face numerous challenges. The crash site is flanked by mountains on three sides, with only one narrow path in and no electricity in the area, according to state media. Heavy rescue equipment was unable to reach the scene on Monday, with videos showing search teams scrambling uphill through the trees.\n\nA cold front is also expected to arrive soon, which could see heavy rainfall in the coming days, according to the Guangxi Meteorological Bureau.\n\nIt’s not yet clear what caused the plane to begin dropping – and we won’t know more until authorities can retrieve and analyze the plane’s cockpit voice recorder, black box and other essential pieces of data, said Soucie, the former FAA inspector.\n\nAviation expert Peter Goelz, a former managing director of the US National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), told CNN that it might not be possible to do so.\n\n“The biggest thing they can do right now is try and recover the flight data recorder and the voice recorder but with that kind of impact, those recorders could be damaged,” said Goelz.\n\nThe investigation will be led by the CAAC. Boeing, the engine manufacturer, CFM, and the FAA will also be involved in the probe.\n\nInvestigators taking part in Tuesday’s press conference did not comment on whether representatives from the NTSB would take part in the investigation.\n\nThis arrangement is standard for aviation incidents involving a US-designed aircraft that occur overseas.\n\nRescuers at the crash site on March 21. Jiang Hui/VCG/Getty Images\n\nPiecing together all the information and evidence in an investigation into the crash of a modern jetliner could take months or longer. The final report for the 2010 Henan Airlines crash wasn’t released until almost two years later.\n\nMeanwhile, China Eastern Airlines is contacting all families of the victims, according to CCTV. Wuzhou authorities have sent dozens of buses and taxis to pick up family members.\n\n“That’s the most difficult part about being an accident investigator, is dealing with the families,” Soucie said. “What the families want at this point is to obtain whatever remains they can from the victims of the accident. In this case, there won’t be much for them to get.”\n\nBoeing troubles\n\nThough Boeing’s 737 has faced extraordinarily high-profile safety concerns over the past three years, the plane that crashed Monday was a different version of the aircraft than the embattled 737 Max, crashes of which shook Boeing to its core.\n\nThe China Eastern Airlines plane was a Boeing 737-800, the most popular version of Boeing’s jets now in service and the workhorse of many airlines’ fleets. The plane that crashed Monday had been in service since 2015.\n\nThe airline will ground all its Boeing 737-800 flights, CCTV reported. But other Chinese carriers will continue to operate the same aircraft type, according to state media.\n\nThe 737-800 is part of a class of Boeing jets known as 737-NG, standing for “Next Generation.” These planes have had safety issues cited by US regulators, although none of those rose to the level of requiring the planes to be grounded.\n\nBoeing has sold more than 7,000 737-NG airliners worldwide and, until Monday, the type had seen only a dozen fatal accidents in its 25-year history.\n\nBoeing came under international scrutiny after its 737 Max, which succeeded the 737-800, suffered two fatal crashes in 2018 and 2019. Those crashes were shown to be caused by a flaw in the design of a new stabilization system, which the 737-800 does not have.", "authors": ["Jessie Yeung Yong Xiong Hannah Ritchie", "Jessie Yeung", "Yong Xiong", "Hannah Ritchie"], "publish_date": "2022/03/22"}, {"url": "https://www.cnn.com/2022/10/31/asia/seoul-itaewon-halloween-mourning-memorial-intl-hnk/index.html", "title": "Seoul Halloween crush: South Korean authorities say they had no ...", "text": "Seoul, South Korea CNN —\n\nSouth Korean authorities said Monday they had no guidelines to handle the huge crowds that gathered for Halloween festivities in Seoul, as families in the country and around the world mourn the 156 victims of Saturday night’s crowd crush.\n\nThe crush took place in the narrow neon-lit alleyways of the popular nightlife district Itaewon, where witnesses described being unable to move or breathe as thousands of revelers stood shoulder-to-shoulder in a street no more than 4 meters (13 feet) wide.\n\nFrantic families spent much of Sunday gathering at information centers where authorities compiled details of the dead and wounded, and contacting morgues and hospitals in a desperate attempt to locate missing relatives.\n\nWith all of the victims now identified, the panic has transformed to national grief as the country grapples with one of its worst-ever disasters – while parents overseas make arrangements for their deceased children in a foreign land.\n\nA woman pays tribute at a memorial altar on October 31 in Seoul, South Korea. Chung Sung-Jun/Getty Images\n\nOfficial memorial altars were set up in central Seoul Monday, with photos showing crowds visiting to pay their respects. Many were in tears and holding white flowers; others knelt and bowed deeply to the altar.\n\nSouth Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol, his wife, Kim Keon-hee, and top officials including the prime minister and Seoul mayor joined the mourners.\n\nMany shops and businesses were closed to observe a week-long national period of mourning. Parts of central Seoul were nearly deserted – a highly unusual sight in the usually bustling capital that’s home to about 10 million people.\n\nPeople also paid respects at a makeshift memorial in Itaewon, outside a subway station near the alley where the crush occurred. The station entrance is adorned with rows of flowers, and offerings such as handwritten notes, bottles of the Korean liquor soju and paper cups filled with drinks.\n\nAmong the mourners was a civic group of the bereaved families of the Sewol Ferry disaster, which killed 304 people – mostly teens on a school trip – when the vessel sank in 2014.\n\n“As one who had suffered the same pain, my heart is torn and I’m rendered speechless,” one of the group’s members told reporters at the memorial, saying the families were saddened to see “a major disaster like this repeated.”\n\nQuestions about police numbers\n\nJust down the street, the entrance to the alley had been cordoned off, with security personnel standing guard as forensic teams clad in white protective suits scoured the area, still littered with trash and debris.\n\nAmid the grief, questions have emerged about the government’s handling of the incident and an apparent lack of crowd control before the tragedy.\n\nOne survivor, 22-year-old French exchange student Anne-Lou Chevalier, told CNN she passed out in the crowd after being “crushed” by fellow revelers. “At some point I had no air, and we were so crushed to other people that I couldn’t breathe at all. So, I just passed out,” Chevalier said.\n\nSeveral eyewitnesses and survivors said they had seen few or no police officers in the area before the situation deteriorated.\n\nEarlier on Sunday, the minister of the interior and safety said only a “normal” level of security personnel had been deployed to Itaewon because the crowd there did not seem unusually large – whereas a “considerable number” of police had been sent to another part of Seoul in response to expected protests.\n\nMourners pay tribute for victims of the deadly Halloween crowd surge in Seoul on October 31, 2022. Rebecca Wright/CNN\n\nBut – facing a backlash from Korean politicians and on social media – authorities seemed to change tack on Monday, saying they had deployed about 137 personnel to Itaewon that night, compared to about 30 to 70 personnel in previous years before the pandemic.\n\n“For this time’s Halloween festival, because it was expected that many people would gather in Itaewon, I understand that it was prepared by putting in more police force than other years,” said Oh Seung-jin, director of the violent crime investigation division at the National Police Agency.\n\nHowever, he admitted, “currently there is no separate preparation manual for such a situation where there is no organizer and a gathering of a crowd is expected.” Moreover, the police had been deployed not for crowd control – but for crime prevention and to prevent “various illegal activities.”\n\nKim Seong-ho, director of the disaster and safety management division at the Ministry of the Interior and Safety, echoed these comments, saying they did not have “guidelines or a manual” for such an “unprecedented situation.”\n\nVictims emerge\n\nThe victims were mostly young people who had gone to Itaewon Saturday night, eager for South Korea’s first Halloween celebrations in years without Covid restrictions.\n\nThe death toll rose to 156 on Tuesday following the death of a critically injured woman in her 20s, Seoul police said. In total, 101 women and 55 men were killed.\n\nTwelve of the victims were teenagers and more than 100 were in their 20s, according to authorities.\n\nAmong their number were 26 foreign nationals from countries including the United States, China, Iran, Thailand, Sri Lanka, Japan, Australia, Norway, France, Russia, Austria, Vietnam, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan.\n\nA further 149 people were injured, 33 seriously, including 15 foreign nationals.\n\nSix students who attended schools in Seoul – one middle schooler and five high schoolers – were among the dead, as well as three teachers, said the Korean Ministry of Education.\n\nThree South Korean military personnel were also among those killed, said a Korean Defense Ministry official.\n\nShin Ae-jin was a 24-year-old graduate killed in the crowd surge on Saturday, her father told CNN.\n\nShe had started working at McKinsey & Company in September. Ahead of this new phase of her life the family took a trip to Europe in July, he said.\n\n“I traveled much with her from when she was young. We took many family trips together. We are a very happy family,” her father, Shin Jung-seob, a retired venture capitalist, told CNN.\n\n“It’s sad that I won’t see her again but I feel I had a fulfilled life with her … She lived in happiness,” he said while receiving mourners at the Samsung Seoul Hospital’s funeral home in the capital.\n\n“My daughter was always bright, had many dreams, and didn’t shy away from challenges. She lived as a high achiever.”\n\nThe father said that he plans to bury his daughter next to a tree, a practice called Sumokjang where the ashes of the deceased are put in a degradable container and buried, often in a cemetery plot. The family can then visit the tree and commemorate their loved one.\n\nWhen asked why he’s choosing this type of burial, Shin said: “We wanted to remember her. A tree has life, so it grows on.”\n\nSteven Blesi, 20, a college student from Marietta, Georgia. Courtesy family of Steven Blesi\n\nTwo American college students were identified – Steven Blesi from Georgia, and Anne Gieske from Kentucky – both in their junior year.\n\nBlesi’s father, Steve Blesi, said his son had “always been an adventurer.” He was an Eagle Scout, liked basketball and wanted to learn multiple languages, he said.\n\n“Maybe in a half hour before this tragedy event took place, I texted him in WhatsApp … ‘I know you’re out and about. Stay safe. I love you.’ And I never got a response back,” Steve said. “He had an incredibly bright future that is now gone.”\n\nDan Gieske, Anne’s father, said in a statement Sunday evening that the family was “completely devastated and heartbroken,” calling Anne “a bright light loved by all.”\n\nAnne had been a nursing student studying abroad in Seoul this semester, said the president of the University of Kentucky.\n\nAnne Gieske, a student at the University of Kentucky who died in the crowd crush in Seoul. Courtesy Beechwood Schools\n\nThe father of Mei Tomikawa, a 26-year-old Japanese exchange student who was killed in the crush, told Japanese public broadcaster NHK he was “prepared for the worst” when he couldn’t reach her.\n\nShe was studying Korean before starting school in Seoul, he said, speaking before traveling from Japan to South Korea on Monday.\n\n“I tried calling her to warn her to be careful, but she never answered her phone,” he said, according to NHK. “She was a great daughter … I want to see my daughter as soon as possible.”\n\nGrace Rached, an Australian woman killed in the crowd crush in Seoul, South Korea. Australia DFAT\n\nThe family of an Australian victim, Grace Rached, also released a statement on Monday describing her as “a talented film producer who was passionate about making a difference.”\n\n“We are missing our gorgeous angel Grace who lit up a room with her infectious smile. Grace always made others feel important and her kindness left an impression on everyone she ever met. Grace always cared about others and she was loved by all,” the family wrote.\n\nAuthorities are now working with foreign embassies and families overseas, offering support with funeral arrangements. As the week goes on, more names and faces of those who died are likely to emerge, as the nation searches for answers as to how such a disaster – in an area known to be crowded on Halloween, with festivities weeks in the planning – could have unfolded.", "authors": ["Jessie Yeung Sophie Jeong Gawon Bae Jake Kwon Mayumi Maruyama", "Jessie Yeung", "Sophie Jeong", "Gawon Bae", "Jake Kwon", "Mayumi Maruyama"], "publish_date": "2022/10/31"}, {"url": "https://www.cnn.com/2022/11/06/africa/tanzania-plane-crash-intl/index.html", "title": "Tanzania plane crash: Precision Air flight crashes into Lake Victoria ...", "text": "CNN —\n\nA Tanzanian commercial flight operated by Precision Air crash-landed in bad weather in Lake Victoria on Sunday, killing 19 people.\n\nPrime Minister Kassim Majaliwa said officials believe all bodies have been recovered from the airplane.\n\n“We’re starting to pull out the luggage and personal items from the aircraft. A team of doctors and security agencies have started the process of identifying the dead and notifying the families,” Majaliwa said.\n\nThe airline confirmed the death toll and amended the number of survivors down to 24 in an updated statement on Sunday evening. Earlier, the carrier as well as local officials had said that 26 of the 43 people on board had been rescued.\n\nThe Precision Air plane is seen partially submerged in Lake Victoria. Sitide Protase/AFP/Getty Images\n\n“Precision Air extends its deepest sympathies to the families and friends of the passenger and crew involved in this tragic incident. The company will strive to provide them with information and whatever assistance they will require in their difficult time,” the airline said.\n\n“The names of passengers and crew on board the aircraft will not be released until all next-of-kin have been notified,” it added.\n\nThe flight, including 39 passengers and four crew members, had taken off from Tanzania’s commercial capital of Dar es Salaam and was headed to the town of Bukoba before it plunged into Lake Victoria as it was preparing to land.\n\nVideo circulating on social media taken by onlookers on the shores of Lake Victoria showed the aircraft submerged in the water with emergency responders coordinating rescue efforts from nearby boats.\n\nPrecision Air CEO Patrick Mwanri appeared visibly distressed while speaking to reporters in Dar es Salaam Sunday.\n\nMwanri’s voice broke and he had to pause to wipe away tears as he said the plane had departed around 6 a.m. local and had been expected in the northwestern lakeside town of Bukoba at 8.30 a.m.\n\n“But at 8.53 a.m. our Operations Control Center got a report that that aircraft had not arrived,” he said in a televised statement.\n\nThe crash killed 19 people, while 24 survived. Sitide Protase/AFP/Getty Images\n\nThe accident is believed to have happened on the final approach to the airport whose runway begins right next to Lake Victoria, Africa’s largest freshwater lake.\n\nLocal officials suggested bad weather may have played a part in the accident, saying the area had been under heavy rainfall and strong winds at the time.\n\n“Preliminary reports showed the weather conditions at 8 a.m. yesterday morning was good,” Transport Minister Makame Mbarawa said during a funeral service for victims of the crash in Bukoba on Monday.\n\n“However, at 8:25 a.m. there was a sudden change of weather conditions – at the time the precision airline pilot was on the final descent towards Bukoba airport, there were heavy rains and strong winds i.e. down drafts,” he added.\n\nThe airline has opened a Crisis Management Center and established information areas in Bukoba and Dar es Salaam to communicate with families of the passengers.\n\nTanzanian President Samia Suluhu Hassan called for calm while rescuers worked at the site of the crash. “I have received with sadness the information of the crash of the Precision Air flight at Lake Victoria, in the Kagera region,” she tweeted Sunday. “I send my condolences to all those affected by this incident. Let’s continue to be calm as the rescue operation continues and we pray to God to help us.”\n\nOn Monday, Prime Minister Majaliwa sought to reassure the public about his country’s air safety record during the funeral service in Bukoba.\n\n“I want to ensure to everyone that [our] air transport is the safest,” he said on Monday in Bukoba, Tanzania. “Yesterday is a tragic accident that we believe will never happen again.”", "authors": ["Idris Mukhtar Lauren Said-Moorhouse Larry Madowo", "Idris Mukhtar", "Lauren Said-Moorhouse", "Larry Madowo"], "publish_date": "2022/11/06"}, {"url": "https://www.cnn.com/2022/08/29/asia/pakistan-flood-damage-imf-bailout-intl-hnk/index.html", "title": "Pakistan floods caused by 'monsoon on steroids,' says UN chief | CNN", "text": "Karachi, Pakistan CNN —\n\nUN Secretary General António Guterres on Tuesday warned that the world is “sleepwalking” into environmental destruction, as he launched a flash $160 million appeal for flood-ravaged Pakistan.\n\nMore than 1,100 people have been killed and 33 million others impacted in one of the country’s worst monsoon seasons in over a decade.\n\n“The Pakistani people are facing a monsoon on steroids – the relentless impact of epochal levels of rain and flooding,” Guterres said during the appeal’s launch.\n\n“As we continue to see more and more extreme weather events around the world, it is outrageous that climate action is being put on the back burner as global emissions of greenhouse gases are still rising, putting all of us – everywhere – in growing danger,” he said.\n\n“Let’s stop sleepwalking towards the destruction of our planet by climate change,” Guterres, who is scheduled to travel to Pakistan on September 9 for a “solidarity visit,” said. “Today, it’s Pakistan. Tomorrow, it could be your country.”\n\nImages of water gushing down streets, swallowing villages and destroying bridges serve as a stark reminder of the inequities of the climate crisis, which impacts the developing world disproportionately. Richer countries also bear a much larger historical responsibility for the crisis in the first place.\n\nPakistan’s Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif said on Tuesday the current flooding in Pakistan has been “the worst in the country’s history.”\n\nIn his first time speaking with international media since becoming prime minister in April, he warned that Pakistan was facing a food shortage due to the crop damage caused by the floods, and that the price of tomatoes and onions had “skyrocketed.”\n\n“Every penny of aid” sent to Pakistan “will reach the needy,” Sharif added.\n\nAt the same briefing, planning minister Ahsan Iqbal said that the global north should step up its responsibility to countries affected by climate change.\n\n“All the quality of life that people are enjoying in the west, someone is paying the price in the developing world,” he said.\n\nVideo Ad Feedback Deadly flash floods wipe out critical bridge in Pakistan 02:31 - Source: CNN\n\nPakistan last year ranked as the eighth most affected nation by climate change from 2000 to 2019, in the Global Climate Risk Index by non-profit group Germanwatch. People living in hotspots like South Asia are 15 times more likely to die from climate crisis impacts.\n\n“This is a climate crisis,” Abdullah Fadil, UNICEF’s representative in Pakistan told CNN. “A climate that has been mostly done by richer countries, contributing to the crisis, and I think it is time that the world responded to support Pakistan in this time of need.”\n\nHomes are surrounded by floodwaters in Jaffarabad, Pakistan, on Thursday, September 1. Zahid Hussain/AP An 18-year-old woman displaced by the flooding looks after her 1-day-old baby boy at a hospital in Sehwan, Pakistan, on Wednesday, September 7. Akhtar Soomro/Reuters A herd of sheep passes through floodwaters in Nowshera, Pakistan, on Tuesday, September 6. Fayaz Aziz/Reuters Children sit on a charpai in the Jaffarabad district on August 31. Fida Hussain/AFP/Getty Images People wade through floodwaters in Charsadda, Pakistan, on August 31. Muhammad Sajjad/AP Displaced people take refuge in a school in Jacobabad, Pakistan, on August 30. Akhtar Soomro/Reuters Residents of Kyhber Pakhtunkhwa gather beside a road damaged by flooding on August 29. Abdul Majeed/AFP/Getty Images A displaced child sleeps under a mosquito net at a makeshift camp in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa on August 29. Abdul Majeed/AFP/Getty Images This satellite image shows the scale of the flooding along the banks of the Indus River in Rajanpur, Pakistan, on August 28. Maxar Technologies/Reuters People wade through floodwaters in Pakistan's Mirpur Khas district on August 28. Ahmed Ali/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images Pakistani Army soldiers distribute food following a flash flood in Hyderabad, Pakistan, on August 28. Ahmed Ali/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images Flooded land is seen in Mingora, a town in Pakistan's northern Swat Valley, on August 28. Abdul Majeed/AFP/Getty Images Volunteers load relief food bags on a truck in Karachi, Pakistan, on August 28. Rizwan Tabassum/AFP/Getty Images Displaced people take refuge along a highway after fleeing from their flood-hit homes in Pakistan's Charsadda district on August 28. Abdul Majeed/AFP/Getty Images Displaced people wade through a flooded area in Peshawar, Pakistan, on August 27. Hussain Ali/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images A man carries his sick daughter along a road damaged by floodwaters in Pakistan's northern Swat Valley on August 27. Abdul Majeed/AFP/Getty Images A man swims in floodwaters while heading for higher ground in Charsadda on August 27. Fayaz Aziz/Reuters Flood-affected people stand in a long line for food distributed by Pakistani Army troops in Rajanpur on August 27. Asim Tanveer/AP A flooded area is seen from atop a bridge in the Charsadda district on August 27. Abdul Majeed/AFP/Getty Images A man helps children navigate floodwaters using a satellite dish in Balochistan, Pakistan, on August 26. Fida Hussain/AFP/Getty Images Volunteers prepare food boxes to distribute to flood victims in Peshawar on August 26. Fayaz Aziz/Reuters A family carries their belongings through floodwaters in Jamshoro, Pakistan, on August 26. Yasir Rajput/Reuters People walk through floodwaters in Dagai Mukram Khan, Pakistan, on August 26. Hussain Ali/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images A woman cooks food for her flood-affected family at a makeshift camp in Nawabshah, Pakistan, on August 25. Asif Hassan/AFP/Getty Imagse Rescue workers carry out an evacuation operation for stranded people in Rajanpur on August 25. Shahid Saeed Mirza/AFP/Getty Images Villagers take shelter at a makeshift camp in Pakistan's Jaffarabad district on August 24. Fida Hussain/AFP/Getty Images Workers load sacks of relief goods for flood victims in Balochistan on August 5. Fayaz Aziz/Reuters A boy wades through his flooded house in Karachi on July 26. Rizwan Tabassum/AFP/Getty Images In pictures: 'Unprecedented' flooding in Pakistan Prev Next\n\nThe deadly floods are threatening to engulf up to a third of the nation by the end of the monsoon season, taking a high toll on lives but also infrastructure, and wreaking havoc on crops across farmland in the middle of a food crisis.\n\nIn a statement Monday, IRC’s Pakistan country director Shabnam Baloch said that Pakistan produced less than 1% of the world’s carbon footprint.\n\nA lack of hygiene facilities and clean drinking water has exacerbated the risk of diseases spreading in flooded areas, with nearly 20,000 people in need of critical food supplies and medical support, Baloch added.\n\n“Our needs assessment showed that we are already seeing a major increase in cases of diarrhea, skin infections, malaria and other illnesses,” she said. “We are urgently requesting donors to step up their support and help us save lives.”\n\nOn Tuesday, the US Agency for International Development (USAID) announced it will provide $30 million in humanitarian assistance in response to the flooding in Pakistan.\n\n“With these funds, USAID partners will prioritize urgently needed support for food, nutrition, multi-purpose cash, safe water, improved sanitation and hygiene, and shelter assistance,” the agency said in a press release, adding that a USAID disaster management specialist has already arrived in Islamabad to assess the impact of the floods and to coordinate with partners on the ground.\n\nOne-third of Pakistan could be under water soon\n\nIn a statement Tuesday, Pakistan’s military said rescue missions were ongoing and international aid was beginning to arrive in the country, including seven military aircraft from Turkey and three from the United Arab Emirates.\n\nHelicopters had evacuated more than 300 stranded people and distributed over 23 metric tons of relief items, while more than 50 medical camps have been established with over 33,000 patients being treated, the statement said.\n\nAlso on Tuesday, China will send two aircraft carrying 3,000 tents and Japan will send tarpaulins and shelters, the statement said, adding that the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and Azerbaijan have announced financial assistance.\n\nThe International Monetary Fund (IMF) provided another lifeline Monday, releasing $1.17 billion in bailout funds to avert a default on the South Asian nation’s debt obligations as it grapples with political and economic turmoil worsened by the unprecedented floods.\n\nPeter Ophoff, head of the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC) in Pakistan told CNN he had not seen anything on the scale of the floods in nearly three decades working for the aid agency. The country was, however, hit with similarly devastating floods in 2010.\n\n“Pakistan is in dire need and the damages are here and we will be in this a very long time,” Ophoff said. “It’s not months but years we are talking about.”\n\nThe 33 million people impacted by the floods and rain represent 15% of the population.\n\nAmong 1,136 people killed since mid-June were 386 children, the National Disaster Management Agency (NDMA) said Monday, as the unrelenting rain raised fears of more fatalities to come. Nearly half a million homes have been destroyed, according to NDMA.\n\n“By the time this is over, we could well have one quarter or one third of Pakistan under water,” Pakistan’s climate change minister Sherry Rehman told Turkish news outlet TRT World last week.\n\n‘Water gushed in’\n\nDramatic scenes of disaster have unfolded in Pakistan as floods inundated the country.\n\nIt was raining but not heavily, Ali Jan told Reuters Monday, as he stood surrounded by water in Chadsadda in northern Pakistan. But that quickly changed.\n\n“Suddenly the outer wall of the compound collapsed and water gushed in,” Jan said. “We barely managed to save ourselves. By the time the women were leaving the house, the water had become almost waist-deep. We evacuated the women and the cattle. The rest is there for you to see. Crops have also been destroyed.”\n\nFamilies sit near their belongings inundated by flood waters in Pakistan's southwestern Balochistan province on August 28, 2022. Zahid Hussain/AP\n\nIn videos shared by the Alkhidmat Foundation Pakistan, its volunteers used a bed frame and makeshift pulley system to help a child and elderly man cross rushing floodwaters, according to the NGO’s digital media manager Ihtisham Khaliq Waseer.\n\nMore than 3,000 volunteers from the NGO are distributing aid across the country, he said.\n\n“We are getting aid but it’s not enough with what we need on the ground, because the damages are very much higher than expected,” he said, adding that volunteer teams have been stretched thin delivering supplies to hard-to-reach areas for weeks.\n\nWaseer said he hopes that as rains weaken and flood waters recede in the coming week based on weather forecasts, his team would be able to deliver food rations and set up medical centers in remote areas.", "authors": ["Sophia Saifi Kathleen Magramo Mayumi Maruyama Angela Dewan", "Sophia Saifi", "Kathleen Magramo", "Mayumi Maruyama", "Angela Dewan"], "publish_date": "2022/08/29"}]}
{"question_id": "20230120_3", "search_time": "2023/01/20/16:36", "search_result": [{"url": "https://www.cnn.com/2022/11/23/football/qatar-fifa-world-cup-explainer-spt-intl/index.html", "title": "How Qatar ended up hosting the World Cup | CNN", "text": "CNN —\n\nWith the World Cup now underway in Qatar, many are wondering how this moment arrived – that a tiny Gulf nation with little footballing history ended up hosting the biggest event the sport has to offer.\n\nQatar had never previously appeared at a World Cup tournament – let alone staged one – and became the first host nation to lose the opening game of the tournament with a 2-0 defeat against Ecuador on Sunday.\n\nThe country’s World Cup debut was 12 years in the making, a period in which Qatar’s host status has stirred controversy within the footballing community and beyond.\n\n‘New lands’\n\nWhen Qatar was named as host of the 2022 World Cup back in 2010, it was selected ahead of bids from the United States, South Korea, Japan and Australia.\n\nDuring the bidding process, it faced several obstacles as FIFA, football’s governing body, flagged concerns in technical reports. Those included a lack of existing infrastructure and the region’s intense heat in the summer, when World Cup tournaments are traditionally held.\n\nIndeed, the reports even went as far as to label Qatar’s bid as “high risk,” but the country nevertheless triumphed with 14 votes to USA’s eight in the final round of balloting.\n\nAt the time, Qatar promised to make the world “proud of the Middle East” as the first country from the region to host the tournament, while then-FIFA President Sepp Blatter welcomed the prospect of football’s showpiece event going to “new lands.”\n\n“I’m a happy president when we speak of the development of football,” he said.\n\nTwelve years later, Blatter is more critical.\n\nEarlier this month, he told Swiss newspaper Tages Anzeiger: “Qatar is a mistake … the choice was bad.\n\n“It is too small of a country. Football and the World Cup are too big for it.”\n\nBlatter said FIFA amended the criteria it used to select host countries in 2012 in light of concerns over the working conditions at tournament-related construction sites in Qatar.\n\n“Since then, social considerations and human rights are taken into account,” he said.\n\nWith a population of three million, smaller than that of Connecticut, Qatar has invested billions in its football infrastructure in preparation for the 2022 tournament.\n\nBut questions about just how Qatar won the right to stage the World Cup continue.\n\nAs recently as March 2020, the US Department of Justice alleged that bribes were accepted by top officials as part of the voting process to elect Russia and Qatar as the tournament host for the 2018 and 2022 events – claims Russian officials denied and Qatari officials called “false” in a statement to CNN.\n\nThe DOJ has been investigating allegations of corruption in international soccer, including FIFA, for years. To date, there have been more than two dozen convictions and some cases are ongoing.\n\nA statement from FIFA in April 2020 said it “supports all investigations into alleged acts of criminal wrongdoing regarding either domestic or international football competitions and will continue to provide full cooperation to law enforcement officials investigating such matters.\n\n“FIFA is closely following these investigations and all related developments in the legal processes ongoing in the United States and other parts of the world.\n\n“It is important to point out that FIFA has itself been accorded victim status in the US criminal proceedings and senior FIFA officials are in regular contact with the US Department of Justice.”\n\nFIFA was handed victim status by US prosecutors as they viewed football’s world governing body as having been almost hijacked by a number of corrupt individuals.\n\nHuman rights criticism\n\nQatar’s human rights record has also been in the spotlight ahead of the World Cup, particularly around the welfare of migrant workers.\n\nGiven the minimal infrastructure Qatar had in place at the time it was awarded the hosting rights to the World Cup, seven new stadiums have been erected ahead of the tournament, as well as new hotels and expansions to the country’s airport, rail networks and highways.\n\nThat has placed a reliance on Qatar’s migrant workers, who account for 90% of the total workforce, according to Amnesty International.\n\nSince 2010, many migrant workers have respectively faced delayed or unpaid wages, forced labor, long hours in hot weather, employer intimidation, and an inability to leave their jobs because of the country’s sponsorship system, human rights organizations have found.\n\nVideo Ad Feedback FIFA president launches explosive tirade against Western critics of Qatar 02:19 - Source: CNN\n\nHowever, Qatar’s Supreme Committee for Delivery & Legacy (SC) said the health, safety and dignity of “all workers employed on our projects has remained steadfast,” with “significant improvements” made around workers’ rights.\n\nFIFA president Gianni Infantino also told CNN Sport’s Amanda Davies that he has seen “great evolution” in Qatar’s labor reforms, and the International Labor Organization has noted reformes like a non-discriminatory minimum wage that Qatar is the first in the region to adopt.\n\nMeanwhile, Qatar’s state-backed discrimination against LGBTQ people has also been criticized in the years leading up to the World Cup.\n\nSex between men is illegal and punishable by up to three years in prison in the country, and a report from Human Rights Watch, published last month, documented cases as recently as September of Qatari security forces arbitrarily arresting LGBT people and subjecting them to “ill-treatment in detention.”\n\nA statement sent to CNN on behalf of the SC said it was committed to “an inclusive and discriminatory-free” World Cup, pointing to the fact that the country had, it said, hosted hundreds of international and regional sporting events since being awarded the World Cup in 2010.\n\n“There has never been an issue and every event has been delivered safely,” the statement read.\n\n“Everyone is welcome in Qatar, but we are a conservative country and any public display of affection, regardless of orientation, is frowned upon. We simply ask for people to respect our culture.”\n\nPerhaps the most obvious sign that this World Cup is different to most has been the decision to stage it in November and December, rather than June and July as is the norm.\n\nSweltering heat during the summer months in Qatar has necessitated the switch, although temperatures are still forecasted to rise above 30 degrees Celsius (86 degrees Fahrenheit) later this week.\n\nOther changes to the organization of the tournament have been rather more last-minute.\n\nOn Friday, FIFA announced that no alcohol would be sold at the stadiums, and then on Monday, captains from seven countries were warned they would receive yellow cards if they wore armbands promoting inclusion and opposing discrimination.\n\nFIFA announced earlier on Monday that it had brought forward its “No Discrimination” campaign – which also has a designated armband – adding that “all 32 captains will have the opportunity to wear this armband” during the World Cup.\n\nFIFA’s equipment regulations state that “for FIFA final competitions, the captain of each team must wear the captain’s armband provided by FIFA.”\n\nTime will tell what the legacy of this World Cup will be, but if the past few days, months, and years are anything to go by, it is likely to be complicated and controversial.", "authors": ["George Ramsay"], "publish_date": "2022/11/23"}, {"url": "https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/local/delaware/2016/07/07/delaware-little-league-tournaments/86808726/", "title": "Delaware District 3 Little League tournaments underway", "text": "Gray Hughes, rghughes@dmg.gannett.com\n\nThe Delaware District 3 Little League All-Star tournaments are currently underway and so far there are already three winners.\n\nMillsboro Senior League All Star Team, the Milton 9-10 All Star Team and the Nanticoke Major All Star team have all emerged victorious in the tournament thus far.\n\nNanticoke Major Softball All Stars win the district\n\nThe Nanticoke Major Softball team began its quest for district supremacy on June 27 where it played its first game against Laurel. Nanticoke emerged as the 6-0 victor.\n\nAs winner, Nanticoke had an off day before its game with Lower Sussex. The girls from Nanticoke once again emerged victorious, winning 6-0 once again and earning them the right to play in the district championship game.\n\nNanticoke faced Millsboro, who had beaten the team from Lower Sussex to earn the right to play in the championship game.\n\nIn the seventh day of the tournament, and Nanticoke's fourth game, Nanticoke emerged victorious, defeating Millsboro 10-0.\n\nNanticoke had a very successful tournament. Nanticoke did not allow a single run throughout the tournament and scored 36 runs in four games.\n\nSussex Tech's Lux signs with Delaware Tech baseball\n\nMillsboro Senior League All Stars team wins Senior League tournament\n\nThe Millsboro team for children from age 13 to 16 won its first game against the Woodbridge Senior League All Star Team 6-4 to play the Lower Sussex team. Millsboro was able to defeat them by a score of 11-3.\n\nMillsboro then had to play its eventual finals matchup, Cape/Georgetown for the first time on June 28. Millsboro once again had no difficulty dispatching its opponent, emerging victorious with a final score of 7-0.\n\nMillsboro then received a welcomed day off as it waited to see who would emerge victorious from the Nanticoke-Cape/Georgetown game. Cape/Georgetown won that matchup to earn the right to play Milton once again in the final.\n\nThe final, which was Millsboro’s fourth game of the seven-day tournament, saw Millsboro emerge victorious for the second time over the Cape/Georgetown team, with Millsboro scoring 11 and Cape/Georgetown only scoring two.\n\nThe tournament was a success for the Millsboro team on both offense and defense. Millsboro scored 35 runs in four games while only surrendering nine runs over the same span.\n\nMilton 9-10 All Stars win tournament\n\nThe team from Milton started off its tournament with a 10-3 victory over Nanticoke, then played Georgetown, which had beaten the team from Lower Sussex the day before.\n\nMilton won 8-4, setting up a matchup with the team Milton would eventually face in the finals: Lewes/Rehoboth.\n\nMilton had a day of rest between the two games, which according to coach Paris Mitchell was used to rest tired pitchers. The break seemed to help, as Milton won 10-1, sending Lewes/Rehoboth to the loser’s bracket.\n\nIn order to get to the title game, Lewes/Rehoboth beat the Nanticoke team 14-13, thus setting up the rematch between Lewes/Rehoboth and Milton.\n\nIn the game played at 7 p.m. on July 1, Milton won 11-9.\n\nNext District 3 baseball tournaments\n\nJunior: Begins July 9\n\nMajor: Begins July 15\n\nNext District 3 softball tournaments\n\n9-10: Begins July 9\n\nJunior: Currently underway with the title game scheduled for July 9\n\nSenior: Begins July 19\n\nNorthampton's Webb on track to be a Yankee\n\nIn Focus: On the Shore no more", "authors": [], "publish_date": "2016/07/07"}, {"url": "https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/2020/12/13/2020-world-series-poker-main-event-changes-covid-19/6522558002/", "title": "2020 World Series of Poker Main Event begins with major changes", "text": "It would be difficult to identify a major competition as poorly suited to pandemic conditions as the World Series of Poker Main Event.\n\nIn a typical year, you’re talking about 7,000 people packed into a convention center hall, sitting nearly elbow-to-elbow, passing chips and cards back and forth, playing for hours and hours every day for nearly two weeks until somebody finally wins a life-changing amount of money.\n\n“I think we came to realize almost immediately in mid-March that live poker tournaments, which are a definition of social gathering, were going to be challenge,” said Ty Stewart, the World Series of Poker’s executive director.\n\nBut a year without crowning a Main Event champion was almost unthinkable. Beyond being the biggest prize in poker, it’s an event that penetrates mainstream American culture whether it’s Matt Damon’s character in the 1998 movie \"Rounders\" thinking about going heads-up with Johnny Chan or an accountant named Chris Moneymaker showing up in 2003 and beating all the pros on ESPN to win $2.5 million.\n\nSince then, people have come to Las Vegas every summer from all over the world, willing to put up $10,000 for their shot in the only kind of competition where poker pros, folks who play a weekly neighborhood game or celebrities like Tobey Maguire and Michael Phelps start off with the same chance to win.\n\n“I look at this like, hey, the NBA found a way to have a championship, the NFL found a way to have a season. Even college football eventually came around,” Phil Hellmuth, a former Main Event champion and winner of a record 15 WSOP bracelets, said in a phone interview this week. “So I’d hate to see a World Series board where there was no champion in 2020.”\n\nWith some major modifications to the format, a champion will be crowned this year after all. Beginning Sunday, the WSOP has built a hybrid model for the tournament where players will play online for a projected two days until the field has been whittled down to nine for the final table. At that point, the remaining players will gather at the Rio on Dec. 28, go through a COVID-19 testing process and play in person in a bubble-type environment until there’s just one left.\n\nThe same process is already underway in Europe, where the online stage is over and the final table will begin on Tuesday in the Czech Republic. The two winners will then play heads-up in Las Vegas on Dec. 30 for the title of world champion and an extra $1 million.\n\nThe reaction to the format, Stewart said, was “initially mixed but now it’s turning toward positive” because the big-name players ultimately understand how important it is for the growth of the sport to remain in the public view. And like past years, ESPN will cover the tournament with a heavy emphasis on the final table and the heads-up championship match while also showing some key hands from the online portion in something of an e-sports format.\n\n“We felt like it’s our responsibility to not have an asterisk in 2020 into the history of the World Series of Poker,” Stewart said. “I think people understand that and players applaud the fact we're in this for the long haul and we’re trying to provide opportunities and interest in the game and the Main Event is really the only event that creates national interest and international interest.”\n\nIt won’t be clear until the tournament begins how many players actually signed up this year. Stewart said there were 674 entries on the international side. Most likely, it will be a fraction of the 8,569 who played last year.\n\nPart of the reason for that is, in order to play the Main Event this year, you have to be physically located in New Jersey or Nevada due to state regulations of online gaming. The digital platform, Stewart said, is equipped with geotracking software that ensures players are logged onto a phone or computer within those state borders.\n\n\"We expect some players may be sitting in parking lots or hotels or their home for the first time, and that makes it a very unique Main Event,” he said.\n\nIt also changes the nature of the competition. For someone like Hellmuth, who has career earnings of more than $15 million in WSOP tournaments alone, experience in being able to read opponents can be a pretty big advantage in the late stages of a long event. He said before 2020, he hadn’t played online poker in five years but has developed a better sense in recent months of picking up tells on the timing of when opponents raise or push all-in.\n\n\"I think that it’s still a lot of the same principles apply, but I like it when there’s 50, 60 players left in a tournament and people are getting nervous and they're tired,” he said. “It's the end of a day and hopefully I can see what they’re doing more clearly whereas online there’s a little bit more cloak. They can cloak their face, cloak their nervousness.”\n\nIn some ways, it’s kind of a full-circle moment for poker, which has always had to evolve to grow. At the first WSOP in 1970, where Jack Binion invited seven of the top players to the Horseshoe casino, the winner was determined by a player vote after a series of cash games. It wasn’t until 1982 that the Main Event topped 100 entrants. The first million dollar prize was 1991, and the first time television viewers saw the cards via the “pocket cam” was 2002.\n\nMoneymaker’s win sparked a boom of interest in the game worldwide, making it more accessible to people who weren’t professional gamblers and launching innovations (followed by regulations) in how people could play online for money.\n\nNow, because of COVID-19, we’ll have a World Series champion where the bulk of the tournament was played virtually.\n\n“What we’re doing is just completing (our seasons) like the other sports leagues and I think it’s going to be a legitimate champion,” Hellmuth said. “You look at what happened in the NBA, they had their tournament in a bubble and it was kind of like what was happening in the rest of the world. Now we have our tournament with two days of online poker and more people are spending more time online during the pandemic. So I love it and I think it’s good for poker.”", "authors": [], "publish_date": "2020/12/13"}, {"url": "https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/college/red-raiders/2022/05/25/big-12-baseball-scores-schedule-globe-life-field-arlington/9925132002/", "title": "Big 12 Baseball Scores, Schedule from Globe Life Field in Arlington", "text": "The Big 12 baseball tournament is underway on day three at Globe Life Field in Arlington.\n\nRefresh this page for updates and summaries from each game.\n\nBIG 12 TOURNAMENT\n\nat Globe Life Field, Arlington\n\nSeeds, records in parentheses\n\nWednesday's First-Round Games\n\nMore:Big 12 baseball tournament: Oklahoma State Cowboys vs. Texas Longhorns score, live updates\n\nTexas 4, Oklahoma State 0\n\nARLINGTON — Douglas Hodo III earned his opportunity Wednesday.\n\nThe Texas centerfielder dropped a bunt down — which thanks to an errant throw from Oklahoma State starting pitcher Victor Mederos — allowed him to reach first base, and advance to second while also plate Trey Faltine for the first run of the contest in the top of the sixth inning against Oklahoma State.\n\nThe fifth-seeded Longhorns used that as a spark toward a 4-0 victory over the No. 4 seed Cowboys in the first game of the Phillips 66 Big 12 Tournament held at Globe Life Field.\n\nIn the next frame, Austin Todd provided an insurance run by smacking a solo home run into the left-field seats, before Faltine added another by hitting an RBI single up the middle to give the Longhorns a 3-0 advantage after the top half of the seventh.\n\nSilas Ardoin notched a solo home run in the top of the ninth toward the final scoring margin.\n\nTCU 4, Baylor 2\n\nARLINGTON — Kurtis Byrne hit an RBI single, as part of a two-run eight inning rally, to propel first-seeded TCU to a 4-2 victory over Baylor in the second game of the Big 12 tournament.\n\nKyle Nevin hit an RBI triple in the top of the first to provide the first run for the Bears, who were taking on first-seeded TCU in the Big 12 tournament.\n\nTexas Tech 5, Kansas State 3\n\nARLINGTON — After a Kurt Wilson double and Hudson White two-out single, Wilson scored on an errant pickoff throw to first and White scored on a wild throw home from first in the second inning.\n\nParker Kelly singled, stole second and scored on an errant throw from the catcher to second base.\n\nDillon Carter hit a two-RBI triple to increase the scoring margin in the bottom of the sixth inning.\n\nKansas State cut into the lead thanks to an RBI single from Cole Johnson and two-RBI double from Kaelen Culpepper in the top of the seventh.\n\nMore:Eye on the prize: More than usual, Tech needs strong showing at Big 12 tournament\n\nOklahoma 6, West Virginia 4\n\nARLINGTON — The Sooners plated five runs in the second and took control of the contest early against the Mountaineers.\n\nPeyton Graham highlighted the second inning by smacking a ball off the centerfield batter's eye for a grand slam to provide OU with a 5-0 advantage.\n\nTanner Tredaway added another run following an RBI single to centerfield in the fourth.\n\nWVU ended its scoreless streak thanks to a wild pitch, which allowed J.J Wetherholt to cross home plate in the eighth inning.\n\nGrant Hussey hit a solo home run into the right-field seats while Wetherholt hit a two-run homer for the final scoring margin.\n\nBig 12 baseball tournament: Texas Tech, other teams at a glance\n\nThursday's Games\n\nElimination bracket semifinals\n\nOklahoma State 11, Baylor 1 (7 inn.)\n\nKansas State 8, West Virginia 5\n\nWinners' bracket finals\n\nTexas 5, TCU 3\n\nOklahoma 6, Texas Tech 3\n\nMore:Texas Tech's Brandon Birdsell, Hudson White earn Big 12 baseball awards\n\nFriday's Games\n\nElimination bracket finals\n\nOklahoma State 8, TCU 4\n\nK-State 6, Texas Tech 5 (11 inn.)\n\nSaturday's Games\n\nTop bracket final\n\nOklahoma State 8, Texas 1\n\nTexas 9, Oklahoma State 2; Oklahoma State eliminated\n\nBottom bracket final\n\nOklahoma 4, Kansas State 3; Kansas State eliminated\n\nSunday's Championship\n\nOklahoma 8, Texas 1\n\nPhillips 66 Big 12 Baseball Updates", "authors": [], "publish_date": "2022/05/25"}, {"url": "https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/2022/06/02/memorial-tournament-2022-map-pga-tour-event-underway/7482591001/", "title": "Memorial Tournament map as PGA tour event is underway", "text": "The 2022 Memorial Tournament has begun at Muirfield Village as the field that includes seven of the top 10 golfers in the world try to unseat defending champion Patrick Cantlay.\n\nBut it's golf, so rarely do you play other golfers but instead play the golf course. And the golf course at Muirfield Village has been a pesky opponent since 1976.\n\nMemorial Tournament leaderboard updates:Follow live first-round PGA coverage of the 2022 Memorial Tournament\n\nMemorial Tournament weather:Will Jack Nicklaus' Memorial Tournament weather be hit by the curse of Chief Leatherlips?\n\nJack Nicklauson gambling, Saudis, lawsuit, Justin Thomas, young PGA stars and more\n\nJack Nicklaus designed the course and some of the names to master Muirfield Village include Tiger Woods, Tom Watson and even Nicklaus himself.\n\nWoods has won five times (1999-2001, 2009 and 2012). Kenny Perry won three times (1991, 2003 and 2008). Nicklaus won twice in 1977 and 1984. Cantlay has won twice (2019 and 2021). Watson, Hale Irwin and Greg Norman are also two-time winners.\n\nSo what does the course look like? Here's map.\n\nMemorial Tournament 2022 course map\n\nHere's the course map:\n\nMemorial golf tournament course by hole, par at Muirfield Village\n\nHole 1: Par 4\n\nHole 2: Par 4\n\nHole 3: Par 4\n\nHole 4: Par 3\n\nHole 5: Par 5\n\nHole 6: Par 4\n\nHole 7: Par 5\n\nHole 8: Par 3\n\nHole 9: Par 4\n\nHole 10: Par 4\n\nHole 11: Par 5\n\nHele 12: Par 3\n\nHole 13: Par 4\n\nHole 14: Par 4\n\nHole 15: Par 5\n\nHole 16: Par 3\n\nHole 17: Par 4\n\nHole 18: Par 4\n\nHow to watch the Memorial golf tournament\n\nTV: Thursday (2-6 p.m., Golf Channel); Friday (2-6 p.m., Golf Channel), Saturday (12:30-2:30 p.m., Golf Channel; 2:30-6 p.m., CBS, Ch. 10); Sunday (12:30-2:30 p.m., Golf Channel; 2:30-6 p.m., CBS, Ch. 10).\n\nHow to stream Memorial Tournament\n\nThe Memorial Tournament can be streamed a variety of ways. Paramount+ will have have the CBS live stream on Saturday and Sunday. CBS is also streaming on several providers, like Hulu Live.\n\nStreaming providers like Hulu Live, Sling and YouTube TV offer the Golf Channel, which is airing all the rounds.", "authors": [], "publish_date": "2022/06/02"}, {"url": "https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/2017/08/30/fishing-reeling-some-big-tournament-dollars/617457001/", "title": "Fishing tournament pays off big", "text": "Jim Freda\n\nSpecial to The Record\n\nThe 2017 MidAtlantic Tournament ended last Friday in Cape May and Sunset Marina in Ocean City, Md. Tournament Director Aaron Hoffman said, “It was a week that not only saw a total eclipse of the sun but also saw a total cash purse eclipse the previous MidAtlantic Tournament record payout.\"\n\nIt was also the first time in the tournament’s 26-year history where a participant won two of the event’s major categories. There was a tournament record $3.24 million awarded to all the lucky winners, including well over $1 million alone to one lucky crew. Larry Hesse of Fort Lauderdale and his crew of the Brielle, Goin’ In Deep including Capt. Walter Harmstead of Manasquan and Hesse’s son Larry Jr were the big winners at this year’s event as they doubled up and nabbed the blue marlin and tuna categories top prizes thanks to the 680 lb blue marlin and 184-pound tuna weighed on day four of the tournament and walked away with $1,110,634.\n\nOn the last day of the tournament, shortly after the evening’s weigh-in session got underway, Scott Poole’s Waste Knot from Morehead, NC with Capt. Patrick Kannan at the wheel pulled to the scale in Ocean City and weighed a white marlin of 75 pounds for angler Kyle Mayer. Poole and his crew of the Waste Knot were among those eyeing the scale as minutes later Captain JJ Logan wheeled Rich Van Camps Reel Rodeo from Fort Lauderdale into the marina with an upright white marlin flag flying indicating they had a boated billfish aboard.\n\nMoments later, angler Andrew Kennedy’s billfish would weigh 71 pounds and Reel Rodeo would finish with the third heaviest white marlin for the tournament and won $73,602. Poole and his crew aboard the Waste Knot let out a sigh of relief as their heaviest white marlin gave the crew $796,509. Ken Hager’s Taylor Jean from Tinton Falls with Capt Jay Monteverdi of Brielle held on to take home the second heaviest white marlin prize and a check for $217,665 for his 72 -pound billfish.\n\nThough several tuna were weighed on day five, none were able to make the leaderboard much less top Goin’ In Deep’s 184-pound Allison yellowfin. Denny Howell’s Big Dog hung on to take the second heaviest in the category and won $80,088, while Pat Healy’s New Gretna based Viking 62 and Brick, NJ’s Mike Murray aboard his Caitlin finished in a tie for third heaviest tuna at 72 pounds and won $164,837 and $116,929 respectively.\n\nThe Manasquan River Marlin and Tuna Club 37th Annual Offshore Open is currently underway and will run through Sept. 3. Unfortunately, the wind has not cooperated at all this week with strong east-northeast winds. The next few days look better. As of this writing the boat Paddywhack has weighed in the largest tuna a 72.75-pound yellowfin worth $13,800.00. The tournament info can be found at www.MRMTC.com/offshoreopen.\n\nFalse albacore have inundated our waters from 5-15 miles out and will soon move in along the beach. The September albies that we see along the beach usually range in size from 3-8 pounds. These pelagic speedsters fall into the family Scombridae, also commonly referred to as the mackerels. Therefore their meat does not make for good table fare. People will eat them however and you can find tons of recipes on the internet on how to cook them if you goggle it. Probably one of the best lures to catch them if you are casting to them is the Deadly Dick lure. The #3-4 long and # 1 long are the sizes to get.\n\nCapt. Rob of the Sea Hunter out of Atlantic Highlands www.seahunter.info reports, “We had some descent trips early in the week in the bay. That started to slow up so we hit the ocean channels and they are finally holding some fish in our range for the half day trips. Unfortunately, we had a few days of hard east/northeast winds that kept us out of the ocean. Next Tuesday is the last day of the fluke season. We are sailing for fluke twice daily with two trips 8 a.m.-12:30 p.m. and 1:30 p.m.-6 p.m., seven days a week, Capt. Rob.”\n\nBest Bet: Yellowfin tuna are present 40 miles outside the Manasquan Inlet. False albacore, bluefish, bonito and mackerel are being caught 10-15 miles out. Striped bass are present in the rivers and bays at night feeding on spearing, peanut bunker, and mullet. Fluke fishing is good but ends Sept. 5.\n\nHot Baits: Bucktailing is still one of the most productive methods for catching fluke. Use a teaser above a bucktail tipped with 4 or 5 inch Gulp swimming mullet in any color.\n\nHot Spots: Expect false albacore to show up in good numbers from 1-10 miles off the beach in the next two weeks. They will concentrate on the inshore lumps and ridges.\n\nAnnouncements of Interest: Now through Sept. 3, Manasquan River Marlin and Tuna Club 37th Annual Offshore Open, more info email offshoreopen@mrmtc.com. Sept. 5, fluke season closes. Sept. 9, 55th Annual H.W. Shaner Tournament an Association of Surf Angling Clubs, open to teams and individuals, Avalon, contact Lynda Greaves, 609-214-0939 or lgreaves68@comcast.net.\n\nTip of the Week: False albacore can be caught several at a time by trolling small purple and black feathers or #2 Clark spoons pulled behind 6 oz drails at 6.0-6.8 knots.", "authors": [], "publish_date": "2017/08/30"}, {"url": "https://www.cnn.com/2022/11/20/football/qatar-ecuador-opening-game-world-cup-2022-spt-intl/index.html", "title": "Ecuador dampens Qatar's party as controversial World Cup gets ...", "text": "Al Khor, Qatar CNN —\n\nFor the past year, a giant clock in Doha has been counting down to the opening match of the World Cup. Qatar and the world need wait no more, after this controversial tournament got underway Sunday with the host losing 2-0 to Ecuador.\n\nAfter a spectacular opening ceremony, which starred the likes of Hollywood actor Morgan Freeman and BTS star Jung Kook, the sport itself finally took center stage after being overshadowed by off-the-pitch matters during the build-up.\n\nIt wasn’t the result that many in Qatar would have hoped for. The host looked nervous and struggled against an opposition possessing experience and quality. In truth, the game was all but over at halftime, with Ecuador comfortably 2-0 up thanks to two goals by Enner Valencia.\n\nAll the excitement pre-match slowly drained away from the stadium in the second half and there were noticeably more empty seats as some fans seemed to have had enough.\n\nEmpty seats are seen during the match. Dylan Martinez/Reuters\n\nFestival atmosphere\n\nThe nearer we got to Sunday’s kickoff in Doha, the more excited fans in this city became. A magnificent firework display lit up the sky on Saturday night and social media exploded with Qataris making their enthusiasm known about hosting one of sport’s biggest events.\n\nOver the last few days, fans from around the world have gathered in squares in downtown Doha to sing, chant and wave their national flags, creating a fantastic atmosphere.\n\nThat festival spirit continued on match day, from the city center to the newly-built Al Bayt Stadium, which hosted the opening match of this historic World Cup, the first to be held in the Middle East.\n\nPeople watch as fireworks go off before the start of the World Cup at the Al Bayt Stadium. Aijaz Rahi/AP\n\nAt times, it has felt like any other major international tournament, but the build-up to this event has, of course, been unlike any other.\n\nCorruption scandals plagued FIFA, world football’s governing body, after it awarded Qatar the tournament in 2010 – though Qatari officials have previously “strongly denied” to CNN the allegations of bribery which has surrounded its bid.\n\nFor over a decade, and increasingly so as kickoff neared, the pre-tournament build-up has focused on the country’s human rights record, from the death of migrant workers and the conditions many have endured in Qatar, as well as its LGBTQ laws and the role of women in its society. The country’s last-minute ban of alcohol in World Cup stadiums also made headlines around the world.\n\nFIFA President Gianni Infantino’s remarkable press conference on the eve of the opening game demonstrated just how little on-field issues have featured so far.\n\nThe FIFA boss addressed hundreds of journalists in Doha, Saturday, and started the news conference with a near hour-long speech, during which he accused Western critics of hypocrisy and racism.\n\nThose involved in the tournament have faced much criticism. Colombian singer Maluma, who features in the official World Cup anthem, walked out of an interview on Israeli television when he was questioned about the Gulf state’s human rights record.\n\nThe opening ceremony itself focused heavily on unity, with performances giving a nod to all the countries playing in this year’s tournament.\n\nVAR comes into play\n\nWhile the pre-match attention was inevitably on the host nation, Qatar’s opponents also had a story to tell as its place in the tournament was only confirmed weeks ago after it was involved in a legal dispute with rivals Chile.\n\nIt centered around the eligibility of Bryon Castillo who, rivals argued, was ineligible to represent Ecuador over claims he was born in Colombia. The case was referred to the Court of Arbitration for Sport, who deemed Castillo eligible but, despite this, he was not included in his nation’s World Cup squad for Qatar 2022. On Sunday’s showing, it doesn’t look like the team miss Castillo.\n\nValencia scores past Qatar's goalkeeper Saad Al Sheeb for Ecuador's opening goal. Ariel Schalit/AP\n\nMinutes after the game started, the noisy Ecuadorian fans were celebrating after it appeared their side had taken the lead. Valencia headed in from close range but the Video Assistant Referee (VAR) deemed Valencia was offside and disallowed the goal.\n\nBut just minutes later, the yellow shirts were celebrating again as Valencia put his side ahead from the penalty spot. Goalkeeper Saad Al Sheeb had fouled the forward as he attempted to skip beyond him.\n\nThe captain doubled his tally before the first half finished, directing a bullet header into the bottom corner as Qatar looked short of confidence and belief.\n\nNow that the action is underway, organizers will hope attention will move away from human rights and other off-field issues. But, in truth, this tournament’s legacy will not be determined on the pitch. Instead, it will be decided by real change and the improvement of the lives of the people who helped make it happen.", "authors": ["Ben Church"], "publish_date": "2022/11/20"}, {"url": "https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/olympics/beijing/2022/02/02/winter-olympics-are-underway-mixed-doubles-curling/9312000002/", "title": "2022 Winter Olympics: Curling at the Ice Cube kicks off Beijing Games", "text": "BEIJING — In 2008, as the Water Cube, it was where U.S. swimmer Michael Phelps won a record eight gold medals.\n\nAnd Wednesday, as the Ice Cube, it's where the 2022 Winter Olympics officially began.\n\nA full 48 hours before the opening ceremony, curlers from eight countries – including the United States – kicked off the mixed doubles competition at the National Aquatics Center, in what was the first sporting event of the Beijing Games.\n\nThe American team of Vicky Persinger and Chris Plys faced Australia in their first round-robin game, squeaking out a 6-5 win. And the opportunity to lead off Olympic competition was just as exciting.\n\n\"It's kind of nice to be the first, to get the party started,\" said Persinger, 29. \"We've been here for several days, and we weren't able to get on the ice until today, actually. So just being out there, and getting to take our masks off and throwing those first few rocks in the game, it made me feel a lot more comfortable. Just kind of the joy of like, this is why we came here.\"\n\nPlys said that, due in part to travel, it had been about a week and a half since they had been able to practice on the ice, prior to Wednesday's opener.\n\n\"We kind of talked about how half the battle to these Olympics is getting here healthy, to a point where we can play,\" the 34-year-old from Duluth, Minnesota said. \"It's been less than ideal circumstances, obviously, for everybody. But as the Games continue on and we get some reps in under our belt and find that confidence, I think it'll help us sharpen up down the stretch.\"\n\nCHASING GOLD: Sign up for our newsletter to learn everything about USA's quest for gold in Beijing\n\nEXCLUSIVE ACCESS: Sign up for USA TODAY’s Olympics texts to get the latest updates and behind-the-scenes coverage from Beijing\n\nWednesday's action lacked some of the typical fanfare of Olympic competition due to COVID-19. With the Games being staged in a \"closed-loop system,\" Beijing 2022 organizers had announced that only select Chinese fans would be invited to watch the Games in person – and only if they met certain COVID-19 restrictions.\n\nAt the Ice Cube, this translated to about 200 fans spread out across six sections of blue seats, and a few dozen more scattered on the side opposite them. Most clapped when host China pulled off a big shot, or won an end. Others waived blue flags adorned with panda Bing Dwen Dwen, the mascot of the Games.\n\n\"It's cool, man,\" Plys said of the atmosphere. \"We'll take fans any way we can get them right now. Last time I played in a major competition, there were cardboard cutouts of people in the stands, and that was a bit weird.\"\n\nPersinger and Plys will return to the ice Thursday with two more round-robin games, against Italy and Norway.\n\nIt's a strange quirk of Olympic scheduling, that competition in some events begins before the Olympic flame is officially lit. Two other sports – moguls skiing and women's hockey – will join curling on the competition schedule Thursday, with the U.S. women facing Finland in their first preliminary game at 8:10 a.m. ET.\n\nThe ceremonial start of the Games will come roughly 24 hours later, with the opening ceremony at Beijing's National Stadium, more commonly known as the Bird's Nest. NBC's coverage of the event begins at 6:30 a.m. ET.\n\nContact Tom Schad at tschad@usatoday.com or on Twitter @Tom_Schad.", "authors": [], "publish_date": "2022/02/02"}, {"url": "https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/high-school/sports-awards/2020/11/15/planning-underway-northeast-wisconsin-high-school-sports-awards-show/6278612002/", "title": "Planning underway for Northeast Wisconsin High School Sports ...", "text": "USA TODAY NETWORK-Wisconsin\n\nThe Northeast Wisconsin High School Sports Awards is a nine-month student-athlete recognition program that culminates in a star-studded, on-demand broadcast show featuring the biggest names in professional sports and the top athletes from the Appleton, Fond du Lac, Green Bay, Manitowoc, Marshfield, Oshkosh, Sheboygan, Stevens Point, Wausau and Wisconsin Rapids coverage areas.\n\nHonorees for 23 WIAA-sanctioned sports will be announced throughout the year in the Appleton Post-Crescent, Fond du Lac Reporter, Green Bay Press-Gazette, Manitowoc Herald Times Reporter, Marshfield News Herald, Oshkosh Northwestern, Sheboygan Press, Stevens Point Journal, Wausau Daily Herald and Wisconsin Rapids Daily Tribune. Nominees will also be announced on the event website at sportsawards.usatoday.com/northeastwi.\n\nDuring the on-demand broadcast, top professional athletes and sportscasters will present these honorees, along with the three finalists and the athlete of the year for each sport.\n\nThe awards showcase also will feature other premier awards for the on- and off-the-field accomplishments of athletes, coaches and teams, including awards for a scholar-athlete of the year, the top band, coach of the year, team of the year, and the male and female athlete of the year.\n\nThe awards show will be free to watch on any smartphone or computer thanks to our sponsors. It’s scheduled to premiere at 6 p.m. June 30.\n\nOnce announced, honorees should register on the show website at sportsawards.usatoday.com/northeastwi to reserve their complimentary athlete gift box, which is scheduled to arrive approximately one week prior to the show. Registrations are also used to send out awards for winners following the show.\n\nVisit sportsawards.usatoday.com/northeastwi to sign up for updates to keep up with show information, honoree selections, presenter announcements and more.\n\nThe Northeast Wisconsin High School Sports Awards, formerly known as Wisconsin Prep Sports Awards, is part of the USA TODAY High School Sports Awards, the largest high school sports recognition program in the country.\n\nEvent organizers had hoped to plan for an in-person event in 2021, but concerns for the continued safety and health of students and their families with the ongoing spread of COVID-19 led to the decision to produce a virtual streaming awards show.\n\n“Due to the various county, state and regional variations in protection against the spread of the virus, as well as our own commitment to safety, we couldn’t confidently plan for live events across the country in 2021,” said Crystal Costa, Gannett’s event director for the high school sports award series. “We do hope and plan to be returning to our ESPY-style high school awards shows in person in 2022.”\n\nAlong with the chance to be recognized in this regional awards show, top student-athletes may also be featured as honorees for the Wisconsin High School Sports awards program.\n\nThose honorees will also be announced throughout the year, and top selections for the statewide program will be announced July 15 on sportsawards.usatoday.com/wisconsin.\n\nVisit the website to sign up for updates and honoree selections throughout the year. Stories about the selections and more program information can also be found at usatoday.com/sports/high-school-sports-awards.\n\nFinally, the most elite high school athletes, coaches and teams from across the United States will be featured in the inaugural USA TODAY High School Sports Awards show.\n\nThe Wisconsin athlete of the year winners will be national honorees in baseball, basketball, cross country, football, golf, gymnastics, hockey, soccer, swimming and diving, tennis, volleyball, wrestling, softball, and track and field.\n\nThe USA TODAY High School Sports Awards show, which will be televised and available for streaming in early August, will showcase those honorees from each state, announce the top three in the country and then name the athlete of the year in each sport.\n\nViewers will also see awards for the freshman athlete of the year, play of the year, the nation’s top male and female athlete and many other premier awards for high school student-athletes.\n\nPlease use the hashtag #NEWISCONSINHSSA and #USATODAYHSSA for a chance to be featured on the social media feeds on the event websites and be a part of the online conversation.\n\nGannett owns and operates the largest high school athlete recognition program in the United States.\n\nViewers can find honorees from various regions, including the national honorees and winners at sportsawards.usatoday.com. For more information, email sportsawards@usatoday.com.", "authors": [], "publish_date": "2020/11/15"}, {"url": "https://www.cnn.com/2022/03/12/golf/players-championship-storm-pga-tour-delay-spt-intl/index.html", "title": "Players Championship: Powerful storm wreaks havoc as golf ...", "text": "CNN —\n\nThe Players Championship is set for its latest finish in at least 17 years after a powerful storm delayed the PGA Tour event for a second successive day in Florida.\n\nPlay at Ponte Vedra Beach’s TPC Sawgrass course has faced severe disruption since the tournament got underway on Thursday, with almost three inches of rainfall across 48 hours.\n\nApproaching what would typically be the tournament’s penultimate day on Saturday, 47 players are yet to complete their first round.\n\nFlorida is currently under tornado watch until 11 a.m. E.T Saturday – the earliest time the Tour said play will resume – with possibilities of tornadoes, winds of up to 70 mph, and heavy rain the key concerns, according to CNN weather’s team.\n\nJustin Rose of England lines up a putt as caddie David Clark holds an umbrella. Mike Ehrmann/Getty Images\n\nFlooding caused by additional rain could be particularly disruptive for grounds staff at The Players – nicknamed ‘the fifth major’ for its prestige – and looks set to extend the tournament to, at a minimum, its first Monday finish since 2005.\n\n“Unfortunately, the weather conditions are not providing us any relief,” Chief Referee Gary Young said on Friday.\n\n“Our desire is to not have anyone on the property at that time,” added Young, referring to the projected severe weather system on Saturday. “We are into a Monday finish. We know that.”\n\nThe rain and severe storm threat will have passed by midday Saturday, according to the CNN weather team, though temperatures will plummet and strong winds of up to 40 mph look set to prolong difficulties for golfers.\n\nRory McIlroy of Northern Ireland lines up his putt amid the rain. Mike Ehrmann/Getty Images\n\n‘Unplayable’\n\nOn the eve of the tournament, Young said organizers were “confident” in their ability to navigate bad weather, yet issues began also immediately when overnight rainfall delayed the start by an hour.\n\nPlay was resumed only to be later suspended for over four hours due to dangerous weather, Thursday ultimately concluding with 69 players – less than half the field – completing their first round.\n\nFriday saw little improvement – just 22 more players completing their opening rounds before heavy rain saw play called off after four hours.\n\n“The golf course has reached a point where it’s unplayable,” Young said Friday.\n\nThe seventh hole at TPC Sawgrass. David Cannon/Getty Images\n\nEngland’s Tommy Fleetwood sits level with US pair Tom Hoge and Brice Garnett at six under heading into the eventual restart.\n\nFleetwood, one of the 69 players able to finish their first round on Thursday, has gone two years without a victory, but made an excellent start with three straight birdies after the delay.\n\n“I’m chuffed to be in on that score,” Fleetwood said Thursday.\n\n“I felt like I drove the ball well aside from a couple, and I felt like I chipped and putted great. For sure, that was the most I could have got out of the round. So days like that are very, very pleasing.”", "authors": ["Jack Bantock"], "publish_date": "2022/03/12"}]}
{"question_id": "20230120_4", "search_time": "2023/01/20/16:36", "search_result": [{"url": "https://www.cnn.com/2022/12/14/tech/tiktok-states/index.html", "title": "Why a growing number of states are cracking down on TikTok | CNN ...", "text": "Washington CNN —\n\nTwo years after TikTok avoided a national ban in the United States, the popular short-form video app is now facing growing pushback at the state level.\n\nIn the past two weeks, at least seven states have said they will bar public employees from using the app on government devices, including Alabama, Maryland, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Utah and Texas. (Another state, Nebraska, banned TikTok from state devices in 2020.) Last week, the state of Indiana announced two lawsuits against TikTok accusing the Chinese-owned platform of misrepresenting its approach to age-appropriate content and data security.\n\nOn Tuesday, a group of 15 attorneys general wrote to Apple and Google calling on the app store owners to stop listing TikTok as being appropriate for teens, over claims about the prevalence of mature content on the app.\n\nThe mounting pressure on TikTok has come from states led by Republican governors who have highlighted fears that TikTok users’ personal information could wind up in the hands of the Chinese government, thanks to that country’s national security laws.\n\n“South Dakota will have no part in the intelligence gathering operations of nations who hate us,” said Gov. Kristi Noem in announcing the new state policy.\n\nThe flurry of announcements has drawn sharp contrasts with activity at the federal level. Since 2020, when the Trump administration threatened a ban over national security concerns, TikTok and the US government have been negotiating a deal that may allow the short-form video app to keep serving US users.\n\nThere have been years of closed-door negotiations between TikTok and the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, an opaque multi-agency panel charged with reviewing foreign investment deals for national security risks. One US official has suggested that CFIUS ban TikTok from the United States outright.\n\nWhatever outcome the negotiations produce is still expected to have big implications for TikTok and its users. But the federal government’s continued inaction on that front, as well as recent reports of delays in the negotiations, has left the door open for states to step in as the app has gained immense popularity among US users.\n\nIn taking these steps, the states are unlikely to disrupt how everyday users access the app. But these recent announcements could nonetheless add to political pressure for tougher action at the federal level, which could in turn be more disruptive to users.\n\n“It feels like the states are stepping into the DC vacuum on TikTok,” said Paul Gallant, a policy analyst at the investment research firm Cowen Inc. “I don’t see those new restrictions disrupting TikTok that much, but it probably adds a bit of pressure for Washington to ‘do something’ on TikTok one way or another.”\n\nThe Treasury Department, CFIUS’s chair agency, said in a statement that the panel is “committed to taking all necessary actions within its authority to safeguard US national security” and declined to comment on TikTok specifically. The White House also declined to comment.\n\n“We’re disappointed that so many states are jumping on the bandwagon to enact policies based on unfounded, politically charged falsehoods about TikTok,” Hilary McQuaide, a spokesperson for TikTok, said in a statement provided to CNN. “It’s unfortunate that the many state agencies, offices, and universities on TikTok in those states will no longer be able to use it to build communities and connect with constituents.”\n\nA long wait for federal action\n\nUS lawmakers have raised bipartisan concerns that China’s national security laws could force TikTok — or its parent, ByteDance — to hand over the personal data of its US users. Security experts have said that the data could allow China to identify intelligence opportunities or to seek to influence US users through disinformation campaigns.\n\nTikTok has said it is working with the US government to address all reasonable national security concerns. It has also taken independent steps to isolate US user data from other parts of its business. Last week, amid the pushback from the states, the company said it would restructure its US-focused content moderation, policy and legal teams under US Data Security, a special group within the company that’s led by US-based officials and walled off organizationally from other teams focused on the rest of the world.\n\nUnder the change, content policies TikTok develops for its global audience must be “reviewed and approved” for US audiences by TikTok’s US Data Security group, to ensure the policies meet the standards of any deal approved by CFIUS, the company said. Content moderation involving US users’ data, TikTok said, will be handled by a US-specific trust and safety team within the US Digital Security group, and not by its global trust and safety team.\n\nTikTok has previously acknowledged that employees based in China can currently access user data, and has also declined to commit to stop sending US user information to China.\n\nHarry Broadman, who leads the CFIUS practice at Berkeley Research Group, a consulting firm, said he isn’t privy to the details of the negotiation between TikTok and the US government but called the continued lack of resolution “a mystery.”\n\n“I’m a little bit mystified why it’s taking so long for CFIUS to deal with this problem,” he said. “There must be some issue that’s going on.”\n\nOn Tuesday, Sen. Marco Rubio, the top Republican on the Senate Intelligence Committee, and a bipartisan pair of congressmen in the House, introduced new legislation that aims to ban TikTok from operating in the United States. In a statement, Rubio expressed frustration with the lack of action at the federal level.\n\n“The federal government has yet to take a single meaningful action to protect American users from the threat of TikTok,” Rubio said. “There is no more time to waste on meaningless negotiations with a CCP-puppet company. It is time to ban Beijing-controlled TikTok for good.”\n\nAn opening for Republican governors\n\nWith no deal yet between CFIUS and TikTok, the states led by Republican officials appear to have capitalized on the moment from a “tactical, political, winning-points perspective,” Broadman said.\n\n“I don’t think it reflects a deeper suspicion on the part of the Republicans versus Democrats,” he said. “I think it’s more of a tactical question.”\n\nSince government agencies have clear authority to manage their own devices in ways they see fit, barring public employees from using the app represents low-hanging fruit (and easy headlines), Broadman said.\n\nIn some ways, the states that have restricted TikTok are following the federal government’s lead. Already, the US military, the State Department, and the Department of Homeland Security have prohibited their own employees from using TikTok.\n\nStates such as Maryland also enacted their TikTok bans on government devices as part of a wider crackdown on Chinese-linked products and services, making the announcement more about China than about TikTok individually. Maryland’s directive also applies to Huawei and ZTE, which the US government has also taken steps to block from US markets.\n\nAt least one state is going even further. Last week, Indiana sued TikTok in two separate cases. One claimed that TikTok lures children onto the platform by falsely claiming it is appropriate for users between 13 and 17 years old; the other claims TikTok has “deceived” consumers about whether user data is sufficiently protected from Chinese government access. TikTok has declined to comment on the litigation but has said “the safety, privacy and security of our community is our top priority.”\n\nSome states could also choose to begin advancing meaningful legislation that effectively limits TikTok on private devices, Broadman said, in a move that would more directly impact TikTok’s American user base. But such a move would likely introduce other issues about the regulation of commerce, and potentially result in legal challenges.", "authors": ["Brian Fung"], "publish_date": "2022/12/14"}, {"url": "https://www.cnn.com/2022/12/15/tech/senate-tiktok-ban-devices/index.html", "title": "Senate passes legislation to ban TikTok from US government devices", "text": "CNN —\n\nThe Senate passed legislation Wednesday evening to ban TikTok from US government devices, in a move designed to limit perceived information-security risks stemming from the social media app.\n\nThe vote by unanimous consent approved the No TikTok on Government Devices Act, a bill authored by Missouri Republican Sen. Josh Hawley.\n\nThe move marks lawmakers’ latest step against the short-form video app that has become popular with over a billion users worldwide. US officials fear that TikTok’s user data could end up in the hands of the Chinese government due to that country’s influence over TikTok’s parent, ByteDance.\n\nA companion bill was introduced in the House last year by Colorado Republican Rep. Ken Buck. It has yet to be approved by members of the House Oversight Committee.\n\nHouse Speaker Nancy Pelosi said Thursday it isn’t yet clear whether the chamber will take up the TikTok bill in light of its Senate passage, saying lawmakers were consulting with White House officials on its language.\n\n“Once again, Sen. Hawley has moved forward with legislation to ban TikTok on government devices, a proposal which does nothing to advance U.S. national security interests,” a spokesperson for TikTok said in a statement. “We hope that rather than continuing down that road, he will urge the Administration to move forward on an agreement that would actually address his concerns.”\n\nThe latest legislative action comes as TikTok and the US government have been negotiating a deal that may allow the app to keep serving US users. There have been years of closed-door talks between TikTok and the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, as well as recent reports of delays in the negotiations.\n\nSome lawmakers have expressed frustration with an apparent lack of progress in those talks. Following Wednesday’s vote, Virginia Democratic Sen. Mark Warner, a vocal critic of TikTok, said of the process: “My patience is running out.”\n\nOn Tuesday, US lawmakers led by Florida Republican Sen. Marco Rubio introduced a bill to ban TikTok in the United States more generally, along with other apps based in, or under the “substantial influence” of, countries that are considered foreign adversaries, including China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, Cuba and Venezuela. In introducing the bill, Rubio also indicated some frustration, saying that the federal government “has yet to take a single meaningful action” on the matter.\n\nBut several senators, including Warner and Hawley, have stopped short of endorsing Rubio’s proposal. On Thursday, Hawley said he would be “fine” if the US government and TikTok reached a deal to safeguard US users’ data. “But if they don’t do that … then I think we’re going to have to look at more stringent measures,” Hawley said.\n\nIn the past two weeks, at least seven states have said they will bar public employees from using the app on government devices, including Alabama, Maryland, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Utah and Texas. (Another state, Nebraska, banned TikTok from state devices in 2020.)\n\nSome US government agencies have independently taken steps to limit TikTok usage among their employees. Already, the US military, the State Department and the Department of Homeland Security have restricted the app from government-owned devices. But Wednesday’s bill would apply to the entire federal workforce.", "authors": ["Brian Fung"], "publish_date": "2022/12/15"}, {"url": "https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2022/12/16/ban-tiktok-us-states-congress/10905325002/", "title": "US TikTok bans? Efforts spread in Congress; Texas, GA among states", "text": "Bans and restrictions on the popular social media app TikTok are spreading at the state and federal levels, with some lawmakers seeking to block TikTok in the United States.\n\nThe U.S. Senate this week approved legislation to ban the use of the video platform on government devices. Some state lawmakers have blocked TikTok on state devices too, and officials in the Senate and House also introduced legislation to block TikTok from coast to coast.\n\nBut why are lawmakers focused on the app that many Americans know as a place where teenagers learn viral dance challenges? Here’s what you need to know.\n\nWhy do officials care about TikTok?\n\nCritics of TikTok fear that the Chinese government could gain access to information through the app or use it to spread misinformation. That’s because TikTok is owned by ByteDance, a Chinese company. For example:\n\nFBI Director Christopher Wray earlier this month said the bureau was concerned with Chinese officials controlling the app’s algorithm and argued that China could use the app to view data on users.\n\nSen. Mark Warner, D-Va., chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, called TikTok “an enormous threat” in an interview earlier this year.\n\nBut there has been debate over whether Chinese officials are actively collecting TikTok data, or that China could actually gain an advantage from information sourced from the app.\n\nAre all of the TikTok bans the same?\n\nNo, different lawmakers are asking for different actions targeting the social media app. Some of the moves go further than others.\n\nState lawmakers have mostly restricted TikTok from devices controlled or issued by a state government. Some of the states that have taken action include:\n\nThe U.S. armed forces have also banned TikTok on devices from the military.\n\nAt the federal level, Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., introduced legislation to ban TikTok from operating in the U.S. Reps. Mike Gallagher, R-Wis., and Raja Krishnamoorthi, D-Ill., sponsored companion legislation in the U.S. House.\n\nAlso at the federal level, Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., introduced legislation to ban TikTok on government devices. That legislation was passed this week with unanimous consent, meaning no senators objected to the legislation.\n\nHow many people use TikTok?\n\nThe app said last year that more than one billion people around the world use TikTok every month. The average American user watched TikTok for 80 minutes a day, The Washington Post reported.\n\nApproximately 67% of U.S. teenagers say they ever use TikTok, according to the Pew Research Center.\n\nHas the US tried to ban TikTok before?\n\nYes, former President Donald Trump issued orders focused on Chinese tech companies. The orders tried to block new users from downloading TikTok or WeChat, a messaging app, but the orders failed in court.\n\nThe Senate also passed a bill in 2020 to ban TikTok, but it never passed in the House.\n\nWhat does TikTok say about the bans?\n\nTikTok in a statement to USA TODAY this week called Rubio’s proposed legislation “politically motivated.”\n\n\"TikTok is loved by millions of Americans who use the platform to learn, grow their businesses, and connect with creative content that brings them joy,\" said Brooke Oberwetter, a TikTok spokesperson. \"We will continue to brief members of Congress on the plans that have been developed under the oversight of our country's top national security agencies – plans that we are well underway in implementing – to further secure our platform in the United States.\"\n\nUSA TODAY has reached out to TikTok for comment on this story.\n\nWhat's next for TikTok in the US?\n\nPresident Joe Biden has ordered the Commerce Department to review security concerns. U.S. officials and the company have been in talks about a potential agreement to resolve security concerns for people living in America.\n\nGo deeper\n\nContributing: Natalie Neysa Alund, USA TODAY; The Associated Press", "authors": [], "publish_date": "2022/12/16"}, {"url": "https://www.cnn.com/2022/12/13/tech/tiktok-ban-bill/index.html", "title": "TIKTok ban bill introduced by US lawmakers | CNN Business", "text": "Washington CNN —\n\nA trio of US lawmakers has introduced new legislation that aims to ban TikTok from operating in the United States.\n\nThe new bill by Sen. Marco Rubio, the top Republican on the Senate Intelligence Committee, and a bipartisan pair of congressmen in the House, reflects the latest escalation by US policymakers against the Chinese-owned short-form video app. TikTok has faced doubts about its ability to safeguard US user data from the Chinese government.\n\nThe proposed legislation would “block and prohibit all transactions” in the United States by social media companies with at least one million monthly users that are based in, or under the “substantial influence” of, countries that are considered foreign adversaries, including China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, Cuba and Venezuela.\n\nThe bill specifically names TikTok and its parent, ByteDance, as social media companies for the purposes of the legislation. Rubio and one of the House sponsors of the bill, Wisconsin Republican Rep. Mike Gallagher, had indicated their intention to introduce the bill in a Washington Post op-ed last month.\n\nThe legislation comes as a wave of states led by Republican governors have introduced state-level restrictions on the use of TikTok on government-owned devices. In the past two weeks, at least seven states have introduced such measures, including Maryland, South Dakota and Utah.\n\nThe flurry of activity contrasts with the lengthy negotiations TikTok has been having for years with the US government on a potential deal that may allow the company to address the national security concerns and to continue serving US users.\n\n“The federal government has yet to take a single meaningful action to protect American users from the threat of TikTok,” Rubio said in a statement. “There is no more time to waste on meaningless negotiations with a CCP-puppet company. It is time to ban Beijing-controlled TikTok for good.”\n\n“It’s troubling that rather than encouraging the Administration to conclude its national security review of TikTok, some members of Congress have decided to push for a politically-motivated ban that will do nothing to advance the national security of the United States,” Hilary McQuaide, a spokesperson for TikTok, said in a statement.\n\n“We will continue to brief members of Congress on the plans that have been developed under the oversight of our country’s top national security agencies—plans that we are well underway in implementing—to further secure our platform in the United States,” McQuaide added.\n\nTikTok has previously said it doesn’t share information with the Chinese government and that a US-based security team decides who can access US user data from China. TikTok has also previously acknowledged that employees based in China can currently access user data.\n\nTuesday’s bill is not the only federal legislation to target TikTok. Last year, US lawmakers proposed a law that would ban TikTok usage by federal agencies, and Rubio introduced a bill that would force some app makers to disclose ownership information. Another bill introduced this fall would prohibit TikTok from allowing China-based employees to access the user data of US citizens.\n\nAlready, the US military, the State Department and the Department of Homeland Security have restricted TikTok from devices under their control.", "authors": ["Brian Fung"], "publish_date": "2022/12/13"}, {"url": "https://www.cnn.com/2022/12/22/tech/washington-tiktok-big-tech/index.html", "title": "Washington moved fast to crack down on TikTok but has made little ...", "text": "CNN —\n\nIn a matter of days, the United States is expected to ban federal employees from downloading or using TikTok on government-issued phones or tablets, marking the country’s broadest crackdown on the short-form video app to date.\n\nThe looming ban is the result of a bill that’s moved through Congress in the final days of the year with lightning-fast speed and bipartisan support. It’s gone from being just another proposal from a Republican lawmaker to being unanimously adopted in the Senate, backed by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and added to a massive year-end congressional spending package. The proposed ban has support from the White House, which already blocks TikTok on its devices.\n\nThe TikTok measure, while limited in its impact on the app’s wider US user base, highlights how quickly lawmakers can act when a combination of national security fears, bipartisan anti-China suspicions, and more targeted proposals cause the legislative stars to align.\n\nBut in fast-tracking the bill, Congress can’t help but draw attention to its notable lack of progress on regulating American tech giants more broadly — despite years of reports, hearings and proposed legislation.\n\nThe stark difference between the two illustrates how simple narratives, well-funded lobbying and genuinely thorny policy questions can make or break a bill. It also hints at how a select few Big Tech companies continue to maintain their dominance in the market and their centrality in the lives of countless US households.\n\nWashington finds a different tech villain\n\nThe tech industry’s largest players have faced a kitchen sink of allegations in recent years. From knee-capping nascent rivals; to harming children and mental health; to undermining democracy; to spreading hate speech and harassment; to censoring conservative viewpoints; to bankrupting local news outlets; Big Tech has been made out as one of Washington’s largest villains.\n\nBut over the course of this year, TikTok has once again emerged as an even bigger target, two years after the Trump administration threatened to ban the application in the United States amid rising tensions with China. And one reason why is the relatively straightforward case that US policymakers have put forward for banning the app.\n\nThe central allegation against TikTok is that the company poses a potential national security risk. US officials have worried that the Chinese government could pressure TikTok or its parent company, ByteDance, into handing over the personal information of its US users, which could then be used for Chinese intelligence operations or the spreading of Chinese-backed disinformation.\n\nThere’s no evidence yet that that has actually happened. Still, policymakers and security experts have said China’s national security laws make it a possibility — identifying a kernel of risk that fits into a broader anti-China narrative linked to issues including trade, human rights and authoritarianism. Those concerns were renewed after a report this year suggested US user data had been repeatedly accessed by China-based employees. TikTok has disputed the report.\n\nIn recent weeks, numerous states have leapt on the bandwagon, further increasing the pressure on Congress to act. More than a dozen states have now banned TikTok on state government devices, from Maryland to South Dakota.\n\nTikTok has insisted it maintains robust security controls on its data and that it prioritizes user privacy. It has also taken steps in recent months to wall off US user data from other parts of its business, both technologically and organizationally. But earlier this year, it acknowledged that China-based employees can access TikTok user data and declined to commit to cutting off those data flows in general.\n\nSince 2020, TikTok has been negotiating with the US government on a possible deal to keep the app running in the United States. But those talks have so far proven fruitless, giving an opening to policymakers in Congress and at the state level to seek restrictions on TikTok.\n\n“We’re disappointed that Congress has moved to ban TikTok on government devices—a political gesture that will do nothing to advance national security interests—rather than encouraging the Administration to conclude its national security review,” said Brooke Oberwetter, a TikTok spokesperson.\n\nCongress has moved swiftly on a bill that would ban federal employees from downloading or using TikTok on government-issued phones or tablets. But it's been far slower to take meaningful action on American tech giants. Sarah Silbiger/Reuters\n\nTikTok’s head of public policy, Michael Beckerman, has called the ban affecting government devices a “political approach that doesn’t have any real impact on national security.”\n\n“We think a lot of the concerns are maybe overblown,” Beckerman told CNN’s Jake Tapper on Tuesday, “but we do think these problems can be solved” through the ongoing government negotiations.\n\nAmerican tech giants better at playing defense\n\nTikTok has significantly expanded its Washington presence in recent years.\n\nIn 2019, ByteDance had 17 lobbyists and spent $270,000 on lobbying, according to public records gathered by the transparency group OpenSecrets. By the end of last year, its lobbyist count had more than doubled and the company had spent nearly $5.2 million on lobbying.\n\nThat pales in comparison, however, to the full force of Big Tech’s lobbying machine, which has become one of the largest in Washington.\n\nMeta was the biggest internet industry lobbying giant last year, spending upward of $20 million. Next was Amazon at $19 million, then Google at almost $10 million. Combined, that’s roughly $49 million in lobbying — almost 10 times what was spent by TikTok’s parent, which nevertheless clocked in at number four on the list.\n\nTech giants have repeatedly deployed their CEOs to Capitol Hill, who in some cases have made arguments citing the threat of Chinese competition. They’ve also leaned on help from trade associations they’re members of and relied on advertising campaigns to make the case against some of the biggest legislative threats to their business.\n\nOne of those bills, the American Innovation and Choice Online Act (AICOA), would erect new barriers between tech platforms’ various lines of business, preventing Amazon, for example, from being able to compete with third-party sellers on its own marketplace. That legislation was a product of a 16-month House antitrust investigation into the tech industry that concluded, in 2020, that many of the biggest tech companies were effectively monopolies.\n\nFor much of this year, supporters of AICOA insisted the legislation had enough votes to pass, and they called on Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer to bring it to a floor vote. But between intense tech lobbying and doubts about whether the bill did in fact have the votes, it never received the floor time its supporters wanted. The same fate awaited other tech-focused antitrust bills, such as one that would have forced Apple to allow users to download iPhone apps from any website, not just its own app store.\n\nFor a brief moment this month, lawmakers seemed poised to pass a bill that could force Meta, Google and other platforms to pay news organizations a larger share of ad revenues. But the legislation stumbled after Meta warned it could have to drop news content from its platforms altogether if the bill passed.\n\nTime and again, Silicon Valley’s biggest players have maneuvered expertly in Washington, defending their turf from lawmakers keen to knock them down a peg.\n\nAn easy win for Congress\n\nBut it isn’t just lobbying that has made some of these bills difficult to pass. It’s much more challenging to impose sweeping regulations on an entire industry than it is to pass a bill governing how the US government handles its own technology.\n\nThe TikTok bill banning the app from government devices is seen as having a limited potential impact on the company’s wider US user base, which skews younger. A ban on public employees’ use of the app likely wouldn’t reach the many teens or other young people with whom the app has grown increasingly popular.\n\nWith at least 100 million US users as of 2020, and likely more by now, TikTok has become almost “too big” to ban outright, some analysts have said.\n\nPolitically speaking, in light of TikTok’s deep foothold among US consumers, a ban affecting government devices also represents low-hanging fruit for policymakers who enjoy clear legal authority over official devices and don’t have to worry about triggering a consumer backlash that a broader ban might invite.\n\nBy contrast, decisions about the rules government might impose on tech platforms have called into question how those regulations may affect different parts of the economy, from small businesses to individual users to the future of the internet itself.\n\nIn some cases, as with proposals to revise the tech industry’s decades-old content moderation liability shield, Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, legislation may raise First Amendment issues as well as partisan divisions. Democrats have said Section 230 should be changed because it gives social media companies a pass to leave some hate speech and offensive content unaddressed, while Republicans have called for changes to the law so that platforms can be pressured to remove less content.\n\nThe cross-cutting politics and the technical challenges of regulating an entire sector of technology, not to mention the potential consequences for the economy of screwing it up, have combined to make it genuinely difficult for lawmakers to reach an accord.\n\nIt’s no wonder, then, that when Congress sees an easier victory within its grasp, lawmakers take it.", "authors": ["Brian Fung"], "publish_date": "2022/12/22"}, {"url": "https://www.cnn.com/2022/11/29/tech/south-dakota-tiktok/index.html", "title": "South Dakota governor bans state employees from using TikTok on ...", "text": "1. How relevant is this ad to you?\n\nVideo player was slow to load content Video content never loaded Ad froze or did not finish loading Video content did not start after ad Audio on ad was too loud Other issues", "authors": ["Stella Chan Leslie Perrot", "Stella Chan", "Leslie Perrot"], "publish_date": "2022/11/29"}, {"url": "https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/education/2023/01/19/college-campuses-ban-tiktok/11067304002/", "title": "Why TikTok bans have spread onto college campuses in multiple ...", "text": "Leon Ondieki earns a living filming and posting TikTok videos on college campuses. He built up his following just before he enrolled at the University of Georgia and has amassed 2.1 million followers – which helped pay for his tuition and a car.\n\nAs a growing number of universities ban the wildly popular social media platform on school-owned devices and networks, Ondieki is adapting, posting on YouTube Shorts and Snapchat Spotlight. Now taking a gap year, he outfitted the sprinter van for his upcoming tour with Starlink, a broadband internet service, and a hot spot so he doesn't have to rely on campus Wi-Fi.\n\n\"For any content creator who's in school, I can see how this would be frustrating, especially considering that some content creators have made a lot of money for their schools,\" he said, pointing to high-profile athletes like Olympic gold medalist Sunisa Lee, who competes for Auburn University – which has banned the app – and who has more than 1.6 million TikTok followers\n\nThe University of Texas at Austin this week became one of the latest to announce it is restricting access to TikTok. Universities in Texas, Oklahoma and Georgia also are among those limiting access and shutting down official university accounts. The colleges often cite recent state and federal level bans when taking action.\n\nThe bans come after more than 30 states have issued varying TikTok bans, Congress banned TikTok from most government-issued devices, and the U.S. armed forces banned the app on military devices.\n\nExperts say that although the measures don't fully bar TikTok, they can inhibit faculty’s research, teaching and ability to connect with students.\n\nWhich schools have banned TikTok?\n\nWhy ban TikTok?\n\nTikTok is owned by Chinese company ByteDance, and some worry that it could share sensitive data with the Chinese government. FBI Director Christopher Wray told Congress in November that he is “extremely concerned” China could weaponize data collected through the app.\n\nHigher education institutions are being cautious because they could lose public funding or be sued if there's a majority security breach, said Vanessa Dennen, professor of instructional systems and learning technologies at Florida State University, which has no ban.\n\n\"Personnel data, student data, our research data – the protection of data is something that we're highly concerned with,\" Dennen said. \"There seems to be sufficient reasonable concern from a data security issue or standpoint and it's not unusual for universities to have this kind of a concern.\"\n\nDo TikTok bans work?\n\nThe restrictions do not erase TikTok from campus, Dennen said: Users can still access the app on personal devices using cellular data.\n\nUniversity of Texas at Austin professors Natalie Stroud and Samuel Woolley questioned whether the ban will have the intended security effect given staff are able to access university systems on their personal devices as well.\n\n\"It's unclear to me what the specific threat is of potential data gathered by the Chinese government,\" Woolley added.\n\nHow will the bans affect students and faculty?\n\nFor Stroud and Woolley, part of the university's Center for Media Engagement, the ban means they'll no longer be able to share information with students through the center's TikTok channel or share videos in classes. They said the ban will keep them from being able to effectively teach and research disinformation, misinformation and other forms of propaganda spreading on TikTok.\n\n\"If you're not able to relate to them with a communication medium that many of them use frequently, that's a significant handicap,\" Stroud said.\n\nUniversity faculty and staff also use the app to recruit students and engage with the school community and athletic fans.\n\n\"It isn't just the research,\" Dennen said. \"It is the marketing of the universities, of the institutions that would be affected.\"\n\nSixty-seven percent of U.S. teenagers say they use TikTok, according to the Pew Research Center. But Dennen said she doesn't believe the bans will have a major impact on most students.\n\n\"People will have their workarounds, and their workarounds are not going to be tremendously difficult or cumbersome,\" Dennen said.\n\nUT Austin professors:Why the TikTok ban needs university exemptions\n\nHow has TikTok responded to the bans?\n\nThe company is \"disappointed\" by the recent state-level bans, Jamal Brown, a spokesperson for TikTok, told USA TODAY.\n\n\"We're disappointed that so many states are jumping on the political bandwagon to enact policies that will do nothing to advance cybersecurity in their states and are based on unfounded falsehoods about TikTok,\" Brown said. \"We're especially sorry to see the unintended consequences of these rushed policies beginning to impact universities' ability to share information, recruit students, and build communities around athletic teams, student groups, campus publications, and more.\"\n\nDig deeper\n\nContributing: The Associated Press\n\nContact Breaking News Reporter N'dea Yancey-Bragg at nyanceybra@gannett.com or follow her on Twitter @NdeaYanceyBragg", "authors": [], "publish_date": "2023/01/19"}, {"url": "https://www.cnn.com/2022/12/22/tech/tiktok-universities/index.html", "title": "Some universities are now restricting TikTok access on campus ...", "text": "CNN —\n\nA small but growing number of universities are now blocking access to TikTok on school-owned devices or WiFi networks, in the latest sign of a widening crackdown on the popular short-form video app.\n\nThe University of Oklahoma and Auburn University in Alabama have each said they will restrict student and faculty access to TikTok, in order to comply with recent moves from the governors in their respective states to ban TikTok on government-issued devices. The 26 universities and colleges in the University System of Georgia are also reportedly taking a similar step.\n\n“In compliance with the Governor’s Executive Order 2022-33, effective immediately, no university employee or student shall access the TikTok application or website on University-owned or operated devices, including OU wired and wireless networks,” the University of Oklahoma said in an email this week.\n\nAccording to the email, the school will also require that university-administered TikTok accounts be deleted and “alternate social media platforms utilized in their place.”\n\nMore than a dozen states, including Maryland, South Dakota and Texas, have announced bans in recent weeks of TikTok for state employees on government-issued devices. The bans come as a growing number of lawmakers continue to scrutinize TikTok over possible national security concerns due to its ties to China through its parent company, ByteDance.\n\nThe criticism ramped up earlier this year after a Buzzfeed News report said some US user data has been repeatedly accessed from China, and cited one employee who allegedly said, “Everything is seen in China.” TikTok, for its part, has confirmed US user data can be accessed by some employees in China.\n\n“We’re disappointed that so many states are jumping on the political bandwagon to enact policies that will do nothing to advance cybersecurity in their states and are based on unfounded falsehoods about TikTok,” Jamal Brown, a spokesperson for TikTok, said in a statement provided to CNN on Thursday.\n\n“We’re especially sorry to see the unintended consequences of these rushed policies beginning to impact universities’ ability to share information, recruit students, and build communities around athletic teams, student groups, campus publications, and more,” Brown added.\n\nAuburn University in Alabama started restricting access to TikTok on school-owned devices or Wi-Fi networks last week, in accordance with Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey’s recent executive order for state-owned networks and devices to block access to and from the TikTok social media application.\n\nBut an Auburn University spokesperson told CNN the decision is “not a ban on campus.” TikTok users will still be able to access the app on personal devices via their own mobile data.\n\nLast week, a trio of lawmakers led by Republican Sen. Marco Rubio introduced a bill that aims to ban TikTok from operating in the United States. In a statement announcing the proposed legislation, Rubio accused TikTok of collecting data to “manipulate feeds” and blasted the app as a “CCP [Chinese Communist Party]-puppet company.”\n\nTikTok has been negotiating for years with the US government on a potential deal that addresses national security concerns and lets the app continue serving US customers. It has also taken steps to isolate US user data from other parts of its business.\n\nIn addition, TikTok faces scrutiny over it’s powerful algorithm which may lead users, and especially its youngest users, down concerning rabbit holes, including directing them to potentially harmful subject matter such as content around suicide and eating disorders.\n\nTikTok has made a number of announcements in recent years in an effort to ease concerns, including publishing tools to help users customize content recommendations, rolling out parental controls to give users more options to restrict what their children can see on the app, and pledging more transparency related to its content moderation systems for researchers.", "authors": ["Samantha Murphy Kelly"], "publish_date": "2022/12/22"}, {"url": "https://www.cnn.com/2022/12/28/tech/house-bans-tiktok/index.html", "title": "US House bans TikTok from official devices | CNN Business", "text": "Washington CNN —\n\nTikTok has been banned from electronic devices managed by the US House of Representatives, according to an internal notice sent to House staff.\n\nUsers who install the short-form video app on any House mobile device will be asked to remove the software, according to the notice, which was provided to CNN by the Office of the Chief Administrative Officer.\n\nThe notice identifies TikTok as a “high risk to users due to a number of security risks.”\n\nSeparately, the US government is soon expected to ban TikTok from all federal devices as part of legislation included in the $1.7 trillion omnibus bill awaiting President Joe Biden’s signature. The move comes after more than a dozen states in recent weeks have implemented their own prohibitions against TikTok on government devices.\n\nTikTok has previously called efforts to ban the app from government devices “a political gesture that will do nothing to advance national security interests.” TikTok declined to comment on the House restrictions.\n\nUS policymakers have cited TikTok as a potential national security risk, saying that the Chinese government could pressure TikTok or its parent company, ByteDance, into handing over the personal information of its US users, which could then be used for Chinese intelligence operations or the spreading of Chinese-backed disinformation.\n\nThere is no evidence that that has actually occurred, though the company last week confirmed that it fired four employees who improperly accessed the TikTok user data of two journalists on the platform.\n\nSince 2020, TikTok has been negotiating with the US government on a potential deal to resolve the national security concerns and allow the app to remain available to US users. TikTok has said that the potential agreement under review covers “key concerns around corporate governance, content recommendation and moderation, and data security and access.” The company has also taken some steps to wall off US user data, organizationally and technologically, from other parts of TikTok’s business.\n\nBut an apparent lack of progress in the talks has led some of TikTok’s critics, including in Congress and at the state level, to push for the app to be banned from government devices and potentially more broadly.", "authors": ["Brian Fung"], "publish_date": "2022/12/28"}, {"url": "https://www.cnn.com/2022/11/02/tech/fcc-commissioner-tiktok-ban/index.html", "title": "FCC commissioner calls for TikTok ban | CNN Business", "text": "Washington CNN Business —\n\nThe US government should ban TikTok rather than come to a national security agreement with the social media app that might allow it to continue operating in the United States, according to Brendan Carr, a commissioner at the Federal Communications Commission.\n\nA string of news reports this year about TikTok’s handling of US user data has left Carr with “little confidence there’s a path forward,” he told CNN in a phone interview Tuesday. “Perhaps the deal CFIUS ends up cutting is an amazing, airtight deal, but at this point I have a very, very difficult time looking at TikTok’s conduct thinking we’re going to cut a technical construct that they’re not going to find a way around.”\n\nThe Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, a multi-agency government body charged with reviewing business deals involving foreign ownership, has spent months negotiating with TikTok on a proposal to resolve concerns that Chinese government authorities could seek to gain access to the data TikTok holds on US citizens. This year the company said it had migrated its US user data to servers run by Oracle, but concerns have persisted over whether China-based employees of TikTok or its parent, ByteDance, will still be able to access that information. Those bipartisan fears were again raised in September, when under pressure from US lawmakers, TikTok declined to commit to cutting off data flows to China.\n\n“Commissioner Carr has no role in or direct knowledge of the confidential discussions with the US government related to TikTok and is not in a position to discuss what those negotiations entail” a TikTok spokesperson said in a statement to CNN. “We are confident that we are on a path to reaching an agreement with the US government that will satisfy all reasonable national security concerns.”\n\nCarr, who spoke to CNN from Taiwan during a first-ever visit by an FCC official to that country, said he has not met with CFIUS member agencies or the White House to specifically raise the issue, though he added the topic could have arisen incidentally amid other routine discussions.\n\nCarr’s call for a TikTok ban was first reported by Axios, and the remarks expand on his earlier calls for Apple and Google to remove TikTok from their respective app stores.\n\nCarr acknowledged that as an FCC official, his own capacity to regulate TikTok is limited; CFIUS, the Commerce Department or the Federal Trade Commission may have greater legal authority over the company, he said.\n\nStill, Carr said his call for a TikTok ban reflects a “natural progression in my thinking” and is informed by his own agency’s work to limit China’s influence in US telecommunications networks. The FCC has taken numerous steps to block or ban Chinese-affiliated telecom companies from selling equipment or services in the United States, over allegations that those companies could also be compelled to give up the data they hold on US communications to the Chinese government.\n\n“For me, this is taking what I’ve learned in the Huawei, ZTE, China Mobile context, where we’re looking at possibly nefarious data flows, and bringing it to bear in terms of this issue,” Carr said.", "authors": ["Brian Fung"], "publish_date": "2022/11/02"}]}
{"question_id": "20230120_5", "search_time": "2023/01/20/16:37", "search_result": [{"url": "https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2022/11/14/amazon-lay-off-10000-employees-report/10697110002/", "title": "Amazon plans to lay off about 10000 employees, largest in company ...", "text": "Amazon plans to lay off about 10,000 employees in what would be the largest reduction in the company's history, according to reports.\n\nThe New York Times reported the mass layoffs could begin as soon as this week and will focus on Amazon's devices organization, retail division and human resources, citing people with knowledge of the move who were not authorized to speak publicly.\n\nAmazon did not immediately confirm the layoffs to USA TODAY.\n\nThe reported layoffs would affect about 3% of Amazon's corporate employees and less than 1% of its global workforce. The company has more than 1.5 million workers worldwide.\n\nA recent report from market analysis firm Finbold found Amazon had lost 45% of its value in the past year, from $1.6 trillion on Jan. 1 to $939 billion on Nov. 3. Other companies, including Apple and Microsoft, also saw drops in value.\n\nPetra Moser, a professor of economics at New York University, had told USA TODAY the loss in market value probably would be felt through employment.\n\n'This is a dicey moment':Amazon, Apple, other tech giants lose billions in value as market wobbles\n\nJeff Bezos: Billionaire and Amazon founder says he plans to give most of his fortune to charity\n\nOther major tech companies have announced similar moves in recent weeks. Thousands of people were laid off at Twitter in the beginning of November, one week after billionaire Elon Musk acquired the company.\n\nA few days later, Facebook parent company Meta announced it was going to lay off more the 11,000 employees, about 13% of its workforce, \"to become a leaner and more efficient company.\"\n\nThe New York Times report comes as Amazon announced million of deals that will be available for its 48- hour Black Friday event, which begins Nov. 24.\n\nOn Oct. 27, Amazon announced in its third-quarter financial results that its net sales had increased more than 15% compared with last year, but operating income decreased to $2.5 billion compared with the $4.9 billion operating income in the same time span last year.\n\nA New York Times report from Oct. 4 said Amazon would freeze corporate hiring in its retail business for the rest of the year, but Amazon said it has plans to hire roughly 150,000 people for open seasonal, full-time and part-time roles \"across its operations network in the U.S. to help deliver for customers during the holidays.\"\n\nFollow Jordan Mendoza on Twitter: @jordan_mendoza5.", "authors": [], "publish_date": "2022/11/14"}, {"url": "https://www.cnn.com/2022/11/14/tech/amazon-layoffs-report/index.html", "title": "Amazon layoffs: Company plans to lay off thousands of employees ...", "text": "CNN Business —\n\nAmazon is planning to lay off some 10,000 employees in corporate and technology jobs, the New York Times reported on Monday, citing anonymous sources with knowledge of the matter.\n\nThe job cuts could start as early as this week, and will likely include staff working on Amazon (AMZN) devices (such as its voice-assistant Alexa), as well as people in its retail and human resources divisions, according to the report. “The total number of layoffs remains fluid,” the report stated.\n\nAmazon did not immediately respond to CNN Business’ request for comment Monday. CNN has not been able to independently confirm the report. The Wall Street Journal also reported Monday that Amazon is set to lay off thousands of workers, citing a person familiar with the matter.\n\nThe news would make Amazon the latest in a spate of tech companies that have announced significant layoffs in recent weeks, amid broader economic uncertainty and a sharp slowdown in the demand many tech giants saw during the pandemic that led them to quickly add staff. Last week, Facebook-parent Meta announced it is laying off 11,000 employees.\n\nEarlier this month, Amazon said it was freezing corporate hiring “for the next few months,” citing economic uncertainty and “how many people we have hired” in recent years. Amazon rapidly grew its headcount as the pandemic shifted consumer habits and spending towards e-commerce. In its most-recent earnings report, however, Amazon forecast its revenue for the holiday quarter would be lighter than analysts had expected.\n\nShares in Amazon have fallen more than 40% in 2022 so far amid a broader market decline.\n\nNews of potential layoffs comes at a crucial time for the retail industry, ahead of the holiday shopping season. Despite recession fears and inflationary pressures, the National Retail Federation is predicting a 6% to 8% sales increase from last year during the holiday shopping months.\n\nLast month, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos tweeted about the possibility of a looming recession, writing, “the probabilities in this economy tell you to batten down the hatches.” In an interview with CNN’s Chloe Melas on Saturday, Bezos said that advice was meant for business owners and consumers alike. “Take some risk off the table,” he said. “Just a little bit of risk reduction could make the difference.”", "authors": ["Catherine Thorbecke"], "publish_date": "2022/11/14"}, {"url": "https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2023/01/18/microsoft-layoffs-10000-employees-stock/11074235002/", "title": "Microsoft layoffs: 10,000 employees affected; stock opens higher", "text": "Microsoft announced thousands of job cuts this week, becoming the latest tech company to pluck its workforce as the global economy slows.\n\nThe software company confirmed Wednesday its reducing workforce by 10,000 people through the end of the third quarter of the 2023 fiscal year.\n\nThe cuts come “in response to macroeconomic conditions and changing customer priorities,\" the company's CEO Satya Nadella released in a statement to its employees Wednesday.\n\nMicrosoft reported the layoffs would affect roughly 5% of its workforce, with some notifications happening as early as Wednesday.\n\n\"It’s important to note that while we are eliminating roles in some areas, we will continue to hire in key strategic areas. We know this is a challenging time for each person impacted,\" Nadella wrote in the statement. \"The senior leadership team and I are committed that as we go through this process, we will do so in the most thoughtful and transparent way possible.\"\n\nAccording to Bloomberg, which cited a person familiar with the matter, Microsoft will cut jobs in a number of engineering divisions.\n\nInflation's cooling, rates are peaking:Is it time to buy stocks and bonds again?\n\nTax FAQs:What are the 2022 US federal tax brackets? What are the new 2023 tax brackets?\n\nMicrosoft stock (MSFT)\n\nThe company's stock was modestly higher in early Wednesday trading, opening at a share price of $241.56.\n\nHow many employees does Microsoft have?\n\nMicrosoft employs about 221,000 people around the world, including 122,000 in the United States, as of June 30, 2022.\n\nNadella: 'Difficult, but necessary'\n\nNadella also said the company will continue to invest in strategic areas for its future, \"meaning we are allocating both our capital and talent to areas of secular growth and long-term competitiveness for the company, while divesting in other areas.\"\n\n\"These are the kinds of hard choices we have made throughout our 47-year history to remain a consequential company in this industry that is unforgiving to anyone who doesn’t adapt to platform shifts,\" he wrote.\n\n\"As such, we are taking a $1.2 billion charge in Q2 related to severance costs, changes to our hardware portfolio, and the cost of lease consolidation as we create higher density across our workspaces .... We will treat our people with dignity and respect, and act transparently. These decisions are difficult, but necessary. \"\n\nMicrosoft layoffs come amid tech slowdown\n\nAfter a massive hiring spree in the first two years of the pandemic, industry giants like Amazon and Meta reversed course in 2022.\n\nThere were at least 154,000 layoffs from more than 1,000 tech companies last year, according to Layoffs.fyi, a website that has been tracking tech layoffs since March 2020.\n\nThe website's tallies – which are likely an undercount – have continued at a fast clip in 2023, with more than 25,000 layoffs recorded so far this year.\n\nLayoffs.fyi data shows the U.S. tech companies that trimmed the most jobs last year include:\n\nMeta: 11,000\n\nAmazon: 10,000\n\nCisco: 4,100\n\nCarvana: 4,000\n\nTwitter: 3,700\n\nLockdowns had a major effect on consumer spending. Experiences like travel or restaurants were largely off the table, so people began to shift their discretionary spending to products from tech companies like Amazon and Peloton.\n\nContributing: Bailey Schulz, USA TODAY\n\nNatalie Neysa Alund covers trending news for USA TODAY. Reach her at nalund@usatoday.com and follow her on Twitter @nataliealund.", "authors": [], "publish_date": "2023/01/18"}, {"url": "https://www.cnn.com/2022/11/16/tech/amazon-layoffs/index.html", "title": "Amazon confirms it has begun laying off employees | CNN Business", "text": "CNN —\n\nAmazon confirmed on Wednesday that layoffs had begun at the company, two days after multiple outlets reported the e-commerce giant planned to cut around 10,000 employees this week.\n\nThe initial cuts at Amazon will impact roles on the devices and services team, per a memo shared publicly by Dave Limp, senior vice president of devices & services at Amazon\n\n“After a deep set of reviews, we recently decided to consolidate some teams and programs. One of the consequences of these decisions is that some roles will no longer be required,” Limp said. “We notified impacted employees yesterday, and will continue to work closely with each individual to provide support, including assisting in finding new roles.”\n\nLimp did not specify how many employees have been cut.\n\nAmazon spokesperson Kelly Nantel told CNN Business in a statement that the company looks at all of its businesses as part of an annual operating review process. “As we’ve gone through this, given the current macro-economic environment (as well as several years of rapid hiring), some teams are making adjustments, which in some cases means certain roles are no longer necessary,” Nantel added.\n\nShe continued: “We don’t take these decisions lightly, and we are working to support any employees who may be affected.”\n\nOn Tuesday evening into Wednesday morning, many laid-off Amazon workers posted publicly on LinkedIn that they had been impacted by the job cuts and were looking for work. Some of these posts mentioned they were on teams involved with Amazon’s voice assistant, Alexa.\n\nAmazon and other tech firms significantly ramped up hiring over the past couple of years as the pandemic shifted consumers’ habits towards e-commerce. Now, many of these seemingly untouchable tech companies are experiencing whiplash and laying off thousands of workers as people return to pre-pandemic habits and macroeconomic conditions deteriorate.\n\nFacebook-parent Meta recently announced 11,000 job cuts, the largest in the company’s history. Twitter also announced widespread job cuts after Elon Musk bought the company for $44 billion, funded in part by debt financing.\n\nIn a sobering sign of the times, a growing number of business leaders in the tech sector – from Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg to Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey – have been issuing remorseful apologies in recent weeks as their employees lose their livelihoods.\n\nAfter reaching record highs during the pandemic, shares of Amazon have shed more than 40% in 2022 so far.", "authors": ["Catherine Thorbecke"], "publish_date": "2022/11/16"}, {"url": "https://www.cnn.com/2022/11/09/tech/meta-facebook-layoffs/index.html", "title": "Facebook parent company Meta will lay off 11000 employees", "text": "New York CNN Business —\n\nFacebook parent company Meta on Wednesday said it is laying off 11,000 employees, marking the most significant job cuts in the tech giant’s history.\n\nThe job cuts come as Meta confronts a range of challenges to its core business and makes an uncertain and costly bet on pivoting to the metaverse. It also comes amid a spate of layoffs at other tech firms in recent months as the high-flying sector reacts to high inflation, rising interest rates and fears of a looming recession.\n\n“Today I’m sharing some of the most difficult changes we’ve made in Meta’s history,” CEO Mark Zuckerberg wrote in a blog post to employees. “I’ve decided to reduce the size of our team by about 13% and let more than 11,000 of our talented employees go.”\n\nThe job cuts will impact many corners of the company, but Meta’s recruiting team will be hit particularly hard as “we’re planning to hire fewer people next year,” Zuckerberg said in the post. He added that a hiring freeze would be extended until the first quarter, with few exceptions.\n\nIn September, Meta had a headcount of more than 87,000, per a September SEC filing.\n\nMeta’s core ad sales business has been hit by privacy changes implemented by Apple, advertisers tightening budgets and heightened competition from newer rivals like TikTok. Meanwhile, Meta has been spending billions to build a future version of the internet, dubbed the metaverse, that likely remains years away from widespread acceptance.\n\nLast month, the company posted its second quarterly revenue decline and said that its profit was cut in half from the prior year. Once valued at more than $1 trillion last year, Meta’s market value has since plunged to around $250 billion.\n\n“I want to take accountability for these decisions and for how we got here,” Zuckerberg wrote in his post Wednesday. “I know this is tough for everyone, and I’m especially sorry to those impacted.”\n\nShares of Meta rose 5% in trading Wednesday following the announcement.\n\nMeta is not alone in feeling the pain of a market downturn. The tech sector has been facing a dizzying reality check as inflation, rising interest rates and more macroeconomic headwinds have led to a stunning shift in spending for an industry that only grew more dominant as consumers shifted more of their lives online during the pandemic.\n\n“At the start of Covid, the world rapidly moved online and the surge of e-commerce led to outsized revenue growth,” Zuckerberg wrote Wednesday. “Many people predicted this would be a permanent acceleration that would continue even after the pandemic ended. I did too, so I made the decision to significantly increase our investments. Unfortunately, this did not play out the way I expected.”\n\n“I got this wrong, and I take responsibility for that,” he added.\n\nMeta’s headcount in September was nearly twice the 48,268 staffers it had at the start of the pandemic in March of 2020.\n\nA handful of tech companies have announced hiring freezes or job cuts in recent months, often after having seen rapid growth during the pandemic. Last week, rideshare company Lyft said it was axing 13% of employees, and payment-processing firm Stripe said it was cutting 14% of its staff. The same day, e-commerce giant Amazon said it was implementing a pause on corporate hiring.\n\nAlso last week, Facebook-rival Twitter announced mass layoffs impacting roles across the company as its new owner, Elon Musk, took the helm.\n\nIn addition to the layoffs, Zuckerberg said the company expects to “roll out more cost-cutting changes” in the coming months. Meta, which like other tech giants is known for its vast, perk-filled offices, is rethinking its real estate needs, he said, and “transitioning to desk sharing for people who already spend most of their time outside the office.”\n\n“Overall,” he said, “this will add up to a meaningful cultural shift in how we operate.”", "authors": ["Catherine Thorbecke"], "publish_date": "2022/11/09"}, {"url": "https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2023/01/18/amazon-layoffs-18000-employees/11076820002/", "title": "Amazon layoffs result in more than 18,000 job cuts since November", "text": "Amazon began laying off thousands of more employees Wednesday, as the online retailer and cloud computing giant continues the largest job cuts in its history just months after an initial round of 10,000 job cuts.\n\nThe Seattle Times and multiple other outlets reported Amazon made the staff reductions in its human resources and stores division, as the company is expected to lay off about an added 8,000 employees. Doug Herrington, Amazon's worldwide retail chief, said in a memo the company would begin to notify employees by email Wednesday, according to Bloomberg.\n\nHere's what to know about Amazon's layoffs:\n\nTracking tech layoffs:Why companies like Amazon and Meta cut jobs in 2022\n\nMicrosoft:Company to lay off 10,000 employees starting Wednesday; roughly 5% of workforce affected\n\nAmazon to lay off over 18,000 employees\n\nAmazon began making layoffs to its devices organization, retail division and human resources divisions in November, cutting about 10,000 employees.\n\nOn Jan. 4, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy announced the company planned to lay off more than 18,000 employees \"between the reductions we made in November and the ones we’re sharing today.\" The additional layoff notifications would begin Jan. 18, Jassy said.\n\nAmazon didn't specify to USA TODAY how many cuts would be made to certain departments, but Jassy previously said the majority were being made in its Amazon Stores and PXT (People, Experience, and Technology) organizations.\n\nHow many employees does Amazon have?\n\nAmazon had over 1.5 million employees as of October 2022.\n\nWhat is Amazon is saying about the layoffs?\n\nJassy said in his Jan. 4 note the company will be providing severance packages to affected employees, including separation payments, transitional health insurance benefits and external job placement support.\n\n\"Amazon has weathered uncertain and difficult economies in the past, and we will continue to do so. These changes will help us pursue our long-term opportunities with a stronger cost structure,\" he said. \"However, I’m also optimistic that we’ll be inventive, resourceful, and scrappy in this time when we’re not hiring expansively and eliminating some roles. Companies that last a long time go through different phases. They’re not in heavy people expansion mode every year.\"\n\nAmazon, Microsoft and more tech companies lay off employees\n\nAmazon's news comes the same day Microsoft announced it would be reducing its workforce by 10,000 people through the end of the third quarter of the 2023 fiscal year (ending March 31).\n\nThey aren't the only tech companies to recently lay off employees; there were at least 154,000 layoffs from more than 1,000 tech companies last year, according to Layoffs.fyi, a website that has been tracking tech layoffs since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic in March 2020.\n\nMore than 26,000 jobs have been cut in 2023 so far, as Layoffs.fyi creator Roger Lee previously told USA TODAY he doesn't see layoffs \"going away anytime soon.\"\n\nContributing: Bailey Schulz, USA TODAY\n\nFollow Jordan Mendoza on Twitter: @jordan_mendoza5.", "authors": [], "publish_date": "2023/01/18"}, {"url": "https://www.cnn.com/2022/11/17/tech/amazon-ceo-layoffs-andy-jassy/index.html", "title": "Amazon CEO says job cuts will continue into 2023 | CNN Business", "text": "CNN Business —\n\nAmazon CEO Andy Jassy said job cuts at the e-commerce giant would continue into early next year, in his first public remarks since the company began widespread layoffs earlier this week.\n\n“Our annual planning process extends into the new year, which means there will be more role reductions as leaders continue to make adjustments,” Jassy wrote in a letter to staff Thursday. “Those decisions will be shared with impacted employees and organizations early in 2023.”\n\nJassy said that the company hasn’t “concluded yet exactly how many other roles will be impacted” by the layoffs, but added that “each leader will communicate to their respective teams when we have the details nailed down.”\n\nAmazon confirmed on Wednesday that layoffs had begun at the company, just days after multiple outlets reported the e-commerce giant planned to cut around 10,000 employees this week.\n\nAmazon (AMZN) and other tech firms significantly ramped up hiring over the past couple of years as the pandemic shifted consumers’ habits toward e-commerce. Now, many of these seemingly untouchable tech companies are experiencing whiplash and laying off thousands of workers as people return to pre-pandemic habits and macroeconomic conditions deteriorate.\n\nFacebook-parent Meta recently announced 11,000 job cuts, the largest in the company’s history. Twitter also announced widespread job cuts after Elon Musk bought the company for $44 billion.\n\nJassy alluded to the macroeconomic climate in his memo Thursday, saying this year’s annual operating review “is more difficult due to the fact that the economy remains in a challenging spot and we’ve hired rapidly the last several years.”\n\nJassy said that this is the most difficult decision the company has had to make during his year-and-a-half tenure at Amazon’s helm.\n\n“It’s not lost on me or any of the leaders who make these decisions that these aren’t just roles we’re eliminating, but rather, people with emotions, ambitions, and responsibilities whose lives will be impacted,” Jassy wrote.", "authors": ["Catherine Thorbecke"], "publish_date": "2022/11/17"}, {"url": "https://www.cnn.com/2022/11/18/investing/premarket-stocks-trading/index.html", "title": "Premarket stocks: Fed officials crushed investors' hopes this week ...", "text": "New York CNN Business —\n\nInvestors sleuthing for clues about what the Federal Reserve will decide during its December policy meeting got quite a few this week. But those hints about the future of monetary policy point to an outcome they won’t be very happy about.\n\nWhat’s happening: Federal Reserve officials made a series of speeches this week indicating that aggressive interest rate hikes to fight inflation would continue, souring investors’ hopes for a forthcoming central bank policy shift. On Thursday, St. Louis Federal Reserve President James Bullard said the central bank still has a lot of work to do before it brings inflation under control, sending the S&P 500 down more than 1% in early trading. It later pared losses.\n\nBullard, a voting member on the rate-setting Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC), said that the moves the Fed has made so far to fight inflation haven’t been sufficient. “To attain a sufficiently restrictive level, the policy rate will need to be increased further,” he said.\n\nThose comments come a day after Kansas City Fed President Esther George, a voting member of the FOMC, said to The Wall Street Journal that she’s “looking at a labor market that is so tight, I don’t know how you continue to bring this level of inflation down without having some real slowing, and maybe we even have contraction in the economy to get there.”\n\nSan Francisco Fed President Mary Daly added on Wednesday that a pause in rate hikes was “off the table.”\n\nA numbers game: Fed officials should increase interest rates to somewhere between 5% and 7% to tamp inflation, Bullard said Thursday. Those numbers shocked investors, as they would require a series of significant and economically painful hikes which increase the chance of a hard landing.\n\nThe current interest rate sits between 3.75% and 4% and the median FOMC participant projected a peak funds rate of 4.5-4.75% in September. If those numbers hold steady, Fed members would only raise rates by another three-quarters of a percentage point.\n\nBut Fed Chair Powell said at the November meeting that the projections are likely to rise in December and if Bullard is correct, that means investors can expect another one to three percentage points in rate hikes.\n\nDreams of a pivot: October’s softer-than-expected CPI and producer price reading bolstered investors’ hopes that the Fed might ease its aggressive rate hikes and sent markets soaring to their best day since 2020 last week.\n\nBut messaging from Fed officials this week has brought Wall Street back down to earth.\n\nThat’s because market rallies help to expand the economy, said Liz Ann Sonders, Managing Director and Chief Investment Strategist at Charles Schwab, which is the opposite of what the Fed is trying to do with its tightening policy. Fed officials could be attempting to do some “jawboning” via excessively hawkish speeches in order to bring markets down, she said.\n\nThe bottom line: Investors listen closely to Bullard’s comments because he’s known for having looser lips than other Fed officials, Peter Boockvar, chief investment officer of Bleakley Financial Group, wrote in a note Thursday. But his hawkish predictions may have been “overboard,” especially since he won’t be a voting member of the FOMC next year.\n\nStill, Wall Street analysts are listening. Goldman Sachs raised its peak fed funds rate forecast on Thursday to 5-5.25%, up from 4.75-5%.\n\nTech layoffs don’t mean impending recession\n\nA series of high-profile layoffs have rattled Big Tech this month.\n\nAmazon confirmed that layoffs had begun at the company and would continue into next year, just days after multiple outlets reported the e-commerce giant planned to cut around 10,000 employees. Facebook-parent Meta recently announced 11,000 job cuts, the largest in the company’s history. Twitter also announced widespread job cuts after Elon Musk bought the company for $44 billion.\n\nThe series of high-profile layoff announcements prompted fears that the labor market was weakening and that a recession could be around the corner.\n\nThose fears aren’t unwarranted: The Federal Reserve is actively working to slow economic growth and tighten financial conditions to rebalance the white-hot labor market. Further layoffs in both tech and other industries are likely inevitable as the Fed continues to raise interest rates.\n\nBut this wave of layoffs isn’t as significant as headlines might lead Americans to believe. Thursday’s weekly jobless claims actually fell by 4,000 to 222,000 in spite of the surge in tech job cuts.\n\nIn a note on Thursday Goldman Sachs analysts outlined three reasons why the layoffs may not point to a looming recession in the US.\n\nFirst off, the tech industry accounts for a small share of aggregate employment in the US. While information technology companies account for 26% of the S&P 500 market cap, it accounts for less than 0.3% of total employment.\n\nSecond, tech job openings remain well above their pre-pandemic level, so laid-off tech workers should have good chances of finding new jobs.\n\nFinally, tech worker layoffs have frequently spiked in the past without a corresponding increase in total layoffs and have not historically been a leading indicator of broader labor market deterioration, Goldman analysts found.\n\n“The main problem in the labor market is still that labor demand is too strong, not too weak,” they concluded.\n\nMortgage rates plunge in largest weekly drop since 1981\n\nMortgage rates dropped sharply last week following a series of economic reports that indicated inflation may finally be easing, reports my colleague Anna Bahney\n\nThe 30-year fixed-rate mortgage averaged 6.61% in the week ending November 17, down from 7.08% the week before, according to Freddie Mac, the largest weekly drop since 1981.\n\nBut that’s still significantly higher than a year ago when the 30-year fixed rate stood at 3.10%.\n\n“While the decline in mortgage rates is welcome news, there is still a long road ahead for the housing market,” said Sam Khater, Freddie Mac’s chief economist. “Inflation remains elevated, the Federal Reserve is likely to keep interest rates high and consumers will continue to feel the impact.”\n\nAffording a home remains a challenge for many home buyers. Mortgage rates are expected to remain volatile for the rest of the year. And prices remain elevated in many areas, especially where there is a very limited inventory of available homes for sale.\n\nMeanwhile, inflation and rising interest rates mean many would-be buyers are also facing tightened budgets.", "authors": ["Nicole Goodkind"], "publish_date": "2022/11/18"}, {"url": "https://www.cnn.com/2022/11/17/us/five-things-november-17-trnd/index.html", "title": "5 things to know for November 17: House, Layoffs, UVA shooting ...", "text": "CNN —\n\nGet '5 Things' in your inbox If your day doesn’t start until you’re up to speed on the latest headlines, then let us introduce you to your new favorite morning fix. Sign up here for the ‘5 Things’ newsletter.\n\nNASA’s Artemis I mission that launched Wednesday has shared a spectacular view of Earth on its way to the moon. If you often marvel at space and its endless expanse, you may also enjoy tracking the spacecraft in real time as it travels thousands of miles away from our planet.\n\nHere’s what else you need to know to Get Up to Speed and On with Your Day.\n\n(You can get “5 Things You Need to Know Today” delivered to your inbox daily. Sign up here.)\n\n1. House\n\nRepublicans will win the House of Representatives, CNN projects, after passing the threshold of 218 seats needed for control of the chamber. The victory falls short of the GOP’s hopes of a “red wave” but will thwart President Joe Biden’s domestic agenda and will likely subject his White House to relentless investigations. The GOP win, on the other hand, could create an environment where both parties are more productive than you think – as research shows the US government actually overperforms during periods of divided government. The House win for Republicans also means House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy is in line to be the next speaker and will bring an end to Democrat Nancy Pelosi’s second tenure in January. Pelosi is expected to “address her future plans” today, her spokesperson said, with many anticipating she may step aside for a new generation of leadership.\n\n2. Tech layoffs\n\nAmazon has confirmed it has begun laying off employees, a few days after multiple outlets reported the e-commerce giant planned to cut around 10,000 people this week. Amazon’s layoffs come as several major tech companies are significantly scaling back their workforces as people return to pre-pandemic habits. Facebook parent Meta recently announced 11,000 job cuts, the largest in the company’s history. Twitter also announced widespread job cuts after Elon Musk bought the company for $44 billion. Musk has given employees until this evening to commit to “extremely hardcore” work or else leave the company, according to a copy of an internal email sent by the billionaire and obtained by CNN.\n\nVideo Ad Feedback Twitter under Musk shows 'the unwinding of a person' not a company: Scott Galloway 10:17 - Source: CNN\n\n3. UVA shooting\n\nThe student accused of killing three University of Virginia football players was denied bail Wednesday as chilling new details emerge. The suspect was on a field trip Sunday with fellow UVA students to see a play in Washington, DC, a university spokesperson said. When the bus returned to the Charlottesville campus, authorities said, the 22-year-old opened fire on the bus, killing the three players. According to a witness, the suspect shot one of the three players while he was sleeping, the Albemarle County prosecutor said. The suspect is in custody and faces several charges, including second-degree murder and counts of using a handgun in the commission of a felony.\n\nVideo Ad Feedback 'Bizarre': Witness speaks about confrontation before shooting 01:59 - Source: CNN\n\n4. Ukraine\n\nPresident Biden today responded to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s claim that a Ukrainian missile was not responsible for a deadly explosion in Poland on Tuesday that killed two people. “That’s not the evidence,” Biden told reporters at the White House after returning from the G20 summit in Bali, Indonesia. Polish officials say it is likely that a Ukrainian missile, deployed by its air defenses amid waves of Russian missile attacks, fell inside Polish territory. Meanwhile, Russian shelling and missile strikes continued to target civilian infrastructure overnight, including gas and electricity facilities, according to Ukrainian officials. Russia’s renewed attacks on civilian infrastructure come after Moscow’s forces fired around 100 missiles on at least a dozen cities and districts in Ukraine on Tuesday.\n\nVideo Ad Feedback Missile that hit Poland may have come from Ukraine 02:56 - Source: CNN\n\n5. College rankings\n\nYale and Harvard law schools, two of the premier law schools in the country, announced they are parting ways with U.S. News & World Report’s rankings of best law schools. The schools are bowing out after criticizing the publication’s methodology, arguing that the list actively perpetuates disparities in law schools. Given the elite status of Yale and Harvard, the move is significant and could signal a greater shift away from college rankings. For years, policymakers and those working in higher education have dismissed the rankings, though they are still referenced by potential students and their families. The decisions have been met with praise, but some questioned whether the move, if followed by other schools, would make it more difficult for the average person to choose to which colleges to apply.\n\nBREAKFAST BROWSE\n\n‘Most Cringiest Thing’: Daniel Craig dances in new ad\n\nThe man we know as James Bond ditched his dapper suits to perform a hilarious dance number in a vodka ad. Watch the video here.\n\nTaylor Swift’s ‘Midnights’ snubbed at Grammys?\n\nSome are asking why Swift’s phenomenally successful album “Midnights” was not nominated for a Grammy this week. Here’s what happened.\n\nAndy Warhol artwork sells for ‘monumental’ $85.4 million\n\nWarhol may be best known for his pop art prints of Marilyn Monroe and Campbell’s soup cans, but this piece just joined the most valuable post-war works ever to sell at auction.\n\nFreeze your feast: The ultimate make-ahead Thanksgiving\n\nForget feeling overwhelmed in the kitchen this year. Here’s how you can prepare your Thanksgiving feast ahead of time to have a stress-free holiday.\n\nCoffee prices are down thanks to better weather in Brazil\n\nRain in Brazil is making for a good coffee crop this year, securing supply… but it may not mean much for your cup of joe. Starbucks and other stores are still raising prices amid increasing labor and distribution costs.\n\nTODAY’S NUMBER\n\n4 feet\n\nThat’s how much snow could be dumped on western New York in the coming days as forecasters are now measuring the potential snowfall in feet rather than inches. This week’s lake effect snowfall in and around Buffalo and Watertown is expected to be “paralyzing,” the National Weather Service said. Historical events in the region include November 2000, when many were stranded in their vehicles as two feet of snow fell in less than 24 hours, and the twin storms that made “Snow-mageddon” in 2014 infamous with over 5 feet of snow.\n\nTODAY’S QUOTE\n\n“I still pray for the president. And I pray for the grace to forgive him and all those responsible for that tragic day.”\n\n– Former Vice President Mike Pence, on whether he is still angry with former President Donald Trump for putting his family at risk during the January 6 insurrection. During a CNN town hall on Wednesday, Pence was shown a video of his family fleeing for safety at the US Capitol. Pence reacted to the video with dismay, calling Trump’s rhetoric and behavior “reckless.” Still, he emphasized that he is moving on from being angry because “in the Christian faith, forgiveness is not optional.”“\n\nTODAY’S WEATHER\n\nVideo Ad Feedback Second round of heavy lake effect snow begins late Thursday 03:09 - Source: CNN\n\nCheck your local forecast here>>>\n\nAND FINALLY\n\n\"Moon River\" on Piano for Sharky the Dog\n\nDog enjoys peaceful piano\n\nWatch this talented 7-year-old beautifully play “Moon River” for her dog, Sharky. You may recognize this song from “Breakfast at Tiffany’s,” originally performed by Audrey Hepburn. (Click here to view)", "authors": ["Alexandra Meeks"], "publish_date": "2022/11/17"}, {"url": "https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/business/2012/10/30/swiss-bank-layoffs/1667979/", "title": "Swiss bank UBS plans massive layoffs of 10,000", "text": "AP\n\nUBS posts huge 3Q losses, aims to shrink ailing investment bank\n\nBank plans to lay off 16% of workforce in 57 countries by 2015\n\nSwitzerland's biggest bank hit by series of costly blunders in recent years\n\nGENEVA (AP) — Swiss banking giant UBS plans to cut as many as 10,000 employees, or some 16% of its staff, to drastically shrink its ailing investment bank.\n\nNews of the layoffs came as Switzerland's biggest bank posted another big loss for the third quarter. It said Tuesday that the job cuts are part of a strategy to shore up profits.\n\nAs a result, UBS said it needs to reduce its headcount to \"around 54,000\" by 2015, down from its current 64,000 employees in 57 countries.\n\n\n\nSome 7,500 jobs are to be cut mainly in London and the United States, where UBS has a prominent building and trading operations in Stamford, Conn., near New York City. The other 2,500 cuts are to be in Switzerland.\n\n\n\nInvestors cheered the move and the stock was trading 5% higher Tuesday in Zurich on top of the 7.3% rise Monday amid speculation over the cuts.\n\n\n\nThe announcement of the job cuts came as the Zurich-based bank posted a loss of $2.31 billion in the third quarter, in contrast to last year's equivalent net profit of $1.13 billion in the same three period.\n\n\n\nUBS blamed the loss on a $1 billion charge at the investment bank and an $920 million hit linked to an accounting rule on how banks must value their debt.\n\n\n\nBanks can post gains if the value of their debt falls, because it would theoretically become cheaper for the bank to repurchase that debt. But the rule also says that when a bank's debt increases, it must take a write-down because it would theoretically have to pay more to buy back its own debt on the open market.\n\n\n\nIn what it called \"a significant acceleration\" in its transformation, the bank said it would sharpen its focus on the investment bank and appoint a new executive, Andrea Orcel, formerly of Bank of America, to lead it. The current co-head of the investment bank, Carsten Kengeter, is stepping down from the group's executive board to unwind the non-core assets.\n\n\n\nUBS said it also plans to save millions of dollars in additional costs through 2015, but that the reorganization will result in restructuring charges of nearly the same amount over the next three years, including a charge next quarter.\n\n\n\nUBS CEO Sergio Ermotti said the investment unit, which has been hit by a series of costly blunders in recent years, will \"continue to be a significant global player in its core businesses.\"\n\n\n\nBut tighter industry-wide requirements for banks to increase their capital cushion also have hurt profitability as banks have less cash to invest.\n\n\n\n\"It can't get better than this point for us to act,\" he told reporters.\n\n\n\nErmotti, who took over in November after the discovery of unauthorized trading last year, has been downsizing the investment bank to meet stricter capital requirements and shrinking profits due largely to Europe's sovereign debt crisis.\n\n\n\nFormer UBS trader Kweku Adoboli has been facing trial in London this month on charges of committing fraud that cost the bank $2.3 billion. He has told the jury that the losses came after senior traders persuaded him to change from a bearish to a bullish point of view in July 2011.\n\n\n\nThe bank has been under fire on other fronts. In 2008, it was forced to seek a bailout from the Swiss government when it was hard hit by the financial crisis and its fixed-income unit had more than $50 billion in losses.\n\n\n\nUBS is one of several global banks being investigated in the U.S. and other countries for the alleged rigging of benchmark interest rates known as Libor, or London Interbank Offered Rate.\n\n\n\nIn April, Ermotti said Switzerland's tax disputes with the U.S. and some European nations are \"an economic war,\" putting 20,000 jobs at risk.\n\n\n\nSwitzerland has been trying to shed its image as a tax haven, signing deals with the U.S., Germany and Britain to provide greater assistance to foreign tax authorities seeking information on their citizens' accounts in the Alpine nation.\n\n\n\nBut the tax agreements have drawn fire from Switzerland's nationalist People's Party, which won more than a quarter of the vote in last year's general election, with some lawmakers saying they will try to block the treaties through referendums.", "authors": [], "publish_date": "2012/10/30"}]}
{"question_id": "20230120_6", "search_time": "2023/01/20/16:37", "search_result": [{"url": "https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/wnba/lynx/2018/05/04/wnba-lynx-coach-cheryl-reeve-gender-white-house-snub-trump/580065002/", "title": "Champion WNBA coach on no White House invite: 'Probably ...", "text": "Cheryl Reeve, the coach and general manager of the WNBA champion Minnesota Lynx, said this week that she believes her team has not been invited to the White House at least in part because of how President Donald Trump's administration views women.\n\n\"It’s hard not to think that gender is playing a role here because of the consistency with which men’s teams are being invited and celebrated,\" Reeve told The Washington Post on Thursday. \"I think it reflects the priorities of this particular administration.\"\n\nReeve told reporters Wednesday that the Lynx received congratulatory phone calls and invitations to the White House from Trump's predecessor, Barack Obama, after their previous title wins in 2011, 2013 and 2015. More than seven months have passed since their most recent championship and they have yet to hear from Trump, she said.\n\n\"It's probably because we're a women's sport and it maybe is not on our president's radar,\" Reeve said on a podcast with Star Tribune columnist Jim Souhan.\n\nReeve, a two-time WNBA coach of the year, told reporters that if the White House extends an invitation, she will meet with a group of veterans on the team, and they will decide whether to accept it.\n\nThe White House press office did not immediately reply to an email from USA TODAY Sports seeking comment.\n\nVisiting the White House has long been a tradition for championship sports teams, but it has not been a certainty under Trump. The president withdrew a White House invitation for the NBA champion Golden State Warriors after star Stephen Curry said he didn't want to attend. (The Warriors went to the National Museum of African American History and Culture with a group of children instead.)\n\nMore recently, several prominent Olympians who have been critical of President Trump — including skier Lindsey Vonn and figure skater Adam Rippon — skipped a trip to the White House.\n\nHowever, several major professional teams have received and accepted invitations to the White House since Trump's arrival, including the NFL's Super Bowl LI champion New England Patriots, MLB champion Houston Astros, NHL champion Pittsburgh Penguins and NCAA football champion, Alabama. In late April, a Philadelphia Eagles spokesman told The New York Times that the team is \"discussing the logistics of an upcoming visit to Washington.\"\n\nGiven those trips, Reeve said, the absence of an invitation for the champion of the most popular women's professional sports league stands out.\n\n\"That’s the disappointment, is, what’s going on here?\" she told The Post. \"Let’s not perpetuate this antiquated narrative that women are less than men, because we’re not. And that has to change.\"\n\nContact Tom Schad at tschad@usatoday.com or on Twitter @Tom_Schad.", "authors": [], "publish_date": "2018/05/04"}, {"url": "https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/ncaaf/2019/01/14/clemson-white-house-donald-trump-hosts-national-football-champions/2568501002/", "title": "Clemson football team visits White House, greeted by President ...", "text": "WASHINGTON — Exactly one week after beating Alabama to win their second national championship in three years, the Clemson Tigers traveled to the White House on Monday for a celebration hosted by President Donald Trump.\n\nAnd they were greeted with a buffet of fast food.\n\nIn the midst of the longest partial government shutdown in U.S. history, Trump welcomed coach Dabo Swinney, quarterback Trevor Lawrence and 75 other players with stacks of burgers from McDonald's, Burger King and Wendy's, among other assorted fast food.\n\nPress secretary Sarah Sanders said in a statement that Trump covered the cost of the food because \"the Democrats refuse to negotiate on border security\" and \"much of the residence staff at the White House is furloughed.\"\n\nStart the day smarter:Get USA TODAY's Daily Briefing in your inbox\n\n\"I had a choice,\" Trump said. \"Do we have no food for you? ... Or do we give you some little quick salads that the First Lady will make, along with the Second Lady — they'll make some salads.\n\n\"(No), I said, you guys aren't into salads.\"\n\nThough the White House did not initially detail the amount of fast food and its costs, Trump said he ordered \"about 1,000 hamburgers\" for the group. He believed the football players would enjoy the meal because they have some \"very large people that like eating.\"\n\nThe result was an unusual scene in the East Room, where empty boxes of Big Macs sat atop intricately embroidered tablecloths and the ornate room smelled lightly of grease.\n\nAs the Clemson contingent finished eating, Trump stepped to the podium and spent much of his time praising the Tigers' 44-16 win over the Crimson Tide. He singled out wide receiver Hunter Renfrow, defensive coordinator Brent Venables, cornerback A.J. Terrell and Lawrence in his remarks.\n\n\"Oh I want to be the agent for that tall, handsome quarterback,\" Trump said of Lawrence. \"Six foot seven, they say great athlete, and he's accurate. That's nice.\"\n\nIt was the Tigers' second trip to the White House in less than two years, making Clemson the only repeat visitor among championship sports teams since Trump took office. The program previously met with Trump in the summer of 2017, roughly five months after its previous title-game victory that completed the 2016 season.\n\nMonday's celebration also came just seven days after the national title game — an unusually quick turnaround for a team's White House visit.\n\nTrump announced the visit in a tweet Friday, and expressed excitement about the unique menu for the event Monday morning before flying to New Orleans to address the American Farm Bureau Federation's convention. Clemson, meanwhile, spent part of Monday afternoon on the National Mall, including a pit stop at the Lincoln Memorial.\n\n\"What a fun day it's been,\" Swinney said during his remarks in the East Room. \"It's an honor to be a part of this tradition, and to be honest with you, it's really cool that football can create an opportunity like this.\"\n\nWhite House visits have long been a tradition for championship teams and athletes, but they have become increasingly sporadic under Trump. None of the four NCAA men's and women's basketball champions have visited the White House under Trump, nor have the two-time NBA champion Golden State Warriors.\n\nThe most recent NFL champions, the Philadelphia Eagles, were initially invited to visit last summer before Trump learned that they would not be sending a large delegation and rescinded the invitation. The defending World Series champion Red Sox have accepted a White House invitation but a date for the visit has yet to be announced.\n\nContact Tom Schad at tschad@usatoday.com or on Twitter @Tom_Schad.", "authors": [], "publish_date": "2019/01/14"}, {"url": "https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/nba/2018/06/08/donald-trump-lebron-james-steph-curry-not-invited-white-house/684154002/", "title": "Donald Trump: LeBron James, Steph Curry not invited to White House", "text": "President Donald Trump told reporters Friday morning that he will not invite the Cleveland Cavaliers or Golden State Warriors to visit the White House following the conclusion of this year's NBA Finals.\n\nCavaliers forward LeBron James and Warriors guard Stephen Curry said their teams had no interest in a prospective White House visit.\n\n\"I didn't invite LeBron James, and I didn't invite Steph Curry. We're not going to invite either team,\" Trump told reporters before departing for Canada, where he will participate in the G7 Summit.\n\n\"But we have other teams that are coming. If you look, we had Alabama — national champion. We had Clemson, national champion. We had the New England Patriots. We had the Pittsburgh Penguins last year.\"\n\nTrump also said he believes the Washington Capitals will make a visit to the White House after clinching their first Stanley Cup title with a 4-3 win over the Vegas Golden Knights on Thursday night. The president congratulated the team on Twitter earlier Friday.\n\nFollow every game: Latest NBA Scores and Schedules\n\n\"I think we'll have the Caps. We'll see,\" Trump told reporters. \"You know, my attitude is if they want to be here, the greatest place on Earth, I'm here. If they don't want to be here, I don't want them.\"\n\nIn a similar situation last year, Trump uninvited the Warriors from visiting the White House after Curry and other prominent members of the team said they weren't interested in attending a ceremony. The move prompted a tweet from James, who wrote \"U bum @StephenCurry30 already said he ain't going! So therefore ain't no invite. Going to White House was a great honor until you showed up!\"\n\nProfessional and college sports teams have long celebrated championships with a ceremonial visit to the White House, but the tradition has become increasingly controversial under Trump.\n\nJust this week, the president abruptly uninvited the Super Bowl champion Philadelphia Eagles from visiting the White House, in part because they planned to bring a \"smaller delegation\" rather than their full team. White House press secretary Sarah Sanders accused the Eagles of pulling \"a political stunt.\"\n\nThe Minnesota Lynx, the reigning WNBA champions, did not receive an invitation to the White House and instead spent a day performing community service in Washington this week.\n\nContact Tom Schad at tschad@usatoday.com or on Twitter @Tom_Schad.", "authors": [], "publish_date": "2018/06/08"}, {"url": "https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2017/09/25/trumps-approach-sports-breaks-long-bipartisan-tradition/699543001/", "title": "Trump's approach to championship sports teams breaks tradition", "text": "WASHINGTON — Ever since President Jimmy Carter invited the NBA's Washington Bullets to the White House in 1978, presidents of both parties have used the White House to celebrate championship teams as the embodiment of American virtues of teamwork, determination and diversity.\n\nBut President Trump's weekend assaults on those who took a knee during the anthem have jeopardized that tradition, as the event has become wrapped up in cultural wars over patriotism, police violence and race during the Trump presidency.\n\nFirst, Trump said at a rally Friday night that NFL owners should fire any player who kneels in protest during the national anthem. \"Get that son of a bitch off the field right now,\" he said. What followed was a weekend of non-stop coverage of national anthem protests.\n\nThen Trump rescinded a White House invitation to the NBA champion Golden State Warriors after their star player Stephen Curry expressed ambivalence.\n\nIt follows a pattern of Trump breaking with presidential traditions — some substantive, and others more ceremonial. In response to opposition, he skipped the Kennedy Center Honors and the White House Correspondents' Dinner. And he frequently injects political comments into non-political events like the Boy Scout Jamboree and previous ceremonies honoring championship football teams.\n\nTo use the sports metaphors favored by presidents on these occasions, a championship team's invitation to the White House should be a slam dunk. They give a president an opportunity to appear presidential, to be a \"winner by association,\" and to adopt the team's victory as an American moment.\n\nMore:Analysis: This is a major political week for Trump. But his NFL feud is overshadowing his agenda\n\nSanders on Trump's NFL insults: 'It's always appropriate' for president to defend flag\n\n\"These are important ceremonies, otherwise they wouldn’t be happening,\" said Michael Hester of the University of West Georgia, who has studied presidential sports ceremonies. \"They're perfect for a president to use their office, to use their pulpit, to articulate national values.\"\n\nPresidents have invited sports teams to the White House since at least Andrew Johnson, according to the White House Historical Association. Johnson invited two amateur baseball teams — the first professional team was still four years away — in August, 1865, just three months after the end of the Civil War.\n\nOther teams were recognized sporadically, but it wasn't until Jimmy Carter that the tradition began to take hold. Reagan expanded and popularized the practice, with frequent references to The Gipper, a reference to his movie portrayal of the college football star. Over time, Olympic medalists, collegiate teams and women's sports have also been recognized.\n\nRegardless of president or party, those events have largely followed the same script. There are some subtle differences: Republicans talk more about individual achievement, while Democrats talk more about teamwork, for example.\n\nAnd while presidents sometimes compare championship sports teams to presidential campaigns, Trump has perhaps gone further than his predecessors. Honoring the Super Bowl champion New England Patriots, Trump told a long story about how coach Bill Belichick supported him in the campaign. At a ceremony to present the Commander in Chief Trophy to the Air Force Academy Falcons — and with cadets as a backdrop — he blasted Democrats three times, putting the officially apolitical cadets in an awkward situation.\n\nTrump's polarizing presidency has caused an increasing number of athletes to say they won't attend the White House ceremonies.\n\n\"Going to the White House is considered a great honor for a championship team. Stephen Curry is hesitating, therefore invitation is withdrawn!\" Trump tweeted Saturday.\n\nLeBron James of the Cleveland Cavaliers — perhaps Curry's biggest on-court rival — defended Curry and called Trump a \"bum\" on Twitter. \" Going to White House was a great honor until you showed up!” he said.\n\nAt the Cavalier's media day outside Cleveland Monday, James accused Trump of being divisive. \"The thing that kind of frustrated me and pissed me off a little bit is the fact that ... he used the sports platform to try to divide us. And sports is so, is so, is so amazing,\" James said.\n\nBut White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said Monday the remarks were intended to be unifying, not divisive.\n\n\"Look, this isn't about the president being against anyone,\" she said. \"This is about the president and millions of Americans being for something; being for honoring our flag, honoring our national anthem, and honoring the men and women who fought to defend it.\"\n\nIt's unclear whether Trump has done any lasting damage to the role of the president as the sports-fan-in-chief. After he disinvited the Warriors, he made clear that the Pittsburgh Penguins hockey team was still invited.\n\nThe Stanley Cup champions confirmed their attendance, saying the Penguins \"respect the institution of the Office of the President, and the long tradition of championship teams visiting the White House.\"\n\n\"Any agreement or disagreement with a president's politics, policies or agenda can be expressed in other ways,\" the team said in a statement. \"However, we very much respect the rights of other individuals and groups to express themselves as they see fit.”\n\nBut Hester says Trump's sports rhetoric has already broken barriers.\n\n\"With Trump everything is personal. I can't imagine a previous president disinviting someone,\" he said. \"He flips all of these traditional ways we think about using the presidency on their head. Just burn every political science book. Everything we’ve been teaching is wrong. This guy breaks all the rules.\"", "authors": [], "publish_date": "2017/09/25"}, {"url": "https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/nfl/columnist/mike-jones/2018/06/06/malcolm-jenkins-eagles-donald-trump-white-house-protests/679281002/", "title": "Malcolm Jenkins won't let NFL players' message be silenced", "text": "PHILADELPHIA – YOU AREN’T LISTENING.\n\nMalcolm Jenkins presented his message in the simplest, black-and-white form he could think of: in all-caps, written in Sharpie on poster boards.\n\nJournalists encircled the Philadelphia Eagles safety and social justice leader, eager to hear his thoughts on President Trump’s decision to revoke the football team’s invitation to visit the White House this week for what would have been a celebration of February’s Super Bowl victory.\n\nBut Jenkins did not speak. His bearded face remained emotionless as reporters hurled questions at him. To each he simply raised another sign, many of which bore sobering statistics on the justice system.\n\n“What does that have to do with not going to the White House yesterday?” one reporter called out.\n\nFollow every game: Latest NFL Scores and Schedules\n\n“Malcolm, do you feel it was fair for the president to cancel the White House trip even though a large majority of the team wasn’t going?” another asked.\n\n“Are you upset with the White House for canceling the event?” came another.\n\nUpset? Over a canceled trip to the White house?\n\nJenkins had it right with the “YOU AREN’T LISTENING” poster.\n\nMore:Coach Doug Pederson: Canceled White House visit 'is what it is,' and Eagles remain united\n\nMore:Steve Kerr: President Trump treating Eagles situation like a 'political game'\n\nMost Eagles players didn’t waste energy on the yanked White House invitation. Most of them hadn't been set to go anyway.\n\nThe unfairness that they’re concerned with involves those faced daily by people of color, at-risk youth and poverty-stricken Americans.\n\nMany of the Eagles players had no desire to rub shoulders with Trump, who lacks a sympathetic ear on such issues. He’s the same person who last fall referred to any player who kneeled as a “son of a bitch\" for protesting during the playing of the national anthem. The president did not engage on the issues driving the protests and instead painted players as anti-patriotic and unappreciative of the military.\n\nSo as the president again bashed the NFL, touting the canceled visit as a matter of respect for The Star-Spangled Banner, Jenkins and his teammates stuck to their message.\n\nJenkins’ poster board responses stuck to his original point:\n\n• “More than 60 percent of people in prison are people of color.”\n\n• “Nearly 20,000 juveniles enter the adult criminal system each year, most for non-violent crimes.”\n\n• \"In 2018, 439 people shot and killed by police (thus far). In U.S. Pop. – 8 percent African-American males; Shot by police – 25 percent African-American males”\n\n• “Any given night, 500,000 sit in jail. Convicted? No. Too poor? Yes.”\n\nJenkins’ other posters displayed a lengthy list of NFL players, which he called “TRUE PATRIOTS” because of their charitable work. Many of those players were his fellow members of the Players Coalition, which worked with team owners to secure $90 million for social justice efforts over the next several years.\n\nThe list of players included exiled quarterback Colin Kaepernick, who has now given $1 million to charity. Another was Jenkins’ teammate Chris Long, who donated his entire 2017 salary to Philadelphia schools.\n\nLong also faced a barrage of questions. He did speak, but avoided getting caught in a war of words with the president. Like Jenkins, Long understands that’s what feeds Trump and his supporters. He recognizes that accusations of anti-patriotism or disrespect for the military are nothing more than ill-informed opinions and distraction tactics.\n\nNone of those ploys can detract from the players' true mission, Long said.\n\n“I don’t feel like the work these guys are doing in the community can be hijacked,” he said. “You’ve got guys like Malcolm doing tremendous work in the community dealing with criminal justice reform, meeting with legislators. We’ve got a bunch of guys doing great work in their community, and really all across the league. Some of the best men I know are guys I’ve met that are pro football players and who really had the opportunity to not give a crap about people with less than them, but they do it anyway. They go in the community to help people who have less and use their platform well.”\n\nEver since Kaepernick began taking a knee during the national anthem two years ago to raise awareness of the police violence against people of color, opponents of the protest have tried to tell players to “stick to sports.” But they’re ignoring the point.\n\nWith his stunt this week, the president succeeded in a few regards. He further strengthened his standing in the eyes of those who are willing to gulp down his narrative with little to no concern for the facts. And he further alienated the portion of the population fighting for equality and reform.\n\nHe again used the NFL – the country’s most powerful sports league and the exclusive club to which Trump tried in vain to gain membership with a failed attempt to buy the Buffalo Bills in 2014 – as his pawn. But he did not accomplish anything truly meaningful.\n\nAt a time when so many, from the White House to some NFL fans, are telling professional football players how to conduct themselves, perhaps a better solution is take a page from their playbook.\n\nGet to know each other.\n\n“One of the beautiful things about the NFL is you have a true melting pot of guys from all over the country,” said Eagles center Jason Kelce, who declined to say if he planned on attending the White House, because it was irrelevant at this point.\n\nHe continued, “You’ve got guys from rural America, guys from inner city Detroit, guys that have grown up in upper class, to middle class, to guys that have grown up in single-parent households and have nothing. I think there’s all sorts of different viewpoints and different beliefs, and one thing you learn quickly in this league is, everyone has different beliefs, but you learn to quickly put that aside and as a team you accomplish great things, you develop empathy and sympathy for one another, to learn and develop the ability to work together, and to be honest, I think our country could follow that a little bit more.”\n\nThat’s an American talking. He happens to play football.\n\nFollow Mike Jones on Twitter @ByMikeJones.", "authors": [], "publish_date": "2018/06/06"}, {"url": "https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/ncaaf/2019/01/11/donald-trump-national-champ-clemson-football-team-visit-white-house/2553119002/", "title": "Donald Trump: National champ Clemson football team to visit White ...", "text": "The national champion Clemson Tigers football team will visit the White House on Jan. 14, President Donald Trump announced in a tweet Friday.\n\n“I look forward to hosting, right out of the great State of South Carolina, the 2019 NCAA Football Champion Clemson Tigers at the White House on Monday, January 14th. What a game, what a coach, what a team!” President Trump wrote.\n\nIt will be the second trip to the Trump White House for Clemson, which beat Alabama 44-16 in the College Football Playoff National Championship on Monday. The Tigers also visited in 2017 after they beat the Crimson Tide for the 2016 national championship.\n\nChampionship teams visiting the White House became a yearly tradition late in the 20th century under Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush.\n\nSince President Trump took office, however, the practice of visiting the White House has invited scrutiny and controversy. The Golden State Warriors have not been to the White House for either of their back-to-back NBA titles, with President Trump saying in 2017 that star Steph Curry “is hesitating, therefore invitation is withdrawn!”\n\nThat Twitter declaration prompted NBA superstar LeBron James to call the president “a bum” in a tweet.\n\nThe Philadelphia Eagles also did not make a trip to the White House after winning their first Super Bowl title. The champions’ invitation was rescinded last year after a number of players dropped out of attending.\n\nThe current men's and women's college basketball national champions also have not visited the White House. Villanova coach Jay Wright said in October that his most recent title team did not receive an invitation.\n\nAlabama, the college football champion before Clemson, made a White House trip after winning the 2017 championship. A number of other pro teams and athletes have also visited: The Pittsburgh Penguins attended after winning the Stanley Cup in 2017, as did the Houston Astros for their 2017 title. The Boston Red Sox have announced that they will make a White House visit at some point after winning the 2018 World Series.", "authors": [], "publish_date": "2019/01/11"}, {"url": "https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/mlb/astros/2018/01/03/world-series-champion-astros-invitation-white-house-donald-trump/1000882001/", "title": "World Series champion Astros will accept invitation to White House", "text": "The Houston Astros officially have been invited to visit the White House and plan to accept that invitation, a team spokesperson confirmed to USA TODAY Sports on Wednesday.\n\nAstros president of business operations Reid Ryan told The Houston Chronicle in an interview that the team is planning to visit the White House at President Donald Trump's invitation, adding that the date for the visit has not yet been finalized.\n\n\"This is a tradition and an honor,\" Ryan told the newspaper. \"For many people, this might be their only time to ever be invited to the White House. And as the representatives of baseball and the World Series champs, when the White House calls and invites you to come up, it's something that as an organization we felt both a responsibility and an obligation to be part of.\"\n\nWhen asked about Ryan's comments Wednesday, team spokesperson Steve Grande told USA TODAY Sports in an e-mail that the report is accurate and that he has \"nothing to add.\"\n\nWhile most teams visit the White House before, during or after a series with the Washington Nationals or Baltimore Orioles, the Astros' schedule will not bring them to the area until the end of September. The team could instead choose to visit the White House during spring training.\n\nIt has long been customary for the champions of major professional sports leagues to visit the White House, though the trips and invitations have become less certain since President Donald Trump entered office nearly a year ago.\n\nThe NBA-champion Golden State Warriors did not visit the White House after guard Stephen Curry said he would not attend, prompting Trump to subsequently withdraw the team's invitation. The NCAA-champion South Carolina women's basketball team also did not visit the White House despite receiving an invitation.\n\nThe Pittsburgh Penguins, who won last season's NHL championship, visited the White House in October.\n\nContact Tom Schad at tschad@usatoday.com or on Twitter @Tom_Schad.", "authors": [], "publish_date": "2018/01/03"}, {"url": "https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/nhl/2019/03/19/washington-capitals-white-house-ceremony-donald-trump/3214528002/", "title": "President Trump to welcome Washington Capitals at White House ...", "text": "The Washington Capitals have accepted an invitation to meet with President Donald Trump at the White House on Monday to celebrate last June’s Stanley Cup championship, the team confirmed Tuesday.\n\nA person familiar with Capitals plans but not authorized to speak about them publicly said players were told they were free to make their own decisions about whether they want to attend.\n\nSeveral professional championship teams haven't been invited to the White House during the Trump Administration after players said they wouldn't go.\n\nBut in the week after winning the Cup, most players told the Washington Post they would visit the White House if invited.\n\nFollow every game: Latest NHL Scores and Schedules\n\nPLAYOFFS:Arizona, Carolina could both make it for first time since 2002\n\nSOARING:Tampa Bay Lightning clinch Presidents' Trophy\n\nForward Brett Connolly said publicly back then he would skip the White House visit. He reiterated that to reporters on Monday.\n\n“I respectfully decline,” Connolly, a Canadian, said, according to The Athletic. “That’s all I’ll say about it. Everyone is entitled to their opinion. It’s obviously a big deal and it gains a lot of attention. I’ve been in full support of an old teammate that I’m really good friends with and who I agreed with, and a guy who will be back here I’m sure at the end of the year. That’s all I’ll say.”\n\nThat player is forward Devante Smith-Pelly, a black Canadian who told the National Post last June that he wouldn’t go because some statements by Trump “are straight-up racist and sexist.”\n\nSmith-Pelly was waived by the Capitals in February and sent to the American Hockey League in a salary cap move.\n\nThe Stanley Cup champion Pittsburgh Penguins did visit the White House in 2017, while the NBA champion Golden State Warriors were not invited to the White House in 2017 and 2018. Trump canceled the 2018 Super Bowl champion Philadelphia Eagles’ visit when several players said they wouldn’t be attending.\n\nThe MLB champion Boston Red Sox were scheduled to visit in February but postponed until May because of the government shutdown.\n\nSome players on the 2019 Super Bowl champion New England Patriots players have said they would not go to the White House if their team is invited.", "authors": [], "publish_date": "2019/03/19"}, {"url": "https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/wnba/storm/2020/10/21/joe-biden-kamala-harris-get-support-wnba-champion-seattle-storm/3722503001/", "title": "Joe Biden-Kamala Harris get support from WNBA champion Seattle ...", "text": "In recent weeks and months, dozens of professional and college sports teams have urged their fans to register and vote in the upcoming presidential election.\n\nBut on Wednesday, the reigning WNBA champions took it one step further.\n\nIn an exceedingly rare move for a sports organization, the Seattle Storm urged fans to support Democrats Joe Biden and Kamala Harris in the upcoming election, posting an endorsement of the Democratic ticket on its team-branded Twitter account.\n\n\"Join us in support of @JoeBiden and @KamalaHarris,\" the team wrote in a tweet, accompanied by a hyperlink for fans to register to vote.\n\nThe message reflects the political beliefs of Seattle's three co-owners: Lisa Brummel, Ginny Gilder and Dawn Trudeau. All three women have made donations to federal Democratic candidates or causes in the current election cycle, according to a review of federal campaign filings by USA TODAY Sports.\n\n\"We don't typically endorse candidates,\" Gilder wrote on Twitter, \"but these are NOT typical times.\"\n\n2020 WNBA FINALS:Seattle Storm sweep Las Vegas Aces to win their fourth WNBA championship\n\nSUE BIRD:Perception of 'cute white girls' helps U.S. women's soccer\n\nSPORTS NEWSLETTER:Sign up now to get top sports headlines delivered daily\n\nWhile sports team owners have long made financial contributions to political candidates, they have often done so quietly, or gone to great lengths to distinguish their political views as independent of their teams.\n\nThe Storm, meanwhile, took the unusual stance of directly linking the two.\n\nGilder told The Seattle Times that she believes the team's tweet in support of Biden and Harris is in line with its values as an organization.\n\n\"There’s a certain value set that the Storm organization represents that we try to deliver on whenever the owners take a stand on anything,\" she told the newspaper. \"I don’t think we caught anyone in our organization off guard.\"\n\nGilder added that she \"hopes for a White House that NCAA champions and women’s pro sports champions can return to,\" according to The Seattle Times.\n\nUnder President Trump, none of the past three WNBA champions have been invited to visit the White House, which has long been a tradition for championship sports teams. The Storm, who have won four WNBA titles, visited the White House in 2011 at the invitation of Barack Obama but were not invited by Trump after they won in 2018.\n\nContact Tom Schad at tschad@usatoday.com or on Twitter @Tom_Schad.", "authors": [], "publish_date": "2020/10/21"}, {"url": "https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/mlb/braves/2022/09/26/braves-visit-white-house-president-biden-celebrate-2021-title/8121744001/", "title": "Braves visit White House, President Biden to celebrate 2021 title", "text": "Associated Press\n\nWASHINGTON – President Joe Biden said Monday that the Atlanta Braves will be “forever known as the upset kings of October” for their improbable 2021 World Series win, as he welcomed the team to the White House for a victory celebration.\n\nBiden called the series an “unstoppable, joyful run.” The team got its White House victory visit in with a little more than a week left before the 2022 regular season wraps up and playoffs begin again. The Braves are just two wins behind first place in the National League East. Chief Executive Officer Terry McGuirk said he hoped they’d be back to the White House again soon.\n\nIn August 2021, the Braves were a mess, playing barely at .500. But then they started winning. And they kept doing it, clinching the World Series in six games over the Houston Astros.\n\nBiden called their come-from-behind win one of “history’s greatest turnarounds.”\n\n“This team has literally been part of American history for over 150 years,” said Biden. “But none of it came easy … people counting you out. Heck, I know something about being counted out.”\n\nPlayers lined up on risers behind Biden, grinning and waving to the crowd, but the player most discussed was one who hasn’t been on the team in nearly 50 years and who died last year: Hall of Famer Hank Aaron.\n\nHammerin’ Hank was the homerun king for 33 years, dethroning Babe Ruth with a high flier to centerfield on April 8, 1974. He was one of the most famous players for Atlanta and in baseball history, a vocal and clear-eyed chronicler of the many hardships thrown his way – from the poverty and segregation of his Alabama youth to the racist threats he faced during his pursuit of one of America’s most hallowed records. He died in January at age 86.\n\n“This is team is defined by the courage of Hank Aaron,” Biden said.\n\nMcGuirk said Aaron, who held front office positions with the team and was one of Major League Baseball’s few Black executives, was watching over them.\n\n“He’d have been there every step of the way with us if he was here,” McGuirk added.\n\nThe president often honors major league and some college sports champions with a White House ceremony, typically a nonpartisan affair in which the commander in chief pays tribute to the champs’ prowess, poses for photos and comes away with a team jersey.\n\nThose visits were highly charged in the previous administration. Many athletes took issue with President Donald Trump’s policies and rhetoric on policing, immigration and more. Trump, for his part, didn’t take kindly to criticism from athletes or their on-field expressions of political opinion.\n\nUnder Biden, the tradition appears to be back. He’s hosted the NBA champion Milwaukee Bucks and Super Bowl champion Tampa Bay Buccaneers at the White House. Biden on Monday joked about first lady Jill Biden’s Philadelphia allegiances.\n\n“Like every Philly fan, she’s convinced she knows more about everything in sports than anybody else,” he said. He added that he couldn’t be too nice to the Atlanta team because it had just beaten the Phillies the previous night in extra innings.", "authors": [], "publish_date": "2022/09/26"}]}
{"question_id": "20230120_7", "search_time": "2023/01/20/16:37", "search_result": [{"url": "https://www.cnn.com/2022/10/20/uk/liz-truss-resigns-analysis-intl-gbr-cmd/index.html", "title": "Liz Truss' resignation leaves a party in tatters and a nation in despair ...", "text": "London CNN —\n\nEven by recent standards, Thursday was a jaw-dropping day in British politics.\n\nLiz Truss, a born-again Brexiteer who took over from Boris Johnson a mere six weeks ago, announced that she was to resign. In her wake, she leaves an economic crisis precipitated by a “growth plan” full of unfunded tax cuts, and a Conservative Party that may be in office, but is most certainly not wielding much power.\n\nIt is hard to overstate just how much impact Truss’ accession to the top job had on British politics in such a short space of time. Her radical economic policy proposals – even before they were even enacted – caused the pound to sink to its lowest level against the dollar in decades.\n\nThe turmoil caused government bonds to soar, which had a negative impact on government borrowing and, more perilously, real people’s pension funds. The rise in interest rates forced up mortgage repayments, and lenders scrambled to pull their products from the market, dashing the hopes of prospective homeowners almost overnight.\n\nFaced with the fury of her own party – for whom fiscal discipline had, for so long, been a watchword – Truss capitulated. She sacked her finance minister, lost her home secretary and has created even more divisions in a party that has been tearing itself to shreds ever since the 2016 Brexit vote.\n\nIt was only a matter of time before she was forced out.\n\nPoliticians across the divide are asking the same question that the majority of the country are probably asking themselves: What on earth happens now?\n\nWhat we know for certain is that the UK will have a new prime minister by the end of next week. That person will be chosen, again, by the Conservative Party – its members of parliament and its grassroots members — rather than the general public. It is a state of affairs that has infuriated the opposition Labour party, which is demanding a general election.\n\nThat won’t happen. The Conservative Party’s poll ratings are at a record low, and as the date of an election is within the government’s gift, these turkeys won’t be voting for Christmas.\n\nSo, the party will drag itself through another leadership election and a second prime minister in as many months. At least it will be swift: Party managers want it all over by the end of next week.\n\nWho might stand is currently a bit of a mystery. CNN was told by allies of former prime minister Boris Johnson that he is considering what would be an astonishing comeback, despite resigning in disgrace just a few months ago.\n\nWhile people close Johnson are making the case that he is the only candidate who could truly unite a bitterly divided party, others are quick to say that there was a good reason he was forced from office.\n\nThose reasons, for those with short memories, are that he was hit by so many scandals – from breaking his own Covid regulations to installing someone with a reputation for sexual harassment as his deputy chief whip – that his position as leader of the UK was simply untenable.\n\nPrime Minister Boris Johnson makes a speech outside 10 Downing Street, London on his last day in office. Stefan Rousseau/PA Images/Getty Images\n\nUnity candidates?\n\nFormer allies who left Johnson’s side after things got too much say that installing him would leave the Conservatives open to quite a simple line of attack: why is this person who was proven to be wholly unfit for high office suddenly the best person to lead the country?\n\nBoth Conservative MPs who fear a Johnson return and officials from the opposition Labour Party pointed out to CNN that Johnson is also under investigation as to whether he deliberately misled parliament over the so-called Partygate scandal.\n\nThere are other options for unity candidates. Penny Mordaunt, one of Truss’s cabinet ministers, is thought to be weighing up running for the job. She is a Brexiteer who is popular across the party and regarded as a sensible moderate who would take a calm approach to leadership. She openly criticized Truss’s leadership while in her cabinet by saying she wanted to see welfare payments rise in line with inflation at a time of serious tension in the party, which will have won her praise from Truss critics.\n\nThere’s Rishi Sunk, the former finance minister, whose resignation from cabinet was thought to be the catalyst for Johnson’s downfall over the summer. He was Truss’s final rival in the leadership contest and is loathed by Johnson’s supporters, so his elevation would likely be unpopular with large parts of the party.\n\nAnd being popular with the party – MPs and members – is going to be critical for whoever takes over. Divisions over everything from Brexit to fiscal discipline has made a party with a large parliamentary majority virtually ungovernable.\n\nLeaving aside the personal dislike people might have of individuals like Johnson, Truss or Sunak, the sense that the Conservative Party is an untamed beast charging from one crisis to the next has created the impression that it is in terminal decline.\n\nConservative MPs and officials are utterly despondent. If you even compare Truss’s resignation to Johnson’s, just a few weeks before, there were no supportive MPs lining the streets or army of supporters smiling on. It was a bleak, cold speech to a quiet Downing Street.\n\nA large number of Conservative MPs think that the party has absolutely no hope of winning the next general election. And seeing as calling a general election is something in the government’s gift, that means clinging to power as long as possible in the vague hope that things will improve.\n\nThe Labour Party has gone in the space of a few short weeks from believing itself to be an upbeat government-in-waiting to being absolutely furious that the Conservatives are willing to install another leader with no mandate, depriving the public of a stable government.\n\nThis is the current state of UK politics. The government of the day will not call a general election. A generous analysis might say that this is because they think the country needs stability at a difficult time. A more cynical analysis, alternatively, could be that they are terrified of how bad their election loss could be.\n\nThings will become clearer over the next 48 hours as candidates come forward and the process for a smooth transition it outlined. But if the past year of British politics is anything to go by, the coronation of a new prime minister will be accompanied by nasty briefings and dirty politics to which we’ve become well accustomed.\n\nThe simple truth is that the big beasts of British politics are likely to remain at each other’s throats for the foreseeable future. And given the state of the country, that’s terrible news for its citizens.", "authors": ["Luke Mcgee"], "publish_date": "2022/10/20"}, {"url": "https://www.cnn.com/2022/03/15/health/covid-rising-uk-us/index.html", "title": "What rising Covid-19 infections in the UK and Europe could mean ...", "text": "CNN —\n\nTwo weeks after the United Kingdom dropped its last remaining Covid-19 mitigation measure – a requirement that people who test positive for the virus isolate for five days – the country is seeing cases and hospitalizations climb once again.\n\nCovid-19 cases were up 48% in the UK last week compared with the week before. Hospitalizations were up 17% over the same period.\n\nThe country’s daily case rate – about 55,000 a day – is still less than a third of the Omicron peak, but cases are rising as fast as they were falling just two weeks earlier, when the country removed pandemic-related restrictions.\n\nDaily cases are also rising in more than half of the countries in the European Union. They’ve jumped 48% in the Netherlands and 20% in Germany over the past week, according to data from Johns Hopkins University. But daily cases in Germany had yet to drop below pre-Omicron levels, and the Netherlands hadn’t seen cases fall as much as they did in the UK.\n\nThe situation in Europe has the attention of public health officials for two reasons: First, the UK offers a preview of what may play out in the United States, and second, something unusual seems to be happening. In previous waves, increases in Covid hospitalizations lagged behind jumps in cases by about 10 days to two weeks. Now, in the UK, cases and hospitalizations seem to be rising in tandem, something that has experts stumped.\n\n“So we’re obviously keenly interested in what’s going on with that,” Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, told CNN.\n\nFauci said he’s spoken with his UK counterparts, and they have pegged the rise to a combination three factors. In order of contribution, Fauci said, these are:\n\nThe BA.2 variant, which is more transmissible than the original Omicron\n\nThe opening of society, with people mingling more indoors without masks\n\nWaning immunity from vaccination or prior infection\n\nIn a technical briefing Friday, the UK Health Security Agency said BA.2 had an 80% higher relative growth rate than the original Omicron strain, though it does not seem more likely to lead to hospitalization.\n\nGiven that BA.2 doesn’t seem to be causing more severe disease – at least not in the highly vaccinated British population – it’s not clear why hospitalizations are ticking up.\n\n“The issue with hospitalization is a little bit more puzzling, because although the hospitalizations are going up, it is very clear their use of ICU beds has not increased,” Fauci said. “So are the numbers of hospitalizations a real reflection of Covid cases, or is there a difficulty deciphering between people coming into the hospital with Covid or because of Covid?”\n\nThe US, like the UK, has lifted most mitigation measures as Covid-19 infections have fallen. Two weeks ago, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention changed how it measures Covid-19 impact in communities. The new metric – which relies on hospitalizations and hospital capacity in addition to cases – did away with masking recommendations for most parts of the country. States and schools have followed suit, lifting indoor masking requirements.\n\nREAD: Your top Covid questions, answered\n\n“Without a doubt, opening up society and having people mingle indoors is clearly something that is a contributor, as well as overall waning immunity, which means we’ve really got to stay heads-up and keep our eye on the pattern here,” Fauci said. “So that’s the reason why we’re watching this very carefully.”\n\nMichael Osterholm, who directs the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota, told CNN, “it’s like a weather alert. Right now, the skies are sunny and bright, and we hope they stay that way. But we could have some bad weather by evening, and we just don’t know.”\n\nWhat will BA.2 do in the US?\n\nBA.2 has been growing steadily in the US. Last week, the CDC estimated it was causing about 12% of new Covid-19 cases here.\n\nMeanwhile, BA.2 now accounts for more than 50% of cases in the UK and several other European countries.\n\n“The tipping point seems to be right around 50%,” said Keri Althoff, an epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. “That’s when we really start to see that variant flex its power in the population” as far as showing its severity.\n\nAlthoff said although the UK may provide a glimpse of the future, there are key differences that will affect how BA.2 plays out in the United States.\n\nIn the UK, 86% of eligible people are fully vaccinated, and 67% are boosted, compared with 69% of those eligible vaccinated and 50% boosted in the US.\n\n“What we see happening in the UK is going to be perhaps a better story than what we should be expecting here,” Althoff said.\n\nIn the Netherlands, it took about a month for BA.2 to overpower BA.1, she noted. If the same timeline occurs in the US, that will mean the variant is taking off just as the immunity generated by winter’s Omicron infections will be waning.\n\n“I’m concerned about that,” Althoff said. “But we were in a similar situation last spring, where we really got hopeful that things were going to settle down, and we got a little bit of a summer, and then we got walloped by Delta.”\n\nIt will be important for people to understand they may be able to take their masks off for a few weeks, Althoff said, but they might also need to go back to wearing them regularly if cases spike.\n\n“We could see another wave of illness at our hospitals,” she said.\n\nAlthoff will also be closely watching wastewater data over the next few weeks.\n\n“Wastewater surveillance is an incredible advancement in how we can monitor SARS-CoV-2 and what it’s doing in the population without needing, really, any input from people,” she said. “Keeping our eye on wastewater surveillance is an important tool to understand where the virus is going and if it’s increasing in terms of infection.”\n\nPreparing for the next wave\n\nProtection against the next variant has to start with vaccination.\n\n“We absolutely have to continue to find people who are unvaccinated and get them vaccinated,” Althoff said.\n\nFauci agreed that vaccination rates could be better in all age groups but said current numbers are especially bad for kids. Data collected by the CDC show about 28% of children ages 5 to 11 are fully vaccinated, while 58% of kids ages 12 to 17 have had two doses of a Covid-19 vaccine.\n\nEven though the youngest children, those under 5, can’t yet be vaccinated, recent studies have shown young kids are less likely to catch Covid-19 when they’re surrounded by vaccinated older children and adults.\n\nGet CNN Health's weekly newsletter Sign up here to get The Results Are In with Dr. Sanjay Gupta every Tuesday from the CNN Health team.\n\n“So the way you protect them is to surround the children, to the extent possible, with people who are vaccinated and boosted so that you have somewhat a veil of protection around them,” Fauci said.\n\nIt will also be important to continue to be flexible.\n\n“The important thing in this massive experiment where we’re dropping all masking and restrictions is we have to stay diligent in terms of monitoring of it and testing and be prepared to possibly reverse a lot of the relaxing of these restrictions,” said Deborah Fuller, a microbiologist at the University of Washington.\n\n“We can’t let our guard down, because the message that people get when they say ‘we’re lifting restrictions’ is the pandemic is over. And it’s not,” she said.", "authors": ["Brenda Goodman Deidre Mcphillips", "Brenda Goodman", "Deidre Mcphillips"], "publish_date": "2022/03/15"}, {"url": "https://www.cnn.com/2022/05/16/politics/baby-formula-biden-administration-steps/index.html", "title": "FDA announces it will make it easier to import some baby formulas ...", "text": "CNN —\n\nThe US Food and Drug Administration said Monday that it is making it easier to import certain infant formulas as it works to address a nationwide shortage.\n\nThe US ordinarily produces 98% of the infant formula it uses, with imported formula primarily coming from Mexico, Ireland and the Netherlands, the agency said in a statement. But because of the shortage, the FDA is outlining a process by which it “would not object to the importation of certain infant formula products intended for a foreign market,” as well as the US distribution of products that were made domestically for export to other countries.\n\n“Companies seeking to take advantage of these flexibilities should submit information for the FDA to quickly evaluate whether the product can be used safely and whether it provides adequate nutrition,” the agency said. “For example, labeling, information on nutritional adequacy and safety testing, and information about facility inspection history.”\n\nThe administration will prioritize applications “that stand a good chance of being successful, that indicate sort of clear quality and safety and nutritional adequacy and all of that, and that have potential to move significant product into the United States quickly,” a White House official told CNN, including imports from countries like Ireland, Chile, Australia, New Zealand, the UK and the Netherlands, which feature safety inspection systems similar to those in the US.\n\nThe FDA said it is already in discussions with some manufacturers and suppliers regarding additional supply, but officials warn that even importing formula from abroad won’t offer immediate relief.\n\n“With these flexibilities in place, we anticipate that those products that can quickly meet safety and nutrition standards could hit U.S. stores in a matter of weeks,” FDA Commissioner Dr. Robert Califf said in a statement.\n\nSusan Mayne, director of the FDA’s Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition, said on a media call Monday that “it depends in part on what kind of information we get in from others, but I think we’re looking at weeks in terms of getting the imported product into the market.”\n\nThe news comes as the White House is working with key manufacturers to help provide logistics support during the baby formula shortage, an official said in a statement on Monday.\n\n“The White House is having ongoing conversations with the four major infant formula manufacturers – Reckitt, Abbott, Nestle/Gerber, and Perrigo – to work with them to identify transportation, logistical, and supplier hurdles to increasing production of formula at their US- and FDA-approved facilities, to expand the amount and speed of FDA-approved formula being shipped into the country, and ensure that formula is quickly moving to retailers from factories,” the White House official said.\n\nCNN reported earlier Monday that the Biden administration is confronting a barrage of questions and criticism for the national baby formula shortage that has anxious and angry parents hopping from store to store in search of baby food. The administration offered a new website, HHS.gov/formula, to provide resources to families in need, but when a CNN reporter tested out some of those options, the exercise resulted in apologetic customer service representatives, one hold time that lasted well over an hour and serious challenges in finding baby formula through some of the main suggestions listed on the new Health and Human Services website.\n\nThe White House is also in “ongoing communication” with Target, Amazon, Walmart and other major retailers, the official said, “to identify parts of the country that may be at risk of critically low supply of infant formula, and have offered to work with manufacturers and retailers to bring more formula to those parts of the country, including with US government transportation and logistics support.”\n\nPresident Joe Biden held virtual meetings Thursday with the leadership of Target and Walmart, as well as formula manufacturers Reckitt and Gerber, respectively. Officials have since been in “close communication to follow up on those conversations,” per the official.\n\nThere are also efforts to shore up the supply chain, with outreach to formula manufacturers’ suppliers.\n\n“We are also contacting suppliers to infant formula manufacturers to inform them that their materials are critical for boosting U.S. infant formula production and they should prioritize their production and delivery,” the official noted.\n\nDuring an appearance on CNN’s “New Day” on Monday, Califf said the administration is “doing everything we can” to resolve the shortage.\n\nCaliff pointed to efforts to work with manufacturers to increase production, to work on the supply chain and to work closely with Abbott to get its shuttered plant open as soon as possible.\n\nAfter Abbott restarts the site, it will take six to eight weeks for the products to reach store shelves, the company said Monday.\n\nPressed on how much of an effect the move to make it easier to import some formulas will have, Califf said the situation more broadly will “gradually improve” over a “few weeks.”\n\nThis Thursday, Califf testifies before the Agriculture Appropriations Subcommittee on the FDA’s 2023 budget request and on the oversight of infant formula.\n\nThe baby formula shortage has been exacerbated by the shutdown of the country’s largest formula plant, the Abbott Nutrition facility in Sturgis, Michigan.\n\nProduction halted at the facility in February after reports that four infants who consumed formula manufactured at the plant had fallen ill with rare and serious infections caused by Cronobacter sakazakii bacteria. Two of the babies died. A whistleblower also detailed allegations to the FDA that Abbott was hiding safety issues months before the infant formula was recalled in February.\n\nIn the end, however, testing by the FDA and the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that the genetic sequences of the Cronobacter samples from the plant did not match any of the bacteria isolated from the sick children or the formula inside their homes. Genetic samples from the sick babies also did not match each other, suggesting there was no link between their cases, Abbott said in a news release.\n\nAdditionally, Abbott said no baby formula distributed to consumers tested positive for Cronobacter or Salmonella.\n\nPressed on how soon supply will be back to normal, HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra declined to give specifics, saying on CNN Monday that “Abbott is the one that can tell you the timeline.”\n\nBecerra said the federal government is working with the company to make sure it’s addressing the safety concerns raised to them and that “it should be done in a matter of weeks.”\n\n“We don’t run their plants. Only they can address the safety concerns that were identified through our inspections. They have been working on this a while. We have been advising them of what they need to do,” Becerra told CNN’s Kate Bolduan on “At This Hour.”\n\n“We’ll do everything we can, we’ll pull all the levers we can to help them move quickly as possible, but they control their plant. They own and operate it. They’re the ones that have to do the fix.”\n\nAbbott said last week that it could restart production at its Michigan facility, pending FDA approval, within two weeks, but it could be a few more weeks until the formula is made available on shelves.\n\nOn CNN, Becerra also defended the administration’s response to the Abbott recall and complaint, saying, “We have been moving as quickly as we can.”\n\n“FDA moves with deliberate speed to make sure that if you’re going to do something as drastic as urge a manufacturer to pull a product off the shelves, that there’s good evidence for it. That’s why it takes a little time,” he said.\n\nThis story has been updated with additional reporting.", "authors": ["Betsy Klein Katherine Dillinger Veronica Stracqualursi", "Betsy Klein", "Katherine Dillinger", "Veronica Stracqualursi"], "publish_date": "2022/05/16"}, {"url": "https://www.cnn.com/2022/09/05/uk/new-british-prime-minister-liz-truss-intl-gbr/index.html", "title": "Liz Truss to succeed Boris Johnson as British prime minister ...", "text": "London CNN —\n\nLiz Truss will be the next prime minister of the United Kingdom after winning most votes in the Conservative Party leadership contest, succeeding Boris Johnson who resigned in July after a series of scandals.\n\nTruss defeated rival Rishi Sunak with 81,326 votes to 60,399 among party members and will take over as leader on Tuesday, as Britons face mounting economic and social crisis.\n\nShe pledged action to tackle the crisis in a short victory speech at a conference center in London on Monday. Without offering details, Truss promised a “bold plan” to cut taxes and build economic growth, and “deliver on the energy crisis, dealing with people’s energy bills but also dealing with the long-term issues we have on energy supply.”\n\nMonday’s announcement ends weeks of bitter campaigning during which Sunak, the former Chancellor of the Exchequer (finance minister), accused the Foreign Secretary of risking a prolonged recession if she goes ahead with her promised tax cuts.\n\nOnce Johnson formally resigns his post to the Queen on Tuesday, Truss will also visit the monarch at her Scottish residence Balmoral, where, as leader of the largest party in parliament, she will be invited to form a government.\n\nTruss had been the frontrunner for weeks, and the 47-year-old will now follow Margaret Thatcher and Theresa May to become Britain’s third female premier. Despite voting to remain in the European Union back in 2016, she has found herself to be the preferred candidate of the vast majority of Brexiteers in her party.\n\nHer victory was smaller than expected, Conservatives who supported both candidates are privately admitting. It had been predicted by many that her margin of victory would be larger than the 18 percentage points announced on Monday afternoon.\n\nIn terms of her premiership, this could mean that she cannot run roughshod over her MPs, who voted in greater numbers for Sunak than Truss in the parliamentary part of this leadership contest.\n\nAnd Truss could find that she has to accommodate a wider range of views from her party, which could mean embracing Sunak’s ideas for helping Britons with the cost-of-living crisis and a less aggressive approach to tax cuts – especially corporation tax.\n\nMany Conservative MPs are privately worried that Truss’s modern-day Thatcherism could cost them the next election and will be leaping on the surprisingly low margin of victory to encourage the next PM to soften her economic stance.\n\nThe opposition Labour Party immediately dismissed her arguments, saying in a statement, “after years serving in Tory cabinets, nodding through the decisions that got us into this mess, Liz Truss simply doesn’t have the answers to this crisis.”\n\nLong political journey\n\nIn the leadership campaign, Truss’s platform had featured plenty of red meat for the Conservative membership, from a hard line against the EU on Brexit to tax cuts as her main solution to the cost-of-living crisis. This tactic clearly proved decisive in winning over ordinary members, who had the final say in electing the leader of the ruling party, who consequently becomes prime minister.\n\nBut critics have accused her new-found hardline Brexit stance of being a cynical ploy. They have pointed to the fact that throughout her adult life Truss has evolved, from being an anti-monarchist Liberal Democrat in favor of legalizing drugs in her youth to the embodiment of the Conservative right today.\n\nThroughout her political career, especially during the leadership contest, Truss has been compared to Thatcher, who, for many on the right, remains the benchmark for Conservative leaders. She was a tax-cutting, hard-nosed leader who took on the unions and played a large role in ending the Cold War. Like Thatcher, Truss has come from relatively humble beginnings to dominate a world inhabited largely by men.\n\nSince becoming an MP, Truss has gone from being the darling of the liberal Conservative leader David Cameron, who took a personal interest in her career, to the Euroskeptic right’s figurehead.\n\nBefore the Brexit referendum, Truss said that she was “backing remain as I believe it is in Britain’s economic interest and means we can focus on vital economic and social reform at home.”\n\nCabinet colleagues at the time say that she never voiced any issue about supporting staying in the EU, despite having ample opportunities to express her own Euroskepticism.\n\nThese days, Truss is more than happy to pick fights with Brussels and to claim that it was the EU all along that held the British economy back.\n\nA country in turmoil\n\nTruss will take over a Conservative government that is facing multiple crises in the country. With steep rises in energy and food prices, long waiting lists for hospital treatment, and public sector workers, dock workers and even lawyers going on strike, making the case that the party deserves to win a historic fifth term at the next general election – due to be called by December 2024 at the latest – will be an uphill battle.\n\nInflation rose above 10% in July for the first time in 40 years, driven largely by the rising cost of energy, food and fuel. According to a forecast by the Bank of England, inflation will soar to 13% by the end of the year. The central bank also predicted that the UK would enter into recession before the end of the year. And on Monday, in a signal of these serious challenges ahead, the British pound dropped 0.3% to its lowest level against the US dollar since 1985.\n\nAnalysts are skeptical that Truss’s tax-cutting policies will do much help citizens, especially after a decade of austerity policies. The Institute for Fiscal studies, an independent research group focusing on public finances, said last month that the leadership contestants, who were both promising tax cuts and smaller government spending, “need to recognise this even greater-than-usual uncertainty in the public finances.”\n\nThe specter of Johnson\n\nLooming over Truss’s new government will be the long shadow of Johnson, whose time in office saw approval ratings and voter intentions plummet for the Conservative Party. He leaves office a deeply unpopular prime minister less than three years after romping home to an enormous landslide election victory in 2019.\n\nJohnson was forced to resign from office on July 7 after a string of scandals made his position untenable. His downfall followed months of revelations over parties held in 10 Downing Street while the country was under Covid lockdown restrictions. Johnson himself was fined by the police, making him the first prime minister in history found to have broken the law in office.\n\nHowever, Johnson rode out the “Partygate” scandal. It was only when Chris Pincher, his deputy chief whip responsible for party discipline, was accused of sexually assaulting two men at a party, and Johnson delayed in acting over the matter, that his own party finally turned on him.\n\nIt is not yet known whether Johnson will remain in politics. He may still be forced to resign as a Member of Parliament after a House of Commons committee gives its verdict on whether or not Johnson knowingly misled Parliament when he claimed no rules were broken in Downing Street.\n\nRegardless, Johnson is likely to remain a high-profile figure. There is a good chance he will return to his former media career as a columnist and broadcaster, though the damage to his reputation in office might mean his appeal is limited compared to where it stood before he entered Downing Street.\n\nThroughout the campaign, Truss has been seen by most as the Johnson continuity candidate and enjoyed the backing of many of his loyalists.\n\nWhile this support has helped Truss during the leadership contest with Conservative members who saw her rival Sunak as a traitor, and who value tribal loyalty, it means she will be forever tied to the Johnson legacy.\n\nThat could ultimately become a weight around her neck, as the specter of Johnson risks overshadowing anything Truss might do to tackle the misery that many Britons are set to face this winter.", "authors": ["Luke Mcgee Peter Wilkinson", "Luke Mcgee", "Peter Wilkinson"], "publish_date": "2022/09/05"}, {"url": "https://www.cnn.com/2022/08/17/asia/sri-lanka-gotabaya-rajapaksa-return-intl-hnk/index.html", "title": "Gotabaya Rajapaksa: Sri Lanka's former president tipped to return to ...", "text": "Colombo, Sri Lanka CNN —\n\nSri Lanka’s former president Gotabaya Rajapaksa, who fled the crisis-hit island nation last month amid mass protests, is expected to return to the country next week, according to a senior minister.\n\nForeign Minister Ali Sabry told CNN late Wednesday the Sri Lankan government had been told of Rajapaksa’s return “through diplomatic channels.”\n\n“Officially we have no role in the return. He is a citizen of Sri Lanka and can travel as he wishes,” Sabry said.\n\nRajapaksa’s estranged cousin Udayanga Weeratunga, a former Sri Lankan Ambassador to Russia, told reporters Wednesday the former leader would return on August 24.\n\nRajapaksa is in Thailand after fleeing Sri Lanka in July on a military plane for Maldives, and then traveling to Singapore, days after angry protesters stormed his official residence and office.\n\nHe tendered his resignation from Singapore, while public anger grew over his alleged mismanagement of the economy.\n\nThe former leader’s hurried exit was a historic moment for the nation of 22 million, which members of the Rajapaksa family ruled with an iron fist for much of the past two decades.\n\nAnger has been growing in Sri Lanka for months after the country’s foreign exchange reserves plummeted to record lows, with dollars running out to pay for essential imports including food, medicine and fuel.\n\nRajapaksa’s brother Mahinda Rajapaksa was forced to resign as prime minister in May as public fury grew over the crisis.\n\nHis departure came during a day of chaos and violence that culminated in police imposing a curfew across the country.\n\nSri Lankan President Ranil Wickremesinghe reportedly said in late July it was “not the right time” for Gotabaya Rajapaksa to return to the country as it could inflame political tensions.", "authors": ["Iqbal Athas Rhea Mogul", "Iqbal Athas", "Rhea Mogul"], "publish_date": "2022/08/17"}, {"url": "https://www.cnn.com/2022/05/10/europe/finland-nato-putin-analysis-intl-cmd/index.html", "title": "Analysis: Finland is on the verge of asking to join NATO. Here's why ...", "text": "CNN —\n\nVladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine has backfired on a number of fronts. But one of the most disastrous consequences of all for the Russian President is the increasingly likely prospect of Finland joining NATO.\n\nThe Nordic nation is expected to announce its interest in NATO membership as soon as this week after its Foreign Affairs Committee drafts a response to the government’s security report – which includes the option of joining the alliance. After that, the Finnish parliament will hold an extraordinary debate on whether to approve the security report recommendations.\n\nAt this point it is very likely NATO would invite the country to talk about accession to the alliance.\n\nIt is broadly believed this would happen very quickly, as Finland already meets most of the criteria and it’s highly unlikely any NATO members would object.\n\nMultiple recent opinion polls have shown that at least 60% of Finns are now in favor of NATO membership, a huge jump from a previous high of around 30% in past years.\n\nIf this plays out as expected, this country of under 6 million people will have redrawn the European security map in a way that was previously inconceivable and may have tremendous consequences for Russia.\n\nNATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg talks speaks during a joint press with Sweden and Finland's Foreign ministers after their meeting at the Nato headquarters in Brussels on January 24, 2022. John Thys/AFP/Getty Images\n\nBefore Putin invaded Ukraine, he made clear his belief that NATO had edged too close to Russia and should be stripped back to its borders of the 1990s, before some countries that either neighbor Russia or were ex-Soviet states joined the military alliance.\n\nRussia currently shares about 755 miles of land border with five NATO members, according to the alliance. Finland’s accession would mean that a nation with which Russia shares an 800-mile border would become formally militarily aligned with the United States.\n\nNot only would this be bad news for the Kremlin, but the addition of Finland would be quite a boon for NATO. Despite its relatively small population, Finland is a serious military power that has been unofficially aligned with the West for decades. Its military has for decades used equipment purchased from the United States that is compatible with NATO allies, meaning it could easily join NATO missions should it choose to do so.\n\n‘Survival’ ideology\n\nMany believe the only reason Finland hadn’t joined the alliance prior to the Ukraine crisis was simple pragmatism.\n\n“Finnish security has always been based on two concepts: first geography and history; second idealism and realism,” Alexander Stubb, a former Prime Minister of Finland, told CNN.\n\n“In an ideal world we want to cooperate with Russia, which we cannot escape being our geographical neighbor. But we also know from history that the greatest realistic threat to our national security is Russia. Over time, the reality that Russia is willing to create greater chaos in our region has become even clearer, so joining NATO becomes the pragmatic option,” he said.\n\nHistorically, Finland has navigated these competing realities by simultaneously indulging Russia’s security concerns, however irrational they may be, while also maintaining high defense spending and a standing military that is compatible with Western allies.\n\n“It’s always been bonkers, the idea that a Western country would invade Russia, but we have tried to minimize those concerns by boosting trade and cooperating in other areas,” said Charly Salonius-Pasternak, a leading researcher in global security at the Finnish Institute of International Affairs.\n\nHe adds, however, that on top of policies like conscription – all Finnish men are liable to be called up for military service – and high defense spending, Finnish politicians have consistently sold to the public the idea that Finland’s idealistic way of life must be maintained at all costs.\n\nSwedish Army armoured vehicles and tanks participate in a military exercise called \"Cold Response 2022\", gathering around 30,000 troops from NATO member countries as well as Finland and Sweden, amid Russia's invasion of Ukraine, in Setermoen in the Arctic Circle, Norway, March 25, 2022. Yves Herman/Reuters\n\n“Finland’s default ideology has been one of survival. In the past 100 years we have become a strong, sovereign country with high standards of living. We have had to sacrifice land in order to maintain peace,” Salonius-Pasternak said. “It is therefore vitally important that our way of life survives, whether that is by pragmatic diplomacy or taking a harder stance against our greatest threat.”\n\nThere is no doubt that Finland joining NATO would be a major blow to Putin. Not only would it mean those extra 800 miles of shared border with the alliance, but symbolically it would go further in uniting the anti-Putin coalition that has emerged since the invasion of Ukraine. Countries that were once neutral are now providing funding and arms to Ukraine and Putin is an international pariah with fewer allies by the day.\n\nIt would also expand NATO’s influence in northern Europe all the way up to the Arctic, an area that is becoming increasingly important geopolitically due to its natural resources, strategic location and numerous territorial claims – including by Russia, Finland and the US.\n\nSweden, which neighbors Finland to the west, is also considering joining the alliance – and Finland’s accession would make it all the more likely, as the two countries have been on a similar journey since the start of the Ukraine crisis.\n\nRussian response\n\nOf course, there are concerns over how Russia might react to Finland expressing its desire to join NATO.\n\nMartti Kari, who previously served as Finland’s assistant chief of defense intelligence, told CNN that Russia is already starting a misinformation campaign against it. “The main theme is that Finland is a Nazi country, because we fought against [the] Soviet Union in the Second World War alongside of Nazi Germany,” he said.\n\nHe predicts that Russia could violate Finland’s airspace and disrupt its activities at sea, including shipping, as well as upping its intelligence operations against the country.\n\nHåkon Lunde Saxi, an associate professor at the Norwegian Defence University College, thinks that any move toward Finnish NATO membership would “probably result in a Russian military build-up along NATO’s new border with Russia, which would in itself not be beneficial for Finnish or European security.”\n\nFinland's Prime Minister Sanna Marin addresses a press conference in Berlin on March 16, 2022. John Macdougall/Pool/Getty Images\n\nHowever, he believes that the benefits would by far outweigh the “possible negative consequences of a somewhat larger Russian military footprint along Finland’s border.”\n\nAnd despite concerns over what would happen in the interim period, where Finland would not be protected by NATO membership but would be in negotiations, multiple officials have told CNN that they expect members of the alliance, notably the UK and US, to guarantee Finnish security through this process.\n\nOf course, nothing is certain until Finland makes the first move of declaring its intention. But with public approval, political support and Russia providing every reason for another of its neighbors to join its hated rival, there’s little doubt that Putin’s gambit to decrease NATO’S influence in Europe has backfired, spectacularly.", "authors": ["Luke Mcgee"], "publish_date": "2022/05/10"}, {"url": "https://www.cnn.com/2022/11/11/india/rajiv-gandhi-assassination-freed-intl-hnk/index.html", "title": "India's top court orders release of six people convicted of killing ...", "text": "CNN —\n\nIndia’s top court on Friday ordered the release of six people convicted of killing the country’s former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi, 31 years after their imprisonment.\n\nThe Supreme Court released Nalini Sriharan, the only woman convicted in the case, and five men, according to Anand Landge, the lawyer for the petitioners.\n\nThey were arrested a few weeks after Gandhi was assassinated in a suicide bomb attack on May 21, 1991, in the southern state of Tamil Nadu.\n\nThe attack was blamed on separatist rebels fighting for a Tamil state in Sri Lanka. Gandhi’s killing was seen as retaliation for his decision to send Indian troops into Sri Lanka in 1987 to enforce a peace accord to end the island nation’s civil war.\n\nOver the years, various Tamil Nadu governments have requested the release of those found guilty over the killing.\n\nIn May, the Supreme Court ordered the release of A. G. Perarivalan, another man convicted in the case.\n\nPerarivalan, who was 19 years old at the time of the attack, was accused of buying batteries for the bomb. He was convicted of criminal conspiracy to commit murder, among other charges.\n\nKnown as the “unwilling” prime minister who never wanted the job, Gandhi became India’s youngest leader at the age of 40 after his mother and former prime minister, Indira Gandhi, was shot dead by her bodyguards.\n\nBut he served less than a decade, losing the 1989 general election following a corruption scandal, and was assassinated two years later.\n\nDuring his tenure, he signed peace accords with insurgent groups in states where religious tensions were high, and is credited for developing India’s science and technology sectors, giving him the moniker “Father of Information and Technology.”", "authors": ["Rhea Mogul Swati Gupta", "Rhea Mogul", "Swati Gupta"], "publish_date": "2022/11/11"}, {"url": "https://www.cnn.com/2022/12/12/china/china-zero-covid-impact-beijing-intl-hnk-mic/index.html", "title": "China's zero-Covid: Country braces for impact as virus 'spreads ...", "text": "Editor’s Note: 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.\n\nBeijing CNN —\n\nChina is bracing for an unprecedented wave of Covid-19 cases as it dismantles large parts of its repressive zero-Covid policy, with a leading expert warning Omicron variants were “spreading rapidly” and signs of an outbreak rattling the country’s capital.\n\nChanges continued Monday as authorities announced a deactivation of the “mobile itinerary card” health tracking function planned for the following day.\n\nThe system, which is separate from the health code scanning system still required in a reduced number of places in China, had used people’s cell phone data to track their travel history in the past 14 days in an attempt to identify those who have been to a city with zones designated “high-risk” by authorities.\n\nIt had been a point of contention for many Chinese people, including due to concerns around data collection and its use by local governments to ban entry to those who have visited a city with a “high-risk zone,” even if they did not go to those areas within that city.\n\nBut as the scrapping of parts of the zero-Covid infrastructure come apace, there are questions about how the country’s health system will handle a mass outbreak.\n\nThroughout the weekend, some businesses were closed in Beijing, and city streets were largely deserted, as residents either fell ill or feared catching the virus. The biggest public crowds seen were outside of pharmacies and Covid-19 testing booths.\n\nMedia outlet China Youth Daily documented hours-long lines at a clinic in central Beijing on Friday, and cited unnamed experts calling for residents not to visit hospitals unless necessary.\n\nHealth workers in the capital were also grappling with a surge in emergency calls, including from many Covid-positive residents with mild or no symptoms. A hospital official on Saturday appealed to residents in such cases not to call the city’s 911-like emergency services hotline to keep it free for the seriously ill.\n\nThe daily volume of emergency calls had surged from its usual 5,000 to more than 30,000 in recent days, Chen Zhi, chief physician of the Beijing Emergency Center said, according to official media.\n\nCovid was “spreading rapidly” driven by highly transmissible Omicron variants in China, a top Covid-19 expert, Zhong Nanshan, said in an interview published by state media Saturday.\n\n“No matter how strong the prevention and control is, it will be difficult to completely cut off the transmission chain,” Zhong, who has been a key public voice since the earliest days of the pandemic in 2020, was quoted saying by Xinhua.\n\nChanges, and concerns\n\nThe rapid rollback of testing nationwide and the shift by many people to use antigen tests at home has also made it difficult to gauge the extent of the spread, with official data now appearing meaningless.\n\nAuthorities recorded 8,626 Covid-19 cases across China on Sunday, down from the previous day’s count of 10,597 and from the high of more than 40,000 daily cases late last month. CNN reporting from Beijing indicates the case count in the Chinese capital could be much higher than recorded.\n\nOne note seen on a residential building in Beijing is indicative of the larger situation, reading: “Due to the severe epidemic situation in recent days, the number of employees who can come to work is seriously insufficient, and the normal operation of the apartment has been greatly affected and challenged.”\n\nPosters used for health code scanning and barriers used for health screening are seen dismantled at Nanjing South railway station on Friday in Nanjing, China. Yifan Ding/Getty Images\n\nThe country is only days out from a major relaxation of its longstanding zero-Covid measures, which came as a head-spinning change for many Chinese living under the government’s stringent controls and fed a longstanding narrative about the deadliness of Covid-19.\n\nLast Wednesday, top health officials made a sweeping rollback of the mass testing, centralized quarantine, and health code tracking rules that it had relied on to control viral spread. Some aspects of those measures, such as health code use in designated places and central quarantine of severe cases, as well as home isolation of cases, remain.\n\nOutside experts have warned that China may be underprepared to handle the expected surge of cases, after the surprise move to lift its measures in the wake of nationwide protests against the policy, growing case numbers and rising economic costs.\n\nWhile Omicron may cause relatively milder disease compared to earlier variants, even a small number of serious cases could have a significant impact on the health system in a country of 1.4 billion.\n\nZhong, in the state media interview, said the government’s top priority now should be booster shots, particularly for the elderly and others most at risk, especially with Lunar New Year coming up next month – a peak travel time where urban residents visit elderly relatives and return to rural hometowns.\n\nHealth authorities on Sunday ordered improvements in medical capabilities in rural areas by the end of the month.\n\nMeasures to be undertaken include increasing ICU wards and beds, enhancing medical staff for intensive care and setting up more clinics for fevers, China’s National Health Commission said in a statement.\n\n‘Over-hyping’\n\nMeanwhile, experts have warned a lack of experience with the virus – and years of state media coverage focusing on its dangers and impact overseas, before a recent shift in tone – could push those who are not in critical need to seek medical care, further overwhelming systems.\n\nBob Li, a graduate student in Beijing, who tested positive on Friday said he wasn’t afraid of the virus, but his mother, who lives in the countryside, stayed up all night worrying about him. “She finds the virus a very, very scary thing,” Li said.\n\n“I think most people in rural China may have some misunderstandings about the virus, which may come from the overhyping of this virus by the state in the past two years. This is one of the reasons why people are so afraid,” he said, adding that he still supports the government’s careful treatment of Covid-19 during the pandemic.\n\nThere are clear efforts to tamp down on public concern about Covid-19 – and its knock-on effects, like panic buying of medications.\n\nChina’s market watchdog said on Friday that there was a “temporary shortage” of some “hot-selling” drugs and vowed to crack down on price gouging, while major online retailer JD.com last week said it was taking steps to ensure stable supplies after sales for certain medications surged 18 times that week over the same period in October.\n\nA hashtag trending on China’s heavily moderated social media platform Weibo over the weekend featured a state media interview with a Beijing doctor saying people who tested positive for Covid-19 but had no or mild symptoms did not need to take medication to recover.\n\n“People with asymptomatic infections do not need medication at all. It is enough to rest at home, maintain a good mood and physical condition,” Li Tongzeng, chief infectious disease physician at Beijing You An Hospital, said in an interview linked to a hashtag viewed more than 370 million times since Friday.", "authors": ["Simone Mccarthy Selina Wang Wayne Chang", "Simone Mccarthy", "Selina Wang", "Wayne Chang"], "publish_date": "2022/12/12"}, {"url": "https://www.cnn.com/2022/10/21/uk/uk-no-election-explained-intl-gbr/index.html", "title": "UK election: Why crisis-wracked nation won't be voting soon | CNN", "text": "London CNN —\n\nThe United Kingdom is – once again – in the market for a new leader following the resignation of Prime Minister Liz Truss only six weeks into her disastrous premiership.\n\nTruss’ successor will be the fifth PM to lead the country since it voted for Brexit in 2016 – a decision that set into motion the turmoil that ultimately led to the current political chaos.\n\nAnd while a general election might seem to be the obvious way forward, Brits (and their dogs) are unlikely to be lining up in front of the ballot box any time soon. Here’s why.\n\nWhy won’t there be a new election?\n\nIn the UK, general elections must be held at least every five years.\n\nLuckily for the Conservative Party, which is currently in power but trailing the opposition in opinion polls, the next vote doesn’t need to be held until January 2025.\n\nThat’s because in the UK, prime ministers are not elected directly by the people. In fact, four of the last five British prime ministers came into the role without a general election.\n\nTruss is in Downing Street because she is the leader of the largest party in the House of Commons. She was picked by the roughly 172,000 members of the Conservative Party after the departure of Boris Johnson, who himself became prime minister without a general election after winning the party leadership contest in 2019 – although he did call a new vote in December that year and won.\n\nTheresa May, who served as prime minister before Johnson, also first became PM without an election, as did Labour’s Gordon Brown when he replaced Tony Blair in 2007.\n\nSo how will the new PM be picked?\n\nThe Conservative Party is still the largest one in Parliament, so its new leader will automatically become prime minister.\n\nWhile the last leadership election took almost two months – longer than Truss will spend as prime minister – the next one will be swift.\n\nGraham Brady, leader of the 1922 Committee, which represents rank-and-file Conservative members of parliament, said Thursday the new PM will be chosen by next Friday.\n\nTo narrow the field of those in the running, the candidates to replace Truss will need at least 100 nominations from Conservative MPs, which means there will be a maximum of three people in the running.\n\nMust the new prime minister call a general election?\n\nNo. The next general election is due to take place no later than January 2025.\n\nHowever, the prospect of Britain seeing its third prime minister since the last poll in 2019 and the second to come into power without a public vote will put pressure on Truss’ successor to ask the public for a new mandate.\n\nThe last time three successive prime ministers entered Downing Street without standing in a general election was before and during the World War II.\n\nThe opposition, sensing an opportunity, is pushing for a new vote. Keir Starmer, the leader of the Labour Party, which is enjoying a huge lead in opinion polls, repeated his calls on Thursday for an early general election. “After 12 years of Tory failure, the British people deserve so much better than this revolving door of chaos,” he said in a statement posted on Twitter. Scottish First Minister Nicola Sturgeon also called for an early vote, saying a new “general election is now a democratic imperative.”\n\nWhat do British people think about all this?\n\nJudging by the numerous protests, jokes and memes, many are far from impressed. A public petition calling for a new election was launched in September. It gathered more than 715,000 signatures and was debated in parliament earlier this week.\n\nHowever, there is little the public can do if the Conservative Party, which is firmly in control of parliament, decides not to call an election now. For many Conservative lawmakers, voting for an early election would mean the end of their political careers. The odds of that happening are likely to be low.", "authors": ["Ivana Kottasová"], "publish_date": "2022/10/21"}, {"url": "https://www.cnn.com/2022/12/05/politics/trump-2024-presidential-campaign/index.html", "title": "Trump's slow 2024 start worries allies | CNN Politics", "text": "CNN —\n\nBack in 2015, Donald Trump’s first campaign rally in Iowa as a contender for the Republican presidential nomination came just 10 hours after he declared his candidacy in New York. The following day, he was across the country in New Hampshire, with plans to visit South Carolina before the end of his first week.\n\nBut seven years later – and nearly three weeks into his 2024 presidential campaign – Trump has yet to leave his home state or hold a public campaign event in an early voting state.\n\nTrump’s disengaged posture has baffled former and current allies, many of whom experienced firsthand the frenetic pace of his two previous White House bids, and who now say he’s missed the window to make a splash with his 2024 rollout. The uninspiring launch of his supposed political comeback comes as his campaign appears to be operating on auto pilot, with few signs of momentum or enthusiastic support from donors or party heavyweights.\n\n“I don’t know why he rushed this. It doesn’t make sense,” one Trump adviser said of his lackluster announcement speech last month, which came one week after Republicans delivered an underwhelming performance in the midterm elections and as the rest of the party turned its attention to the Senate runoff contest in Georgia.\n\nTrump’s announcement was roundly panned for lacking zest, so much so that some audience members attempted an early exit, and his recent hosting of Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes and embattled rapper Kanye “Ye” West at Mar-a-Lago only further galvanized GOP opposition against him. A person familiar with the matter said Trump spent the Sunday after Thanksgiving asking people around him if they thought the backlash to his private dinner with Ye and Fuentes was truly damaging.\n\n“So far, he has gone down from his bedroom, made an announcement, gone back up to his bedroom and hasn’t been seen since except to have dinner with a White supremacist,” said a 2020 Trump campaign adviser.\n\n“It’s 1000% a ho-hum campaign,” the adviser added.\n\nThe only other notable event to occur since Trump announced he was running again was both unintended and dreaded for weeks by the former president’s attorneys. Just three days after Trump launched his campaign, Attorney General Merrick Garland appointed a special counsel to oversee two ongoing criminal investigations into the 45th president and his associates.\n\nWhile some Republicans long speculated that Trump entered the presidential race early to inoculate himself from further legal peril, his candidate status instead appeared to serve as the catalyst for Garland’s announcement.\n\nA Trump campaign spokesman said the former president has held “multiple events since he announced,” noting his remote appearance at the annual Republican Jewish Coalition summit last month, video remarks to a conference for conservative activists in Mexico, a Patriots Freedom Fund event, his remarks at two separate political events held at Mar-a-Lago, and a tele-rally Monday night for Georgia Republican Senate hopeful Herschel Walker. None of these events were billed as campaign events.\n\nTrump’s current campaign trajectory has left both allies and Republican opponents wondering if he will flip a switch in 2023 or fail to adapt to a different political environment. Even as the GOP’s undisputed 2024 frontrunner, some of his closest allies say he simply cannot afford to take his position for granted at a moment when influential Republicans appear exceedingly interested in dislodging him from his influential perch.\n\n“If Trump was working in a lush jungle environment in 2016, he is in a desert today,” said a Republican close to the former president. “The political landscape has totally changed. He was irresistible because no one understood him but now everybody knows how to deal with him, so the question is, can he recalibrate?”\n\nSome sources said Trump’s first-out-of-the-gate strategy, which was said to be partly aimed at clearing the GOP primary field, already looks poised to fail.\n\n“You know what it’s done to dissuade people from getting in? Nothing. He hasn’t hired anyone. He hasn’t been to the early states,” said the 2020 campaign adviser.\n\nTrump’s lack of impact was on display a week after his announcement, as other 2024 Republican hopefuls took the stage in Las Vegas for the annual RJC summit. Some attacked the former President, while others, once allies of Trump, indicated they were ready to take him on in 2024.\n\nJust days before the event, Trump’s team announced plans for him to address the group remotely. Two people familiar with the matter said his virtual address was organized by aides at the last minute after he grew agitated upon realizing the event was a cattle call for Republican presidential prospects and he was not on its original list of speakers. The Trump campaign spokesman disputed this account, saying Trump’s remote remarks were planned “many weeks prior to the event.”\n\nOther sources who for months harbored concerns that Trump wasn’t as enthusiastic about running as he was letting on in public appearances now say his inactivity has increased their worry. Apart from a planned fundraising appearance for a classical education group in Naples last weekend, the former president has yet to announce any events before the end of the year. A person familiar with the matter said Trump’s team is toying with a pre-Christmas event of some kind, though his campaign has not yet finalized any travel. In a statement last week panning a move by Democratic officials to put South Carolina first on the party’s primary calendar, Trump appeared to tease a visit to Iowa, currently the first state to cast votes in both parties’ presidential nominating contests, “in the very near future.”\n\n“I can’t wait to be back in Iowa,” he said.\n\nCampaign is ‘taking a breather’\n\nInside Trump’s campaign, sources said his current approach is entirely intentional, dismissing concerns that he has forfeited the spotlight at a critical time but acknowledging that Trump is currently working with a bare-bones staff.\n\nThe campaign “is doing exactly what everyone always accuses [them] of not doing – taking a breather, planning and forming a strategy for the next two years,” said one source familiar with Trump’s operation said.\n\nSenior staff are holed up working on a plan,” this person added, noting that Trump’s campaign travel is expected to begin early in the new year, right as possible rivals who have taken the holidays to mull their own political futures may start launching their own campaigns or exploratory committees.\n\nAnd while some Trump allies have been surprised by his lack of a hiring spree right out of the gate, his campaign has been content to maintain a lean operation while he’s the only candidate in the field. The former president is not expected to tap a formal campaign manager, instead elevating three trusted advisers – Susie Wiles, Brian Jack and Chris LaCivita – to senior roles, but allies said he will likely need to build out his on-the-ground staff in early voting states in the months to come, as well as a robust communications operation if he finds himself in a competitive primary.\n\nWhile those hires don’t need to happen immediately, people close to Trump said his early entry into the 2024 race does raise questions about how he will sustain campaign-related costs over a longer period than other candidates who declare later, including chief potential rival Ron DeSantis. CNN has previously reported that the Florida governor, should he decide to take on Trump, would announce next May or June, after the conclusion of his state’s legislative session and just months before the Republican party could host its first primary debate, according to a party official involved in debate planning.\n\n“The question a lot of us have is can Trump sustain a campaign for two years. That’s the real difficulty here. The pacing we’re seeing right now is designed to do that,” said a person close to Trump.\n\nIn addition to planning rallies and events and building momentum around the former President, the campaign staff is also looking at how to best insulate Trump after many were caught off guard learning of Trump’s dinner with Fuentes and West. The event, and the days of fallout and negative coverage, has expedited some of the campaign’s long-term plans, including ensuring a senior campaign staffer is always with the former president, a source familiar with the campaign said.\n\nTrump’s White House staff worked with resort staff during his presidency in a similar fashion to protect Trump from potentially “unsavory” guests of members, the source said. Those close to Trump blamed “low level staffers” for allowing Fuentes to slip into the resort without any flags being raised.", "authors": ["Gaborr Kristen Holmes", "Kristen Holmes"], "publish_date": "2022/12/05"}]}
{"question_id": "20230120_8", "search_time": "2023/01/20/16:37", "search_result": [{"url": "https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2023/01/18/desantis-florida-covid-19-mask-mandates-ban/11075664002/", "title": "DeSantis to push for permanent ban on Florida mandates for masks ...", "text": "John Kennedy\n\nCapital Bureau | USA TODAY NETWORK – FLORIDA\n\nTALLAHASSEE – In a wide-ranging attack on efforts to combat COVID-19, Gov. Ron DeSantis called Tuesday for the Republican-controlled Legislature to make permanent Florida’s prohibitions on mask mandates at schools and vaccine requirements for local governments and businesses.\n\nThe measures were enacted during a special session DeSantis called in late 2021, when he was fighting many Florida school districts, private businesses and the federal government under President Joe Biden, which were taking steps they saw as potentially needed to reduce the transmission of COVID-19.\n\nThe mandate bans approved then by Florida lawmakers are set to expire in June.\n\nBut DeSantis wants to keep them on the books and raised the specter that efforts to reinstate them could emerge from places like California, which actually lifted statewide requirements almost a year ago.\n\n“Being the free state of Florida did not happen by accident,” DeSantis said in a campaign rally-like speech to a crowd at a Panama City theater where, prior to him taking the stage, a governor’s office staffer instructed people to wave signs bearing the message, “Science Not Censorship.”\n\nLadapo promotes dubious vaccine dataFlorida Surgeon General Ladapo appears on anti-vaccine podcast, promotes medical falsehoods\n\nFlorida stands alone in balkingFlorida surgeon general defends opposition to COVID-19 vaccines for children before Congress\n\nDeSantis gets grand jury on vaccinesFlorida Supreme Court approves DeSantis call for coronavirus vaccine grand jury\n\n'Just nuts:' DeSantis continues to say mandates clash with freedom\n\nDeSantis continued, touting his defense of Florida freedom. “It required us over the past few years to stand against major institutions in our society: The bureaucracy, the medical establishment, legacy media and even the president of the United States who, together, were working to impose a bio-medical security state on society,” he said.\n\nFor about an hour, DeSantis and other invited speakers cast doubt on the effectiveness of COVID-19 vaccines and masking, condemning what the speakers said were continuing efforts in other states to reinstate masks or require university students or staff to get booster shots.\n\n“This is just nuts that we’re still doing this,” DeSantis said.\n\nThe deadline facing Florida on the COVID-19 mandate bans will bring the issue into the Legislature when it convenes in March. But it also gives DeSantis, widely seen as a 2024 Republican presidential candidate, an opportunity to push back against the Biden administration.\n\nCOVID-19 vaccinations and masks also are an animating topic among many Republican voters nationally. The Kaiser Family Foundation’s COVID-19 Vaccine Monitor reports that only 37% of Republicans say they are vaccinated and boosted, compared with 74% of voters who identify as Democrats.\n\nMore than 84,000 Floridians have died from COVID-19, while the state has reported almost 7.4 million cases since the beginning of the pandemic.\n\nFlorida doctors appear with DeSantis\n\nIncluded at Tuesday’s event were a pair of area doctors: Dr. Jon Ward, a Panama City dermatologist who promotes “natural immunity” on his Twitter account and another, Dr. Tim Boyett, a Gulf Breeze radiologist, who shunned the vaccine but has been helped by what he said is a “three-day treatment regimen,” that he says has been successful with other patients fighting COVID-19.\n\nU.S. Rep. Neal Dunn, R-Panama City, also a doctor, praised the governor’s approach.\n\nAmong those joining DeSantis was Florida Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo, who was recently criticized by medical school colleagues at the University of Florida for what they concluded was flawed research which resulted in the state Health Department issuing guidance discouraging COVID-19 vaccines for men under age 40, citing possible cardiac risks the department found.\n\nThe governor’s office has dismissed the criticism.\n\n“There’s a lot of lunacy out there,” Ladapo said of mask recommendations that came from state and federal governments and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.\n\nSurgeon General Ladapo derides California\n\nHe and DeSantis also ridiculed a California law that allows regulators to punish doctors for spreading false information about COVID-19 vaccinations and treatments.\n\n“They should be allowed to say what they think and they shouldn’t be forced or essentially be scared into feeling they can’t express themselves,” Ladapo said.\n\nDeSantis agreed and said he wants state lawmakers to include a new ban against any proposals that could lead to regulatory punishments for vaccine- or mask-questioning doctors in Florida.\n\n“You’re going to have Florida become the state where if a very high-quality physician is driven out of California, this is the first place you’re going to have people want to go,” DeSantis said.\n\nJohn Kennedy is a reporter in the USA TODAY Network’s Florida Capital Bureau. He can be reached at jkennedy2@gannett.com, or on Twitter at @JKennedyReport", "authors": [], "publish_date": "2023/01/18"}, {"url": "https://www.cnn.com/2022/02/08/us/new-york-mask-mandate-vaccine-announcement/index.html", "title": "New York will end its mask-or-vaccine mandate for indoor ...", "text": "CNN —\n\nNew York will lift its statewide mask-or-vaccine requirement for indoor businesses – but not for schools – on Thursday, Gov. Kathy Hochul said.\n\n“Given the declining cases, given the declining hospitalizations, that is why we feel comfortable to life this in effect tomorrow,” she said Wednesday. “We want to make sure that every business knows, this is your prerogative. And individuals who want to continue wearing masks, continue wearing masks.”\n\nThe mandate required businesses to ask customers for proof of vaccination or for them to wear masks indoors, except when eating or drinking. The emergency temporary measure was put in place two months ago and was set to expire Thursday.\n\nThe mask mandate still remains in place for schools, child care settings, hospitals, nursing homes and on public transit. Hochul said the state plans to review student Covid-19 test results and other metrics next month to decide whether to continue requiring masks in schools.\n\n“After the break, after we’ve had kids tested, we are going to make an assessment that first week in March based on all the metrics I’ve described to you and look at that combined picture,” the governor said. She acknowledged it was a “strong possibility” the school mask mandate will be lifted.\n\nFollowing the decision, New York City Mayor Eric Adams announced private businesses can choose whether to require masks.\n\nThe move comes as the Omicron wave that swept across the US in the last few months has started to recede, prompting many state officials in politically liberal regions to pull back on Covid-19 mitigation measures.\n\nPeople wearng masks work out at a gym in Manhattan, New York City, on May 19, 2021. ED JONES/AFP via Getty Images\n\nA number of Northeast states with high vaccination rates, including New Jersey and Delaware, have set timelines for ending school mask mandates in recent days.\n\nOn Wednesday, Massachusetts announced it will lift its school mask mandate on February 28, according to Gov. Charlie Baker and the state’s Department of Elementary and Secondary Education.\n\n“We’ve learned a lot about how safe schools are and how to keep kids in class learning over the course of this pandemic,” Baker, a Republican, said. “We have far more tools available to us to deal with the pandemic than we had back at the beginning.”\n\nRhode Island Gov. Dan McKee announced the state will be lifting its indoor mask mandates and proof of vaccination protocols on Friday.\n\nIn Illinois, Gov. J.B. Pritzker said the state – which is seeing the fastest decline in hospitalizations since the pandemic – is planning to lift its statewide indoor mask requirement on February 28.\n\nFurther, nearly a dozen health officers in California’s Bay Area will lift universal mask requirements for most indoor settings starting next Wednesday, according to a joint press release. And the Denver Department of Public Health & Environment announced it will lift its school mask mandate on February 25.\n\nNY’s requirement began two months ago\n\nGov. Kathy Hochul meets virtually with leadership from education groups including school superintendents, principals, school boards, and parent teacher associations. Mike Groll/Office of Governor Kathy Hochul\n\nIn New York, Hochul issued the mask-or-vaccine requirement for all indoor businesses in December 2021 as the Omicron variant caused a large increase in Covid-19 cases, hospitalizations and deaths. That wave of new cases peaked about a month ago and has since receded.\n\nOn Tuesday, Hochul said the requirement was put in place “when we first saw the early signs of this Omicron could be wildly contagious,” she said. “It certainly was, and so we put in some protections in place to help our workplaces and help employees and customers.”\n\nTwo weeks ago, a judge struck down the mandate, saying the Department of Health did not have the authority to put it in place, but an appeals court judge allowed it to stay in effect.\n\nHochul met earlier this week with teachers, superintendents and parents to thank them for keeping schools safe and open and to discuss how to continue to “smartly” protect against Covid-19.\n\nIn a statement released after the meeting, New York State School Boards Association Executive Director Robert S. Schneider summed up the challenge of determining Covid-19 protocols in schools.\n\n“Like everyone, our members are ready to get past this pandemic and return to life as normal, and they want to do so in a way that keeps all of our students, teachers, employees and their families safe. The governor, like school board members, must balance many different concerns and ultimately decide based on what’s best for our students.”\n\nOther states set timelines for lifting mandates\n\nOther states have started lifting their mask mandates. Oregon’s health department announced the state will remove general mask requirements for indoor public places no later than March 31. School mask mandates will also be lifted March 31, according to CNN affiliate KATU-TV.\n\nCalifornia Gov. Gavin Newsom announced the state’s indoor mask requirement will expire February 15, though unvaccinated people will still need to wear masks indoors.\n\nWashington’s outdoor mask mandate will be lifted on February 18, Gov. Jay Inslee said Wednesday afternoon at a news conference.\n\nInslee said it’s not time to lift all masking requirements just yet and he plans to share more information after gathering another week or so of data.\n\nThe governor said the state will make a “safe transition” when it’s time.\n\n“The day to totally remove masks rapidly approaching,” Inslee said. “I did not require masks for symbolism, I required them because they work. Now I believe we’re in a position to transition to a different state.”\n\nDemocratic governors in New Jersey, Delaware and Connecticut announced that school mask mandates will be lifted in the coming weeks. The governors cited the declines in Covid-19 case counts, hospitalizations, test positivity rates and rates of transmission in making their decision.\n\nIn Connecticut, Gov. Ned Lamont said he recommends ending the statewide mask mandate in schools and childcare centers effective February 28, leaving decisions on mask requirements in schools to officials at the local level.\n\nIn Delaware, Gov. John Carney said that public and private K-12 mask mandates will expire March 31, and in New Jersey, Gov. Phil Murphy said the state’s universal mask mandate for schools and child-care settings will lift March 7.\n\nLifting of school mask mandates goes against guidance from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The agency has not provided states a road map for how to transition from the emergency phase of Covid-19 into the “new normal,” so these states have taken steps on their own.\n\n“We’ve adhered overwhelmingly with the CDC guidance. The reason why we’re making this step today is our reality in New Jersey,” Murphy told CNN on Monday. “We are now in a dramatically different place than the norm right now across the country, which is why we feel like we can decouple and take this step.”\n\nPritzker, the Illinois governor, has teased changes to his state’s indoor mask policy in the past few days.\n\n“I think I’ve said over the last few press conferences that I really believe that we ought to be looking seriously at how to ratchet that back. I think we’re going to be making announcements very soon about that,” Pritzker said at an unrelated news conference Tuesday, in response to reporters asking about the mandate.\n\nAt a Monday news conference, Pritzker addressed a circuit judge’s temporary restraining order that blocked schools from enforcing portions of his school-related Covid-19 mitigation policies, saying he asked the state’s attorney general to work to get the restraining order overturned.\n\nCorrection: An earlier version of this story incorrectly characterized New York’s mask mandate. It requires businesses to ask customers for proof of vaccination or for them to wear masks indoors, not both.", "authors": ["Eric Levenson Amir Vera Kristina Sgueglia", "Eric Levenson", "Amir Vera", "Kristina Sgueglia"], "publish_date": "2022/02/08"}, {"url": "https://www.cnn.com/2022/02/20/us/immunocompromised-high-risk-americans-covid-measures-forgotten/index.html", "title": "As US pushes to a pre-Covid reality, high-risk and disabled ...", "text": "CNN —\n\nTasha Nelson’s 10-year-old son held back tears when he heard the news. The two were in the car when the announcement came through the radio: Virginia’s freshly sworn-in governor had signed an order attempting to ban mask mandates in schools.\n\n“My son looked up at me and he had tears in his eyes because he knew what it meant. He said, ‘Mom, does that mean I can’t go to school anymore?’” Nelson said. “He said, ‘Can’t we let the governor know about kids like me? I want to go to school too.’”\n\nJack, a fourth grader, has cystic fibrosis, a progressive genetic disease that causes persistent, damaging lung infections, making it harder to breathe over time. Like other immunocompromised, disabled and chronically ill Americans, Jack was taking measures, like masking, to dodge infections before the pandemic too. But with Covid-19 still rampant, it’s not as easy. Even though he’s vaccinated, the virus poses a serious, potentially deadly, risk to Jack. His 2-year-old brother, who is not yet eligible for the shots, is another concern.\n\nTasha Nelson with her 10-year-old son, Jack, who is no longer attending school in person after Virginia effectively barred schools from implementing mask mandates. Courtesy Tasha Nelson\n\nNelson is among a group of parents who sued Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin over that order, claiming it puts students who are immunocompromised or have disabilities at risk and violates the Americans with Disabilities Act. CNN has reached out to Youngkin’s office for comment on the lawsuit.\n\nRoughly two weeks after that lawsuit was filed, the governor signed a bill into law allowing parents to opt their children out of school mask mandates.\n\nNelson is keeping her son at home again because of it.\n\n“This whole pandemic, our culture, media (and) government has made it very clear to high-risk and disabled people that we are an acceptable loss,” Nelson said. “We’re doing everything we can to survive this pandemic too.”\n\nCovid-19 cases and hospitalizations are declining nationwide, but transmission – how much virus is circulating in a community – remains high in more than 90% of the United States, according to data from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The CDC still recommends everyone to mask indoors in areas of substantial or high transmission.\n\nBut public health experts are split on whether it’s time to lift mitigation measures. Some say dropping protections at a time when Covid-19 numbers are so high is a political move rather than a public health one. Others say the downward trends justify those moves and note Omicron is milder than earlier variants for most healthy people.\n\nAs local and state leaders nationwide remove mask and vaccination rules, those at high risk for severe disease say doing away with protections now leaves them more vulnerable, especially as they, or family members, return to in-person work or school. And for some, Covid-19 vaccines are not as effective in staving off a severe bout with the virus, prompting the CDC to recommend a fourth shot for immunocompromised people 12 years and older in October.\n\nRoughly seven million American adults are immunocompromised, the CDC estimates. While not all have conditions that leave them severely immunocompromised and vulnerable to severe Covid-19, about 61 million adults – roughly one in four in the US – have some type of disability, according to the agency. More than three million children had a disability in 2019, according to the US Census Bureau.\n\n“Everyone knows someone who had cancer, everyone knows somebody who had a kidney transplant for one reason or another, or someone who’s got Alzheimer’s or someone who has a heart condition or someone who was born with a rare immunodeficiency,” said Sara Willette, who has been in isolation with her husband in Iowa since the state reported its first case of the virus, some 700 days ago.\n\n“The more protections that we remove, the less accessible the rest of the world becomes to people who are high-risk,” Willette said.\n\nEven though Willette is triple vaccinated and preparing for her fourth shot, catching the virus could be deadly. She has Common Variable Immunodeficiency Disorder (CVID), meaning her body does not produce protective antibodies to defend itself against pathogens like bacteria or viruses.\n\nThe couple considered leaving their home in Ames and moving to southern California, where stricter masking protocols could have helped protect her. But they ruled out the idea after California’s governor lifted the indoor mask mandate for vaccinated people this month, citing a drop in infections.\n\nIowa’s lawmakers are going even further – a bill looking to effectively ban vaccine and mask mandates is making its way through the legislature. “We have to make a choice between staying alive and having a life,” Willette said.\n\nThe high-risk people CNN spoke to said as the country eagerly looks to move on from the pandemic, they feel forgotten – and worse, like they don’t matter to the rest of the American public. Some say they feel like they’ve been left to adapt to a more dangerous reality, while others are now mapping out a permanently isolated lifestyle.\n\nVideo Ad Feedback New York state supreme court judge strikes down mask mandate 02:30 - Source: CNN\n\nFamilies faced with impossible choices\n\nIn Wilmington, Massachusetts, Karen Yurek’s family is navigating a tough balancing act. Yurek and her husband are both high-risk and on immunosuppressant medications. She has rheumatoid arthritis and he has multiple sclerosis. Both have received four Covid-19 shots and work remotely.\n\nTheir family was almost entirely isolated until last week, when their 6-year-old son, Billy, returned to school. Billy is vaccinated, and Yurek and her husband felt he could stay safe with the help of a universal masking requirement that was in place.\n\nThen, state officials announced they were lifting the mandate at the end of February. Yurek wrote to the Wilmington School Committee, urging them to keep masks mandatory to “protect the members of our community who don’t have the luxury of ‘normal’ anymore.”\n\nThe committee voted Wednesday to lift its mask mandate, posing a difficult dilemma for Yurek’s family: pull their child out of in-person class or risk serious illness.\n\n“It’s really demoralizing,” Yurek said. “It just feels like everyone’s so focused on getting back to normal that … they’re forgetting about all of the really at-risk people. And if they’re not forgetting about them, that they’re just saying, ‘Well, you’re on your own.’”\n\nDr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, told CNN’s John Berman on Thursday that lifting school mask mandates given the current transmission levels could push cases back up. “We’ve been to this show before,” he said. “Where things came down, you pull back a little, and it bounces back.”\n\nKaren Yurek's son, Billy, is seen here on his first day back to in-person school. He was excited to be back, Yurek said. Courtesy Karen Yurek\n\nWhen asked this month about immunocompromised Americans who feel left behind, CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky said the agency is working to update its mask guidance so it is “relevant for the public, but also for the public who is immunocompromised and disabled,” but offered no further details.\n\nTo help keep more people safe, mask requirements should depend on how much virus is circulating in a community, said Raymund Razonable, a professor of medicine at the Mayo Clinic and vice chair of the division of public health, infectious diseases and occupational medicine in Rochester, Minnesota. Shedding masks at a time the virus is still rampant and the threat of more variants – including an Omicron subvariant – loom is a risk, Razonable told CNN.\n\nAll but one of the remaining states that still had mask mandates in place – Hawaii – have announced plans to remove them.\n\nOther local leaders have announced the end of vaccine measures too. The country’s capital put an end to its indoor business vaccine requirement Tuesday. In the following days, Philadelphia and Boston also announced they were dropping vaccine requirements. In New York City, Mayor Eric Adams told employers to end work-from-home policies, saying in a news conference, “We need people back to work.”\n\n“Unfortunately, for the most part, we’re seeing a lot of disregard for the immunocompromised and the disabled community,” said April Moreno, a public health expert and founder of the Autoimmune Community Institute, a nonprofit research and advocacy organization. “We’re hurting.”\n\nKris Giere, a 42-year-old who has Type 1 diabetes and lives in Indiana, a state that ended its mask mandate last April, echoed the same.\n\n“I’m tired of having to worry about how many disease vectors I’m in contact with,” Giere said. “I’m on edge every day, because I don’t get to go back to normal. There is no going back to normal for me.”\n\n‘We don’t have the luxury of pretending the pandemic is over’\n\nWhen the CDC updated its isolation guidelines in December to say people can leave isolation five days after testing positive if their symptoms are gone or getting better, and to wear a well-fitted mask for 10 days, the agency also urged them to “avoid people who are immunocompromised or at high risk for severe disease,” for at least 10 days.\n\nBut it can be hard to know when someone – a coworker, a friend or a passerby – is immunocompromised or high-risk, Moreno pointed out. It’s why many conditions are known as “invisible illnesses.”\n\nApril Moreno, who was diagnosed several years ago with an autoimmune condition, says she feels like high-risk Americans are being disregarded. Courtesy April Moreno\n\n“No one … has given me a giant foam hat with an arrow saying ‘immunocompromised’ on it,” said Matthew Cortland, who works on disability and health policy at Data for Progress, a left-leaning think tank. “The lengths we have to go to in order to mitigate, to some extent, the risk that society at large is just offloading onto us is absurd.”\n\nCortland permanently works from home. But many friends who are also chronically ill and disabled don’t have the same option. That’s why public health measures remain critical, Cortland said, including global vaccination campaigns, widespread availability and use of high-quality masks, research into more adaptive personal protective equipment, improvements to indoor air quality, better testing procedures and sufficient treatments.\n\nThe US has increased its order for one of the key preventive therapies for the immunocompromised, Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra announced last week. But even with that boost, the country will only have enough of that monoclonal antibody treatment for less than a quarter of its immunocompromised population. And while there are other Covid-19 therapeutics that can help people including the severely immunocompromised, they are still also in short supply in many parts of the US and won’t be more widely available until spring, the US Food and Drug Administration has said.\n\n“There’s not enough for the millions of immunocompromised patients,” said Razonable. In his hospital, he said there is a “sufficient” supply to cover only “the highest risk group” of people.\n\nTwo years in, high-risk Americans are feeling traumatized and exhausted from the daily risk assessments and new hurdles that life in a Covid-era America comes with.\n\nAs Cortland puts it: “No one wants to actually be done with the pandemic more than disabled, chronically ill, and immunocompromised Americans. We just don’t have the luxury of pretending the pandemic is over when it isn’t. And it clearly is not.”", "authors": ["Christina Maxouris"], "publish_date": "2022/02/20"}, {"url": "https://www.cnn.com/2022/02/08/health/states-lift-school-mask-mandates-cdc/index.html", "title": "As states plan to lift school mask mandates, CDC remains vague on ...", "text": "CNN —\n\nAs many states see declines in their daily Covid-19 case numbers and hospitalization rates, some have moved forward with plans to lift a significant mitigation measure: mask mandates in schools.\n\nThe moves go against guidance from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, but the agency has remained mum about the states’ decisions, simply telling CNN on Monday that it still recommends universal masking for all in schools.\n\nHowever, some public health experts have questioned whether it’s time for the CDC to update its school guidance, especially as the nation mulls over what life after the pandemic might look like. Without federal guidance on when and how to transition out of the pandemic phase and into a Covid-19 endemic phase, some states are taking steps on their own.\n\n‘Dropping like a rock’\n\nThe Democratic governors of three East Coast states – Connecticut, Delaware and New Jersey – announced Monday that they will lift mask requirements in schools in the coming weeks.\n\nIn Connecticut, Gov. Ned Lamont said he recommends ending the statewide mask mandate in schools and childcare centers effective February 28, leaving decisions on mask requirements in schools to officials at the local level.\n\nIn Delaware, Gov. John Carney said that public and private K-12 mask mandates will expire March 31, and in New Jersey, Gov. Phil Murphy said the state’s universal mask mandate for schools and child-care settings will lift March 7.\n\nAll three states referenced declines in their Covid-19 case counts, hospitalizations, test positivity rates and rates of transmission as reasons why they are planning to lift restrictions.\n\n“Our case count, hospitalizations, the spot positivity rate, the rate of transmission are all dropping like a rock,” Murphy told CNN’s Jake Tapper on Monday, adding that the state is making progress with vaccinations and that there will be better ventilation options in four weeks, when the mask mandate lifts.\n\n“We’ve adhered overwhelmingly with the CDC guidance. The reason why we’re making this step today is our reality in New Jersey,” Murphy said. “We are now in a dramatically different place than the norm right now across the country, which is why we feel like we can decouple and take this step.”\n\nAlso Monday, California Gov. Gavin Newsom announced that the state’s indoor mask requirement will expire February 15, though unvaccinated people will still need to wear masks indoors. He noted that California’s case rate has decreased 65% since its Omicron peak, and hospitalizations have stabilized across the state.\n\nAnd the Oregon Health Authority announced Monday that the state will remove general mask requirements for indoor public places no later than March 31.\n\nBut as these states change their policies, the White House has not changed its position.\n\n“The guidance is very clear, which is that we recommend masking in schools. That is the recommendation from the CDC,” White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki said during a news briefing Monday, referring to the CDC’s guidance urging universal mask-wearing in schools for everyone 2 and older, regardless of a person’s vaccination status.\n\n“It is also true that at some point when the science and the data warrants, of course, our hope is that that’s no longer the recommendation – and they are continually assessing that,” Psaki said of CDC officials. “It is also true that it’s always been up to local school districts to make determinations about how to implement these policies.”\n\nCDC spokesperson Jade Fulce wrote in an email to CNN on Monday that “CDC guidance is meant to supplement — not replace — any federal, state, tribal, local, or territorial health and safety laws, rules, and regulations. The adoption and implementation of our guidance should be done in collaboration with regulatory agencies and state, tribal, local, and territorial public health departments, and in compliance with state and local policies and practices.”\n\nWhen asked whether the CDC plan to release any updated guidance on when it’s appropriate to lift mask mandates in schools, the agency responded that “CDC continuously reviews data on the pandemic as well as the latest science to identify when changes to guidance are recommended.”\n\n‘There has been … a lack of clarity for some time’\n\nThe CDC could improve its communications with state leaders and the public regarding its mask guidance – including when and why mask mandates should be implemented, what the benefits are, and the science and data behind such recommendations, Glen Nowak, co-director of the Center for Health & Risk Communication at the University of Georgia and former head of media relations for the CDC, told CNN on Monday.\n\n“There has been, I think, a lack of clarity for some time regarding what the end goal is,” Nowak said.\n\n“Even now, it would help if the CDC talked about what they were thinking or what they were doing, if anything, with respect to updating their mask guidelines and recommendations,” Nowak said. “What efforts are underway, and what are they trying to do? What are they trying to learn? I think, right now probably still among many people, that’s sort of a mystery.”\n\nState and local officials have had to “take matters into their own hands” when it comes to changing school mask mandates, and that’s bad news for federal public health authorities, CNN Medical Analyst Dr. Leana Wen told CNN’s John Berman on Monday.\n\n“That means that the federal government is becoming less and less relevant,” said Wen, who is also an emergency physician and professor of health policy and management at the George Washington University Milken Institute School of Public Health. “If the CDC guidance that they’re putting out is now not being followed by virtually anyone, that makes the CDC and our federal public health authorities have less credibility.\n\n“And so I really believe that they need to be changing their guidance, and look, they don’t have to do it overnight. They can say ‘here is an off-ramp to masking. You meet these criteria, and this is how you can begin to remove masks or remove other restrictions.’ But we need to hear their leadership here. The CDC has already lost a lot of trust and credibility. This is their time to rebuild and remove restrictions as quickly as they were put in.”\n\nWhen it comes to lifting mask mandates, the decisions are typically based on the risk of someone getting infected with the coronavirus within the community, Dr. Georges Benjamin, executive director of the American Public Health Association, told CNN on Monday.\n\n“If you’re fully vaccinated and boosted, and the broad community spread is low to moderate, then your risk is low,” Benjamin said. In New Jersey and some other states that plan to lift school mask mandates, state officials project that community spread of Covid-19 will probably be low.\n\nBenjamin added that as the country looks ahead, beyond the public health emergency phase of Covid-19, it might be time for the CDC to update its guidance on mask-wearing in schools and the surrounding communities, especially as such guidance is based on data from Covid-19 case counts and test positivity rates in communities. Many people test for Covid-19 at home, which can skew data if they don’t report their results.\n\nSeparately, many state governors and leading public health experts are also calling for the White House to release guidance on what the end of the pandemic, and a transition into an endemic phase, might look like for the country. “Endemic” means a disease has a constant presence in a population but isn’t overwhelming health systems or affecting an alarmingly large number of people, as typically seen in a pandemic.\n\nConsideration for lifting mask mandates\n\nAs some governors set timelines for the end of their states’ school mask mandates, Dr. Carlos del Rio, the executive associate dean of the Emory University School of Medicine, said it’s the right thing to do for school districts in highly vaccinated communities.\n\n“In a highly vaccinated community, as the cases are decreasing right now with Omicron, in a couple of weeks, maybe removing masks is actually the right thing to do. It allows us the opportunity to actually peel off one of those restrictions that has been so controversial,” del Rio told CNN’s Bianna Golodryga on Monday. He added that there are other mitigation measures that schools can adopt, such as improving air ventilation in classrooms.\n\nDel Rio said communities should continue to monitor Covid-19 cases as well as track hospitalizations and test positivity rates.\n\nHe thinks there are two possible metrics for lifting mask mandates, he told CNN in an email Monday: hospitalization rates and capacity levels in intensive care units.\n\nGet CNN Health's weekly newsletter Sign up here to get The Results Are In with Dr. Sanjay Gupta every Tuesday from the CNN Health team.\n\n“If hospitalizations are clearly coming down and positivity rates are coming down in the community, it is the right thing to do,” del Rio told Golodryga of lifting school mask mandates.\n\nOn the other hand, many states that continue to see high Covid-19 case counts and low vaccination rates have not changed their school mask policies. For instance, Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear said Monday that the state will continue to recommend face masks in schools, citing low vaccinations rates in children.\n\nWhen asked what it will take for him to lift that recommendation, Beshear said he will look at the positivity rate and vaccination rate in people 18 and under.", "authors": ["Jacqueline Howard"], "publish_date": "2022/02/08"}, {"url": "https://www.cnn.com/2022/03/07/health/florida-covid-19-vaccine-recommendation/index.html", "title": "Florida: Covid-19 vaccine not recommended for healthy children ...", "text": "CNN —\n\nThe Florida Department of Health will recommend against Covid-19 vaccinations for healthy children, the state’s top public health official said Monday, putting the state at odds with the guidance from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.\n\nThe CDC recommended that children get vaccinated in November, when the shot became available to most kids. Since then, about 22 million children have become fully vaccinated, including 1.1 million Florida kids.\n\nBut Florida Surgeon General Dr. Joseph Ladapo said the state is going to issue separate guidance urging parents not to vaccinate their kids. Ladapo did not say when that guidance would become official and provided few additional details.\n\nFlorida would become the first state to break from the CDC on vaccines for children.\n\nThe announcement from Ladapo came at the end of a 90-minute discussion between some of the medical community’s most vocal skeptics of pandemic mitigation measures. The event, hosted by Florida’s Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis, was harshly critical of the CDC and governments that took steps to slow the spread of the virus through mask mandates and shutdown measures.\n\nSeveral of the doctors and scientists on DeSantis’ panel shared unproven concerns about the safety of the vaccine for kids.\n\nChildren vaccinated against Covid-19 are less likely to be hospitalized for Covid-19 infections than children who are unvaccinated, recent data has shown.\n\nVaccinated grade-schoolers are nearly half as likely to have a Covid-19 case that resulted in care at an urgent care clinic or emergency room compared with children who were unvaccinated, according to a large study funded by the CDC.\n\nAlmost 4.5 million children have had Covid just since the beginning of January.\n\nChildren infected by Covid-19 can develop multisystem inflammatory syndrome weeks later. This rare disease can lead to dangerous complications, causing parts of the body to become inflamed. MIS-C can affect major organs including the kidneys, brain, lungs and heart.\n\nThe vaccine is not authorized for children under the age of 5. About 25% of Florida’s eligible child population is vaccinated, compared with 30% nationally.\n\nDr. William Schaffner, a professor in the Division of Infectious Diseases at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, told CNN he is “disappointed and actually concerned” by the Florida surgeon general’s announcement.\n\n“I think [vaccination] continues to be the best recommendation,” he said. “I would continue to make it to all parents of children 5 and older. The benefits clearly outweigh the risks, and they provide us a firmer foundation for the control of Covid going forward.”\n\nDr. Paul Offit, director of the Vaccine Education Center at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, said Ladapo’s statement Is “wholly irresponsible and completely unsupported.”\n\n“Although it is true that children are less likely to be infected and it is true that children are less likely to be severely infected, they can still be infected, and they can still be severely infected,” he told CNN. “And if you have a vaccine which is safe, which this is, and is effective, which this is, then you give it. What the Florida surgeon general didn’t do was in any sense explain himself. What possible reason could he have for not giving this vaccine to children and putting them in a position where they have to suffer this disease?”\n\nThe Florida chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics was also critical of the decision.\n\n“The COVID-19 vaccine is our best hope for ending the pandemic,” chapter President Dr. Lisa Gwynn said in a statement. “The Surgeon General’s comments today misrepresent the benefits of the vaccine, which has been proven to prevent serious illness, hospitalizations and long-term symptoms from COVID-19 in children and adolescents, including those who are otherwise healthy.\n\n“The evidence is clear that when people are vaccinated, they are significantly less likely to get very sick and need hospital care. There is widespread consensus among medical and public health experts about the life-saving benefits of this vaccine.”\n\nGet CNN Health's weekly newsletter Sign up here to get The Results Are In with Dr. Sanjay Gupta every Tuesday from the CNN Health team.\n\nLadapo has become a lightning rod for criticism since his appointment to lead the Florida Health Department last year. Ladapo gained attention during the pandemic after penning a series of op-eds that challenged the consensus scientific opinion on vaccines, masks and mitigation strategies. He has also pushed unproven Covid-19 therapies, such as ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine.\n\nThe Florida Senate confirmed Ladapo to become the state’s surgeon general last month. During his confirmation hearings, he declined to say whether he was vaccinated and wouldn’t answer questions from lawmakers about the effectiveness of vaccines.\n\nLadapo recently issued new guidance that discouraged private businesses from requiring their employees wear masks.", "authors": ["Steve Contorno Carma Hassan", "Steve Contorno", "Carma Hassan"], "publish_date": "2022/03/07"}, {"url": "https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2021/04/06/tennessee-vaccine-passport-gov-lee-pushes-bill-banning-requirement/7107268002/", "title": "Tennessee vaccine passport: Gov. Lee pushes bill banning ...", "text": "Tennessee Republicans are seizing on a conservative talking point that has taken hold in recent weeks: So-called \"vaccine passports\" and the need to prohibit them.\n\nGov. Bill Lee on Tuesday joined other Republican governors who have taken public stands in recent days against requiring proof of a COVID-19 vaccination, an issue widely discussed in conservative media.\n\n\"I think vaccine passports are a bad idea,\" Lee told reporters. \"I do not believe governments should impose vaccine requirements or mandates in any way and I'm working with the legislature to support legislation that backs that up.\"\n\nNo city, county or government entity in Tennessee appears to have suggested forcing businesses to require patrons to show a vaccine passport. The legislation Lee is supporting, brought this week in the General Assembly, raises questions about existing vaccination requirements in public schools.\n\nThe bill moving through the state legislature would not prevent a private business from instituting its own vaccine requirements, according to a copy of the proposed amendment. It passed the House health subcommittee Tuesday.\n\n\"I don't think it's in the best interest of our state for businesses to impose restrictions and mandates for vaccines, but I also don't think government should impose itself in the private affairs of business practices,\" Lee said. \"We're encouraging businesses in that way, but we're not going to restrict them.\"\n\nNashville officials, whom Lee and other Republicans have criticized for their approach to coronavirus restrictions, aren't seeking to require any such vaccine passport for commerce.\n\n\"The Metro Public Health Department does not have any plans to require proof of vaccination,\" said Brian Todd, spokesperson for the Nashville department. \"A private business or company does have the right to require proof if they feel like it is in their best interest.\"\n\nA spokesperson for Mayor John Cooper said his office shares the position of the health department. Both said the city is focused on ways to increase vaccine access and reach its \"50 by 5\" goal of seeing more than half of Nashville vaccinated by May.\n\nMORE COVID-19 NEWS:Tennessee joins suit against tax mandate in COVID-19 relief plan\n\nCOVID-19 IN TENNESSEE:Nashville reports 79 new cases, two new deaths\n\nCOVID-19:Why COVID-19 vaccines for children could be the key to ending the global pandemic\n\nTennessee, where residents in many rural areas remain hesitant to receive the widely available COVID-19 vaccine, does not have a vaccination goal in place.\n\nRep. John Ragan, R-Oak Ridge, the sponsor of House Bill 575, said in committee that a county neighboring his had implemented vaccine passport requirements for businesses but declined to name the county.\n\nIn an interview afterward, Ragan again refused to cite which county, explaining he \"was provided information\" on the issue but \"did not verify that to the source.\"\n\nRep. Jason Zachary, R-Knoxville, confirmed there have been no discussions in Knox County government about imposing vaccine passport requirements for businesses.\n\nGovernor opposed to public universities requiring COVID-19 vaccine proof\n\nLee also confirmed Tuesday he is opposed to public universities in the state requiring students to receive the COVID-19 vaccine to attend classes.\n\n\"I think that private institutions have decisions they make on their own,\" Lee said. \"I think government agencies should not have vaccine requirements.\"\n\nThe University of Tennessee system already mandates full-time college students submit proof of various immunizations, including Hepatitis B, Measles, Meningitis and Chickenpox.\n\nWhile the University of Tennessee last summer said it intended to require a COVID-19 vaccine if it became available, the network of public universities has since backed away from that plan and announced in January it would not mandate the vaccine.\n\n\"In the interest of public health, we strongly encourage all faculty, students and staff to receive the vaccine as soon as they are eligible,\" spokesperson Jennifer Sicking said. \"The UT System will continue to monitor COVID numbers to determine if additional measures are needed.\"\n\nUnder state law, children entering public grade schools must obtain a vaccine passport of sorts, called the \"Official Immunization Certificate,\" according to the Tennessee Department of Health.\n\nLocal health departments rely on a state database, the Tennessee Immunization Information System, to generate those certificates.\n\nRepublicans in Florida, Texas have made similar announcements on vaccine passports\n\nLee and Tennessee legislative Republicans' vocal opposition to vaccine passports comes as conservatives in other states have raised the issue.\n\nFlorida Gov. Ron DeSantis last week issued an executive order prohibiting both government agencies and private businesses from requiring proof of vaccination to receive service, going a step further than Lee.\n\nOn Tuesday, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott also issued an executive order barring government-mandated vaccine passports, though it does not apply to privately funded businesses.\n\nPresident Joe Biden's administration on Monday and Tuesday reiterated the federal government will not be implementing a vaccine passport program, as some other countries intend to do.\n\n\"The government is not now, nor will we be, supporting a system that requires Americans to carry a credential,\" White House press secretary Jen Psaki said. \"There will be no federal vaccinations database and no federal mandate requiring everyone to obtain a single vaccination credential.\"\n\nSome other countries have already begun issuing or have announced plans to implement central vaccine passport programs.\n\nNew York state recently funded and helped launch Excelsior Pass, a voluntary app to show proof of vaccination that businesses can use as a condition for entry at concerts or other events. It is not required by the state in order to conduct business.\n\nMonica Kast contributed.\n\nReach Natalie Allison at nallison@tennessean.com. Follow her on Twitter at @natalie_allison.\n\nWant to read more stories like this? A subscription to one of our Tennessee publications gets you unlimited access to all the latest politics news, podcasts like Grand Divisions, plus newsletters, a personalized mobile experience and the ability to tap into stories, photos and videos from throughout the USA TODAY Network's 261 daily sites.", "authors": [], "publish_date": "2021/04/06"}, {"url": "https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2022/01/04/iowa-bill-would-forbid-businesses-asking-covid-vaccine-status-mandate-employer-proof/9080166002/", "title": "Iowa bill would forbid businesses from asking for COVID vaccine ...", "text": "Iowa businesses would not be able to ask about or maintain records of a person's medical treatment status — including vaccinations — under details of a bill that a group of House Republicans announced Tuesday.\n\nThe bill would prohibit businesses from hiring or firing someone based on their vaccination status and would additionally ban denying goods and services, providing incentives or discriminating based on that status. The bill would also widely prohibit mask requirements, its authors said.\n\nThe sweeping proposal mirrors a law passed by Montana lawmakers last year — the only one of its kind in the United States. During a pivotal election year, Republican-controlled state legislatures across the nation, including Iowa's, are expected to debate a bevy of coronavirus legislation aimed at pushing back against the Biden administration's approach to ending the pandemic.\n\nWhile Iowa Republican leaders have expressed interest in more restrictions on vaccine mandates, the future of this proposal is uncertain.\n\nState Republican leaders said Tuesday that they don't plan to take immediate action against vaccine mandates when the legislative session begins next week — but they didn't rule out further legislation altogether.\n\nBoth Gov. Kim Reynolds and House Speaker Pat Grassley, R-New Hartford, said they would like to wait for the result of court challenges to the Biden administration's federal mandates before debating any new legislation.\n\n\"I think we need to wait,\" Reynolds, who has vocally opposed vaccine mandates and joined multiple lawsuits against them, told reporters Tuesday morning during a forum held by the Iowa Capitol Press Association.\n\nThe U.S. Supreme Court plans to hear oral arguments in multiple challenges to the Biden administration's vaccine-or-testing requirements for large employers and health care facilities on Friday.\n\nReps. Jon Jacobsen, R-Council Bluffs, and Mark Cisneros, R-Muscatine, have led work on the proposal, which would override the COVID-19 vaccination requirements that some businesses have put in place to fight the virus. The bill would apply widely to employers — including health care providers — and governmental entities but would not affect childhood immunization requirements for schools, Jacobsen said.\n\nWant to stay on top of Iowa politics news? Subscribe to our daily politics newsletter\n\nResponding to leadership's comments about waiting to pass legislation, Jacobsen said he believes the \"Venn diagrams are intersecting perfectly\" for lawmakers to start discussing the bill while the Supreme Court is deliberating.\n\nJacobsen held a news conference Tuesday afternoon that included several members of a task force he had worked with to produce the bill. Presenters included several members of Informed Choice Iowa, a group that opposes vaccine mandates and has protested them at the Iowa Capitol multiple times.\n\nJacobsen portrayed the debate over vaccine mandates as a civil rights issue and suggested employer mandates have similarities to slavery.\n\n“I can’t think of a greater civil rights issue than this. Think about it, if you … are coerced to lose control of your autonomy over your very body itself, you’re not in an employer-employee relationship, you’re in an indentured servant/slave relationship there,\" he said.\n\nTheir work follows last fall's special legislative session, when lawmakers passed a new law expanding medical and religious exemptions for the COVID-19 vaccine. The bill also opened up unemployment benefits to workers who were fired for not complying with their employer's vaccine requirements.\n\nMore:Here's how Iowa Republican lawmakers plan to continue their fight against COVID-19 mandates in 2022\n\nRepublicans passed that law ahead of proposed federal vaccination mandates for large employers, federal contractors and health workers. Those federal mandates are facing court challenges, but several employers have required vaccinations on their own.\n\nMore than 200 Iowans have already claimed unemployment benefits for not complying with a vaccine mandate, according to state data.\n\nMore:Iowa court to see lawsuit alleging 'gross negligence' by Tyson during COVID-19 outbreaks\n\nRep. Bobby Kaufmann, R-Wilton, has said he plans to hold hearings for the new proposed bill in the House State Government Committee, which he chairs.\n\n\"This House Study Bill I feel is what we need to do now in response to protect Iowans,\" he said in the news release.\n\nThe bill says businesses that do not comply could lose their license, permit or other state authorization. It would also place liability on businesses \"for any adverse reactions, injury, disabilities or death that is or may be related to the individual receiving forced medical treatment including vaccines.\"\n\nThe bill would still allow exceptions for records \"necessary for the care and treatment of an individual,\" according to the bill.\n\nIt's unclear how much support the bill has, but Jacobsen said he feels \"very bullish\" about the bill's chances. Grassley, the House Speaker, didn't comment directly on the bill Tuesday.\n\n\"There's all sorts of bills flying around right now within the Legislature discussing what we may or may not do,\" he said. \"Again, as the governor said, and as I stated, you know, seeing how this plays out moving forward through the courts' process … and when we get to that point, whether they're appropriate or not — we'll have\n\nthose conversations.\"\n\nHouse Democrats, who are in the minority in the chamber, have said they believe further focusing on the issue of vaccine mandates is a distraction from other coronavirus-related steps that public officials could be taking, such as educating Iowans about the benefits of the vaccines.\n\n\"We need to spend our energy focusing on getting Iowans to get a vaccine that has been proven safe and effective,\" House Minority Leader Jennifer Konfrst, D-Windsor Heights, said Tuesday.\n\nThe Iowa Association of Business and Industry, which has opposed both the Biden administration's employer mandates and the Legislature's law that broadened exemptions, has not yet taken a position on the yet-to-be introduced bill.\n\n\"ABI members are proud of their role in keeping businesses open and the economy moving in Iowa during the COVID-19 pandemic,\" JD Davis, the association's vice president of public policy, said in an email. \"Our members are grateful to the state officials who made this possible, including Gov. Reynolds and legislative leaders. However, it is stunning that some believe Iowa employers have been a negative aspect of the state's COVID-19 response.\"\n\nIowa's legislative session begins Monday.\n\nIan Richardson covers the Iowa Statehouse for the Des Moines Register. Reach him at irichardson@registermedia.com, at 515-284-8254, or on Twitter at @DMRIanR.\n\nStephen Gruber-Miller contributed reporting.", "authors": [], "publish_date": "2022/01/04"}, {"url": "https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2021/10/28/missouri-gov-mike-parson-attorney-general-eric-schmitt-against-biden-vaccine-mandates-plan-lawsuit/6181560001/", "title": "Gov. Mike Parson, AG Eric Schmitt push against Biden vaccine ...", "text": "Missouri's top officials are pushing back against federal COVID-19 vaccine requirements with an executive order and litigation aimed at resisting the Democratic White House on the issue of mandates.\n\nGov. Mike Parson, a Republican, issued an executive order Thursday banning state government agencies from requiring workers to comply with federal requirements if they have religious or medical exemptions, as well as prohibiting those agencies them from penalizing workers or businesses that don't comply due to exemptions.\n\nThe order is largely symbolic at the moment, as the existing mandate from the Biden administration applies to federal employees and contractors and will have little impact on most state workers. Exceptions for religion and medical conditions are already included in the federal mandate, which takes effect Nov. 22 for federal workers and Dec. 8 for contractors.\n\nThe White House has also indicated it will order all private sector businesses with over 100 employees to require vaccination, though the exact timeline on that mandate is not known.\n\n\"In the state of Missouri, public health decisions are left to the people to either make their own personal decisions or speak through their elected representatives in the General Assembly,\" Parson said. \"The Biden administration's vaccine mandates undermine and deny Missourians’ right to make personal health decisions and to speak through their elected representatives.\"\n\nVaccines in Missouri:Republicans blast Biden orders, lawmakers urge special session to counter\n\nMissouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt, a Republican who is running for U.S. Senate, said Friday he was leading a 10-state lawsuit against the Biden administration, asking the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Missouri to block the mandate for federal contractors. He called the federal requirement a \"power grab\" that \"is sweeping in its scope,\" arguing it violates federal laws and \"is an unlawful usurpation of states' police powers.\"\n\n\"My office has led the nation in taking action to fight back against attempts by petty tyrants to impose their control through mask mandates,\" Schmitt said in a statement. \"Now, we're leading the nation in fighting back against this absurd federal overreach.\"\n\nSchmitt's lawsuit was co-led by Nebraska AG Doug Peterson, and joined by Alaska, Arkansas, Iowa, Montana, New Hampshire, North Dakota, South Dakota and Wyoming. It comes a day after Florida filed a similar lawsuit seeking to block the mandate for contractors.\n\nIn his executive order, Parson ordered all divisions of state government to \"cooperate fully and timely\" with Schmitt's office on any litigation. The two have been among the most vocal opponents of the Biden administration's COVID-19 response and vaccine actions.\n\n“The governor’s executive order appears carefully crafted to do absolutely nothing — except promote the attorney general’s latest frivolous lawsuit at taxpayer expense,\" said House Minority Crystal Quade, a Springfield Democrat. \"If these two put as much energy into fighting the pandemic as they do into fighting those fighting the pandemic, Missouri would be in a much stronger position.”\n\nMissouri's governor joins several others — from Alabama, Arizona, Florida and Texas — in publicly resisting the federal mandates, which have become a divisive political issue among top elected officials.\n\nVaccines in Missouri:Lawmakers weigh action on mandates as protesters rally at Capitol\n\nRepublicans across the state criticized the orders when President Joe Biden first introduced them in September and several conservative lawmakers asked Parson to call a special session to ban mandates for the private sector; he declined to do so. Those lawmakers later joined with an organization opposing workplace mandates to hold a protest inside the Missouri State Capitol.\n\nAs of Thursday, 49.3 percent of Missouri's population has been completely vaccinated, according to state data; it ranks below the U.S. state average of 58.26 percent, according to Johns Hopkins University.\n\nGalen Bacharier covers Missouri politics & government for the News-Leader. Contact him at gbacharier@news-leader.com, (573) 219-7440 or on Twitter @galenbacharier.", "authors": [], "publish_date": "2021/10/28"}, {"url": "https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2022/02/10/vaccine-mask-mandates-iowa-employers-businesses-banned-under-bill/6703336001/", "title": "Iowa mask, vaccine mandate ban bill moves forward in Legislature", "text": "Opponents of vaccination mandates crowded into a Capitol meeting room Thursday for several hours to support a bill that would widely ban vaccination and mask mandates at businesses, governmental entities and schools.\n\nThe meeting came to an abrupt end around 5 p.m. as Rep. Bruce Hunter, the lone Democrat on the subcommittee, said the agreed-upon time for the meeting had run out. He left the room to join his colleagues in the House chamber, where lawmakers were also holding votes in the afternoon.\n\nBut the two Republicans decided to stay longer than the allotted three hours to allow many more people the chance to speak. After Hunter left, they announced that they would advance the bill to the full House State Government Committee.\n\nThe hearing — which extended significantly longer than most legislative subcommittee meetings — was the first test for a far-reaching bill that would specify that businesses, governments and schools couldn't fire workers based on their medical treatment status, including vaccinations.\n\nHouse Study Bill 647 would also ban mask requirements and would make businesses, schools or governmental entities that violate the law liable for any adverse reactions that stem from receiving “forced medical treatment.”\n\nIn the opening hours of the subcommittee meeting, a number of speakers provided testimony taking aim at the federal government's handling of the coronavirus pandemic and the medical guidance on COVID-19 treatment.\n\n\"The medical freedom and privacy bill must pass,\" said Dr. Mollie James, who has claimed to \"jailbreak\" COVID-19 positive patients from hospitals. \"Doctors need to be able to take care of our patients with all evidence available.\"\n\n►More: Iowa doctor goes national and stages hospital 'jailbreaks' for COVID-19 patients\n\nHunter questioned whether some of the testimony from doctors was germane to the bill.\n\n\"It really doesn't have anything to do with whether people are being discriminated against,\" Hunter said.\n\nBut Rep. Jon Jacobsen, R-Council Bluffs, who led a group that drafted the bill, said much of the testimony dealt with the main issue of the bill, which is the privacy of medical data.\n\nSome later speakers detailed their experience with vaccination mandates.\n\nThe legislation faces opposition from several Iowa health care groups, although no one from the groups had spoken before the hearing ended.\n\nIn an email, Iowa Public Health Association executive director Lina Tucker Reinders said the bill doesn't exempt health care facilities, which is concern.\n\n\"Limiting knowledge of a patient’s medical history would limit Iowa’s medical providers’ ability to deliver optimal care to patients,\" she wrote. \"While the intent of this bill may be to protect a person’s right to remain unvaccinated, (and as a reminder, there is no COVID-19 vaccine mandate in Iowa), its far-reaching scope will have unintended and harmful consequences.\"\n\nIowa House Democrats have also criticized Republicans' focus on the issue of vaccine mandates as a distraction from other coronavirus pandemic-related steps that public officials could be taking, such as educating Iowans about the benefits of the vaccines.\n\nJacobsen's proposal echoes a law passed by Montana lawmakers — the only one of its kind in the United States. In the lead-up to the 2022 midterm elections, Republican-controlled state legislatures across the U.S. are expected to debate a bevy of coronavirus legislation aimed at pushing back against the Biden administration's approach to ending the pandemic.\n\nWhat else would Iowa's anti-vaccine bill do?\n\nThe bill would also widely ban mask requirements and prevent entities from offering incentives for vaccination.\n\n“Basically, what we're trying to do is get back to 2019, where you simply could not query anybody in the workplace or elsewhere based on their health status,\" Jacobsen said.\n\nBackground:Proposed Iowa GOP bill would forbid businesses from discriminating based on vaccine status\n\nWhile it doesn't specifically name the COVID-19 vaccine, that's the bill's main target, Jacobsen said. The bill is not intended to affect existing childhood vaccine requirements for schools, he said.\n\nIowa Republican leaders have shared interest in more restrictions on vaccine mandates, but the future of this proposal is uncertain.\n\nRep. Bobby Kaufmann, R-Wilton, who chairs the House State Government Committee, has said he supports holding hearings on the bill and expects it to have a full committee hearing, the next legislative hurdle in becoming a law, next week ahead of a key legislative deadline.\n\nHouse Speaker Pat Grassley, R-New Hartford, told reporters Thursday that he wasn't passing immediate judgment on the legislation and expected the legislation to work its way through the process.\n\n\"I don’t think it’s my job to have a closed mind and just make a decision of the entirety of the caucus,\" he said. \"So we’ll see what that looks like. However, I think we have to continue to remind Iowans that we have taken significant action.\"\n\nWhat steps have Iowa lawmakers taken to curtail COVID vaccine and mask mandates?\n\nThe proposal would expand on other Republican-led efforts over the past year in Iowa that have taken aim at COVID-19 vaccination mandates. In May, Gov. Kim Reynolds signed a law to withhold state grants and contracts from local governments or businesses that require customers to prove they have received the COVID-19 vaccine.\n\nIn October, Reynolds signed another law giving employees of Iowa businesses wider latitude to claim medical and religious exemptions from COVID-19 vaccination mandates. It also allows people to receive unemployment benefits if they're fired for noncompliance.\n\nMore:Gov. Kim Reynolds signs law expanding exemptions from employer vaccine mandates; joins lawsuit against Biden\n\nRepublicans have also passed legislation prohibiting local mask mandates at schools, although an appeals court ruled in January that the state's ban cannot be enforced where masks are required to accommodate students with disabilities.\n\nUnder state law, Iowa's public schools also cannot require proof of the COVID-19 vaccine for students to enter school buildings, Iowa Department of Education spokesperson Heather Doe said in an email.\n\nJacobsen and other Republicans developed the legislation as legal challenges have unfolded surrounding several federal vaccination mandates the Biden administration issued last year. Requirements for employees of large businesses and for federal contractors have since been blocked in court, but mandates for health care workers and members of the military remain in effect.\n\nDespite those existing mandates, Jacobsen said he expects to affect \"probably 98%\" of Iowa's population with the bill.\n\nThe Register's Tony Leys contributed to this report.\n\nIan Richardson covers the Iowa Statehouse for the Des Moines Register. Reach him at irichardson@registermedia.com, at 515-284-8254, or on Twitter at @DMRIanR.", "authors": [], "publish_date": "2022/02/10"}, {"url": "https://www.cnn.com/2022/01/11/health/us-coronavirus-tuesday/index.html", "title": "Omicron variant will 'find just about everybody,' Fauci says, but ...", "text": "CNN —\n\nAs the Omicron variant spreads like wildfire across the United States, it’s likely just about everybody will be exposed to the strain, but vaccinated people will still fare better, the nation’s leading infectious disease expert said Tuesday.\n\n“Omicron, with its extraordinary, unprecedented degree of efficiency of transmissibility, will ultimately find just about everybody,” Dr. Anthony Fauci told J. Stephen Morrison, senior vice president of the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “Those who have been vaccinated … and boosted would get exposed. Some, maybe a lot of them, will get infected but will very likely, with some exceptions, do reasonably well in the sense of not having hospitalization and death.”\n\nIn contrast, those who are not vaccinated are “going to get the brunt of the severe aspect of this,” he added.\n\nAcross the United States, at least one in five eligible Americans – roughly 65 million people– are not vaccinated against Covid-19. More than 62% of the country has been fully vaccinated, but only 23% are fully vaccinated and boosted, according to data from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.\n\nFauci’s comments came in response to a question about whether the pandemic has entered a new phase. That will come when there’s enough protection in the community and drugs to easily treat severe Covid-19, he said, adding, “We may be on the threshold of that right now.”\n\nAlso Tuesday, US Food and Drug Administration acting commissioner Dr. Janet Woodcock said that while most people could catch the virus, the focus now should be on making sure hospitals and essential services function.\n\nWoodcock was responding to a question from Sen. Mike Braun about whether it’s time for the United States to change its Covid-19 strategy. Her statement was not a new assessment of Covid-19, but rather an attempt to make clear the need to prioritize essential services as the Omicron variant surges.\n\n“I think it’s hard to process what’s actually happening right now, which is: Most people are going to get Covid,” Woodcock said Tuesday at a Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee hearing. “And what we need to do is make sure the hospitals can still function, transportation, you know, other essential services are not disrupted while this happens.”\n\nOn Tuesday, the number of US patients hospitalized with Covid-19 hit a record high, adding strain to health care networks and pushing states toward emergency staffing and other measures as they struggle to cope.\n\nMore than 145,900 people were in US hospitals with Covid-19 as of Tuesday – a number that surpasses the previous peak from mid-January 2021 (142,246), and is almost twice what it was two weeks ago, according to data from the Department of Health and Human Services.\n\nThe hospitalization record comes amid a surge in cases fueled by the highly transmissible Omicron variant.\n\nThe United States averaged more than 754,200 new Covid-19 cases daily over the past week, according to Johns Hopkins University data. That’s about three times last winter’s peak average (251,987 on January 11, 2021), and 4.5 times the peak from the Delta-driven surge (166,347 on September 1), according to JHU.\n\nThe country has averaged 1,646 Covid-19 deaths a day over the past week – 33% higher than a week ago, according to JHU. The peak average was 3,402 daily on January 13, 2021, JHU data shows.\n\nThe Omicron variant caused 98.3% of new coronavirus cases in the United States last week, according to estimates posted Tuesday by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.\n\nA technician administers a Covid-19 test Monday at a drive-thru location at Churchill Downs, Kentucky. Jon Cherry/Getty Images\n\nLeaders activate new measures to combat surging numbers\n\nHospitals are increasingly juggling staffing issues – not just because of the increased demand, but also because their employees, who are at a high risk of infection, have to isolate and recover after testing positive.\n\nIn Virginia, Gov. Ralph Northam declared a limited state of emergency Monday after the number of intensive care unit hospitalizations more than doubled since December 1. The order allows hospitals to expand bed capacity and gives more flexibility in staffing, he said, adding that it also expands the use of telehealth as well as expanding which medical professionals can give vaccines.\n\nIn Texas, at least 2,700 medical staffers are being hired, trained and deployed to assist with the surge, joining more than 1,300 personnel already sent across the state, the Texas Department of State Health Services said in a statement to CNN.\n\nKentucky has mobilized the National Guard to provide support, with 445 members sent to 30 health care facilities, the state announced.\n\n“Omicron continues to burn through the commonwealth, growing at levels we have never seen before. Omicron is significantly more contagious than even the Delta variant,” said Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear, noting the earlier variant that spurred a surge of cases in the summer and fall.\n\n“If it spreads at the rate we are seeing, it is certainly going to fill up our hospitals,” he said, and Kentucky is “down to 134 adult ICU beds available.”\n\nAnd New Jersey reinstated a public health emergency, Gov. Phil Murphy announced, saying the state needed to “commit every resource available to beating back the wave” caused by Omicron. In the past two weeks alone, the state saw more than 10,000 people requiring hospitalization due to Covid-19, the governor said in a video announcement.\n\nMitigation measures such as mandatory masking are also being revived in some areas.\n\nDelaware Gov. John Carney signed a universal indoor mask mandate Monday because of hospitalization increases, with some hospitals “over 100% inpatient bed capacity amid crippling staffing shortages,” he said. Churches and places of worship are exempt, while businesses should provide masks to customers and have signage about indoor mask requirements.\n\n“It’s time for everyone to pitch in and do what works. Wear your mask indoors. Avoid gatherings or expect to get and spread Covid. Get your vaccine and, if eligible, get boosted. That’s how we’ll get through this surge without endangering more lives,” Carney said.\n\nShare of hospitalizations from breakthrough infections is growing, but risks for unvaccinated are higher\n\nThe HHS data on Covid-19 hospitalizations includes both those patients who are hospitalized because of Covid-19 complications and those who may have been admitted for something else but test positive for Covid-19. This has been true throughout the pandemic, though the share of patients who fall into each category may have changed over time.\n\nFully vaccinated people are accounting for a growing share of people hospitalized with Covid-19 – but hospitalizations among people who received a booster shot are still rare, and the gap in risk by vaccination status has been wide.\n\nBetween April and July 2021, before the emergence of the Omicron variant, more than 90% of Covid-19 hospitalizations were among people who were either unvaccinated or partially vaccinated, according to a study published by the CDC.\n\nBut a sampling of data collected by CNN suggests that figure has dropped to somewhere between 60% and 75% in recent days and months:\n\n• In Pennsylvania, about 75% of Covid-19 hospitalizations between September and early December 2021 were among people who were not fully vaccinated, according to data from the state health department.\n\n• In New York, about 61% of Covid-19 hospitalizations during the week ending January 2, 2022 were among people who were not fully vaccinated, according to data from the state health department.\n\n• Beaumont Health, the largest health care system in Michigan, reported on Thursday that 62% of Covid-19 patients in its eight hospitals were unvaccinated.\n\nIn some hospitals, up to 40% of patients with Covid-19 “are coming in not because they’re sick with Covid, but because they’re coming in with something else and have had Covid or the Omicron variant detected,” CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky told Fox News on Sunday.\n\nBut Covid-19 cases in hospitals strain resources, regardless of whether a patient was hospitalized because of Covid-19, CNN chief medical correspondent Dr. Sanjay Gupta said.\n\n“If they get (incidentally) diagnosed with Covid in the hospital, they still need to go into infection protocol – personal protective equipment, all of that still needs to be utilized. So it’s a huge drain on the system overall,” Gupta said Tuesday.\n\nWhile fully vaccinated people are accounting for a larger share of Covid-19 hospitalizations, multiple accounts suggest that those who are fully vaccinated and boosted account for a small share.\n\nIn the University of Maryland Medical System, less than 5% of hospitalized patients were fully vaccinated and boosted, President and CEO Dr. Mohan Suntha said Thursday. Beaumont Health reported Thursday that only 8% of Covid-19 patients were fully vaccinated and boosted.\n\nThe CDC did not respond to CNN’s multiple requests for data on the share of Covid-19 hospitalizations by vaccination status.\n\nThe agency publishes data on its website regarding the relative risk by vaccination status. Cumulatively, the risk of hospitalization has been eight times higher for unvaccinated people than for fully vaccinated people. But in the last week of November, CDC data showed that hospitalization rates were about 17 times higher for unvaccinated people than for fully vaccinated people.\n\nSchools and industries face Omicron issues\n\nThe debate over safety in schools from Covid-19 continues to play out as only about one in six children ages 5 to 11 is fully vaccinated, according to data from the CDC.\n\nAs Los Angeles prepared to return to school on Tuesday, approximately 62,000 students and staff had tested positive for Covid-19 and will have to stay home, data from the Los Angeles Unified School District showed Monday, equating to a 14.99% positivity rate. The positivity rate of Los Angeles County at large, by comparison, has spiked to 22%.\n\nIn Chicago, educators returned to school Tuesday and students are expected to resume in-person learning Wednesday following a nearly weeklong dispute. The Chicago Teachers Union had voted to teach remotely last week, and the school district responded by canceling classes for four days.\n\nThe agreement, announced late Monday, included metrics for when a classroom would need to go remote due to Covid-19 levels.\n\nIn areas where schools have returned to in-person learning after the holiday break, the time needed for those with Covid-19 to recover has impacted some essential services.\n\nOther sectors also are struggling due to high infection rates.\n\nSome municipalities have seen nearly a quarter of their trash collection workforce call in sick in recent weeks due to Covid-19, leading to delays, according to the Solid Waste Association of North America.\n\n“This coincided, unfortunately, with increased trash and recycling volumes associated with the holidays. However, we hope that as volumes decline and sanitation workers return to work, these delays will prove temporary,” executive director and CEO David Biderman said in a statement Monday.\n\nIn travel, US airlines canceled thousands of additional flights over the weekend due to Covid-19 callouts and winter storms, and cruise line Royal Caribbean International announced it has canceled voyages on four ships because of “ongoing Covid-related circumstances around the world.” Last week, Norwegian Cruise Line canceled the voyages of eight ships.\n\nPublic transit systems in major metropolitan areas such as New York City and Washington, DC, have had to scale back service with employees ill from Covid-19. In Detroit, 20-25% of SMART bus service is canceled or delayed, the agency said in a statement Saturday.", "authors": ["Travis Caldwell Jason Hanna Deidre Mcphillips Christina Maxouris", "Travis Caldwell", "Jason Hanna", "Deidre Mcphillips", "Christina Maxouris"], "publish_date": "2022/01/11"}]}
{"question_id": "20230120_9", "search_time": "2023/01/20/16:37", "search_result": [{"url": "https://www.cnn.com/2022/12/08/entertainment/celine-dion-stiff-person-syndrome/index.html", "title": "Celine Dion reveals she has a rare neurological syndrome | CNN", "text": "CNN —\n\nCeline Dion is postponing several Europe tour dates after the recent diagnosis of a rare neurological disorder that doesn’t allow her “to sing the way I’m used to,” she announced.\n\nThe superstar singer has stiff-person syndrome, which affects “something like one in a million people,” Dion, 54, said in an emotional video post Thursday to her verified Instagram account.\n\n“While we’re still learning about this rare condition, we now know this is what’s been causing all of the spasms that I’ve been having,” she said. “Unfortunately, these spasms affect every aspect of my daily life, sometimes causing difficulties when I walk and not allowing me to use my vocal cords to sing the way I’m used to.”\n\nStiff-person syndrome is “a rare, progressive syndrome that affects the nervous system, specifically the brain and spinal cord,” according to the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke.\n\n“Symptoms may include extreme muscle stiffness, rigidity and painful spasms in the trunk and limbs, severely impairing mobility,” the institute says. “Spasms can generate enough force to fracture bone.”\n\nSpecific treatments “will improve the symptoms … but will not cure the disorder,” it says.\n\nDion has struggled with her health for a while, she said, adding she has a great team of medical professionals and her children’s support.\n\n“I’m working hard with my sports medicine therapist every day to build back my strength and my ability to perform again,” she said. “But I have to admit it’s been a struggle.”\n\nThe Grammy winner said singing is all she knows – and what she loves.\n\n“I miss you so much,” she said. “I miss seeing all of you, being on the stage, performing for you. I always give 100% when I do my shows, but my condition is not allowing me to give you that right now.”\n\nDion has “hope that I’m on the road to recovery,” she said. “This is my focus.”\n\nShe thanked her followers for their “encouraging wishes of love and support by social media.”\n\n“This means a lot to me,” Dion concluded her message tearfully. “Take care of yourselves. Be well. I love you guys so much, and I really hope I can see you again real soon.”\n\nDion’s spring 2023 shows will be rescheduled to 2024, and eight summer 2023 will be canceled, the post said.", "authors": ["Lisa Respers France"], "publish_date": "2022/12/08"}, {"url": "https://www.usatoday.com/story/entertainment/music/2022/01/24/bad-bunny-worlds-hottest-tour-where-to-buy-tickets/9204876002/", "title": "Bad Bunny unveils dates for 'World's Hottest Tour' with Diplo, Alesso", "text": "\"El Último Tour Del Mundo 2022\", aka the Last World Tour 2022, isn't the last fans will see of Bad Bunny. The Puerto Rican reggaeton artist will continue traveling the world for his first-ever stadium tour.\n\nBad Bunny announced his upcoming \"World's Hottest Tour\" on Monday in an Instagram reel featuring himself, girlfriend Gabriela Berlingeri and Spanish actor Mario Casas in a tropical setting.\n\n\"I was wondering … what if I announce my next tour?\" the emcee said in Spanish, before teasing a new album release later this year.\n\nIn the caption, Bad Bunny wrote in Spanish, \"now, 2022 has begun.\"\n\nThe 29-city \"World's Hottest Tour,\" which spans the United States and Latin America, kicks off Aug. 5 in Orlando, Florida, and will visit major cities including Boston, Chicago, New York and Los Angeles, making stops in iconic venues like Fenway Park, Yankee Stadium and SoFi Stadium.\n\nThe Latin American leg of the tour kicks off Oct. 21 in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, and will visit cities including Buenos Aires, Argentina; Lima, Peru; Panama City; and Mexico City.\n\nDJs Alesso and Diplo will join Bad Bunny on select U.S. dates.\n\nRelated:Bad Bunny announces new world tour during WWE WrestleMania weekend, following epic debut\n\nBad Bunny tops Billboard Latin Music Awards with 10 trophies, goes red carpet official with girlfriend\n\nBad Bunny's Monday tour announcement follows the overwhelmingly positive reception of his \"El Último Tour Del Mundo\" indoor arena tour, which kicks off in February.\n\nThe 27-year-old star sold out all 35 shows of the tour, moving more than 500,000 tickets, and broke the Ticketmaster record for the most ticket sales for a tour on its first day of sales since 2018, according to a press release.\n\nThe reggaetonero also broke audience records with his first stadium concerts last December, performing at the Hiram Bithorn Stadium in Puerto Rico. \"This announcement is a clear representation of Bad Bunny’s extraordinary growth as a global superstar,\" the release read.\n\nMeet rising Puerto Rican reggaeton star Rauw Alejandro: 'I'm my own competition'\n\nManá announces residency at The Forum in Los Angeles: 'Our second home'\n\nBad Bunny has become a household name since the 2018 release of his debut album \"X 100pre.\" In 2020, Bad Bunny released two more studio albums, \"YHLQMDLG\" and \"Bad Bunny El Último Tour Del Mundo.\"\n\nThe \"Dákiti\" rapper has been ranked as the No. 1 Latin artist in the U.S. by Billboard for the third year in a row and has scored the most top 10 hits on the Hot Latin Songs chart.\n\nTickets for the \"World's Hottest Tour\" will be available for pre-sale Wednesday, while the general public can purchase tickets beginning Friday on Live Nation.\n\nAdele frustrates fans with sudden Vegas residency postponement: 'Thanks for the notice'", "authors": [], "publish_date": "2022/01/24"}, {"url": "https://www.usatoday.com/story/entertainment/music/2021/04/15/bad-bunny-ticketmaster-presale-issues-el-ultimo-tour-del-mundo/7249015002/", "title": "Bad Bunny 2022 World Tour: Ticketmaster presale issues frustrate ...", "text": "Bad Bunny fans are hopping mad.\n\nPresale tickets for his El Último Tour del Mundo 2022, aka the Last World Tour 2022, went on sale Thursday, April 15, through Ticketmaster. Many fans experienced long waits and at least one crash of the Ticketmaster site, according to venting on social media.\n\n“I literally don’t even want to go see Bad Bunny anymore thats how (blank) the @Ticketmaster experience was,” tweeted a fan.\n\nAnother fan tweeted: \"Was it just me who cried when Ticketmaster crashed, and I couldn’t get a bad bunny ticket.\"\n\nBad Bunny announces new world tourduring WWE WrestleMania weekend, following epic debut\n\nYet, there's hope. Tickets for the tour go on sale at noon Friday, April 16, to the general public through Ticketmaster.\n\nTickets are currently on StubHub, a secondary market site, in the $300 range.\n\nBad Bunny, born Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio, is a reggaeton superstar from Puerto Rico. His 2020 album, “El Último Tour Del Mundo,” became the first all Spanish-language album to hit No. 1 on the U.S. Billboard 200 albums chart.\n\nHe made a big splash in the wrestling world when he and Damian Priest defeated the Miz and John Morrison in a tag-team match at WrestleMania 37 in Tampa, Florida on Saturday, April 10. That's where he first announced his 2022 world tour.\n\nThe announcement video, which Bad Bunny shared on Instagram, features WWE star Triple H — who praised the artist for his \"incredibly hard work and grind\" in preparation for his pro wrestling performance.\n\n‘Premio Lo Nuestro’ awards: Bad Bunny leads with 7 wins, Selena Gomez performs and more\n\n\"You did amazing at WrestleMania but now, it's time for you to do what you do,\" Triple H tells the singer in the announcement video, before handing him a yellow suitcase.\n\n\"Thanks,\" Bad Bunny responds, before walking away to open the suitcase which holds a microphone in the shape of a skull. It is later revealed that the suitcase reads \"Tour 2022\" on its side.\n\nReps for Bad Bunny and Ticketmaster did not reply to a comment request for this article.\n\nContributing: Pamela Avila", "authors": [], "publish_date": "2021/04/15"}, {"url": "https://www.cnn.com/2022/01/16/entertainment/celine-dion-world-tour-shows-cancellation-intl-scli/index.html", "title": "Celine Dion cancels remaining shows of Courage World Tour due to ...", "text": "CNN —\n\nCeline Dion has announced the cancellation of the remaining 16 shows of her world tour, due to ongoing health issues.\n\nThe Canadian singer said she was recovering from “severe and persistent muscle spasms,” that were hindering her ability to perform, according to a post published from her verified Instagram account on Saturday.\n\nDion postponed her Las Vegas residency in October 2021 as a result of the spasms, saying at the time that she was “heartbroken.”\n\nThe remaining shows of her Courage World Tour had been rearranged to take place from March 9 to April 12 of this year. However, they have since been called off while her medical team assesses and treats her condition.\n\n“I was really hoping that I’d be good to go by now, but I suppose I just have to be more patient and follow the regimen that my doctors are prescribing,” Dion said in the Instagram post published.\n\n“There’s a lot of organizing and preparation that goes into our shows, and so we have to make decisions today which will affect the plans two months down the road.\n\n“I’ll be so glad to get back to full health, as well as all of us getting past this pandemic, and I can’t wait to be back on stage again,” she added.\n\nDion is best known for her recording of the balladic “Titanic” theme song, “My Heart Will Go On,” for which she won two Grammys in 1998.\n\nIn the following years she become one of the best-selling artists of all time with record sales surpassing 200 million globally, according to Sony Music.\n\nSpeaking about the cancelation of the North American leg of the tour, Dion added, “Meanwhile, I’ve been very touched by all the words of encouragement that everyone’s been sending to me on social media. I feel your love and support and it means the world to me.”", "authors": ["Sana Noor Haq"], "publish_date": "2022/01/16"}, {"url": "https://www.cnn.com/2022/11/01/entertainment/taylor-swift-eras-tour/index.html", "title": "Taylor Swift announces 'The Eras Tour' | CNN", "text": "CNN —\n\nFresh on the heels of breaking chart records, Taylor Swift has announced a new tour.\n\nThe US leg of “The Eras Tour” kicks off in the spring.\n\n“I’m enchanted to announce my next tour: Taylor Swift | The Eras Tour, a journey through the musical eras of my career (past and present!),” Swift wrote on social media with the announcement. “The first leg of the tour will be in stadiums across the US, with international dates to be announced as soon as we can!”\n\nShe also wrote that she was “Feeling like the luckiest person alive because I get to take these brilliant artists out on tour with me,” as she announced that fellow artists Paramore, Beabadoobee, Phoebe Bridgers, Girl in Red, Muna, Haim, Gayle, Gracie Abrams and Owenn would be joining her.\n\n“I can’t WAIT to see your gorgeous faces out there,” Swift wrote. “It’s been a long time coming.”\n\nThe tour is set to start on March 18 at the State Farm Stadium in Glendale, Arizona and wrap August 5 at SoFi Stadium in Los Angeles.\n\nThanks to her new album “Midnights,” Swift became the first artist to simultaneously claim all top ten spots on the Billboard Hot 100 list.\n\nThose wishing to purchase tickets can register here through Wednesday, November 9 at 11:59 p.m. ET. Registrants will receive a code will have exclusive access to purchase tickets on Tuesday, November 15, starting at 10 a.m. local venue time.", "authors": ["Lisa Respers France"], "publish_date": "2022/11/01"}, {"url": "https://www.usatoday.com/story/entertainment/people/2017/02/01/beyonce-announces-shes-pregnant-twins-instagram/97359466/", "title": "Beyonce announces she's pregnant with twins on Instagram", "text": "MARK KENNEDY\n\nAP Entertainment Writer\n\nNEW YORK (AP) — Blue Ivy is about to become a big sister — twice over.\n\nBeyonce and Jay Z announced Wednesday on Instagram that the superstar singer is pregnant with twins.\n\n\"We have been blessed two times over. We are incredibly grateful that our family will be growing by two,\" said a statement signed \"The Carters,\" Jay Z's real last name.\n\nThe news accompanied a photo of Beyonce showing a baby bump while wearing just a bra, underwear and a veil, kneeling in front of a backdrop of flowers. The singer's representative did not immediately respond to requests for comment. The news triggered half a million tweets in 45 minutes, according to Twitter.\n\nTheir daughter, Blue Ivy, was born in 2012. The little girl served as the inspiration for Jay Z's hit song \"Glory,\" and she's appeared in music videos alongside her mother.\n\nBeyonce, who set a record in December for earning Grammy Award nominations in the rock, pop, R&B and rap categories in the same year with her diverse album \"Lemonade,\" announced her last pregnancy at the 2011 MTV VMAs.\n\nBeyonce in October ended her six-month Formation World Tour at MetLife Stadium in New York City. She has also been named one of the headliners this spring at the Coachella music festival.\n\nBeyonce and Jay Z routinely make listings of the most powerful people in the entertainment industry. She is the most nominated woman in Grammy Awards history, with 53 nominations and 20 wins. He co-founded the record company Roc-A-Fella, the clothing line Rocawear, a nightclub chain and the streaming service Tidal.\n\nShe and Jay Z were married in April 2008. Beyonce revealed in 2013 that she had suffered a miscarriage before Blue Ivy's birth.\n\nIn 2013, Beyonce told ABC News that she definitely \"would like more children.\"\n\n\"I think my daughter needs some company. I definitely love being a big sister,\" she said, referring to little sister, Grammy-nominated singer Solange Knowles.\n\nThe news of the pregnancy comes a day after Pharrell Williams and his wife, Helen Lasichanh, confirmed they had welcomed triplets. Those babies join 8-year-old big brother Rocket.\n\n___\n\nThis story has been corrected to show Beyonce is not scheduled to perform at the 2017 Grammys.\n\n__\n\nOnline: http://www.beyonce.com", "authors": [], "publish_date": "2017/02/01"}, {"url": "https://www.usatoday.com/story/life/music/2014/07/10/garth-brooks-announces-comeback/12471633/", "title": "He's back! Garth Brooks announces new music, world tour", "text": "Brian Mansfield\n\nSpecial for USA TODAY\n\nNASHVILLE — He's got 13 years to make up for, so Garth Brooks' comeback is going to be big. Really big.\n\nHe'll kick off a three-year world tour soon, with the first date to be announced Monday. More details will follow within 10 days. \"I'm very proud of the ticket price,\" says the 52-year-old singer, who retired in 2001 and drew more than 5 million people to his last tour (1996-98).\n\nHe also has a new studio album, his first since 2001's Scarecrow, in the pipeline.\n\nA new single will be released \"sometime in the next two months,\" he told reporters Thursday at his news conference. The album will follow, likely around Black Friday.\n\nFor the first time, Brooks' fans will be able to buy those releases digitally.\n\n\"His big change is making his music available to download,\" says Lon Helton, publisher of Country Aircheck, an industry trade publication. \"And he's not giving it to iTunes.\"\n\nInstead of going through digital retailers, Brooks will sell his music online at garthbrooks.com. \"That will begin in the next two or three weeks,\" he says, starting with his back catalog.\n\nBrooks, the top-selling artist in the USA since 1991, has been one of the last major holdouts in the digital realm. Some people might think \"I'm giving it away, but I'm not,\" he says. But it will be offered \"at a stupid price.\"\n\n\"I guarantee you it's something where you buy the whole catalog,\" says Kris Rochester, co-host of the syndicated radio show Tony and Kris in the Morning. \"He'll sell millions.\"\n\nBrooks has signed with Sony Music Nashville, and his new album will bear the RCA imprint. That album \"is what we would traditionally think of as a double album, just because there's a lot to say,\" he says. One of the album's songs \"might very well have taken the place of The Dance as my favorite song ever.\"\n\nAnd don't expect him to follow current trends like bro-country or hick-hop. \"For me, it's 'Garth music,' \" Brooks says, though he finds it odd to be considered one of country's more traditional artists. \"I was the guy that wasn't country in the '90s.\"\n\nBrooks told USA TODAY that he's \"deep into\" recording the new album. \"We're probably, I'm going to guess, 60, 75% done at this point.\"\n\nRadio remains his biggest challenge, a format dominated by younger acts such as Luke Bryan and Jason Aldean, who weren't even making records when Brooks retired.\n\n\"You've got to be yourself,\" Brooks told USA TODAY. \"You start chasing (stuff), it doesn't work. If radio takes it, great. If they don't, hey, we've had a great run.\"\n\nTony and Kris' Tony Randall says he expects both fans and radio programmers to welcome Brooks' new music.\n\n\"Whatever he puts on that album is what people want to hear,\" Randall says. \"The only challenge he faces is himself.\"\n\nWhen the arena tour launches, it could last into 2017. \"The first one and the second one were both three years each, so I'd like that,\" Brooks says.\n\nWhen his wife, singer Trisha Yearwood, asked if he was sure he wanted to stay on the road, he says he told her, \"I've never been more sure of anything, because the kids are healthy, and I'm touring with you.\"", "authors": [], "publish_date": "2014/07/10"}, {"url": "https://www.cnn.com/2022/11/05/entertainment/aaron-carter-obit/index.html", "title": "Aaron Carter, singer, dead at 34 | CNN", "text": "CNN —\n\nAaron Carter, a former child pop singer and younger brother of Backstreet Boys’ Nick Carter, has died, a source close to the family told CNN. He was 34.\n\nA spokesperson for the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department told CNN they responded to a call for help at Carter’s Lancaster, California home on Saturday morning around 11 a.m. local time, where a deceased person was found at the scene.\n\nHe was found dead in his bathtub, the source said.\n\nAuthorities gave no information about a possible cause of death.\n\nCarter, who first found fame as a boy with pop songs like “I Want Candy” and “Crush on You,” is survived by his 11-month-old son, Prince.\n\nThe singer’s debut studio album, “Aaron Carter,” was released in 1997 and he performed as the opening act for the Backstreet Boys earlier that year. His fifth and final studio album, “Love,” was released in 2018.\n\nCarter was also known for his roles on television shows such as “Lizzie McGuire” on Disney Channel and “7th Heaven,” which debuted on The WB Television Network. He also appeared on his family’s reality series on E! Entertaiment Television, “House of Carters.”\n\nThe singer received an outpouring of of love and support from fans and other celebrities in 2017 after he came out as bisexual.\n\n“There’s something I’d like to say that I feel is important for myself and my identity that has been weighing on my chest for nearly half of my life,” Carter wrote on Twitter. “This doesn’t bring me shame, just a weight and burden I have held onto for a long time that I would like lifted off me.”\n\nHe then explained that at around the age of 13 he “started to find boys and girls attractive.”\n\n“There were years that went by that I thought about it, but it wasn’t until I was 17-year-old, after a few relationships with girls, I had an experience with a male that I had an attraction to who I also worked with and grew up with.”\n\nThe singer opened up in 2019 in an episode of “The Doctors” about his battle with multiple mental health issues, including multiple personality disorder, schizophrenia, acute anxiety and manic depression.\n\n“This is my reality,” Carter said as he held up a plastic bag of multiple prescription bottles in one clip featured on the show’s Facebook page.\n\nIn 2017, Carter was arrested in Georgia under suspicion of driving under the influence and marijuana possession as he and then-girlfriend Madison Parker were traveling through Habersham County.\n\nThe singer later said in an interview that he doesn’t drink and denied that he has a drug problem, CNN previously reported.\n\n“I don’t need help,” he said. “What I need is for people to understand that I’m human and that I make mistakes just like every other human in this world, but I would never risk my life or my girlfriend’s life.”", "authors": ["Chloe Melas Emma Tucker", "Chloe Melas", "Emma Tucker"], "publish_date": "2022/11/05"}, {"url": "https://www.cnn.com/2022/09/07/us/five-things-september-7-trnd/index.html", "title": "5 things to know for September 7: Extreme heat, Primaries, Covid-19 ...", "text": "CNN —\n\nGet '5 Things' in your inbox If your day doesn’t start until you’re up to speed on the latest headlines, then let us introduce you to your new favorite morning fix. Sign up here for the ‘5 Things’ newsletter.\n\nIt’s 100 days until the Tokyo Olympics, and Japan is running into another problem: Only about 1% of its population is vaccinated from Covid-19.\n\nHere’s what you need to know to Get Up to Speed and On with Your Day.\n\n(You can also get “5 Things You Need to Know Today” delivered to your inbox daily. Sign up here.)\n\n1. Coronavirus\n\nThe US killed al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri in a drone strike, President Joe Biden said Monday in a speech from the White House. Zawahiri, the world’s most wanted terrorist and one of the masterminds of the 9/11 terror attacks, was killed after months of highly secret planning by Biden and a tight circle of his senior advisers. Throughout the complex effort to plan the strike, Biden repeatedly tasked his officials with ensuring that civilians – including members of Zawahiri’s family – were not killed. None were, according to the White House. “People around the world no longer need to fear the vicious and determined killer,” Biden said. The moment was a political win for the President, as he emphasized the US “will always do what is necessary” to ensure the security of Americans.\n\n2. Police violence\n\n3. Afghanistan\n\nDemocrats and Republicans on Capitol Hill are gearing up for a showdown over Covid-19 relief funding this week. House Democrats plan to introduce a massive spending bill as soon as tomorrow that includes roughly $10 billion to help bolster Ukraine, but also tacks on about $22.5 billion in coronavirus relief money that Republicans widely oppose. The move would put Republicans in a tough spot – essentially daring them to block a package that includes money for Ukraine – according to a Democratic source familiar with the matter. The pressure is on for both parties to secure a deal before Friday, when government funding expires. If a broad funding package doesn’t move quickly, lawmakers may be forced to pass another short-term stopgap funding measure to avoid a government shutdown.\n\nVideo Ad Feedback Dr. Gupta: This treatment for 'brain fog' from long-Covid just might surprise you 04:05 - Source: CNN\n\n4. Russia\n\nVideo Ad Feedback 'We are playing with fire': IAEA chief's urgent warning on Ukraine nuclear plant 13:44 - Source: CNN\n\n5. Abortion\n\nBREAKFAST BROWSE\n\nAfter the terrifying rows of sharp teeth, this is what it looks like inside a place you never want to be…\n\nAnd surprisingly, it’s not pumpkin or maple flavored…\n\nActor Jennifer Lawrence is loving being a mom\n\n“My heart has stretched to a capacity that I didn’t know about,” Lawrence said in a new interview on motherhood. Read her heartwarming reaction here.\n\nWNBA legend Sue Bird retires from the game after playoff loss in Seattle\n\nLegendary basketball player Sue Bird bid farewell to the sport after her Seattle Storm lost to the Las Vegas Aces in a nail-biting game on Tuesday.\n\nJustin Bieber suspends tour to take care of his health\n\nThe superstar singer announced that he needs to take another break from his tour following a health crisis he suffered earlier this year.\n\nTips for counting your steps\n\nIf you wear a smartwatch, here’s the magic number of steps you should take each day to reduce your risk of dementia, according to a new study.\n\nTODAY’S NUMBER\n\nThat’s how many miles a 61-year-old man is set to row solo from the US to France. Peter Harley hopes to begin his journey across the Atlantic Ocean next week. He told CNN yesterday he estimates the feat will take anywhere from three to four months.\n\nThat figure represents how much of Pakistan is currently underwater due to never-before-seen, deadly flooding. More than 33 million people have been affected and the death toll has risen to 1,300, officials say.\n\nTODAY’S QUOTE\n\n– Republican Gov. Brian Kemp of Georgia, on signing several education bills into law yesterday, including one banning the instruction of “divisive concepts” pertaining to race in classrooms. The law, known as the “Protect Students First Act,” is part of a broader movement by conservative lawmakers across the country to limit how race is taught and discussed in schools. Kemp also signed into law HB 1178, known as the “Parents’ Bill of Rights,” which provides greater transparency to parents and legal guardians regarding what their students are being taught, and SB 226, which bans literature or books deemed to be offensive in nature from school libraries.\n\n– New Mexico county commissioner Couy Griffin, on being removed from his elected office on Tuesday for his role in the insurrection at the US Capitol on January 6, 2021. Griffin, an ardent conspiracy theorist and founder of Cowboys for Trump, also refused to certify the state’s primary election results this summer in Otero County, New Mexico. This historic ruling represents the first time an elected official has been removed from office for their participation or support of the Capitol riot.\n\nTODAY’S WEATHER\n\nVideo Ad Feedback Heat continues for the West as tropical activity increases 02:25 - Source: CNN\n\nCheck your local forecast here>>>\n\nAND FINALLY\n\nVisit the Okavango Delta in 360° | National Geographic\n\nHonestly, this may be one of the cutest, most hilarious 2-minute videos ever. Enjoy a good laugh this morning! (Click here to view)\n\nThis short video will make you feel immersed with elephants and nature in Botswana’s Okavango Delta. (Click here to view)", "authors": ["Alexandra Meeks"], "publish_date": "2022/09/07"}, {"url": "https://www.usatoday.com/story/life/people/2018/04/20/princes-death-new-photos-video-show-singer-day-before-he-died/535971002/", "title": "Prince death: New photos show singer on the day before he died", "text": "Pictures and videos of Prince in the days before he died were released by Minnesota police and prosecutors Thursday, hours after authorities announced that no criminal charges would be filed against anyone in connection with the singer's accidental opioid overdose.\n\nWith the end of the investigation came the publication of a huge stash of documents, pictures and videos,10 gigabytes of which posted to the website of the Carver County Sheriff's Office.\n\nREAD MORE: Prince's laptop, diet, weight loss and distress highlight captivating police documents\n\nPrince was 57 when he was found alone and unresponsive in an elevator at his Paisley Park studio compound on April 21, 2016. His death sparked a national outpouring of grief and prompted a joint investigation by Carver County and federal authorities to find out how and why he had died.\n\nAn autopsy found he died of an accidental overdose of fentanyl, a synthetic opioid 50 times more powerful than heroin. But Carver County Attorney Mark Metz said Thursday that Prince thought he was taking a common painkiller, Vicodin, but instead was taking counterfeit Vicodin laced with fentanyl.\n\nMetz said it remains a mystery how Prince obtained the deadly pills he was taking or from whom, and there was not enough evidence to prosecute anyone for a crime in connection with his death.\n\nThe pictures and videos of Prince and the inside of Paisley Park on the day he was found dead do not provide any insight to those questions, either.\n\nOne photo shows Prince on April 20, 2016, the day before his death at the office of Dr. Michael Todd Schulenberg, the local family physician who had been treating him after being referred by his patient, Kirk Johnson, one of Prince's oldest friends and top aide.\n\nOn Thursday, Schulenberg agreed to pay $30,000 to settle a federal civil claim for knowingly writing a prescription in someone else's name (Johnson's), which violates the Controlled Substances Act.\n\nSeveral other images show the music superstar’s body on the floor of his Paisley Park estate, near an elevator. He is on his back, eyes closed with his head still partly in the elevator. His right hand is on his stomach and left arm on the floor.\n\nThe documents include interviews with Prince’s inner circle, including Johnson, his bodyguard and estate manager, who told investigators that he had noticed Prince “looking just a little frail.” He said did not realize his boss had an opioid addiction until he passed out on a plane a week before he died.\n\n“It started to all making sense, though, just his behavior sometimes and change of mood and I’m like oh this is what, I think this is what’s going on, that’s why I took the initiative and said let’s go to my doctor because you haven’t been to the doctor, let’s check it all out,” Johnson said, according to a transcript of an interview with investigators.\n\nA paramedic told a police detective that after the second shot of naloxone, Prince “took a large gasp and woke up,” according to the investigative documents. He said the singer told paramedics, “I feel all fuzzy.”\n\nA nurse at the hospital where Prince was taken for monitoring told detectives that he refused routine overdose testing that would have included blood and urine tests. When asked what he had taken, he didn’t say what it was, but that “someone gave it to him to relax.” Other documents say Prince said he took one or two pills.\n\nDays later, Johnson took Prince to see Schulenberg for flu symptoms. The doctor ran some tests and prescribed other medications to help him. A urinalysis came back positive for opioids. At that point, his team contacted California-based addiction specialist Howard Kornfeld, who dispatched his son Andrew to Minnesota. He was among those who found the singer's body on the morning of April 21.\n\nKornfeld told investigators that Prince was still warm to the touch when he was found, but that rigor mortis had begun to set in.\n\nThe documents also show that Prince’s closest confidants knew he was a private person and tried to respect that, with Johnson saying: “That’s what (angers me) cause it’s like, man, how did he hide this so well?”\n\nJohnson said after that episode, Prince canceled some concerts as friends urged him to rest. Johnson also said that Prince “said he wanted to talk to somebody” about his addiction.\n\nOne of Prince’s sisters took to Twitter Friday, expressing disappointment about the way the death investigation was handled. Sharon L. Nelson tweeted: “There is so much about Prince’s death and this investigation that troubles me and millions of #prince fans around the world.”\n\nIn another tweet, she references an article noting that Prince’s computer wasn’t searched immediately, saying “This was disappointing and hurtful. Let’s hope the Federal Gov’t does better.”\n\nContributing: The Associated Press", "authors": [], "publish_date": "2018/04/20"}]}
{"question_id": "20230120_10", "search_time": "2023/01/20/16:37", "search_result": [{"url": "https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/50-states/2022/08/18/hybrid-coral-reefs-butterfly-petition-drawbridge-tragedy-news-around-states/50613275/", "title": "Hybrid coral reefs, butterfly petition: News from around our 50 states", "text": "From USA TODAY Network and wire reports\n\nAlabama\n\nAshland: A Florida college student exploring the Alabama wilderness with his girlfriend was fatally wounded during a shootout with a would-be robber who appeared to be living with others in the woods, authorities said. Adam Simjee, 22, was shot to death in the Talladega National Forest near Cheaha State Park on Sunday, the Clay County Sheriff’s Office said in a statement. Yasmine Hider and Krystal Diane Pinkins were charged with murder, kidnapping and robbery, the statement said. Wounded several times during the confrontation, Hider was awaiting transfer to jail from a Birmingham hospital, where she underwent surgery for her wounds. Pinkins, 36, was jailed. Simjee and girlfriend Mikayla Paulus, 20, were driving on a National Forest Service road when Hider flagged them down and asked for help with her car, sheriff’s officials said. She then pulled out a gun and ordered them into the woods, they said. Simjee also pulled out a pistol and shot Hider several times, but he also was hit and died at the scene. Hider called out for help, and Pinkins emerged from the forest before fleeing, authorities said. Authorities using a dog tracking team and a state police helicopter found a camp where they saw Pinkins, whose 5-year-old son ran from the woods with a loaded shotgun as officers were arresting her, sheriff’s officials said.\n\nAlaska\n\nAnchorage: Two oil and gas companies have announced plans to invest $2.6 billion into developing a major oil field on Alaska’s North Slope. Australia-based Santos and Spain-based Repsol made the announcement, which was lauded by state political leaders, the Anchorage Daily News reports. Santos has a 51% stake in the Pikka project, and the company said Tuesday that its investment will be $1.3 billion. Santos last year acquired Oil Search of Papua New Guinea, which had been working to advance the project. Santos, in a statement, said the funds will cover the initial phase of development at the Pikka field, with 80,000 barrels of oil daily expected to begin flowing in 2026. If developed, the field on state land east of the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska could significantly boost the flow of oil through the trans-Alaska pipeline system. Development could also generate billions of dollars in state and local tax revenue, primarily through royalties to the state. Another major North Slope oil prospect, ConocoPhillips’ Willow project, has been delayed by litigation and a new environmental review. Alaska U.S. Sens. Lisa Murkowski and Dan Sullivan lauded the plans for the Pikka project. Republican Gov. Mike Dunleavy said it “will continue the renaissance on Alaska’s North Slope.”\n\nArizona\n\nPhoenix: An effort by Republican Gov. Doug Ducey to use shipping containers to close a 1,000-foot gap in the U.S.-Mexico border wall near Yuma suffered a brief setback when two stacked containers somehow toppled over. Claudia Ramos, a correspondent for the digital platform of Univision Noticias in Arizona, posted on her Twitter feed a photo she took Monday morning of the containers on their side. She said they fell on the U.S. side of the border. No witnesses have come forward to say what happened Sunday night. Ramos said contractors in the area told her they believed the containers may have been toppled by strong monsoon winds. But C.J. Karamargin, a Ducey spokesman, said he doubted that hypothesis, adding that even though the containers are empty, they weigh thousands of pounds. “It’s unlikely this was a weather event,” Karamargin said, suggesting that someone opposed to the wall was to blame. The stacked pair of containers were righted by early Monday morning. “Clearly we struck a nerve. They don’t like what we are doing, and they don’t want to keep the border open,” the spokesman said. “This happened before securing the containers to the ground. They will be bolted later and will be immovable.”\n\nArkansas\n\nFort Smith: Medical marijuana patients spent $23.3million in July at the state’s 38 dispensaries to take home 4,171 pounds of cannabis. Natural Relief Dispensary of Sherwood had the largest month, with 392 pounds sold, while The Releaf Center of Bentonville followed with 308 pounds. The Arkansas Department of Health reports 88,893 active patient cards. “Medical marijuana purchases increased by more than $1 million from June to July,” said Scott Hardin, spokesperson for the Arkansas Department of Finance and Administration. “An average of $751,720 was spent daily on medical marijuana purchases in July.” Since Jan. 1, 2022, patients have spent a total of $157.9 million to obtain 27,782 pounds from the state’s 38 dispensaries. Arkansas patients purchased 12,056 pounds of medical marijuana in April, May and June totaling $68.75 million. The state tax collection for the first three-month period of the year totaled $8.23 million, the state department reported. For the month of July, the state collected $2.6 million in tax form sales. Patients pay a 6.5% regular state sales tax on medical marijuana and a 4% privilege tax. Cultivators who sell their product to a dispensary only pay the 4% privilege tax.\n\nCalifornia\n\nSacramento: Forecasts for more scorching heat and monsoon moisture brought calls for Californians to conserve electricity Wednesday, along with warnings that lightning, thunderstorm winds and parched vegetation were a recipe for wildfires. The heat wave was expected to be most extreme in the state’s interior, chiefly the Central Valley, where some locations hit 110 degrees Tuesday. The wildfire risk was focused on northern counties. The California Independent System Operator, which manages the state’s power grid, called for voluntary electricity conservation from 4 p.m. to 9 p.m. due to expectation of increased use of air conditioning and tightening power supplies. Late afternoon through early evening is the period when the grid is most stressed due to high demand while solar energy production is decreasing. Red flag warnings for fire danger were posted for the northern Coast Range, eastern Shasta County and the Mount Lassen area. The National Weather Service warned of the possibility of “abundant lightning” and erratic gusts from thunderstorms. “Lightning can create new fire starts and may combine with strong outflow winds to cause a fire to rapidly grow in size and intensity,” the weather service said.\n\nColorado\n\nFort Collins: Tumble out of bed and stumble to your mailbox. Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library is now available in Larimer County. The country music singer’s international children’s literacy program provides one free book a month to children until they turn 5 to help inspire an early love for reading. Parents in Larimer County can enroll their children in the program through the United Way of Larimer County. “People are really excited about the program,” said Allison Hines, United Way of Larimer County’s senior vice president of resource development. “This is a really great opportunity to get books in the hands of families that may not otherwise have access to them.” Any child qualifies for the program until their 5th birthday. In Larimer County alone, roughly 17,000 children are eligible. Since the program launched last week, over 2,000 people have registered their children for the program, Hines said. Officials hope to have 4,200 families signed up in the program’s first year.The Imagination Library is mostly funded through the Dollywood Foundation, supplemented by the Imagination Library of Colorado, which receives money from the state. The Dollywood Foundation selects the books and sends them directly to the child.\n\nConnecticut\n\nNorwich: The city is investing in public art, with two more artists now invited to paint murals downtown. It seems that 2022 has become the year for murals in Norwich with the murals on Market Street Garage and Castle Church. Now, two more are in the works. The Norwich Street Art Collective invited artists Carlitos Skills, whose legal name is Carlos Alexis Rivera Rivera, from Bayamon, Puerto Rico, and Golden, legal name Cristhian Saravia, of Miami, to town. Both of their murals are expected to be finished Thursday. Peter Helms, founder of the Norwich Street Art Collective, was inspired by the street art in the Wynwood neighborhood of Miami, once a blighted neighborhood but now a place where culture and business thrive. “A group of people decided that if they brought in art, that would inspire people and give them a sense of pride in their community and ultimately transform it economically,” Helms said. Norwich is in a unique position. While millions of people visit the nearby casinos every year, there hasn’t been enough of a draw to pull casino visitors into the city. An outdoor art museum may have the kind of pull needed, Helms said. As long as it was family-friendly, the artists could do anything they wanted, as tight restrictions are “not how you get the best art from artists.”\n\nDelaware\n\nWilmington: The Riverside community celebrated the completion of 74 mixed-income apartments Tuesday, bringing updated public housing as well as units designated for people with disabilities and special needs as part of a $100 million redevelopment project in the Wilmington neighborhood. Over 100 state, federal and local elected officials, community leaders and neighbors gathered outside the first phase of Imani Village, where units have been set aside to house seniors, veterans and individuals with disabilities, along with transitioning families out of outdated Wilmington Housing Authority apartments into newly built apartment homes with up to four bedrooms. This is the first of six phases of a “Purpose Built Community” redevelopment plan spearheaded by the nonprofit Reach Riverside. It will offer 59 affordable units as well as 15 market-rate apartments. The second phase, expected to be completed by the end of the year, will add another 50 affordable and 17 market-rate units, said Jennifer Lienhard, Reach Riverside’s director of marketing and communications. Announced in 2018, the multimillion-dollar project aims to build hundreds of public housing units as well as mixed-income and homeownership opportunities, revamp early education and health services at Kingswood Community Center, and add high school grades to the local EastSide Charter School.\n\nDistrict of Columbia\n\nWashington: A Catholic school in Northeast D.C. is raising money to repair the damage after someone broke several concrete windowsills and knocked down a statue of the school’s namesake weeks before the first day of classes, WUSA-TV reports. St. Anthony Catholic School said three benches were also pulled out of the ground and damaged. According to a police report, an unknown suspect destroyed the school’s property overnight Aug. 11 and took the head off the statue. St. Anthony Catholic Principal Mike Thomasian discovered the damage Friday and said he was disappointed to see someone would target the school’s patron saint. “Hate crimes can happen in any house of worship, and Catholics are being attacked right now,” he said. “And I didn’t know how strongly I felt about that until it hit home.” The Metropolitan Police Department is investigating the incident as a suspected hate crime. It is at least the third religious hate crime investigated by police this year. Then, St. Anthony was targeted again over the weekend, according to Thomasian. He said a custodian discovered the principal’s office had been ransacked, and two religious statues had been destroyed. Thomasian said the thief also took $1,400 that children had raised for a charity. A GoFundMe had raised more than $30,000 in donations as of Wednesday.\n\nFlorida\n\nMiami: Scientists and students from the University of Miami dove into the dark waters a few miles off the shores of Miami this week as part of an effort to develop hybrid reefs. The team from the Rosenstiel School of Marine, Atmospheric, and Earth Science was on a mission to collect eggs and sperm from spawning staghorn coral, which they hope to use to fertilize other strains of staghorn corals in a lab. It’s all part of a $7.5 million federal grant from the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency to help address security threats to the military and civilian infrastructure along vulnerable coastal regions in Florida and the Caribbean. The Miami-based project seeks to protect coastal bases from damaging hurricane storm surge using hybrid reefs. “Our mission is to develop hybrid reefs that combine the wave-protection benefits of artificial structures with the ecological benefits of coral reefs,” said Andrew Baker, a professor and director of the Coral Reef Futures Lab at the Rosenstiel School. “We will be working on next-generation structural designs and concrete materials and integrating them with novel ecological engineering approaches to help foster the growth of corals on these structures.” They will also be testing new adaptive biology approaches to produce corals that are faster-growing and more resilient to a warming climate, he said.\n\nGeorgia\n\nSavannah: Attorneys for the family of a woman killed by gunfire last year as sheriff’s deputies executed a search warrant at her cousin’s home are calling for the U.S. Justice Department to investigate, arguing the deadly raid echoes the fatal shooting of Breonna Taylor in Kentucky. Shooting broke out within seconds after Camden County deputies knocked down the door of Varshan Brown’s darkened home in Woodbine, about 100 miles south of Savannah, just before 5 a.m. May 4, 2021. The officers had a warrant to search the house for drugs. Brown’s cousin, 37-year-old Latoya James, was killed by bullets as deputies and Brown fired guns at each other. Brown was wounded and later charged with crimes. Local prosecutors brought no charges against the deputies after concluding they were justified in using deadly force. Lawyers for James’ family say there are striking parallels between this case and the 2020 raid by police in Louisville, Kentucky, that left Taylor dead. In both cases, officers arrived in the middle of the night and forced their way into homes with little to no warning. And each involved a shootout that killed an unarmed Black woman. “Latoya James was innocent in all aspects of this case,” said Harry Daniels, an attorney for her family. “She was at her cousin’s house. She wasn’t a target of any investigation.”\n\nHawaii\n\nHonolulu: Warning of a tough flu season ahead, state health officials are urging residents to get vaccinated against influenza and COVID-19 alike, HawaiiNewsNow reports.\n\nIdaho\n\nBoise: State lawmakers who made it more difficult for transgender people to change the sex listed on their birth certificates despite a U.S. court ruling banning such obstacles must pay $321,000 in legal fees to the winning side after losing in the same court. Republican Gov. Brad Little and Secretary of State Lawerence Denney on the State Board of Examiners on Tuesday approved paying the winning side’s legal fees set by the court in June. The court in March 2018 banned Idaho from automatically rejecting applications from transgender people to change the sex listed on their birth certificates. The court ruled the restriction violated the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment. But lawmakers in 2020 approved a ban anyway, and Little signed the bill into law. The 2018 case was reopened, and Idaho lost again, resulting in the $321,000 legal bill. The state previously paid $75,000 after losing the initial case in 2018. The plaintiffs in the case were represented by Lambda Legal, which on its website describes itself as a national legal organization working to get full civil rights recognition for lesbians, gay men, bisexuals, transgender people and everyone living with HIV. The Board of Examiners typically sends such bills to the Constitutional Defense Council but instead sent the bill to the Legislature on Tuesday.\n\nIllinois\n\nSpringfield: The state’s first lady has again bested her husband in an Illinois State Fair tradition, with M.K. Pritzker outbidding Gov. J.B. Pritzker for the fair’s grand champion steer. The first lady’s $105,000 bid for the steer, King, also beat her own record from 2021, when she and the governor were again pitted against each other in the auction.\n\nIndiana\n\nFremont: Hundreds of fish found dead in a northeastern Indiana lake likely died from natural events tied to recent hot weather, state wildlife officials said. Fisheries biologists with the Indiana Department of Natural Resources visited Clear Lake on Aug. 4 after residents reported numerous dead fish in the lake near the Steuben County town of Fremont, The Journal Gazette reports. The DNR said an estimated 500 fish were found dead, including bluegill, crappie and bass, in the lake about 50 miles northeast of Fort Wayne. The state agency said Monday that natural events likely caused the fish to die and noted that heat, warm water and windless days can produce low levels of dissolved oxygen in lakes. “Without dissolved oxygen, fish are unable to breathe and can die rapidly and in large numbers,” the DNR said in a news release. DNR biologists will continue monitoring conditions at Clear Lake. While the public health threat is considered very low, the agency said people should use common sense when visiting natural waterways, especially during periods of hot weather.\n\nIowa\n\nDes Moines: A City Council member is countersuing two police officers who took the unusual step earlier this year of suing several people who participated in a 2020 protest following a Minneapolis officer’s killing of George Floyd. Councilwoman Indira Sheumaker’s countersuit says Officers Peter Wilson and Jeffrey George used excessive force and violated her civil rights when they arrested her during a protest July 1, 2020, outside the Iowa State Capitol. Sheumaker’s lawsuit also accuses the officers of filing a frivolous lawsuit against protesters. In June, Wilson and George sued Sheumaker and five other protesters, accusing them of assault and seeking monetary damages, including an unspecified amount in punitive damages. The protest was among demonstrations against racism and police brutality that erupted worldwide following Floyd’s killing. It began as a rally at the Iowa State Capitol to push for the restored voting rights to felons and turned violent as police led away arrested protesters. The officers’ lawsuit – which they filed as individuals and not as representatives of the Des Moines Police Department – accuses Sheumaker and another protester of putting George in a chokehold as protesters attempted to thwart the officers’ attempts to arrest several people on prior warrants.\n\nKansas\n\nTopeka: Federal officials are expected next month to rename five creeks and a stream on federal land in the state because their names include a slur for Native American women. That word, “squaw,” was formally declared derogatory last November in an order issued by Deb Haaland, the nation’s first Native American Secretary of the Interior. The term is an ethnic, racial and sexist slur, particularly for Indigenous women, Haaland said in a news release. “Our nation’s lands and waters should be places to celebrate the outdoors and our shared cultural heritage – not to perpetuate the legacies of oppression,” she said. Haaland ordered the Board on Geographic Names, the federal body tasked with naming geographic places, to find replacement names for more than 660 geographic features bearing that term, including the six sites in Kansas.\n\nKentucky\n\nFrankfort: Kentucky State Parks has launched a photo contest that encourages visitors to capture some of the best parts of their stay. The contest aims to attract more travelers and showcase these “places of beauty, from scenic mountain views to tranquil beaches,” Kentucky Department of Parks Commissioner Russ Meyer said in a statement. Photos can be entered in the categories of camping, scenic, trails and park activities and will be judged on factors including originality and artistic composition, officials said. Photo submissions can be made through Oct. 31, and winners will be announced in December. A grand prize winner will receive a two-night cottage stay, a Canon camera and a $100 Kentucky State Parks gift card. Four honorable mention categories will have first- and second-place winners, who will receive camping certificates and gift cards.\n\nLouisiana\n\nShreveport: State law does not require that a candidate who mistakenly fills in the wrong address on a qualification form must be tossed off the ballot, a lawyer for Shreveport Mayor Adrian Perkins told the Louisiana Supreme Court on Tuesday. A lawsuit says Perkins did not use the address where he claims a homestead tax exemption when he signed up to run for reelection, as the law requires. He used another address for a residence he owns in the city. Perkins has acknowledged the mistake, and none of the seven justices Tuesday accused him of perjury. The case involves the question of whether “there are some things that a candidate does not have to tell the truth about,” Justice Jay McCallum said as he questioned Perkins’ attorney, Scott Bickford. Bickford said state law does not specifically call for disqualifying a candidate for using the wrong address. Jerry Harper, attorney for plaintiff Francis Deal, said the use of false information on the sign-up form for the Nov. 8 election – information the candidate swears to be true – disqualifies Perkins, who wants to run for a second term. Justice Scott Crichton at one point suggested that allowing Perkins on the ballot would be tantamount to nullifying the law. It was unclear when the justices would rule. So far, a district judge and an appellate court have ruled against Perkins.\n\nMaine\n\nBangor: A man pleaded guilty Tuesday to defrauding federal pandemic assistance programs of more than $300,000, which investigators say was spent on trucks, exercise equipment, a big-screen TV and laptop computers. Craig Franck, 40, of Levant, also used some of the relief money to post bail and hire a defense attorney after being charged with felony fraud in Florida, prosecutors said. He pleaded guilty to federal wire fraud and money laundering charges. He faces up to 20 years in prison when he’s sentenced. U.S. Attorney Darcie McElwee vowed to go after those who “take advantage of a national emergency simply to line their own pockets.” Franck formerly owned CCF Acoustics LLC and CCF Acoustical Systems, but neither company was in business or had employees in 2020 and 2021 when he applied for federal assistance during the pandemic, prosecutors said. Franck received $177,400 from the Economic Injury Disaster Loan program through the Small Business Administration and $145,060 from a private lender through the Paycheck Protection Program, prosecutors said. U.S. District Judge Lance Walker entered a forfeiture order Tuesday for about $320,000. Franck’s lawyer didn’t immediately return a telephone message seeking comment.\n\nMaryland\n\nCrofton: The family of a man fatally shot by a police officer filed a federal civil right lawsuit Monday against the department and individual officers. Dyonta Quarles Jr. was shot Jan. 30 when Anne Arundel County officers responded to his Crofton home after his mother called 911 saying her son wouldn’t let her leave, according to the Attorney General’s Office. Bodycam footage shows Quarles punching Officer J. Ricci. As officers handcuff Quarles, the video shows him bite Ricci and another officer deploy a stun gun. Ricci calls on colleagues to shoot Quarles, then fires himself. Quarles died, and Ricci was taken to a trauma center in serious condition, officials said. Mikel Quarles said at a news conference announcing the suit Monday that she was asking for help, and her son was killed, news outlets report. Attorneys for the family said part of the suit focuses on officers’ training. The officers weren’t properly trained “and reacted in a manner which was unconstitutional, unreasonable and excessive,” attorney Gregory Kulis said. The officers should have reduced tension, he said. “The police arrived with guns drawn,” Kulis said. “They were ready to go to battle.” The Attorney General’s Office said the case remains under investigation. County police declined comment but said Ricci is still recovering.\n\nMassachusetts\n\nBoston: The city is seeking to ban fossil fuels from new building projects and major renovations, Mayor Michelle Wu announced Tuesday. The Democrat said the state’s largest city will take advantage of a key provision in the climate change bill signed into law by Republican Gov. Charlie Baker last week. That legislation, which is meant to bring the state closer to net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050, calls for a pilot project allowing 10 Massachusetts cities and towns to require new building projects be all-electric, with the exception of life sciences labs and health care facilities. Wu said the city will file a home rule petition with the Legislature to join the pilot. “Boston must lead by taking every possible step for climate action,” she said in a statement. “Boston’s participation will help deliver healthy, energy efficient spaces that save our residents and businesses on utilities costs and create local green jobs that will fuel our economy for decades.” Wu’s office said natural gas, oil and other fossil fuels used in buildings represent more than one-third of the city’s greenhouse gas emissions. New York, Washington, D.C., and Seattle are among the major U.S. municipalities that have enacted similar bans, The Boston Globe reports.\n\nMichigan\n\nGaylord: Recent solar activity and weather conditions could give Michiganders the chance to view the northern lights through Friday night, according to the National Weather Service in Gaylord. The northern lights, also known as the aurora borealis, are created when charged particles ejected by the sun collide with atoms and molecules in Earth’s atmosphere. These charged particles then emit light that viewers perceive as the aurora. The Upper Peninsula is known to offer great conditions to view night sky phenomena due to its latitude, but Lower Peninsula residents may also get the chance to witness the northern lights, as they’re predicted to be visible as far south as Ohio and Pennsylvania. To spot the northern lights, look for greenish streaks of light that move and change, unlike clouds, which move in one direction. For best visibility, avoid areas with light pollution, and try to gain an unobstructed view of the night sky. The aurora will be visible closer to the horizon and will appear higher up in the sky the farther north the viewer are located. Strong solar activity may interfere with electronic communications such as radio, cellphone, television and satellite signals.\n\nMinnesota\n\nMinneapolis: Former Minneapolis police Officer Thomas Lane, who was sentenced to 21/ 2 years for violating George Floyd’s civil rights, will do his time at a low-security federal prison camp in Colorado. A court order Tuesday directs Lane to report to the Federal Correctional Institution Englewood in the Denver suburb of Littleton on Aug. 30. U.S. District Judge Paul Magnuson had recommended that the Bureau of Prisons send Lane to the low-security prison camp in Duluth, closer to his home, but the bureau makes the final decisions on where to place inmates, including weighing safety concerns. “He should be fine there,” said Lane’s defense attorney, Earl Gray. According to the Bureau of Prisons website, FCI Englewood is a low-security prison for men with an adjacent minimum security satellite camp. It holds 1,032 inmates, including 97 at the camp. Housing is dormitory or cubicle style. Life there is highly regimented, including frequent head counts and having to wake at dawn.\n\nMississippi\n\nLexington: Police have “terrorized” Black residents in a small town by subjecting them to false arrests, excessive force and intimidation, according to a federal lawsuit filed Tuesday by a civil rights organization. The group, JULIAN, is seeking a temporary restraining order against the Lexington Police Department to demand protection for the town’s largely Black population. Lexington is about 63 miles north of the capital, Jackson. “It’s both unconscionable and illegal for Lexington residents to be terrorized and live in fear of the police department whose job is to protect them,” said Jill Collen Jefferson, president and founder of JULIAN. “We need both the courts and the Department of Justice to step in immediately.” The town’s city attorney did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The town’s interim police chief, Charles Henderson, cast doubt on many of the allegations in response to an email request for comment. “I’m working on moving the Lexington Police Department forward,” he said. “I will say, don’t buy into everything you hear. This is defamation of character.” The lawsuit comes after JULIAN said it obtained an audio recording in July of then-Lexington Police Chief Sam Dobbins using racial slurs and talking about how many people he had killed in the line of duty.\n\nMissouri\n\nJefferson City: As the U.S. government expands incentives for renewable energy, a decision by the Missouri Supreme Court is moving the state in the opposite direction by halting a solar energy tax break that has been on the books for nearly a decade. The high court struck down a 2013 state law granting a property tax exemption for certain solar energy systems, saying the tax break wasn’t allowed under the state constitution. The case involved a privately run solar farm supplying energy for City Utilities of Springfield, which serves Missouri’s third-largest city. As a result of the ruling, the company owning the solar energy farm will owe at least $423,360 in property taxes from 2017 to 2020, Greene County Collector Allen Icet said. It’s not clear how many other solar energy sites across Missouri could be affected by the ruling or exactly how much tax revenue is at stake. But the ruling could have a chilling effect on solar energy development in Missouri, just as the federal government is trying to encourage it. “This obviously would put a big kink and cost in the way of someone trying to lay out a large panel system, if you’ve got to pay taxes on the material generating this renewable, free energy,” said Jon Dolan, executive director of the Missouri Solar Energy Industries Association.\n\nMontana\n\nHelena: The U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs can be held responsible for damages awarded to a woman who became pregnant after an on-duty BIA officer used the threat of criminal charges to coerce her into having sex, the Montana Supreme Court has ruled. The woman, identified by the initials L.B. in court documents, sued former BIA officer Dana Bullcoming and his employer for the October 2015 sexual assault on the Northern Cheyenne Indian Reservation that resulted in the birth of a child, who is now 7, said her attorney, John Heenan. “This is a woman that had the courage to report a federal law enforcement officer for sexually assaulting her and then had the courage to go through the entire process, including agents there to collect DNA when the child was born,” Heenan said Wednesday. She pursued the case on behalf of people living on reservations to show “that they should have the same rights as Montanans do on this issue.” U.S. District Judge Susan Watters of Billings awarded the woman $1.6 million in damages in May 2020 but had ruled earlier that the BIA could not be held responsible for paying them because under federal law, the coercion and sex were outside the scope of Bullcoming’s duties.\n\nNebraska\n\nOmaha: The special board appointed by President Joe Biden to intervene in stalled railroad contract talks suggested Tuesday that 115,000 rail workers should get 24% raises and thousands of dollars in bonuses as part of a new agreement to avert a strike. Railroads and unions will use those recommendations as the basis for a new round of negotiations over the next month. It remains to be seen, however, whether railroads will agree to the higher wages or find ways to address union concerns about working conditions. If the two sides can’t agree on a new deal by mid-September, federal law would allow a strike or lockout. But Congress is likely to intervene before then to keep the supply chain moving. A railroad strike could devastate businesses that rely on Union Pacific, BNSF, Norfolk Southern, CSX and other major freight railroads to deliver raw materials and ship their products. In past national rail labor disputes, lawmakers have voted to impose terms on the railroads before workers could strike. A White House official said Biden is optimistic the report will provide a good framework for successful negotiations because avoiding a rail shutdown is in the nation’s interests.\n\nNevada\n\nReno: Conservationists who are already suing to block a geothermal power plant where an endangered toad lives in western Nevada are now seeking U.S. protection for a rare butterfly at another geothermal project the developer plans near the Oregon line. The Center for Biological Diversity is petitioning the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to list the bleached sandhill skipper under the Endangered Species Act at the only place it’s known to exist. It says the project the Bureau of Land Management approved last year 250 miles north of Reno could ultimately lead to the extinction of the 2-inch-long butterfly with golden-orange wings. “This beautiful little butterfly has evolved over millennia to thrive in this one specific spot, and no one should have the right to just wipe it off the face of the Earth,” said Jess Tyler, a scientist at the center who co-wrote the petition. USFWS has 90 days to decide whether there’s enough evidence to conduct a yearlong review to determine if protection is warranted, so any formal listing is likely years away. But the petition signals the potential for another legal fight all too familiar to Ormat Nevada, which wants to tap hot water beneath the earth to generate carbon-free energy the Biden administration has made a key part of its effort to combat climate change with a shift from fossil fuels to renewable sources.\n\nNew Hampshire\n\nConcord: A hermit known as River Dave – whose cabin in the New Hampshire woods burned down after he had spent nearly three decades on the property and was ordered to leave – has found a new home in Maine. David Lidstone, 82, has put in windows and is working on installing a chimney on his rustic three-room cabin, which he said is on land he bought. “The foundation needs repair work,” Lidstone, who received more than $200,000 in donations following the fire, said in a phone interview Monday. “It’s just an old camp, but I enjoy working (on it).” Lidstone, who grew up in Maine, declined to say where he was living or provide a contact for the landowner. A search of Maine county registers of deeds did not show any recent transactions involving Lidstone, but a cousin confirmed he had moved to Maine, and a Facebook post had photos of Lidstone with a family member in his new home. “He’s working on putting it together and clearing land and planting gardens, and he’s got some chickens. He’s moving on,” said Horace Clark, of Vermont, Lidstone’s cousin. Lidstone said he had to leave Canterbury, New Hampshire, over his dispute with a different landowner since 2016 over a patch of forest near the Merrimack River that Lidstone called home for 27 years.\n\nNew Jersey\n\nAtlantic City: The state’s casinos, horse tracks that offer sports betting, and the online partners of both types of gambling outlets won $480.7 million in July, an increase of 6.7% from a year ago. But some of Atlantic City’s nine casinos continue to struggle to return to pre-pandemic levels in terms of the amount won from in-person gamblers, with five of them individually winning less in July 2022 than they did in July 2019, before the coronavirus pandemic began. Figures released Tuesday by the New Jersey Division of Gaming Enforcement show that the casinos collectively won just under $299 million from in-person gamblers. That’s more than the $277 million they collectively won in July 2019. But five casinos – Bally’s, Borgata, Golden Nugget, Harrah’s and the Tropicana – won less from in-person gamblers last month than they did in July 2019. Nonetheless, Atlantic City’s performance in July “showed indications of a strong summer season fueled by a return to normal operations and consumer behavior,” said Jane Bokunewicz, director of the Lloyd Levenson Institute at Stockton University. James Plousis, chairman of the New Jersey Casino Control Commission, said the resort is off to a good start to the crucial summer season.\n\nNew Mexico\n\nFarmington: A fundraiser organized by a local LGBTQ organization at a brewery in Aztec was canceled after the owners of the business reportedly received threats. Nicole Hall, board president of Identity Inc., the Farmington-based nonprofit that was organizing the Aug. 12 fundraiser, said she received a call from one of the owners of the 550 Brewing Taproom two days prior saying the business had received several threats from people apparently upset about the all-ages event including a drag show. The Back to School Bash planned by Identity Inc. at the brewery was intended to raise cash and draw donations of school supplies for children and teachers, according to a flyer for the event posted on the organization’s Facebook page. It included a $5 cover charge and featured a drag show, an open mic session, games and more. But Hall said the brewery owner said she and other business representatives had been contacted through various means by people upset by the prospect of children being present for the drag show. Some reportedly threatened the owners and members of their family, Hall said she was told. “My immediate response was, ‘I’m so sorry people are being hateful to you. We’re used to it, but I didn’t think it would boil over to you and your family,’ ” Hall said she told the brewery’s owners.\n\nNew York\n\nNew York: Federal authorities say they have busted an organized crime racket reminiscent of the Mafia’s heyday, involving illegal gambling parlors in New York City and Long Island and a police detective accused of helping to protect the lucrative schemes. Two indictments unsealed Tuesday charged nine people, including the detective, with crimes such as racketeering, illegal gambling, money laundering conspiracy and obstruction of justice. Nicknames of the defendants included “Joe Fish,” “Sal the Shoemaker” and “Joe Box.” The top federal prosecutor in Brooklyn said the racketeers operated from fronts including a coffee bar, a soccer club and a shoe repair shop. “Today’s arrests of members from two La Cosa Nostra crime families demonstrate that the Mafia continues to pollute our communities with illegal gambling, extortion and violence while using our financial system in service to their criminal schemes,” U.S. Attorney Breon Peace said. He called the detective’s alleged conduct “shameful.” The Nassau County Police Department detective, Hector Rosario, is accused of accepting money from the Bonanno crime family in exchange for steering police raids toward competing gambling clubs.\n\nNorth Carolina\n\nRaleigh: Although illegal marijuana and lawful hemp look and smell the same, criminal prosecution for pot can still be legitimate when sight or odor contributes to a warrantless search and seizure, the state Court of Appeals ruled Tuesday. A three-judge panel found no errors related to a trial judge or attorney for Derek Edwin Highsmith, who was convicted last year of felony marijuana possession stemming from a Duplin County traffic stop in 2017. He was sentenced to a maximum of a little over four years in prison. Highsmith argued unsuccessfully at a hearing before his trial that the evidence collected after a K-9 alerted officers to possible drugs inside the vehicle should have been suppressed because it was unlawfully obtained. Superior Court Judge Henry Stevens IV denied Highsmith’s suppression motion, saying the K-9’s positive alert for narcotics, along with other factors, provided officers with the facts to find probable cause to conduct the search. The prosecutor called ït a “K-9 sniff-plus case,” Tuesday’s opinion said. Sheriff’s officers said it saw a vehicle that left a residence after many complaints about narcotics sales there, according to the opinion.\n\nNorth Dakota\n\nFargo: The city’s school board will reconsider its decision to stop reciting the Pledge of Allegiance at each of its meetings, after the move drew widespread criticism and threats of retaliation from some conservative state lawmakers. Fargo Board of Education President Tracie Newman told board members in a memo that she believes the pledge should be reinstated because the onslaught of “negative local and national feedback” could cost time and resources ahead of the new school year. She called a special meeting for Thursday. The Fargo board voted 7-2 last week to nix a previous board edict from April to recite the pledge before each meeting. The board includes four newcomers from the June election. In deciding against reciting the pledge, the board said the move didn’t align with the district’s diversity and inclusion code, largely because it says “under God” in one phrase. Robin Nelson, one of two board members to vote against dropping the pledge, said no one complained after the panel started reciting the patriotic vow. But since last week’s vote, the board has received “hundreds and hundreds of local and national emails and phone calls,” she said. She has heard personally from state lawmakers who have threatened to get even.\n\nOhio\n\nCleveland: A federal judge awarded $650 million in damages Wednesday to two Ohio counties that won a landmark lawsuit against national pharmacy chains CVS, Walgreens and Walmart, claiming the way they distributed opioids to customers caused severe harm to communities and created a public nuisance. U.S. District Judge Dan Polster said in the ruling that the money will be used to abate a continuing opioid crisis in Lake and Trumbull counties, outside Cleveland. Attorneys for the counties put the total price tag at $3 billion for the damage done to the counties. Lake County is to receive $306 million over 15 years. Trumbull County is to receive $344 million over the same period. Polster ordered the companies to immediately pay nearly $87 million to cover the first two years of the abatement plan. In his ruling, Polster admonished the three companies, saying they “squandered the opportunity to present a meaningful plan to abate the nuisance” after a trial that considered what damages they might owe. CVS, Walmart and Walgreens said they will appeal the ruling.\n\nOklahoma\n\nOklahoma City: A state lawmaker has filed an Open Records Act lawsuit seeking records about expenditures from Governor’s Emergency Education Relief funds. Republican state Rep. Logan Phillips filed the lawsuit Tuesday against the Office of Management and Enterprise Services and said Gov. Kevin Stitt and Education Secretary Ryan Walters, also both Republicans, have not responded to his requests for the documents. “I am seeking declarative and injunctive relief because I believe failure to provide the requested records is unlawful, and the records need to be made publicly available,” Phillips said. Stitt and OMES representatives told the Tulsa World that Phillips failed to attend scheduled meetings to see the documents. A U.S. Department of Education audit in July sharply criticized state officials for lack of oversight and accountability in how they used nearly $40 million in coronavirus relief funds intended for education. The audit recommended the state return nearly $653,000 spent on non-educational items such as televisions and Xbox gaming systems and audit another $5.4 million for possible refund of misspent funds. The state blamed the Florida-based contractor hired to administer the programs and sued the company for how it distributed the funds.\n\nOregon\n\nSalem: Oregon’s gubernatorial election took a step closer Tuesday to being a three-way race when unaffiliated candidate Betsy Johnson delivered thousands of voter signatures to get on the ballot. If the signatures are verified by election officials, the former state lawmaker will face Democratic nominee Tina Kotek, who is a former Oregon House speaker; and Republican nominee Christine Drazan, a former leader of the minority GOP in the House. “Coming onto the ballot through the power of people’s signatures is one of the most meaningful and foundational elements of my campaign,” Johnson said. She and several supporters delivered boxes of signature sheets to election officials in Salem. Johnson’s campaign said it delivered 48,214 signatures to Secretary of State Shemia Fagan’s election officials. Officials need to verify 23,744 of them as valid by Aug. 30 for Johnson to qualify for the November ballot. Tuesday was the deadline to deliver the signatures. “By delivering more than twice the number of signatures needed, we’ve made it very difficult for the political establishment to imagine ways to keep me off the ballot,” Johnson said.\n\nPennsylvania\n\nHarrisburg: Two former judges who orchestrated a scheme to send children to for-profit jails in exchange for kickbacks were ordered to pay more than $200 million to hundreds of people they victimized in one of the worst judicial scandals in U.S. history. U.S. District Judge Christopher Conner awarded $106 million in compensatory damages and $100 million in punitive damages to nearly 300 people in a long-running civil suit against the judges, writing the plaintiffs are “the tragic human casualties of a scandal of epic proportions.” In what came to be known as the kids-for-cash scandal, Mark Ciavarella and another judge, Michael Conahan, shut down a county-run juvenile detention center and accepted $2.8 million in illegal payments from the builder and co-owner of two for-profit lockups. Ciavarella, who presided over juvenile court, pushed a zero-tolerance policy that guaranteed large numbers of kids would be sent to PA Child Care and its sister facility, Western PA Child Care. Ciavarella ordered children as young as 8 to detention, many of them first-time offenders deemed delinquent for petty theft, jaywalking, truancy, smoking on school grounds and other minor infractions. The judge often ordered youths he had found delinquent to be immediately shackled, handcuffed and taken away without giving them a chance to put up a defense or even say goodbye to their families.\n\nRhode Island\n\nWarwick: A group of police officers put on body cameras Tuesday as part of a two-month pilot program that’s expected to pave the way for all the department’s patrol officers to wear them. Sixteen Warwick officers wore the Axon body cameras, which officers are now wearing on all three of the department’s patrol shifts. “This pilot program is really us getting our feet wet,” said Warwick’s police chief, Col. Brad Connor. The camera tryout in Warwick evokes a buzz of activity at police departments across the state as many local police officers get ready to do their jobs, day in and day out, with body cameras. A 30-day public comment period for a set of proposed rules and regulations runs out Friday. The draft policy was developed by the office of Attorney General Peter F. Neronha and the Rhode Island Department of Public Safety with guidance from the Rhode Island Police Chiefs Association. Under the program, which is based largely on legislation passed last year, the draft policy can be approved following consideration of public input. The approved policy would govern the use of body cameras by police departments that tap into $15 million in funding that has been allocated by the state legislature.\n\nSouth Carolina\n\nColumbia: Attorneys for disbarred lawyer Alex Murdaugh say prosecutors are taking too long to share their evidence alleging the disbarred attorney killed his wife and son, unfairly making it tougher to defend him at his upcoming trial. It’s a technical legal dispute that precedes many trials, but because of overwhelming public attention on Murdaugh’s case, attorney Dick Harpootlian called a news conference Wednesday that drew a dozen cameras at which he declared prosecutors want a “trial by ambush.” Prosecutors shot back. “This manufactured drama is just a well-known part of defense counsel’s playbook,” the state Attorney General’s Office responded in legal papers. Murdaugh, 54, was indicted in July on murder charges in the shooting deaths of his wife Maggie, 52, and their 22-year-old son, Paul, who were killed June 7, 2021, at one of the family’s homes in Colleton County. He has adamantly denied killing them. Murdaugh’s lawyers immediately asked for the prosecution’s evidence, and court rules require authorities turn it over in 30 days. That deadline was Monday, and defense lawyers said prosecutors didn’t provide the evidence because they wanted a judge to decide whether to require a protective order limiting to whom the defense can show the evidence and how it handles documents, photos and recordings.\n\nSouth Dakota\n\nSioux Falls: U.S. Sen. Mike Rounds, R-S.D., has introduced a bill that would prevent foreign powers like China from buying U.S. agricultural land, according to a press release. The bill plays off the PASS Act introduced on the House side in July by Rep. Elise Stefanik, R-N.Y., and co-sponsored by Rep. Dusty Johnson, R-S.D. The Senate bill would amend the 1950 Defense Production Act to allow for the review of agricultural transactions, according to the bill’s language. The difference between Rounds’ bill and the Promoting Agriculture Safeguards and Security Act includes prohibiting China, Russia, Iran and North Korea from investing in agricultural land, as well as requiring the U.S. secretary of agriculture to report on the risk of foreign takeovers and investments in agricultural companies or land use for ag purposes. “Protecting American farmland is critical to maintaining our national security,” Rounds said. “In my travels around South Dakota, I’ve heard from many farmers and ranchers who are concerned about foreign adversaries owning American farmland.” More than 350,000 acres of farmland in South Dakota belong to foreign businesses, despite a 1979 law barring non-resident foreigners from owning more than 160 acres.\n\nTennessee\n\nNashville: Two Black men who challenged their criminal convictions after jurors deliberated in a courthouse room containing Confederate symbols have received opposite rulings from different judges on the same appeals court. One was granted a new trial. The other was denied. The conflicting decisions likely mean the matter will be appealed up to the Tennessee Supreme Court to sort out the discrepancy. The rulings from two three-judge panels of the Tennessee Court of Criminal Appeals center on trials held at the Giles County Courthouse, putting jurors in a room adorned with items maintained by the United Daughters of the Confederacy, including an antique Confederate flag and portraits of Confederate President Jefferson Davis and Gen. John C. Brown. In June, a state commission approved plans to move the artifacts to a museum. This week, a panel of judges ruled unanimously against a new trial for Barry Jamal Martin, who went to trial in February 2020 and was convicted on drug charges and sentenced to 12 years in prison. The ruling says none of the jurors testified to “even noticing or being aware that the memorabilia was in the room.” The decision also questioned whether an average person would be able to recognize who was in the portraits or what the flag meant.\n\nTexas\n\nUvalde: Just months after an armed teenager entered Robb Elementary and killed two teachers and 19 children, a summer of conflicting government narratives has set parents on edge, particularly after a state report showed that 376 law enforcement officers showed up at Robb on May 24 but did not engage the shooter for more than an hour. Parents are now trying to plan for the back-to-school season and facing tough choices about their children’s education and safety. Some are keeping their kids in the Uvalde Consolidated Independent School District when school starts Sept. 6, the Texas Tribune reports. Some are choosing home-schooling, and others are looking at private schools. At Uvalde High School’s auditorium this past week, district officials laid out for parents new safety measures and increased access to mental health resources for the upcoming school year. Superintendent Hal Harrell discussed the district’s partnership with Texas Child Health Access Through Telemedicine, which helps identify behavioral health needs of children and adolescents. The district is also contracting Rhithm, a company with an app that allows staff and students to log how they are feeling. Communities in Schools, a nonprofit focused on connecting students with resources, is also sending teams to the district to provide additional behavioral health support to students.\n\nUtah\n\nSanta Clara: A 12-year-old Little League World Series player was in critical condition Tuesday with what his family said was a head injury suffered when he fell off the top bunk of his bed at a dormitory complex. Easton Oliverson is a pitcher and outfielder for the Snow Canyon team out of Santa Clara. The Little League World Series began Wednesday in Williamsport, Pennsylvania. His dad, Jace Oliverson, is an assistant coach on the team. “I’ve always been a firm believer of prayer and the power that comes with it, and I feel like if people continue to rally around us that he will make a full recovery,” Oliverson told KSL-TV. “Right now it’s slow. They keep telling me it’s a cross-country race.” Oliverson gave an update on his son’s condition through Facebook and said doctors told him his son had punctured an artery, which caused bleeding on the brain and required the removal of a piece of skull. Snow Canyon Little League started an online store to support the team while in Williamsport. Now, proceeds from the fundraising will go toward Easton’s recovery. Snow Canyon is the first team from Utah to advance to the Little League World Series by winning the Mountain Region. The Santa Clara-based club plays its first game Friday at 1 p.m. and will face the winner of the New England vs. Southeast game.\n\nVermont\n\nBurlington: A city police officer is on leave after he shot a man in the leg who was having an apparent mental health crisis Saturday afternoon, according to a news release from the Vermont State Police. David Johnson, 20, is still in the hospital, and no information has been shared by police about his condition. Sgt. Simon Bombard, who has worked for the Burlington Police Department for seven years, is on procedural administrative leave. Three police officers responded to a call just before 3 p.m. and found Johnson with a large kitchen knife standing outside the house and threatening suicide, according to the state police. The officers reportedly attempted to speak with Johnson, whom they knew from previous interactions, and de-escalate the situation. After about four minutes, Johnson reportedly charged one of the officers. The officer used an electroshock weapon on him, but it did not stop Johnson, according to the state police investigation. Another officer, whom state police have identified as Bombard, shot Johnson once in the upper left leg. The officer’s bullets also hit nearby occupied cars, and one person suffered minor injuries from broken glass. Johnson is expected to face charges, police said.\n\nVirginia\n\nMontpelier Station: The U.S. Postal Service has closed a small post office over agency management’s concerns about its location inside a historic train depot that also serves as a museum about racial segregation. In a statement this week addressing the closure, the USPS noted that the museum near former President James Madison’s Montpelier estate has historical signage above two exterior doors, one labeled “WHITE” and another labeled “COLORED.” It added that “Postal Service management considered that some customers may associate the racially-based, segregated entrances with the current operations of the Post Office and thereby draw negative associations between those operations and the painful legacy of discrimination and segregation.” The statement said operations were being suspended at the Montpelier Station Post Office with the intention of finding suitable alternative quarters in the community or, in the absence of any, proceeding with a study of whether to discontinue the branch. The post office location had one employee and operated four hours daily, according to the statement. It served about 100 people and closed in June, according to the Culpeper Star-Exponent.\n\nWashington\n\nSpokane: The state’s apple crop is forecast to be a bit smaller this year because of the cool spring. The Washington State Tree Fruit Association projected this week that the 2022 fresh apple crop will total 108.7 million 40-pound boxes. That’s an 11.1% decrease from 2021’s 122.3 million boxes. “We are pleased with the size of the harvest, particularly in the face of a long, cold spring,” WSTFA President Jon DeVaney said. The estimate shows that five popular apple varieties make up the majority of the harvest. Gala leads production at 20%, and Red Delicious and Honeycrisp are each projected at 14%, followed by Granny Smith at 13.4% and Fuji at 12.7% of total production. Cosmic Crisp, which is grown only in Washington state, is 4.6% of the harvest, up from 3.2% last year. Washington apples are sold in over 40 countries and are the state’s top farm commodity, representing 20% of the state’s farm-gate agricultural value in 2020. On average, 30% of the harvest is exported.\n\nWest Virginia\n\nCharleston: Officials in one county hit by flooding this week are starting the task of removing residential debris. Curbside debris collection began Wednesday in flood-ravaged neighborhoods of eastern Kanawha County where up to 5 inches of rain fell Monday, the county commission said in a news release. Among the hardest-hit areas were Hughes Creek, Kelleys Creek and Campbells Creek. The statement said dump trucks will collect debris through at least Sunday. The cleanup comes as forecasters predict another rainy stretch of weather starting Saturday. West Virginia Gov. Jim Justice declared a state of emergency in Kanawha and Fayette counties, enabling the National Guard to respond to hard-hit areas. Some people had to be rescued by boat as the flooding damaged more than 100 homes, bridges and roads, interrupted drinking water systems and left more than 2,000 customers without electricity. Along the Fayette-Kanawha county line, several feet of mud made roads impassible in the Smithers area. The state Department of Environmental Protection on Wednesday issued an advisory against the recreational use of a 10-mile area downstream of the Mount Olive Correctional Center to the London Locks and Dam.\n\nWisconsin\n\nMilwaukee: A man vacationing in the city fell to his death after a drawbridge was raised while he was walking across it. Richard Dujardin, 77, of Providence, Rhode Island, was crossing the Kilbourn Avenue Bridge in downtown Milwaukee on Monday afternoon with his wife, according to a Milwaukee County Medical Examiner’s Office report. Rosemarie Dujardin made it across the bridge, which spans the Milwaukee River, but her husband was about halfway across when it began to open. He grabbed onto a side rail as the bridge sections rose to a 90-degree angle, but he lost his grip and fell about 70 feet to the pavement below, the report says. He suffered a head wound and was pronounced dead at the scene, investigators said. The bridge is controlled by the city’s Department of Public Works, and its two halves are raised and lowered for boat traffic by someone working remotely who has two camera views of the span. The lights and bells were operational as the two sections were raised, and crossing arms came down at each end of the bridge, according to investigators. Interim Public Works Commissioner Jerrel Kruschke said the employee who operated the bridge is in his fourth year and has conducted hundreds of bridge openings. He said the employee has been put on leave and offered counseling.\n\nWyoming\n\nCheyenne: Gov. Mark Gordon has a clear path to reelection after winning the Republican primary Tuesday, while state Rep. Chuck Gray won the GOP primary for secretary of state. Megan Degenfelder defeated incumbent Brian Schroeder in the GOP primary for state superintendent of public instruction. Democrats, meanwhile, have all but ceded these offices to Republicans, fielding just two candidates who don’t even have websites for governor and just one candidate for state superintendent. Gordon had faced fierce opposition within the GOP for public health measures to limit the spread of the coronavirus, causing speculation he’d face a tough primary challenge. He didn’t, after lifting a statewide mask mandate and other coronavirus restrictions. Last year, Gordon urged the National Rifle Association to move its headquarters from Virginia to Wyoming. In March, he signed a ban on most abortions that briefly took effect a month after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade and is now on hold pending a lawsuit contesting the ban. Both moves helped buttress Gordon’s right-wing credentials. And while Gordon hasn’t gone out of his way to praise Donald Trump, neither has he criticized the ex-president’s fixation on the false belief that fraud cost him reelection in 2020. Gordon on Tuesday defeated Brent Bien, a retired U.S. Marine Corps colonel who oversaw operations in Guam.\n\nFrom USA TODAY Network and wire reports", "authors": [], "publish_date": "2022/08/18"}]}
{"question_id": "20230120_11", "search_time": "2023/01/20/16:37", "search_result": [{"url": "https://www.cnn.com/2022/11/16/tech/amazon-layoffs/index.html", "title": "Amazon confirms it has begun laying off employees | CNN Business", "text": "CNN —\n\nAmazon confirmed on Wednesday that layoffs had begun at the company, two days after multiple outlets reported the e-commerce giant planned to cut around 10,000 employees this week.\n\nThe initial cuts at Amazon will impact roles on the devices and services team, per a memo shared publicly by Dave Limp, senior vice president of devices & services at Amazon\n\n“After a deep set of reviews, we recently decided to consolidate some teams and programs. One of the consequences of these decisions is that some roles will no longer be required,” Limp said. “We notified impacted employees yesterday, and will continue to work closely with each individual to provide support, including assisting in finding new roles.”\n\nLimp did not specify how many employees have been cut.\n\nAmazon spokesperson Kelly Nantel told CNN Business in a statement that the company looks at all of its businesses as part of an annual operating review process. “As we’ve gone through this, given the current macro-economic environment (as well as several years of rapid hiring), some teams are making adjustments, which in some cases means certain roles are no longer necessary,” Nantel added.\n\nShe continued: “We don’t take these decisions lightly, and we are working to support any employees who may be affected.”\n\nOn Tuesday evening into Wednesday morning, many laid-off Amazon workers posted publicly on LinkedIn that they had been impacted by the job cuts and were looking for work. Some of these posts mentioned they were on teams involved with Amazon’s voice assistant, Alexa.\n\nAmazon and other tech firms significantly ramped up hiring over the past couple of years as the pandemic shifted consumers’ habits towards e-commerce. Now, many of these seemingly untouchable tech companies are experiencing whiplash and laying off thousands of workers as people return to pre-pandemic habits and macroeconomic conditions deteriorate.\n\nFacebook-parent Meta recently announced 11,000 job cuts, the largest in the company’s history. Twitter also announced widespread job cuts after Elon Musk bought the company for $44 billion, funded in part by debt financing.\n\nIn a sobering sign of the times, a growing number of business leaders in the tech sector – from Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg to Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey – have been issuing remorseful apologies in recent weeks as their employees lose their livelihoods.\n\nAfter reaching record highs during the pandemic, shares of Amazon have shed more than 40% in 2022 so far.", "authors": ["Catherine Thorbecke"], "publish_date": "2022/11/16"}, {"url": "https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2023/01/18/microsoft-layoffs-10000-employees-stock/11074235002/", "title": "Microsoft layoffs: 10,000 employees affected; stock opens higher", "text": "Microsoft announced thousands of job cuts this week, becoming the latest tech company to pluck its workforce as the global economy slows.\n\nThe software company confirmed Wednesday its reducing workforce by 10,000 people through the end of the third quarter of the 2023 fiscal year.\n\nThe cuts come “in response to macroeconomic conditions and changing customer priorities,\" the company's CEO Satya Nadella released in a statement to its employees Wednesday.\n\nMicrosoft reported the layoffs would affect roughly 5% of its workforce, with some notifications happening as early as Wednesday.\n\n\"It’s important to note that while we are eliminating roles in some areas, we will continue to hire in key strategic areas. We know this is a challenging time for each person impacted,\" Nadella wrote in the statement. \"The senior leadership team and I are committed that as we go through this process, we will do so in the most thoughtful and transparent way possible.\"\n\nAccording to Bloomberg, which cited a person familiar with the matter, Microsoft will cut jobs in a number of engineering divisions.\n\nInflation's cooling, rates are peaking:Is it time to buy stocks and bonds again?\n\nTax FAQs:What are the 2022 US federal tax brackets? What are the new 2023 tax brackets?\n\nMicrosoft stock (MSFT)\n\nThe company's stock was modestly higher in early Wednesday trading, opening at a share price of $241.56.\n\nHow many employees does Microsoft have?\n\nMicrosoft employs about 221,000 people around the world, including 122,000 in the United States, as of June 30, 2022.\n\nNadella: 'Difficult, but necessary'\n\nNadella also said the company will continue to invest in strategic areas for its future, \"meaning we are allocating both our capital and talent to areas of secular growth and long-term competitiveness for the company, while divesting in other areas.\"\n\n\"These are the kinds of hard choices we have made throughout our 47-year history to remain a consequential company in this industry that is unforgiving to anyone who doesn’t adapt to platform shifts,\" he wrote.\n\n\"As such, we are taking a $1.2 billion charge in Q2 related to severance costs, changes to our hardware portfolio, and the cost of lease consolidation as we create higher density across our workspaces .... We will treat our people with dignity and respect, and act transparently. These decisions are difficult, but necessary. \"\n\nMicrosoft layoffs come amid tech slowdown\n\nAfter a massive hiring spree in the first two years of the pandemic, industry giants like Amazon and Meta reversed course in 2022.\n\nThere were at least 154,000 layoffs from more than 1,000 tech companies last year, according to Layoffs.fyi, a website that has been tracking tech layoffs since March 2020.\n\nThe website's tallies – which are likely an undercount – have continued at a fast clip in 2023, with more than 25,000 layoffs recorded so far this year.\n\nLayoffs.fyi data shows the U.S. tech companies that trimmed the most jobs last year include:\n\nMeta: 11,000\n\nAmazon: 10,000\n\nCisco: 4,100\n\nCarvana: 4,000\n\nTwitter: 3,700\n\nLockdowns had a major effect on consumer spending. Experiences like travel or restaurants were largely off the table, so people began to shift their discretionary spending to products from tech companies like Amazon and Peloton.\n\nContributing: Bailey Schulz, USA TODAY\n\nNatalie Neysa Alund covers trending news for USA TODAY. Reach her at nalund@usatoday.com and follow her on Twitter @nataliealund.", "authors": [], "publish_date": "2023/01/18"}, {"url": "https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2022/11/14/amazon-lay-off-10000-employees-report/10697110002/", "title": "Amazon plans to lay off about 10000 employees, largest in company ...", "text": "Amazon plans to lay off about 10,000 employees in what would be the largest reduction in the company's history, according to reports.\n\nThe New York Times reported the mass layoffs could begin as soon as this week and will focus on Amazon's devices organization, retail division and human resources, citing people with knowledge of the move who were not authorized to speak publicly.\n\nAmazon did not immediately confirm the layoffs to USA TODAY.\n\nThe reported layoffs would affect about 3% of Amazon's corporate employees and less than 1% of its global workforce. The company has more than 1.5 million workers worldwide.\n\nA recent report from market analysis firm Finbold found Amazon had lost 45% of its value in the past year, from $1.6 trillion on Jan. 1 to $939 billion on Nov. 3. Other companies, including Apple and Microsoft, also saw drops in value.\n\nPetra Moser, a professor of economics at New York University, had told USA TODAY the loss in market value probably would be felt through employment.\n\n'This is a dicey moment':Amazon, Apple, other tech giants lose billions in value as market wobbles\n\nJeff Bezos: Billionaire and Amazon founder says he plans to give most of his fortune to charity\n\nOther major tech companies have announced similar moves in recent weeks. Thousands of people were laid off at Twitter in the beginning of November, one week after billionaire Elon Musk acquired the company.\n\nA few days later, Facebook parent company Meta announced it was going to lay off more the 11,000 employees, about 13% of its workforce, \"to become a leaner and more efficient company.\"\n\nThe New York Times report comes as Amazon announced million of deals that will be available for its 48- hour Black Friday event, which begins Nov. 24.\n\nOn Oct. 27, Amazon announced in its third-quarter financial results that its net sales had increased more than 15% compared with last year, but operating income decreased to $2.5 billion compared with the $4.9 billion operating income in the same time span last year.\n\nA New York Times report from Oct. 4 said Amazon would freeze corporate hiring in its retail business for the rest of the year, but Amazon said it has plans to hire roughly 150,000 people for open seasonal, full-time and part-time roles \"across its operations network in the U.S. to help deliver for customers during the holidays.\"\n\nFollow Jordan Mendoza on Twitter: @jordan_mendoza5.", "authors": [], "publish_date": "2022/11/14"}, {"url": "https://www.cnn.com/2022/11/14/tech/amazon-layoffs-report/index.html", "title": "Amazon layoffs: Company plans to lay off thousands of employees ...", "text": "CNN Business —\n\nAmazon is planning to lay off some 10,000 employees in corporate and technology jobs, the New York Times reported on Monday, citing anonymous sources with knowledge of the matter.\n\nThe job cuts could start as early as this week, and will likely include staff working on Amazon (AMZN) devices (such as its voice-assistant Alexa), as well as people in its retail and human resources divisions, according to the report. “The total number of layoffs remains fluid,” the report stated.\n\nAmazon did not immediately respond to CNN Business’ request for comment Monday. CNN has not been able to independently confirm the report. The Wall Street Journal also reported Monday that Amazon is set to lay off thousands of workers, citing a person familiar with the matter.\n\nThe news would make Amazon the latest in a spate of tech companies that have announced significant layoffs in recent weeks, amid broader economic uncertainty and a sharp slowdown in the demand many tech giants saw during the pandemic that led them to quickly add staff. Last week, Facebook-parent Meta announced it is laying off 11,000 employees.\n\nEarlier this month, Amazon said it was freezing corporate hiring “for the next few months,” citing economic uncertainty and “how many people we have hired” in recent years. Amazon rapidly grew its headcount as the pandemic shifted consumer habits and spending towards e-commerce. In its most-recent earnings report, however, Amazon forecast its revenue for the holiday quarter would be lighter than analysts had expected.\n\nShares in Amazon have fallen more than 40% in 2022 so far amid a broader market decline.\n\nNews of potential layoffs comes at a crucial time for the retail industry, ahead of the holiday shopping season. Despite recession fears and inflationary pressures, the National Retail Federation is predicting a 6% to 8% sales increase from last year during the holiday shopping months.\n\nLast month, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos tweeted about the possibility of a looming recession, writing, “the probabilities in this economy tell you to batten down the hatches.” In an interview with CNN’s Chloe Melas on Saturday, Bezos said that advice was meant for business owners and consumers alike. “Take some risk off the table,” he said. “Just a little bit of risk reduction could make the difference.”", "authors": ["Catherine Thorbecke"], "publish_date": "2022/11/14"}, {"url": "https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2023/01/20/google-layoffs-jobs-employees-cut/11088409002/", "title": "Google layoffs: 12,000 job cuts announced by CEO Sundar Pichai", "text": "Google announced Friday that it planned to cut about 12,000 jobs, joining other tech giants who are downsizing staff by the thousands.\n\nSundar Pichai, CEO of Google and parent company Alphabet, confirmed the layoffs in an email sent to Google employees, which was later published in a Google blog post.\n\nThe job cuts would reduce the company's workforce by about 6%.\n\n\"This will mean saying goodbye to some incredibly talented people we worked hard to hire and have loved working with. I’m deeply sorry for that,\" Pichai wrote. \"The fact that these changes will impact the lives of Googlers weighs heavily on me, and I take full responsibility for the decisions that led us here.\n\n\"Over the past two years we’ve seen periods of dramatic growth. To match and fuel that growth, we hired for a different economic reality than the one we face today.\"\n\nTracking tech layoffs:Why companies like Amazon and Meta cut jobs in 2022\n\nPichai said the layoffs reflect the result of a “rigorous review\" of Google's operations. The jobs being eliminated will be \"cut across Alphabet, product areas, functions, levels and regions,\" he said.\n\nHow many employees does Google have?\n\nAccording to a regulatory filing in September 2022, Alphabet said it employed nearly 187,000 people, compared with about 150,000 employees at the end of 2021 and 119,000 in 2019.\n\nThe 12,000 job cuts announced Friday represent more than 6% of total staff.\n\nHave employees affected by Google's layoffs been notified?\n\nAccording to Pichai's message, U.S. employees have already been notified. He noted that the process will take longer in other countries because of local laws and practices.\n\nIn the U.S., employees who are laid off will be paid for the notification period (60 days), 2022 bonuses and remaining vacation time. Google will also offer a severance package starting at 16 weeks plus two additional weeks for every year an employee worked at Google – as well as six months of health care, immigration support and job placement services, according to Friday's message.\n\nWhat's everyone talking about? Sign up for our trending newsletter to get the latest news of the day\n\nAlphabet stock (GOOG)\n\nAlphabet's stock (GOOG) was up more than 2% in early trading Friday.\n\nGoogle's layoffs join Amazon, Microsoft and more\n\nGoogle isn't the only tech giant that has initiated mass layoffs in recent months.\n\nAccounting for Google's staff cuts, more than 200,000 tech industry workers have been laid off since the start of 2022, according to Layoffs.fyi.\n\nEarlier this week, Amazon began laying off thousands of employees. On Jan. 4, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy announced the company planned to cut more than 18,000 employees \"between the reductions we made in November and the ones we’re sharing today.\"\n\nNew layoff notifications for about 8,000 employees began Wednesday – just months after an initial round of 10,000 job cuts.\n\nWednesday:Amazon begins next round of layoffs, as tech giant cuts total of more than 18,000 jobs\n\nAlso this week:Microsoft to lay off 10,000 employees starting Wednesday; roughly 5% of workforce affected\n\nAlso on Wednesday, Microsoft announced 10,000 job cuts, or nearly 5% of its workforce. And Facebook parent Meta announced 11,000 job cuts, or 13% of its workforce, in November.\n\nContributing: Jordan Mendoza, USA TODAY; The Associated Press", "authors": [], "publish_date": "2023/01/20"}, {"url": "https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2023/01/18/microsoft-layoffs-ukraine-chopper-crash-winter-storm-short-list/11066031002/", "title": "Microsoft layoffs, Ukraine chopper crash, winter storm: The Short List", "text": "Ukraine's interior minister was one of at least 14 people that died in a helicopter crash in Kyiv Wednesday. Microsoft will lay off thousands of employees. And nine states were under winter storm warnings.\n\n👋 Hey there! It's Julius. And it's time for Wednesday's news.\n\nBut first: Back-to-back lottery wins. 💲 The $20 million Mega Millions jackpot was won in New York in the first drawing after the nearly $1.35 billion win in Maine on Friday.\n\nThe Short List is a snappy USA TODAY news roundup. Subscribe to the newsletter here.\n\nAt least 14 dead in Kyiv helicopter crash\n\nA helicopter crashed into a kindergarten in a suburb of the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv on Wednesday, killing at least 14 people, including the country's interior minister, authorities said. Interior Minister Denys Monastyrskyi, who oversaw Ukraine’s police and emergency services, appears to be the most senior Ukrainian official killed since the start of the war. Two of his top deputies, their assistants and the helicopter crew were among the dead, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said on Telegram. Nine of those killed were aboard the chopper when it crashed. The other victims were apparently on the ground. \"Unspeakable pain,\" Zelenskyy said. \"Bright memory to everyone whose life was taken by this black morning.\" There was no initial information indicating the helicopter, which was flying in foggy conditions, was shot down. Read more updates on Ukraine.\n\nMicrosoft to lay off 10K employees\n\nMicrosoft confirmed Wednesday it was going to lay off 10,000 people through the end of the third quarter of the 2023 fiscal year, becoming the latest tech company to downsize its workforce as the global economy slows. The company reported the layoffs would affect roughly 5% of its workforce, with some notifications happening as early as Wednesday. The cuts come “in response to macroeconomic conditions and changing customer priorities,\" the company's CEO Satya Nadella said in a statement to its employees Wednesday. Read more about Microsoft's decision.\n\nTracking tech layoffs:Why companies like Amazon and Meta cut jobs in 2022\n\nWhat everyone's talking about\n\nThe Short List is free, but several stories we link to are subscriber-only. Consider supporting our journalism and become a USA TODAY digital subscriber today.\n\nLawmakers spar as US nears debt ceiling\n\nFears of the federal government hitting its \"debt ceiling\" spiked Friday after Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen sent a letter to party leaders in Congress urging them to raise the limit before the expected deadline Thursday. Congress can avert economic disaster by increasing or suspending the limit, as they have done numerous times in the past. However, House conservatives are threatening to delay the process by demanding deep spending cuts a Democratic Senate and White House have already signaled they won't accept. Economic experts say failure to raise the ceiling would have national and worldwide economic consequences, with an impact felt by Americans in numerous ways. More on what could happen if the debt ceiling isn't raised.\n\nWinter storm hits central US after record-breaking snow in Arizona\n\nColorado, Nebraska and other parts of the central U.S. are facing a major snowstorm Wednesday that has already broken records in Arizona – and it could cross more than 1,700 miles of the country. Swaths of the eastern Rockies, the Plains, and the upper Midwest are under winter storm warnings and winter weather advisories Wednesday, and parts of Nebraska could see additional snow accumulations of up to 17 inches. The National Weather Service had issued a winter storm warning for nine states, as of Wednesday morning. The storm could move all the way to parts of Michigan. Follow along for the latest weather updates.\n\nNearly 3 million people under tornado watch; parts of Texas, Louisiana and Arkansas affected.\n\nReal quick\n\nSix GOP congressmen say Rep. George Santos should resign\n\nMost Republican House members from New York are ready to see GOP Rep. George Santos leave less than two weeks after he took office, with six saying he should resign for a string of campaign lies exposed after his election. That contingent consists of every other GOP rookie from the state who joined Congress this month, two of whom represent Long Island with Santos. \"With the extent and severity of the allegations against him, his inability to take full responsibility for his conduct, and the numerous investigations underway, I believe he is unable to fulfill his duties and should resign,” said freshman Rep. Mike Lawler, a freshman representing Rockland and Putnam counties and parts of Westchester and Dutchess. Read more.\n\nA break from the news", "authors": [], "publish_date": "2023/01/18"}, {"url": "https://www.cnn.com/2022/11/30/tech/amazon-andy-jassy-dealbook-union/index.html", "title": "Amazon CEO explains thinking behind layoffs as unionized ...", "text": "CNN Business —\n\nAmazon CEO Andy Jassy on Wednesday said an “uncertain” economy pushed the e-commerce giant to move forward with rare and wide-ranging layoffs after having gone on a significant hiring spree for much of the pandemic.\n\n“We had the lens of a very uncertain economic environment, as well as our having hired very aggressively over the last several years,” Jassy said in an interview at the New York Times DealBook summit on Wednesday. “We just felt like we needed to streamline our costs.”\n\nThe remarks came as part of Jassy’s first interview since Amazon (AMZN) confirmed earlier this month it had begun laying off corporate workers, with plans for layoffs to continue into early next year. The company is reportedly planning to cut up to 10,000 employees, though it has not confirmed a figure.\n\nAmazon, more than most tech companies, experienced a staggering pandemic boom as more customers shifted their spending online during the health crisis. Like other tech companies, it has since changed course and begun cutting employees as it confronts a shift in demand as well as rising inflation and recession fears.\n\n“A lot has happened in the last few years that I’m not sure people anticipated,” Jassy said. “You just look in 2020, our retail business grew 39% year-over-year, at a $245 billion annual run rate, which is unprecedented, and it forced us to make decisions in that time to spend a lot more money and to go much faster in building infrastructure than we ever imagined we would.”\n\n“We built a physical fulfillment center footprint over 25 years that we doubled in 24 months,” Jassy said.\n\nAndrew Ross Sorkin speaks with Amazon CEO Andy Jassy during the New York Times DealBook Summit in the Appel Room at the Jazz At Lincoln Center on November 30, 2022 in New York City. Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images\n\nEven so, Jassy said he thinks the team “made the right decision” regarding its infrastructure build out. Regarding the hiring spree, Jassy said he now looks at is as a “lesson for everyone.”\n\n“I don’t necessarily think it was the wrong thing to have been doubling down, because we were growing so well and we had so many ideas that we thought were good for customers and good for the business, but I think it’s a good lesson, I think, for everybody,” Jassy said. “When you’re hiring, even when things are going really well, that it’s good to think about if there’s some kind of sudden change, even one that you just have a little bit of a hard time imagining. Would you like the incremental headcount that you’re adding at that time, or do you want to be a little bit more conservative?”\n\nLegal battle with union is ‘far from over’\n\nAs Jassy spoke, Amazon warehouse workers who helped organize the company’s first-ever US labor union at a Staten Island facility gathered in the rain outside of the venue to protest their chief executive’s appearance in New York.\n\nDespite the landmark union victory in April, Amazon has so far refused to formally recognize the grassroots worker group known as the Amazon Labor Union, or come to the bargaining table. The company has aggressively pushed back against the workers’ victory through the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB).\n\nWhile the NLRB battle indicates the labor union is on the cusp of being certified, Jassy suggested Amazon’s legal battle with the worker group isn’t done yet. He said there “were a lot of irregularities in that vote,” which is why the company filed objections with the NLRB. (Amazon’s objections were previously rejected by an NLRB hearing officer.)\n\nJassy also emphasized that the last two Amazon union elections held resulted in workers voting not to unionize, and that Amazon prefers to have a direct relationship with fulfillment center workers rather than going through unions.\n\nLabor activist Chris Smalls joins members of the Amazon labor union and others for a protest outside of the New York Times DealBook Summit as Amazon's CEO, Andy Jassy, will be appearing on November 30, 2022 in New York City. Spencer Platt/Getty Images\n\n“In my own opinion on where we are with that legal process is that we’re far from over with it,” Jassy said. “I think that it’s going to work its way through the NLRB, it’s probably unlikely the NLRB is going to rule against itself, and that has a real chance to end up in federal courts.”\n\nIn an interview with CNN Business ahead of Jassy’s remarks, Amazon Labor Union President Chris Smalls slammed that Jassy “even had the audacity to feel comfortable to come to New York City knowing that we haven’t negotiated anything yet.”\n\n“We definitely want to take this opportunity to let him know that the workers are waiting and we are ready to negotiate our first contract,” he added of the demonstration, which he called a “welcoming party” for Jassy.\n\nSmalls said he’s been contacted by a few laid-off Amazon employees in corporate roles, who have since grown interested in the protections of unions. “I tell them — you may have good salary, you may have good perks, you may got good stocks and benefits, obviously better than warehouse workers, but at the end of the day, you’re still an at-will employee,” Smalls said.\n\n“I explained to them, the one building that can’t be touched right now by mass layoffs is JFK8 Staten Island,” he said. “I encourage them to do what they have to do, if that means form a union, so be it, we support it.”", "authors": ["Catherine Thorbecke"], "publish_date": "2022/11/30"}, {"url": "https://www.cnn.com/2022/11/17/tech/amazon-ceo-layoffs-andy-jassy/index.html", "title": "Amazon CEO says job cuts will continue into 2023 | CNN Business", "text": "CNN Business —\n\nAmazon CEO Andy Jassy said job cuts at the e-commerce giant would continue into early next year, in his first public remarks since the company began widespread layoffs earlier this week.\n\n“Our annual planning process extends into the new year, which means there will be more role reductions as leaders continue to make adjustments,” Jassy wrote in a letter to staff Thursday. “Those decisions will be shared with impacted employees and organizations early in 2023.”\n\nJassy said that the company hasn’t “concluded yet exactly how many other roles will be impacted” by the layoffs, but added that “each leader will communicate to their respective teams when we have the details nailed down.”\n\nAmazon confirmed on Wednesday that layoffs had begun at the company, just days after multiple outlets reported the e-commerce giant planned to cut around 10,000 employees this week.\n\nAmazon (AMZN) and other tech firms significantly ramped up hiring over the past couple of years as the pandemic shifted consumers’ habits toward e-commerce. Now, many of these seemingly untouchable tech companies are experiencing whiplash and laying off thousands of workers as people return to pre-pandemic habits and macroeconomic conditions deteriorate.\n\nFacebook-parent Meta recently announced 11,000 job cuts, the largest in the company’s history. Twitter also announced widespread job cuts after Elon Musk bought the company for $44 billion.\n\nJassy alluded to the macroeconomic climate in his memo Thursday, saying this year’s annual operating review “is more difficult due to the fact that the economy remains in a challenging spot and we’ve hired rapidly the last several years.”\n\nJassy said that this is the most difficult decision the company has had to make during his year-and-a-half tenure at Amazon’s helm.\n\n“It’s not lost on me or any of the leaders who make these decisions that these aren’t just roles we’re eliminating, but rather, people with emotions, ambitions, and responsibilities whose lives will be impacted,” Jassy wrote.", "authors": ["Catherine Thorbecke"], "publish_date": "2022/11/17"}, {"url": "https://www.cnn.com/2022/11/03/tech/twitter-layoffs/index.html", "title": "Elon Musk's Twitter lays off employees across the company", "text": "CNN Business —\n\nTwitter on Friday laid off thousands of employees in departments across the company, in a severe round of cost cutting that could potentially upend how one of the world’s most influential platforms operates one week after it was acquired by billionaire Elon Musk.\n\nNumerous Twitter employees began posting on the platform Thursday night and Friday morning that they had already been locked out of their company email accounts ahead of the planned layoff notification. Some also shared blue hearts and salute emojis indicating they were out at the company.\n\nBy Friday morning, Twitter employees from departments including ethical AI, marketing and communication, search, public policy, wellness and other teams had tweeted about having been let go. Members of the curation team, which help elevate reliable information on the platform, including about elections, were also laid off, according to employee posts.\n\n“Just got remotely logged out of my work laptop and removed from Slack,” one Twitter employee said on the platform. “So sad it had to end this way.”\n\nAnother employee said that she and other members of Twitter’s human rights team had been laid off. The employee added that she is proud of the team’s work “to protect those at-risk in global conflicts & crises including Ethiopia, Afghanistan, and Ukraine, and to defend the needs of those particularly at risk of human rights abuse by virtue of their social media presence, such as journalists & human rights defenders.”\n\nSimon Balmain, a former Twitter senior community manager who was laid off Friday, said in an interview with CNN that he lost access to Slack, email and other internal systems around 8 hours before receiving an email Friday morning officially notifying him that he’d been fired. He added that the lay off email “still didn’t provide any details really” about why he’d been let go.\n\n“The waves of annoyance and frustration and all that stuff are absolutely mitigated by the extreme solidarity we’ve seen from people that are in the company, people that are in the same position, people that left the company in years gone by,” Balmain said. “It’s like a giant support network, which has been absolutely amazing.”\n\nOne Twitter employee who was laid off told CNN Friday that some workers are relieved to have been let go. “For me, being safe would’ve been punishment,” the employee said.\n\nWhile Twitter employees were posting about being laid off, Musk on Friday appeared for a friendly interview at an investor conference and spoke about making cheaper electric vehicles and his ambitions to go to Mars. During the interview, Musk said of Twitter, “I tried to get out of the deal,” but then added, “I think there is a tremendous amount of potential … and I think it could be one of the most valuable companies in the world.”\n\nThe interviewer said that Musk had laid off “half of Twitter” and Musk nodded, although he did not comment on the remark.\n\n(In a series of tweets Friday evening, Yoel Roth, head of Twitter’s trust and safety team, confirmed overall headcount was cut by roughly 50%. The layoffs eliminated 15% of the company’s trust and safety team, leading to reductions in customer service but little change to content moderation, according to Roth. )\n\nIn his interview, Musk appeared to frame the sweeping layoffs as necessary for a company that, like other social media firms, was experiencing “revenue challenges” prior to his acquisition as advertisers rethink spending amid recession fears.\n\nMusk also said “a number of major advertisers have stopped spending on Twitter” in the days since the acquisition was completed.\n\nElon Musk spoke at an investment conference Friday morning as employees at Twitter, which he now owns, were receiving notifications that they had been laid off from the company. Baron Capital\n\nTwitter had about 7,500 workers prior to Musk’s takeover, meaning roughly 3,700 employees were laid off. The cuts come as Musk attempts to improve the company’s bottom line after taking out significant debt financing to fund his $44 billion acquisition.\n\nThe email sent Thursday evening notified employees that they would receive a notice by 12 p.m. ET Friday that informs them of their employment status.\n\n“If your employment is not impacted, you will receive a notification via your Twitter email,” a copy of the email obtained by CNN said. “If your employment is impacted, you will receive a notification with next steps via your personal email.”\n\nThe email added that “to help ensure the safety” of employees and Twitter’s systems, the company’s offices “will be temporarily closed and all badge access will be suspended.”\n\nThe email concluded acknowledging that it will be “an incredibly challenging experience to go through” for the workforce.\n\nSeveral Twitter employees on Thursday night filed a class action lawsuit alleging that Twitter is in violation of the federal and California Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act (WARN Act) after laying off some employees already. The complaint was later amended to acknowledge that while several of the plaintiffs did ultimately receive sufficient notice of their termination under the WARN Act, Twitter still allegedly failed to give sufficient notice in the case of some employees.\n\nThe WARN Act requires that an employer with more than 100 employees must provide 60 days’ advanced written notice prior to a mass layoff “affecting 50 or more employees at a single site of employment.”\n\n“Elon Musk, the richest man in the world, has made clear that he believes complying with federal labor laws is ‘trivial,’” Attorney Shannon Liss-Riordan, who filed the lawsuit, said in a statement to CNN. “We have filed this federal complaint to ensure that Twitter be held accountable to our laws and to prevent Twitter employees from unknowingly signing away their rights.”\n\nWARN notices were filed by Twitter on Friday for nearly 1,000 impacted employees at the company’s various California offices.\n\nSeparately, other labor lawyers told CNN Friday they had begun receiving inquiries from Twitter employees questioning whether their terminations may have been unlawfully discriminatory or retaliatory.\n\n“Former Twitter employees have reached out to us regarding their layoffs and their circumstances, and so we’re looking at all the issues — beyond appropriate notice — and to make sure the employee wasn’t laid off due to their membership in a protected category,” said Chauniqua Young, a partner at the law firm Outten & Golden.\n\nBeyond the potential for lawsuits arising from the layoffs, other legal experts say Musk’s handling of the cuts may well create further problems for him down the road — whether in terms of attracting future talent or by keeping remaining workers satisfied.\n\n“Once you treat people like this, they remember that,” said Terri Gerstein, a fellow at Harvard Law School’s Labor and Worklife Program and Economic Policy Institute. “Of the people remaining, it is a certainty that none of them feel secure in their job, and I would be shocked if the remaining people were not updating their resumes right now or talking with each other about starting a union.”\n\nMusk started his tenure at Twitter by firing CEO Parag Agrawal and two other executives, according to two people familiar with the decision.\n\nAnd in less than a week since Musk acquired the company, its C-suite appears to have almost entirely cleared out, through a mix of firings and resignations. Musk has also dissolved Twitter’s former board of directors.\n\nMany staffers on Friday summed up their feelings with a hashtag, #LoveWhereYouWorked, a past-tense play on one previously often used by Twitter employees.\n\n- Brian Fung and Shawn Nottingham contributed to this report", "authors": ["Donie O'Sullivan Clare Duffy", "Donie O'Sullivan", "Clare Duffy"], "publish_date": "2022/11/03"}, {"url": "https://www.cnn.com/2022/11/17/tech/brian-chesky-airbnb/index.html", "title": "Airbnb CEO on the tech downturn: 'It's like we're all in a nightclub ...", "text": "CNN —\n\nAfter years of seemingly unstoppable growth, the tech industry is now facing the “ultimate reality check” as it confronts broader economic uncertainty and waves of layoffs, Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky told CNN on Thursday.\n\n“It’s like we’re all in a nightclub and the lights just came on,” Chesky said in an interview on “CNN This Morning.” After a period of “exuberance and euphoria,” he added, “now we all have to, like, take a hard look at things.”\n\nHis remarks come at a difficult moment for the tech industry. Facebook-parent Meta said last week it was cutting 11,000 jobs after nearly doubling its staff during the pandemic. Amazon confirmed this week that lay offs had begun in its corporate workforce, with reports saying it plans to cut 10,000 positions. And Twitter recently cut approximately 50% of its staff as new owner Elon Musk races to bolster its bottom line.\n\nAirbnb may be an exception. Chesky said the company is not undergoing layoffs at this time, and in fact is hiring. But that is due in large part to the company cutting 25% of its staff at the start of the pandemic as the travel industry was clobbered, and losing more employees by attrition after.\n\n“Two-and-a-half years ago, we lost 80% of our business in eight weeks,” Chesky said. “People were predicting we were going to go out of business.”\n\n“We just hunkered down,” he added. “We rebuilt the company from the ground up, and we stayed really lean.” Now, Chesky said, “we’re stepping on the gas, we’re not putting on the brakes.”\n\nWhile the reckoning hitting much of Silicon Valley is painful, Chesky appeared to suggest that a more sober reassessment of the industry could also provide an opportunity for the tech sector to rethink its place in society, after years of criticism for the impact its products can have on people.\n\n“I think Silicon Valley has done so many amazing things for the world, but we have to be careful having a fetishization of new technology, as if the new technology is going to solve all the problems that the last technology created,” Chesky said. “We need more diversity in Silicon Valley, but that diversity should not just be demographic diversity. We need artists, humanists in this industry.”", "authors": ["Catherine Thorbecke"], "publish_date": "2022/11/17"}]}
{"question_id": "20230120_12", "search_time": "2023/01/20/16:37", "search_result": [{"url": "https://www.usatoday.com/story/entertainment/tv/2023/01/18/only-murders-building-season-3-hulu-release-date-cast/11074386002/", "title": "Where is Season 3 of 'Only Murders in the Building'? Filming is ...", "text": "Spoiler alert! The following contains details from the Season 2 finale of \"Only Murders in the Building,\" \"I Know Who Did It.\"\n\n\"Only Murders in the Building\" is coming back for Season 3 with even more star power – as if its core cast of Steve Martin, Martin Short and Selena Gomez wasn't enough.\n\nOn Tuesday, Martin shared a snap from set with his legendary castmastes, Season 2's surprise guest star Paul Rudd and a new face: Meryl Streep!\n\n\"The filming of Season 3 of 'Only Murders in the Building' has begun! A cast to dream of,\" he tweeted alongside the pic.\n\nHere's what else we know (so far) about Season 3 of Hulu's hit show.\n\n‘Only Murders In the Building’ Season 2 spoilers:Who killed Bunny and the surprise guest star?\n\nWhat is Paul Rudd's role in the show?\n\nRudd first made an appearance in the \"Only Murders\" Season 2 finale as Broadway star Ben Glenroy.\n\nIn the last episode, viewers are taken a year after Charles (Martin), Oliver (Short) and Mabel (Gomez) solved the murder of apartment manager Bunny (Jayne Houdyshell), who died at the end of Season 1.\n\nCharles and Mabel attend the premiere of Oliver’s broadway show starring Charles and Ben, an impolite prominent actor. When the curtain opens, Ben dies soon after giving his opening monologue. Charles is likely to be once again be a suspect in another crime.\n\n“You got to be (expletive) kidding me,” Mabel says as the episode fades to black, teasing a new mystery for the third season: a murder outside the Arconia building.\n\nFans will likely get more insight into Ben and what led up to his death in the upcoming season.\n\nMore Season 2:Cara Delevingne says 'Only Murders in the Building' romance with pal Selena Gomez 'means a lot'\n\nWhat is Meryl Streep's role?\n\nIt's unclear right now what character Streep will play in the new season, but fans (and Gomez) are thrilled.\n\n\"OMG!!!! Iconic,\" replied one fan.\n\nOn Tuesday, Gomez shared a TikTok video from set showing off their newest cast member.\n\n\"Could this honestly get any better?\" Gomez says. The camera pans by cast members before Streep pops into the screen and Gomez’s face turns to fangirl excitement.\n\n\"Meet our new and old crew!\" she captioned the clip. \"Excuse me while I scream in a pillow.\"\n\nSeason 1 review:Steve Martin, Martin Short and Selena Gomez strike gold in 'Only Murders in the Building'\n\nSeason 2 review:'Only Murders in the Building' makes magic again in Season 2\n\nWhen does 'Only Murders' Season 3 arrive?\n\nHulu isn't saying yet. The official Hulu account replied to a fan's question about Season 3's arrival on Twitter and wouldn't divulge.\n\n\"We don't have any news to share at this time, but we'll definitely share your excitement with our team. For now, make sure the series is included in your WL/My Stuff for all updates.\"\n\nHulu confirmed in July that the series would be renewed for a third season. And according to Martin and Gomez, filming has begun.\n\nSteve Martin:Actor talks possible retirement after 'Only Murders in the Building': 'This is weirdly it'\n\nWhere can you watch 'Only Murders?'\n\n\"Only Murders in the Building\" streams exclusively on Hulu. The first two seasons can be binged anytime. Basic Hulu plan runs you $7.99 a month or $79.99 a year. If you want to watch Hulu without ads, the price increases to $14.99 a month.\n\nContributing: Anthony Robledo", "authors": [], "publish_date": "2023/01/18"}, {"url": "https://www.usatoday.com/story/entertainment/tv/2021/08/31/selena-gomez-steve-martin-short-only-murders-in-the-building/5601489001/", "title": "Selena Gomez is 'perfect,' gushes 'Only Murders' co-star Steve Martin", "text": "Behind the scenes of their new comedy/mystery, Selena Gomez shared explicit rap songs with her \"Only Murders in the Building\" co-stars, iconic comedians Steve Martin and Martin Short.\n\n\"We had to listen – not had to – we got to listen to 'WAP,' \" Martin says, referencing Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion's track. \"And what's that other song?\"\n\nKanye West and Lil Pump's \"I Love It,\" Gomez responds in a joint interview, singing some of the unprintable lyrics and then bursting into laughter.\n\n\"I thought that was so politically incorrect, you couldn't even think it,\" Martin says playfully of the lyrics. He says the teaching moments between the castmates \"go back and forth.\"\n\nMartin and Short, in turn, counseled Gomez on boys while filming the 10-episode season. \"They were lovely,\" she says. \"We had the best time.\"\n\nSelena Gomez on why she doesn't handle her social media posts: 6 signs you need to unplug\n\nSelena Gomez says her 'past relationships' have been 'cursed.' Here's why.\n\nThe age gap between Gomez, 29, and her co-stars – Martin, 76, and Short, 71 – plays out onscreen in the Hulu series (now streaming, with episodes releasing weekly on Tuesdays). Mabel (Gomez) jokes to her new friends Charles (Martin) and Oliver (Short) that she doesn't know who their high-profile neighbor Sting is. (In real life, Gomez was familiar with – and intimidated by – the former frontman of The Police, who delighted her when he started picking his guitar to accompany her piano on set.)\n\nCritic's take:Review: Steve Martin, Martin Short and Selena Gomez strike gold in 'Only Murders in the Building'\n\nThe mysterious death of a despised resident in his apartment in New York City's Upper West Side inspires the aloof Mabel, once-successful actor Charles and struggling director Oliver to attempt to solve the murder and start a true-crime podcast of their own.\n\nWhen Martin came up with the idea for the series, he didn't picture himself or Short – his frequent collaborator on movies like \"Father of the Bride\" and \"Three Amigos,\" in the roles. After being asked by executive producers Dan Fogelman and Jess Rosenthal to act in the series, Martin recruited Short.\n\n“As you said, ‘I know he's available,’” jokes Short, giving a taste of their friendly banter.\n\n“No, I said, ‘No, no, actually he can act,’” Martin says, not missing a beat. “And then Selena came in like this magic potion that you sprinkle over.”\n\nShort says the singer and former Disney Channel star, the only one envisioned for the part, complements the long-running duo.\n\n“I have an energy. Steve has an energy,” he says, “and Selena’s energy was different, and it was (completing) the triangle.”\n\nMartin says he and Short were smitten with Gomez following a script read-through over Zoom.\n\n“After we hung up, Marty and I called each other and said, 'She's fantastic!’” Martin remembers. “That's literally what we said. She is perfect because it's so unlike us.”\n\nSteve Martin hilariously refuses to go unrecognized, even in his pandemic mask\n\n'Father of the Bride' cast reunites 25 years later for sort-of sequel, with new cameos\n\nMartin's co-creator/co-writer John Hoffman (\"Grace and Frankie\") says the stars' relationship blossomed along with the series' storyline.\n\n“We had the benefit of them discovering each other within the narrative of our show, and that was hugely helpful for them finding their own natural rhythm as a trio,” says Hoffman. “You watch (Gomez) find her way into the pocket of (Short and Martin), and that classic repartee that they can just carry off like breathing.\n\n“Whether it's an emotional thing or whether it's a funny jab or whether it's just a sweet poke,” Hoffman continues, “she found a way to make that all her own and disarm them, and run the train off the tracks for a moment, in the best way.”\n\nHoffman wanted the mood of “Only Murders” – balancing comedy and crime – to match the unpredictability of the setting.\n\n\"If anyone takes a 10-block walk in New York City, you're going to find five tonal shifts that are all pretty extreme,\" he says. \"That's the feel of the show I wanted to create.\"\n\nThe 10 best new TV shows to watch this summer: More 'Monsters Inc,' Martin Short and Steve Martin\n\nThe 50 best TV shows to watch on Hulu right now, from 'Brooklyn Nine-Nine' to 'Shrill'\n\nCould there be a second season?\n\n\"We're there if they want us,\" Martin says. \"We shouldn't say that, but you know.\"\n\n\"What do you mean?\" Short asks his partner. \"Why shouldn't you say it?\"\n\n\"Because then they could say, 'Well, we're cutting your salary. You want to do it so much, we’re not even gonna pay you,'\" Martin replies.\n\n\"What if you're someone like me who only wants to do it for the money?\" Short asks.\n\nWell, then it seems they've learned well from the wisdom of \"WAP\": \"He got some money, then that's where I'm headed.\"\n\n'We're going to make history':JoJo Siwa to compete on 'Dancing With the Stars' with same-sex partner\n\nMere home renovations aren't enough:Motel makeovers are the latest in supersized TV boom", "authors": [], "publish_date": "2021/08/31"}, {"url": "https://www.cnn.com/2022/09/10/entertainment/emmys-tv-filming-locations-cec/index.html", "title": "The real-life drama behind filming locations for 'Stranger Things ...", "text": "CNN —\n\nWhat do a pub in London, a 113-year-old apartment building in New York City, a former mental hospital in Atlanta, a luxury resort in Hawaii, a sprawling office complex in New Jersey and a mausoleum in one of the South’s largest cemeteries have in common?\n\nOn some of this year’s top Emmy-nominated shows, these places play roles as important as any character. And off-screen, they all have their own dramatic stories.\n\nHere’s a glimpse at the real-life locations behind some of TV’s most popular places, and what we learned talking with some of the people who know them best.\n\nA pub where everyone knows your name\n\nTed Lasso (Jason Sudeikis) shares a toast with Coach Beard (Brendan Hunt) at the Crown & Anchor in an episode of \"Ted Lasso.\" Apple TV+\n\nOn “Ted Lasso,” The Crown and Anchor is the pub where AFC Richmond fans watch and heckle the team’s matches, where Ted wins a memorable game of darts and where he shares many a folksy American one-liner while sipping a pint in a place that’s quintessentially British.\n\nWe can talk and drink, as long as we talk about anything but the game and drink. Coach Beard, talking to fellow pub-goers\n\nWhat it is real life: The Prince’s Head pub in London’s Richmond borough\n\nThe backstory you haven’t heard: British actor Emmy McMorrow already loved her neighborhood and its local watering holes. But she says it wasn’t until an American tourist asked her to snap a photo of him on a bench there that she realized a TV show was featuring Richmond’s charms on-screen. Now McMorrow leads tours of exterior “Ted Lasso” shooting locations (interior scenes are shot in a studio), and she says the pub is always a favorite destination.\n\nAmerican tourists have taken to stopping by the Prince's Head pub in London's Richmond borough to have the same pint that Ted drinks and commune with the locals. Hollie Adams/Bloomberg/Getty Images\n\n“It’s the thing everyone wants to see…because it’s the heart of the show,” she says. “The pub is like our community center. It’s like the heart of the British community. It’s your friends. It’s your community.”\n\nThe team behind “Ted Lasso” built an in-studio version of the pub for filming the show. “It does really, really look like the (actual) pub,” McMorrow says. And visitors to the real location may now even spot bartenders wearing shirts supporting the fictional “AFC Richmond” club.\n\nHow history shaped it: The pub’s history in the neighborhood dates back well over a century. It sits on Richmond Green, which, according to a borough history website, has been surrounded by houses and commercial establishments “for 400 years at least.”\n\nA stately New York landmark known for a ‘long history of disputes’\n\nMabel (Selena Gomez), Oliver (Martin Short) and Charles (Steve Martin) confer in the Arconia's courtyard in the first episode of \"Only Murders in the Building.\" Craig Blankenhorn/Hulu\n\nWe’re the heroes of this building. Before us, you could be killed in your own apartment, and no one would know it. Oliver Putnam, trumpeting the trio's podcasting success\n\nOn “Only Murders in the Building,” the Arconia is full of quirky, only-in-New York personalities, with a gorgeous interior courtyard and an unfortunate track record of homicide.\n\nWhat it is in real life: The Belnord, an apartment building on New York’s Upper West Side\n\nThe backstory you haven’t heard: The Belnord spans a full block in Manhattan and, even before becoming the setting for the hit Hulu series starring Steve Martin, Martin Short and Selena Gomez, it was catching the attention of passersby.\n\nThe Belnord spans a full block on Manhattan's Upper West Side. Mark Abramson/Bloomberg/Getty Images\n\n“It’s sort of thrilling just to walk by it,” says Julia Vitullo-Martin, who’s lived at the Belnord since 1975 and is the executive director of the Belnord Landmark Conservancy.\n\n“The archways lead to our wonderful courtyard. It’s such an extraordinary amenity in New York, because every square inch counts, and here we have 22,000 square feet of courtyard space,” Vitullo-Martin says.\n\nThese days, Vitullo-Martin says many a fan of the show can be seen snapping a selfie near the archways.\n\nAt first, she says, many residents of the building bristled at the idea of filming near their homes. But eventually they struck a deal with producers that only exterior scenes would be shot there, Vitullo-Martin says, and that residents of the Belnord would have the chance to be cast as extras on the show.\n\n\"It's sort of thrilling just to walk by it,\" longtime resident Julia Vitullo-Martin says of The Belnord. Patrick McMullan/Getty Images\n\nHow history shaped it: Construction of the Belnord finished in 1909. In addition to its beauty, the building is also known for a “long history of disputes,” Vitullo-Martin says. Luxury condos in the building now sell for millions of dollars. But for years, a notorious slumlord who controlled the property wouldn’t even let residents spruce up their own units. “Under the stealth of night people would sneak in a new appliance via 87th street to their apartments. Because what were you going to do?” Vitullo-Martin recalls.\n\nIn the 1990s, she says, a new owner found the building in “terrible disrepair,” with its storied courtyard caving in. His investment turned the Belnord’s fortunes around. And now the Hulu show has given Realtors another selling point.\n\nAn abandoned mental hospital, reborn as a government lab\n\nEleven (Millie Bobby Brown) undergoes testing inside the Hawkins Lab on \"Stranger Things.\" Netflix\n\nIn the Hawkins National Laboratory, a secretive government-run facility featured in “Stranger Things,” scientists conduct mind control experiments, subjects are held against their will and its basement tunnels connect to a creepy alternate dimension called the Upside Down.\n\nLet’s burn that lab to the ground. Nancy Wheeler, vowing to avenge her best friend's death\n\nWhat it is in real life: “Building A” on Emory University’s Briarcliff Campus\n\nThe backstory you haven’t heard: In addition to its pivotal role in “Stranger Things,” the brutalist building has appeared in many other film and television productions. “I had a production designer once refer to Building A as an exoskeleton that’s perfect for making it into just about any kind of institutional setting they need – from a bustling hospital to a sedate bank lobby to a nondescript government office,” the university’s head of film production and management recently told Emory magazine. “And the building’s interiors are so varied you can shoot a number of scenes right next to each other and they’ll look like they’ve been filmed at completely different locations.”\n\nBut the building’s days as a popular filming site appear to be numbered. The Emory Wheel student newspaper recently reported that Building A is slated to be demolished as part of plans to renovate the Briarcliff campus into a senior living community.\n\nBuilding A on Emory University's Briarcliff campus has become a popular filming location for \"Stranger Things\" and other productions. Kay Hinton/Emory University\n\nHow history shaped it: The 42-acre property where the building sits was originally the site of the vast estate of Coca Cola heir Asa Candler Jr. The Georgia Mental Health Institute was built there in the 1960s and served as a treatment center for decades. A brochure for the institute once boasted of the building’s “ultra-modern design” and the state’s “forward looking attitude in the field of mental health.”\n\nAfter the institute shut down, it was used as an office building by Emory faculty. In 2001, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution described one professor’s attempts to create a cozier environment by adding rugs, leather furniture and ficus trees to the space, noting there were still “steel grids over the windows that kept the suicidal from leaping and the criminally insane from escaping.”\n\nA luxury resort that found new life during a pandemic lockdown\n\nShane Patton (Jake Lacy) tries to catch the attention of fellow guests Olivia (Sydney Sweeney) and Paula (Brittany O'Grady) at one of the luxury resort's pools in the \"White Lotus.\" HBO\n\nThe resort in “The White Lotus” features numerous beachfront amenities, jaw-dropping views of Hawaii’s natural beauty and brightly colored rooms that reflect the personalities of the characters staying in them. It’s a gorgeous destination, but the show’s protagonists quickly find trouble in paradise.\n\nYou still have the infinity pool, the waterfall pool and the fountain pool. hotel manager Armond trying to reassure an angry guest\n\nWhat it is in real life: Four Seasons Resort Maui at Wailea\n\nThe backstory you haven’t heard: The coronavirus pandemic had virtually shut down tourism around the globe, and a state order forced the Four Seasons Resort Maui and other Hawaii hotels to close their doors temporarily. The normally fully booked resort was still closed when an HBO team asked about shooting “The White Lotus” there.\n\nThe Four Seasons Resort Maui at Wailea has seen an increase in interest from travelers after appearing in \"The White Lotus,\" spokeswoman Crissa Hiranaga says Courtesy Four Seasons Resort Maui\n\n“We took a leap of faith that this was the right thing to do at a really strange time, and it all worked out amazingly,” says Crissa Hiranaga, a spokeswoman for the resort.\n\nSuddenly having a large block of rooms reserved for the show and its production staff “was the best way to reopen the hotel, get people back on the payroll and do it in a super safe way,” Hiranaga says.\n\nThere are some big differences between the satire’s storyline and a real-life stay in the hotel, she says – and the room décor is much kitschier than the Four Seasons’ more modern style.\n\n“It makes it look a little bit garish,” Hiranaga says.\n\nEven though “The White Lotus” depicts dream vacations gone awry, Hiranaga says the real-life resort has still seen a recent increase in interest from travelers. And the show comes up frequently with visitors, too.\n\nLike the fictional White Lotus, the Four Seasons Resort Maui at Wailea boasts numerous pools, fountains and dramatic ocean views. Courtesy Four Seasons Resort Maui\n\n“You can’t walk around the property without hearing people talk about it,” she says.\n\nAt one of the resort’s bars, now there’s even an off-menu cocktail dubbed “The White Lotus.”\n\nHow history shaped it: The Hawaiian property, which opened in 1990, was the Four Seasons’ first-ever resort, Hiranaga says.\n\nA research lab that inspired Nobel prize-winning discoveries\n\nMark Scout (Adam Scott) heads into work at Lumon's corporate headquarters on \"Severance.\" Apple\n\nOn “Severance,” a long driveway and vast parking lot lead Mark Scout back to Lumon’s corporate headquarters every day. He walks through a desolate, modern atrium before taking an elevator into a mysterious world of cubicles and white, windowless corridors.\n\nEvery time you find yourself here, it’s because you chose to come back. Mark S., attempting to reassure an anxious new coworker\n\nWhat it is in real life: Bell Works, a redeveloped mixed use office space in Holmdel, New Jersey\n\nThe backstory you haven’t heard: The original aim for the building complex, which opened in the early 1960s, was to “bring about 6,000 of the greatest minds in the world together,” Ralph Zucker says. Back then it was Bell Labs, a famed research hub known for groundbreaking discoveries. Now it’s Bell Works, a redeveloped office complex that includes a food hall and numerous other amenities.\n\nBell Works, shown here during a 2018 job fair, aims to give workers more reasons to come to the office. Stephen Speranza/The New York Times/Redux\n\n“If you come here on any given day, you might see a flash mob doing a dance routine, you’ll see a ballet class, you’ll see people playing a random pick-up game of basketball right in the middle of the atrium,” says Zucker, a partner in Bell Works and CEO of Inspired by Somerset Development.\n\nOn “Severance,” Lumon gets its workers to come back time and again by making them forget what their office is like through a dystopian medical procedure.\n\nThe interior scenes of \"Severance,\" which feature stark white corridors and creepy, claustrophobic spaces, were filmed in a studio. Apple TV+\n\nZucker says the Bell Works team is taking a friendlier approach with its 2-million-square-foot building.\n\n“We create a place that people can’t wait to come back to,” he says.\n\nHow history shaped it: Before its recent redevelopment, the Bell Labs complex was home to numerous groundbreaking discoveries, Zucker says. Among them, former Energy Secretary Steven Chu’s Nobel prize-winning research on laser cooling. Inside, this legacy endures on a wall that reminds visitors of the many patents from scientists who worked there.\n\nThe mausoleum built by a Coca-Cola heir\n\nMarty Byrde (Jason Bateman) stands flanked by armed guards at the home of drug lord Omar Navarro on \"Ozark.\" Netflix\n\nOn “Ozark,” the gothic architecture and ornate doorways of Omar Navarro’s mansion often loom in the background during the drug lord’s calls with Wendy and Marty Byrde, and when the show’s protagonists meet with him in Mexico.\n\nWelcome. Thank you for coming. I hope you had a pleasant journey. Omar Navarro, greeting Marty and Wendy a split second before they're met with a shocking surprise upon arriving at his home\n\nWhat it is in real life: Westview Abbey, a mausoleum at an Atlanta cemetery.\n\nThe backstory you haven’t heard: The building was designed in Spanish Plateresque style, which Westview Cemetery Director of Administration Jeff Clemmons notes was known “for detailed and extensive ornamentation around doorways, windows and arcades.” Its three floors boast more than 70 stained glass windows, its crypts are covered by more than 35 types of marble and grand chandeliers illuminate the space, Clemmons writes in a history of the cemetery. The abbey’s memorial chapel hosts funerals and concerts, in addition to serving as a popular filming location for “Ozark” and other shows.\n\nWestview Abbey in Atlanta is one of the largest mausoleum's in the country. Derek Storm/Everett Collection\n\nHow history shaped it: Coca-Cola heir Asa “Buddie” Candler Jr. – who Clemmons describes as “an avid yachtsman, car and aviation enthusiast and big game hunter” – ran the cemetery for 18 years and led the construction of Westview Abbey in the 1940s. The mausoleum is one of the largest in the country, with more than 11,000 crypts inside.", "authors": ["Catherine E. Shoichet Austin Steele", "Catherine E. Shoichet", "Austin Steele"], "publish_date": "2022/09/10"}, {"url": "https://www.usatoday.com/story/entertainment/movies/2022/11/24/steve-martin-plane-trains-and-automobiles/10717692002/", "title": "Steve Martin has no regrets about 19 f-bombs in 'Planes, Trains and ...", "text": "For devoted fans, no Thanksgiving is complete without a helping of \"Planes, Trains and Automobiles,\" which turned 35 on Friday.\n\nThe plight of Steve Martin's uptight advertising executive Neal Page – who finds himself stranded by travel delays with shower-curtain-ring salesman Del Griffith (comedy legend John Candy) and is just trying to get home to his family turkey dinner – is essential holiday viewing.\n\n“Around Thanksgiving, it's kind of omnipresent,\" says Martin of the 1987 classic road comedy – now available in a 4K Ultra home release – that has been imbued with even more emotion after the deaths of Candy in 1994 and writer/director John Hughes in 2009.\n\n\"It's tragic,\" Martin says. \"I'd like them to see how this movie has this momentum. When it came out, it did fine. But it was almost a bigger hit 10 years after.\"\n\nMartin, 77, spoke to USA TODAY about insisting on shooting a car-rental scene without f-bombs, and the deleted scene he still misses.\n\n'This is weirdly it':Steve Martin talks possible retirement after 'Only Murders in the Building'\n\nQuestion: \"Planes\" was shot over 87 frigid days in climates from Buffalo, New York, to Braidwood, Illinois. How much real travel bled into the movie?\n\nAnswer: Everything in the movie happened while shooting the movie: missed connections, missed planes. So much moving around. We were supposed to shoot in one town, but there was no snow, so we moved everything to Buffalo. Part of the movie's joke is that John Candy's Del is wearing a parka while I'm wearing a suit. And it was truly 14 degrees when I'm hiking across that field after the train breaks down.\n\nFive new books: Michelle Obama uplifts with 'The Light We Carry,' Steve Martin gets laughs\n\nThere's a deleted plane scene of John Candy riffing about the effects of \"Psycho\" on the shower-ring business. How much of the movie was ad-libbing?\n\nThere was a lot of ad-libbing, because John Hughes loved it. He wouldn't cut. These are the days of film, so you'd do a scene and hear the film run out (makes spinning noise). John and I would look into each other's eyes like, \"Do we keep going?\" Then we'd have to shoot ad-lib reaction shots and the day would be extended to 16 hours. This started as a 145-page script. Eventually, we realized that the movie was moving so slowly and weeks behind. John and I made an agreement: no more ad-libbing.\n\nDid either of you break into laughter, especially during the ad-libs?\n\nWe laughed a lot. But we did the laughing part before rolling to get that out of our system as we'd work out what we were going to do. The scene in the motel bed with \"those aren't pillows\" we came up with on the set, and then we shot it.\n\nIt's funny how comfortable you two look snuggled up in that motel bed. How was that to shoot?\n\nWe were comfortable with each other, we liked each other. He would make me laugh. It's hard to explain why this was funny, but we were together so much that we would come onto the set and fake beat each other up. Sort of take the frustration out of lengthy days, but laughing.\n\n'The Fabelmans' review:Steven Spielberg puts his life on screen, in rousing fashion\n\nWas there ad-lib takes in Neal's famous rental car tirade?\n\nI did not ad-lib. There's a certain rhythm to John's writing. And if you start just saying the f-word anytime you want, it's just going to fall out of whack and not be poetic.\n\nYou write in your new book, \"Number One Is Walking: My Life in the Movies and Other Diversions,\" that you shot that scene without the f-bombs?\n\nI just thought it was practical. In those days, airplanes had cleaned-up versions. I said to (Hughes), \"They're going to need it for airplanes.\" So we shot it. No swears. It was like, \"I want a car right now!\" As far as I know, it never saw the light of day or an airplane.\n\nFast-forward to a now-classic scene. So clearly no regrets about the f-bombs pushing the movie to rated R?\n\nNo, it's a famed scene. Mike Nichols, the great director, told me once, \"In every movie you do, there should be a scene where you say to yourself, can we do that?\" That certainly applies here.\n\nWhat to watch this Thanksgiving holiday weekend:From a new 'Knives Out' to 'Devotion'\n\nIs there a cut scene you really miss even now?\n\nThere's a scene at the very end where I go back to find John's character sitting alone in the train station. That's when the truth comes out. He doesn't have a home, he just travels. Then he said, \"Usually, I'm fine. But around the holidays, I usually attach myself to someone. But this time, I couldn't let go.\" It's a very touching scene. I remember sitting across from John thinking, \"Wow, this guy is killing this.\"\n\nI was surprised the scene was trimmed way down. I never understood why and I didn't ask John because that's his business.\n\nTimothée Chalamet:'Bones and All' star talks cannibalism, gore and ... Lucky Charms?", "authors": [], "publish_date": "2022/11/24"}, {"url": "https://www.usatoday.com/story/entertainment/tv/2021/12/20/best-tv-shows-of-2021-ted-lasso-squid-game/6196093001/", "title": "We pick the best TV shows of 2021, from 'Ted Lasso' to 'Mare of ...", "text": "In 2021, TV came back roaring.\n\nAfter the production delays, rescheduled premieres and \"Tiger King\" obsession that defined TV in 2020 because of the COVID-19 pandemic, 2021 was slightly more normal on the small screen. Production resumed, and broadcast networks debuted their fall TV shows on time. \"Succession\" (finally) returned for Season 3. The Emmys were held in person, and all the favorites won.\n\nAnd as much as the usual schedule of TV programming resumed, the quality of new shows improved after a disappointing 2020. Here's our take on 19 top picks of this year.\n\nThe only shocking 'Tiger King' 2 reveal:'We came up with a plan to decapitate' Joe Exotic\n\nWhy you can't stop watching rich people disintegrate on 'Succession,' 'Real Housewives'\n\n(Bravo)\n\nIn its 18th season, one of the strengths of the reality cooking competition is its ability to adapt and change as it has aged. Who knew that filming under pandemic conditions, which required a small group of guest judges (all former contestants and winners) to appear in each episode and to keep the challenges even more focused on this year’s setting in Portland, Oregon , made “Chef” the best it's been in years. Diversifying the cuisine, from Pan-African to Native American, made the reality series feel not only fresh but vital. The season was marred by the sexual harassment allegations against the winner, Gabe Erales, but the innovation, community and creativity that the quarantined season inspired suggest “Chef\" can continue for years.\n\n(ABC)\n\nProducers Lee Daniels and Saladin K. Patterson took on the monumental task of bringing a beloved sitcom back to life in a way that is both respectful and reminiscent of the original, but also its own unique series. Few remakes are as creatively successful as their new \"Years,\" which follows a middle-class Black family in Montgomery, Alabama, in the late 1960s. Thoughtfully written and expertly acted by an ensemble led by Dulé Hill (\"Psych\" and \"The West Wing\"), \"Wonder\" is a wonder in the world of TV reboots.\n\nWhy Lee Daniels and ABC brought 'The Wonder Years' back with a Black family in the 1960s\n\n17. 'Everything’s Gonna Be Okay'\n\n(Freeform)\n\nNot many TV series set in the modern era have smoothly incorporated the COVID-19 pandemic into their storylines, but Freeform’s teen dramedy was adept at conveying the seriousness of real life. In Season 2, “Everything,\" created by and starring Australian comedian Josh Thomas, continues the story of Nicholas (Thomas), a 20-something who becomes a guardian of his sisters Genevieve (Maeve Press) and Matilda (Kayla Cromer), who is on the autism spectrum, after their father dies. Although “Everything” spends much of Season 2 in quarantine, the show's humor isn't diminished. In fact, the claustrophobia of pandemic life served to enhance the show’s sense of humor and capacity for hijinks. Freeform canceled the series, but “Everything” will have a legacy as one of the most beloved series that never had time to age out of its brilliance.\n\nAidy Bryant on ‘wishful’ rewrites of her life on ‘Shrill’ and ‘overblown’ Elon Musk ‘SNL’ saga\n\n16. 'Shrill'\n\n(Hulu)\n\nAidy Bryant’s Hulu comedy saved the best for last. Its third and final season is a superb sendoff, featuring some of the actress's best work, along with banner scripts from the writers (including Bryant). Based on Lindy West’s memoir, “Shrill” started as a more singularly focused series about Annie (Bryant), a fat woman who spent most of her life trying to hide because of her weight, only to finally realize that while society was wrong for discriminating against her, she was never a bad person for being fat. In Season 3, Annie continues on that journey, navigating life as a single woman who's finally confident and self-assured. But it's the scene-stealing performance of Lolly Adefope, as Annie’s roommate, Fran – who becomes more of a lead than a supporting character this year – that elevates Season 3. The eight-episode season wraps up the story with care, but it’s hard not to want more.\n\n(Peacock)\n\nCreated by Meredith Scardino and executive-produced by the “30 Rock” team of Tina Fey and Robert Carlock, “Girls” is a sweet comedy about a has-been 1990s girl pop group – played by Sara Bareilles, Renée Elise Goldsberry, Busy Philipps and Paula Pell – that tries to make it again in middle age. Occasionally, the series is nostalgic to a fault, but mostly it's a spot-on parody of what the music industry (and Hollywood) does to women who reach a certain age. With hilarious earworms (“Dream Girlfriends” and “The Splingy”), a cast brimming with energy and chemistry, “Girls” is the kind of happy-go-lucky sitcom that's perfect for a post-“Ted Lasso” world.\n\nEmmys 2021 snubs:'Girls5Eva,' Nicole Kidman, Ethan Hawke and more\n\n14. 'What We Do in the Shadows'\n\n(FX)\n\nAlthough it started off unevenly, the third season of FX's riotous vampire mockumentary offered some of its best episodes ever, from its character payoff to the sheer number of jokes that the writers packed into a half hour. With great performances, clever physical and aesthetic jokes and a cast perfectly in sync, \"Shadows\" has become one of TV's most reliably funny comedies.\n\n13. 'Evil'\n\n(Paramount+)\n\nThe second season of this supernatural thriller, from creators Robert and Michelle King (\"The Good Wife\"), started out strong and declined slightly in its second half. Still, a mostly good season of \"Evil\" is vastly better than much of what else is on television. The move to Paramount+ from CBS made it weirder, more horrifying and more ambitious, daring to go to further depths in its horror and mystical elements. It never lost the core appeal of its main characters, played by Katja Herbers, Mike Colter and Aasif Mandvi, even as the mythology became more complicated.\n\n'She's perfect':Steve Martin praises his rap teacher, 'Only Murders' co-star Selena Gomez\n\n'Reservation Dogs':FX's Oklahoma comedy shows 'Indigenous people are really funny'\n\n(Hulu)\n\nSteve Martin and Martin Short brought their considerable talents and longtime comedic partnership to TV with a little help from Selena Gomez for an endearing, breezy end-of-summer series. All play loners, residents of a swanky Manhattan apartment building who bond as lovers of true-crime podcasts. When there's a suspicious death in the building, they band together to solve it (while making their own podcast about it, of course). The 10-episode first season improves with each episode, building to a satisfying conclusion that leaves you wanting a second season, already in the works.\n\n(FX on Hulu)\n\nThis dark comedy about a quartet of rebellious and delinquent Indigenous teens who live on a reservation in Oklahoma is utterly unique. It's not just that there are few shows on TV created by or about Indigenous people, but the specific tone, pacing and style \"Reservation\" carves out for itself is novel. Moody, meandering and meaningful, the series is about kids who are stuck in their hometown – and desperate to beg, borrow or steal enough money to get out – and each episode perfectly highlights that feeling of being trapped. It's a joy to watch, especially in its quietest moments.\n\n(Netflix)\n\nMargaret Qualley (\"Once Upon a Time in Hollywood\") and her real-life mom Andie MacDowell star in this adaptation of Stephanie Land's memoir (\"Maid: Hard Work, Low Pay and a Mother's Will to Survive\") about her life as a single mother who escapes an abusive relationship, only to wind up homeless and desperate, and eventually makes ends meet as a housekeeper. The drama offers a blistering portrayal of the realities of poverty as seen through the eyes of Alex (Qualley), who suffers a series of angering and unjust events as she tries to protect herself and her young daughter. It's hard to watch at times, but even harder to look away.\n\nKate Winslet on HBO’s ‘Mare of Easttown,’ her ‘Titanic’ accent and funny nickname from Jack Black\n\n(HBO)\n\nKate Winslet shed her posh English accent for the dialect of Delaware County, Pennsylvania, in this crime drama, with fantastic results. Winslet plays a local detective battling personal demons while investigating the murder of a young girl and the disappearance of two others, but it's far more than your basic prestige cop show. More compelling than the central mystery is Mare’s family life, including her struggle with trauma after the death of her son by suicide. The supporting cast deepens the narrative, including Jean Smart as Mare’s Fruit Ninja-slaying mother and Evan Peters as a young and hungry detective who's called in to help with the case and develops a puppy-dog crush on her. Layered, intimate and fully committed to its Philadelphia setting, “Mare” is so much better than it appears on the surface.\n\n(Netflix)\n\nThe dark thriller about impoverished, desperate people competing in deadly children's games for the chance to win a fortune became the rare thing on TV in 2021: a bonafide word-of-mouth hit. Not even Netflix was prepared for how big this South Korean drama became as it surged to the top of the streamer's charts. And \"Squid\" has the substance to back up all the hype and memes. There is a visceral, gripping feeling to the series, which traffics in gore but also deep psychological horror and disturbances. The series will return for a second season by popular demand, and it's one of the few times art and commerce are so serendipitously aligned – and in a satirical series that deftly skewers capitalism, no less.\n\n'Squid Game':Why everyone is obsessed with Netflix's brutal South Korean horror series\n\n(Apple TV+)\n\nPlenty of TV shows that hit it big with audiences, critics and Emmy voters in their first season flounder in their second, but thankfully, producer and star Jason Sudeikis' \"Lasso\" isn't one of them. The comedy, about an American football coach drafted to lead a British soccer team, was a warm light of positivity in 2020, a deeply funny and meaningful show with lovable characters. In its second season, the tone turned serious as the writers explored a deeper story about mental health and trauma. But in spite of Ted's journey, the ethos was never lost, and a smart finale set up what is sure to be a terrific third season.\n\n(HBO)\n\nCringeworthy, hilarious and genuinely shocking, the breakout HBO summer miniseries became a sleeper social-media hit, thanks to its impeccably cast stars and creator Mike White’s (“Enlightened\") acerbic brand of comedy. Dreamed up by White as a series that could be easily filmed under COVID-19-safe protocols, was well-written, well-acted and shot against a gorgeous Hawaiian backdrop. “Lotus” follows guests and staff at a Hawaiian resort in the days leading up to a mysterious death on the premises. But the series is so much more than a murder mystery or an upstairs/downstairs drama. “Lotus” is satire at its best – a biting critique of the uber-wealthy that is nonetheless realistic about who has the power in our capitalist culture. (Spoiler alert: it’s the people with all the money.)\n\nHow HBO satire 'The White Lotus' hit uncomfortably close to home for creator Mike White\n\n5. 'We Are Lady Parts'\n\n(Peacock)\n\nShort, pithy and outrageously funny, Peacock’s British import about an all-Muslim girl punk band in London is both far too unacknowledged for its brilliance and the best original series Peacock has released so far. The series kicks off with the band's search for a lead guitarist, which leads to the discovery of Amina (Anjana Vasan), a shy player with stage fright who's unlucky in love. The young cast has wonderful chemistry, the music is lively and the writing feels utterly unique.\n\n(HBO Max)\n\nAll hail Jean Smart. The veteran actress received acclaim and a well-deserved Emmy for her superb HBO Max comedy. As Deb Vance, a Joan Rivers-style comedian with a Las Vegas residency and a QVC empire, Smart is in her element and at her best, a prickly diva with hidden depths. When Deb’s residency is threatened, she is forced to take on Ava (Hannah Einbinder, a revelation), a young, self-centered comedy writer who is similarly coerced into working with Deb after a dumb tweet leaves her jobless. The two actors make an electric pair, and the show combines sharp wit with a great deal of realism and emotion.\n\n(HBO Max)\n\nSuccinct, accomplished and desperately affecting, this British import from creator Russell T. Davies (“Queer as Folk”) is a stirring chronicle of the 1980s AIDS crisis. As told from the point of view of a group of young gay men living in London, “Sin” chooses character over exploitative tragedy when dramatizing how AIDS ripped through their lives, whether or not they were infected by the disease. The group includes Ritchie (Olly Alexander), a young, charming actor who first refuses to believe a disease could kill only gay men; Roscoe (Omari Douglas), who fled his conservative family for freedom and love; and Colin (Callum Scott Howells), a naïve young tailor tagging along with the cool kids who's tickled to be included. Perfectly paced, set to the beat of '80s pop bangers and the neon lights of dance clubs, “Sin” transcends the label of mere “AIDS drama.”\n\n'I was always a late bloomer':Jean Smart on her new comedy 'Hacks,' becoming the queen of HBO at 69\n\nReview:HBO Max's AIDS crisis drama 'It's A Sin' is the best show of 2021 so far\n\n(Amazon)\n\nBrutal, unflinching, hopeful and epic, Barry Jenkins’ adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel is a tour de force miniseries that was criminally overlooked at this year’s Emmy awards. Combining “Moonlight” director Jenkins’ distinct style with Whitehead’s ahistorical, yet deeply familiar, story of a literal railroad, \"Underground\" centers on Cora (Thuso Mbedu), an enslaved woman who takes a train toward freedom but finds horrifying facets of America along her way. With Mbedu’s performance, the haunting score and Jenkins’ direction, “Underground” is a worthy if sometimes difficult journey.\n\n(Apple TV+)\n\nApple’s alternate history of the space race, which posits what might have happened had the Soviet Union beaten the U.S. to the moon and the competition for the final frontier never ended, was a smart, appealing series in its first season. In this year’s second season, however, it rocketed ahead to a possible spot on a list of TV’s all-time great dramas. That’s thanks to a sprawling, effortlessly talented cast led by Joel Kinnaman, a plausible alternate reality, superb writing and riveting action set pieces. The series is at its best in the second-season finale, involving a U.S.-Soviet standoff in space with the stakes of the Cuban missile crisis. “Mankind” asks big questions and doesn’t shy away from the worst tendencies of 20th-century America, all without careening into pedantic and patronizing territory. \"Mankind\" truly flies.\n\n'I know how fraught those images are':Barry Jenkins on portraying slavery in 'The Underground Railroad'\n\n'For All Mankind' fact check:How Apple TV's space series mirrors real moon-landing history", "authors": [], "publish_date": "2021/12/20"}, {"url": "https://www.usatoday.com/story/entertainment/tv/2022/09/13/emmy-awards-behind-the-sceneszendaya-lizzo-henry-winkler-photobomb/10363956002/", "title": "What you didn't see at the Emmys: Will Smith stage warning ...", "text": "LOS ANGELES – Not all the drama was televised during the Emmy Awards Monday night.\n\nAt 26, Zendaya made history as the youngest two-time acting winner after nabbing another best actress Emmy for \"Euphoria,\" , while Michael Keaton forgave his doubters during his acceptance speech after winning his Emmy for \"Dopesick.\"\n\nBut much of the action took place during off-camera moments at the Microsoft Theater as Hollywood's biggest stars wined, dined and schmoozed on tables surrounding the Emmy stages, surrounded by window panels of the Los Angeles skyline below a twinkling ceiling of white lights.\n\nHere's what you didn't see during the broadcast.\n\nEmmys 2022 winners list:'Succession,' 'Ted Lasso,' 'The White Lotus' and more big wins\n\nBest and worst moments: See the top moments of the 2022 Emmy Awards\n\nEmmy producer: Stay off the stage, no bad dancing for the camera\n\nThere wasn't going to be an Emmy stage incident Monday night.\n\nNearly six months since Will Smith's Oscar stage attack on Chris Rock, Emmy producer, writer and comedian Chris Spencer vowed dire consequences to any potential stage offenders during the pre-show audience warm-up session.\n\n\"If any of you come onto this stage, just know that you will get your (butt) kicked,\" Spencer said, joking that the audience was filled with MMA fighters ready to enforce the law. \"Just know if there's a will, there's a way. And that way is going to be a trophy aside your head.\"\n\nSpencer also laid down the law on 45-second award acceptance speeches, saying that the song \"Hit the Road Jack\" would play if long-winded winners ignored the first polite warning music.\n\n\"If you go over 45 seconds, you are going to be interrupted by this song,\" he said.\n\nBad dancers in the audience were asked not to shake it during the musical opening number.\n\n\"If you can't dance, sit your (butt) down,\" Spencer said. \"The camera needs to capture people who can dance.\"\n\nBackstage at the 2022 Emmys: Quinta Brunson jokes she might 'punch' Jimmy Kimmel\n\nWho was that announcing the Emmys? What to know about comedian Sam Jay.\n\nSelena Gomez, Steve Martin and Martin Short killed it in the building\n\nWatching the \"Only Murders in the Building\" crew during the Emmys was like watching an episode of the Hulu series. Selena Gomez arrived late to the show, zipping into her empty seat at the \"Murders\" table with apologies during the first commercial break. Her nominated co-stars Martin Short and Steve Martin immediately jumped to attention with big smiles and hugs, and the trio began posing for pictures. Then the crew chatted and laugh through the show as fellow actors, such as \"Succession\" star Brian Cox, paid visits.\n\nThey smiled even as the butt of jokes from the stage, and through losing out on their Emmy. Both Martin and Short stood up to applaud and shake hands with the passing Jason Sudeikis, as the \"Ted Lasso\" star took the award for best actor in a comedy. Later, Short gallantly jumped from his seat to escort Jean Smart up the stage steps to accept her \"Hacks\" Emmy.\n\nEmmys 2022:'Succession' wins best drama, 'Ted Lasso' takes top comedy for second time\n\nThat beautiful stage bar was fake\n\nThe bartender skit with Kumail Nanjiani might not have worked during the show. But there was no denying that multi-level, fully lit stage bar was impressive. The bar was, however, a stage prop.\n\nA sign warned potential customers before the show, \"Sorry folks, this is not a real bar.\" Spencer also warned, \"This bar is not real, do not touch this.\"\n\nNot to worry: The stars had plenty of real bars in the venue and bottles of wine on the table.\n\n'This is what believing looks like':Sheryl Lee Ralph schools Emmys with 'Abbott Elementary' win\n\nHenry Winkler photobombs Zendaya, Lizzo while taking selfie\n\nSuperstar Zendaya became an even hotter celestial being with her Emmy win. After the \"Euphoria\" star made a low-key return to her table, Lizzo decided to make a congratulatory visit during the commercial break, clutching her own Emmy for \"Lizzo's Watch Out For The Big Grrrls.\"\n\nAs the two new Emmy-winners hugged and posed for pictures, a giggling \"Barry\" star Henry Winkler popped up behind them and pulled off a double-photobomb – not only appearing in the duo's pictures, but filming himself in the act with his own phone.\n\nZendaya caught on and laughingly chided Winkler, who returned to his table still cracking up at his own gag. Lizzo made her way back to her own seat, requiring two friends to carry her lengthy gown train through the crowd of tables.\n\nDuring the same short break, Andrew Garfield ventured over for Zendaya greetings, staying to talk until the stage announcer warned that the telecast was seconds away. Garfield broke away, and sauntered across the stage to his own seat just in time.\n\nFrom Amanda Seyfried to Zendaya:The 10 best dressed celebs at 2022 Emmy Awards\n\nIt's about damn time:Lizzo celebrates on-screen representation in Emmys acceptance speech\n\nMichael Keaton congratulates after-party band during their song\n\nKeaton wowed on stage during his \"Dopesick\" acceptance speech, then rocked out at the Governor's Gala that followed the awards next door. Keaton kept his head down as he pulled his date through the crowd to the bar for drinks – and then back to a table – as if on a mission to celebrate. As the live band played, Keaton got the fever. He sprinted up to the stage beaming and high-fived each of the four singers midsong to congratulate them for their vocal performances.\n\nBut the after-party's biggest stars were the \"Ted Lasso\" crew, who stayed together en masse long after the crowd thinned out. Emmy winners Brett Goldstein and Sudeikis celebrated with the crew and fellow stars such as Hannah Waddingham. With four big wins, including best comedy, there was a virtual herd of \"Ted Lasso\" Emmys placed on the table. Appreciative fans posed for pictures with the stars, even holding the Emmy trophies, before the raucous crew finally headed for the exits.", "authors": [], "publish_date": "2022/09/13"}, {"url": "https://www.cnn.com/2022/07/06/us/highland-park-illinois-shooting-july-fourth-parade-wednesday/index.html", "title": "Highland Park gunman admitted to firing on parade crowd and ...", "text": "CNN —\n\nThe gunman in Monday’s massacre at a Fourth of July parade in the Illinois city of Highland Park admitted he carried out the attack, killing seven and wounding dozens of others, prosecutors said in court Wednesday.\n\nRobert E. Crimo III, 21, told authorities in a voluntary statement that he “looked down his sights, aimed and opened fire” on paradegoers, emptying two 30-round magazines before loading his weapon with a third and firing again, Lake County Assistant State’s Attorney Ben Dillon alleged during a virtual bail hearing.\n\nA judge ordered Crimo, who appeared at the hearing wearing black, to be held without bail on seven charges of first-degree murder. A conviction would result in a sentence of life imprisonment without parole, but more charges could be filed in the future, Lake County State’s Attorney Eric Rinehart said.\n\n“For each individual that was hurt, people can anticipate an attempted murder charge as well as an aggravated battery with a firearm charge,” Rinehart said in a news conference following the hearing. He added: “Every time he fires a bullet at an individual, he is committing aggravated discharge of a weapon, whether he hit someone or not. There will be many more charges coming in the coming weeks.”\n\nCrimo was appointed a public defender and is due in court again July 28.\n\nAccording to authorities, the shooter opened fire from a rooftop on a Highland Park business as the parade was underway just after 10 a.m. CT on Monday.\n\nCrimo dressed in women’s clothing to conceal his identity and used makeup to cover his tattoos, investigators believe. He left the roof and blended in with the fleeing crowd, Lake County Major Crime Task Force spokesperson Chris Covelli previously said.\n\nFive people shot at the parade were pronounced dead at the scene, officials said, and two people hospitalized succumbed to wounds. A total of 39 patients were transported to medical facilities “by either ambulance or other means,” according to Jim Anthony with NorthShore University Health System, and two patients remain hospitalized as of Wednesday afternoon.\n\nSurveillance video from the scene showed a person running west with a black bag over the shoulder immediately after the shooting, Dillon said Wednesday, outlining the events of July Fourth. While the individual was running, an object wrapped in cloth fell to the pavement. The subject left the object and continued running.\n\nWhen it was recovered, authorities identified the object as a Smith & Wesson M&P15 semi-automatic rifle, Dillon said. One round was in the chamber, but there was no magazine inserted.\n\nOn the rooftop, investigators recovered the three 30-round magazines and 83 shell casings, Dillon said.\n\nComplete coverage of the Highland Park shooting\n\nChairs, bicycles, strollers and balloons were left behind at the scene of the mass shooting in Highland Park. Brian Cassella/Chicago Tribune/TNS/Getty Images\n\nShooter ‘seriously contemplated’ committing a second shooting\n\nCrimo is believed by authorities to have planned the attack for weeks, and the rifle he used and another he allegedly had when he was arrested by police appear to have been purchased legally in Illinois, Covelli said. Other guns were recovered from his home in nearby Highwood.\n\nThere could have been even more carnage: According to a police spokesperson, Crimo drove to Madison, Wisconsin, on Monday following the Illinois shooting, and contemplated an attack.\n\nCrimo saw “a celebration that was occurring … and he seriously contemplated using the firearm he had in his vehicle to commit another shooting in Madison,” Covelli told reporters after Wednesday’s hearing, identifying the weapon as a Kel-Tec rifle, a foldable carbine available as a 9 mm or .40 caliber. Crimo had approximately 60 rounds of ammunition in his car at the time, Covelli said.\n\nAuthorities have released this image of a gun that was located in Crimo's car after he was taken into custody Monday evening. Lake County Major Crime Task Force\n\n“We don’t have information to suggest he planned on driving to Madison initially to commit another attack. (But) we do believe that he was driving around following the first attack and saw the celebration,” Covelli said.\n\n“Indications are that he hadn’t put enough thought or research into it,” Covelli said.\n\nCovelli again declined to address the suspect’s motive, telling reporters he didn’t want to go into specific details about what Crimo told investigators.\n\n“However, he had some type of affinity towards the numbers 4 and 7, and the inverse was 7/4,” Covelli said, referring to Monday’s date, July 4. According to Covelli, Crimo’s affinity “comes from music that he’s interested in.”\n\nOfficials have no information to suggest Monday’s shooting was “racially motivated, motivated by religion, or any other protected status,” Covelli said.\n\nGunman had prior contact with police\n\nAs another community reels after a shocking mass shooting, the town’s mayor is questioning how the gunman was able to purchase weapons given his previous encounters with law enforcement.\n\nYet information released by state and local police shows the shooter previously required officer intervention over threats of violence and mental health concerns.\n\nCrimo had two encounters with police in 2019 over fears for his safety and that of others, information that prompted Highland Park Mayor Nancy Rotering to wonder how Crimo was able to later legally obtain firearms.\n\nThe Highland Park Police Department received a report in April 2019 that Crimo had earlier attempted suicide, Covelli said Tuesday. Police spoke with Crimo and his parents and the matter was handled by mental health professionals, he said.\n\nIn September that year, a relative reported that Crimo threatened family members – to “kill everyone” – and had a collection of knives, Covelli said. Police removed 16 knives, a dagger and a sword from their home.\n\nHighland Park police submitted a “Clear and Present Danger” report about the visit to the Illinois State Police, the state agency said. Family members were not willing to file additional complaints, the state police said in a Tuesday news release.\n\nThe knives confiscated by Highland Park police were returned the same day after Crimo’s father claimed they were his, the state police said.\n\nOver the next two years, Crimo legally purchased five guns, according to Covelli – including rifles, pistols and possibly a shotgun. State police confirmed Tuesday that Crimo passed four background checks between June 2020 and September 2021 when purchasing firearms, which included checks of the federal National Instant Criminal Background Check System.\n\nTo buy guns in Illinois, people need a Firearm Owners Identification (FOID) card. Crimo was under 21, so he was sponsored by his father, state police said. Crimo’s application was not denied as there was “insufficient basis to establish a clear and present danger” at the time.\n\nRinehart, the Lake County state’s attorney, told a CNN reporter at the news conference he didn’t want to comment on whether there could be charges for Crimo’s father or other relatives.\n\nCNN legal analyst Areva Martin said parents historically haven’t been charged in mass shootings until recently, as in the case of a 15-year-old who allegedly killed four fellow students at a Michigan high school in November.\n\nParents Jennifer and James Crumbley have each pleaded not guilty to four counts of involuntary manslaughter. Prosecutors say their negligence allowed their son, Ethan, access to the weapon used in that mass shooting.\n\nMartin said Illinois prosecutors would have to establish reasonable foreseeability if they want to prosecute Crimo’s father.\n\n“The question this prosecutor’s going to have to ask (is) was it reasonably foreseeable that someone who had made a suicide attempt and who had threatened to kill others would lead that person … to commit the crime against the paradegoers,” she said.\n\n“And if the answer to that question is yes … there definitely could be manslaughter charges filed against his dad, who did sign that consent form and gave consent for him to gain access to the high-powered weapon and weapons that were used.”\n\nMayor Rotering – who said she knew the shooter as a boy in a Cub Scouts pack she’d led – said she is “looking forward to an explanation” of how Crimo was able to obtain guns, saying Highland Park police had filed the necessary reports.\n\n“We know that in other countries people suffer from mental illness, they suffer from anger, maybe they play violent video games, but they can’t get their hands on these weapons of war and they can’t bring this kind of carnage to their hometowns. This has to stop,” the mayor told CNN’s Anderson Cooper on Tuesday, noting the state has “red flag” laws but adding people need to speak up if they see warning signs.\n\nThe only offense included in the shooter’s legal history was a January 2016 ordinance violation for possession of tobacco, police said, which occurred when he was a juvenile.\n\nA woman views the candles and flowers left the victims of the parade shooting on July 5, 2022 in Highland Park. Taylor Glascock for CNN\n\n7 victims identified by officials\n\nAuthorities identified six of the seven victims killed in the shooting on Tuesday, and a seventh was identified Wednesday:\n\n• 64-year-old Katherine Goldstein of Highland Park\n\n• 35-year-old Irina McCarthy of Highland Park\n\n• 37-year-old Kevin McCarthy of Highland Park\n\n• 63-year-old Jacquelyn Sundheim of Highland Park\n\n• 88-year-old Stephen Straus of Highland Park\n\n• 78-year-old Nicolas Toledo-Zaragoza of Morelos, Mexico\n\n• 69-year-old Eduardo Uvaldo of Waukegan, Illinois\n\nIrina and Kevin McCarthy were with their 2-year-old son, Aiden, who was found alive and taken to safety, their family told CNN.\n\nAiden survived because his father shielded him with his body, his grandfather, Michael Levberg, told the Chicago Sun-Times.\n\nAiden was taken to a police station, and Levberg picked him up, the grandfather told the Chicago Tribune.\n\n“When I picked him up, he said, ‘Are Mommy and Daddy coming soon?” Levberg said Tuesday, according to the Tribune. “He doesn’t understand.”", "authors": ["Travis Caldwell Jason Hanna Dakin Andone", "Travis Caldwell", "Jason Hanna", "Dakin Andone"], "publish_date": "2022/07/06"}, {"url": "https://www.cnn.com/2022/07/07/us/highland-park-illinois-shooting-july-fourth-parade-thursday/index.html", "title": "New York Post: Father of Highland Park gunman wants his son to ...", "text": "CNN —\n\nDays after a gunman killed seven and wounded dozens more in a rampage at a Fourth of July parade in Highland Park, Illinois, the shooter’s father told the New York Post he wants his son to serve a long prison sentence.\n\nYellow barricade tape stretched down the sidewalks along Central Avenue, the main route for the Fourth of July parade that was shattered by gunfire. Authorities said the gunman fired a semi-automatic rifle from a business rooftop at crowds below before fleeing the scene.\n\nRobert E. Crimo III, 21, who was arrested later Monday in connection with the shooting in suburban Chicago, admitted to authorities he was the gunman, prosecutors alleged Wednesday during a court hearing where a judge denied Crimo bond.\n\nHe faces seven counts of first-degree murder and a sentence of life in prison, if convicted. Illinois abolished capital punishment in 2011.\n\n“I want a long sentence,” the suspect’s father, Robert Crimo Jr., said, according to a report by the Post. “That’s life. You know you have consequences for actions. He made a choice. He didn’t have to do that.”\n\nCrimo will face additional charges for those he wounded, along with the murder charges already filed, Lake County State’s Attorney Eric Rinehart said. “It’s vital to the healing of this community that every single victim receives justice,” Rinehart told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer on Wednesday.\n\nAlso revealed publicly Wednesday: After the shooting, Crimo drove to Wisconsin’s capital of Madison on Monday and contemplated a shooting there before deciding against it, authorities said. That might have been one of two narrowly avoided mass gun attacks at July Fourth celebrations nationwide. Police in Virginia say a tip may have foiled a separate attack plot, unrelated to Crimo, in Richmond.\n\nIn Highland Park, residents have been paying their respects in the days following the shooting to those killed or wounded, with some overcome with emotion, others kneeling in prayer.\n\nA mourner visits a memorial for the victims of a mass shooting at a Fourth of July parade, on Wednesday in Highland Park, Illinois. Jim Vondruska/Getty Images\n\nHundreds gathered at a candlelight vigil Wednesday night at nearby Everts Park, where a multitude of orange ribbons – signifying gun violence awareness – were seen hanging as “Amazing Grace” was played on bagpipes.\n\nAs the grieving continues, more people are coming forward to share their experiences the morning of the shooting, including Lily Wathen, who was about to begin marching in the parade when gunfire broke out. Her grandparents were sitting “right across from where the shooter” was located, she told CNN.\n\n“Every single year of my life, we’ve gone to this parade, and they wanted to be there specifically so that when I passed by in the parade, I would be able to find them there,” Wathen said.\n\nHer grandfather was struck by shrapnel in his shoulder, barely missing his lungs, but doctors say he will make a full recovery, she said.\n\nThe trauma of the event, however, has “shaken a lot of people up,” she said. “It’s hard to say how we’ll be in a year, but for right now, it’s scary to even think about going back.”\n\nTwo people wounded remained hospitalized at NorthShore University Health System facilities as of Wednesday afternoon and were in stable condition, according to spokesperson Jim Anthony. A total of 39 people had been treated for injuries, he said, and an 8-year-old boy was transferred to UChicago Medicine Comer Children’s Hospital, which confirmed the child is in critical but stable condition.\n\nA woman views the candles and flowers left for the victims of the July 4th parade shooting on Tuesday, July 5, 2022 in Highland Park, Illinois. Taylor Glascock for CNN A woman lights a candle at a memorial for the victims. Taylor Glascock for CNN Ellie Zuckerman, left, 18, holds her friend Ava Turner , 17, during a vigil for the victims on July 5. Taylor Glascock for CNN Elizabeth Zweiback cries during a candlelight vigil for the victims. Zweiback and her husband were marching in the parade with the Maureen Township food bank when the attack started. \"We ran for our lives,\" she said. Taylor Glascock for CNN Vice President Kamala Harris speaks to a crowd of journalists and onlookers on July 5. \"Yesterday, it should have been a day to come together with family and friends to celebrate our nation's independence and instead, that community suffered a violent tragedy,\" Harris said, adding that \"we need to stop this violence.\" Taylor Glascock for CNN Journalists and residents listen during a press conference on July 5. Taylor Glascock for CNN A Lake Forest police officer walks down Central Avenue in Highland Park on July 4. Brian Cassella/Chicago Tribune/AP Members of the FBI evidence response team work at the scene a day after the shooting in downtown Highland Park on July 5. Charles Rex Arbogast/AP According to authorities, suspect Robert E. Crimo III was taken into custody near Lake Forest, Illinois, just before 8 p.m. ET. WLS A body is transported from the scene of the shooting on July 4. Armando L. Sanchez/Chicago Tribune/AP Students are escorted by police officers to safety after a mass shooting at the Highland Park Fourth of July parade on Monday. Nam Y. Huh/AP Law enforcement officers searched a building for the man suspected of shooting multiple people on Monday in Highland Park, Illinois, who was still at large. Nam Y. Huh/AP Law enforcement officers help evacuate people from a store in Highland Park on Monday. Brian Cassella/AP Officers on the scene after a shooting in Highland Park. Jim Vondruska/Getty Images Officers investigate the scene of the shooting. Tannen Maury/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock Sgt. Chris Covelli of the Lake County Major Crime Task Force speaks to the media. Youngrae Kiim/AFP/Getty images A woman wipes tears after a shooting at the Highland Park Fourth of July parade. Nam Y. Huh/AP Law enforcement officers investigate the scene of the shooting. Tannen Maury/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock Chairs and bicycles lie abandoned after people fled the scene. Police said they recovered a rifle on the roof where they believe the shooter was located. Tannen Maury/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock A police officer reacts as he walks in downtown Highland Park after the shooting on July 4. Nam Y. Huh/AP Police gather at the scene of the shooting in Highland Park on Monday. WLS-TV/ABC7/Reuters In pictures: 4th of July shooting in Highland Park, Illinois Prev Next\n\nSuspect’s father thought he would use weapons at shooting range, report says\n\nThe suspect’s father decided to sponsor his son’s firearm owner’s identification card (FOID), a document needed to buy a weapon in Illinois, because he thought his son would take the weapons to a shooting range, the New York Post reported.\n\n“He bought everything on his own, and they’re registered to him,” Crimo Jr. told the Post.\n\n“They make me like I groomed him to do all this,” he said, according to the report, which comes amid questions over whether Crimo’s parents could face charges. “I’ve been here my whole life, and I’m gonna stay here, hold my head up high, because I didn’t do anything wrong.”\n\nIn a separate interview with ABC News, Crimo Jr. acknowledged he “filled out the consent form to allow my son to go through the process that the Illinois State Police have in place for an individual to obtain a FOID card.”\n\n“They do background checks,” he said. “Whatever that entails, I’m not exactly sure. And either you’re approved or denied, and he was approved.”\n\nCNN’s calls to Crimo Jr. have not been returned. Crimo Jr.’s attorney, Steve Greenberg, told CNN they would not be making any further public comments, “but the parents will continue to speak with law-enforcement and to assist them.”\n\nRinehart, the county state’s attorney, told CNN on Thursday there is no criminal liability for sponsoring someone’s FOID, but added the office is still going through evidence “in terms of who knew what when.”\n\n“There’s different ways to look at potential criminal liability in this case,” Rinehart said. “There’s not a, per se, violation of law if you vouch for somebody in a FOID card and they end up doing something terrible like this. But, having said that, we are continuing to investigate the case and continuing to explore all options.”\n\nIn addition to wanting to see his son serve a long sentence, Crimo Jr. told the Post he is “furious” over his alleged actions, adding that the night before the shooting, the two discussed a 22-year-old Danish man suspected of shooting and killing three people at a mall outside Copenhagen on Sunday.\n\n“He goes, ‘Yeah, that guy is an idiot.’ That’s what he said!” Crimo Jr. recalled, saying his son added, “People like that … (commit mass shootings) to amp up the people that want to ban all guns.”\n\n“I talked to him 13 hours before (Monday’s massacre). That’s why I guess I’m in such shock. … Like, did he have a psychiatric break or something?” Crimo Jr. said, per the Post.\n\nThe suspected shooter’s uncle, Paul Crimo, told CNN on Thursday that his nephew “showed no aggression towards me or nothing.”\n\n“There’s no indications of nothing, that I saw, that would lead to all this,” he told CNN. The uncle added that he did not know where his nephew got the money to pay for the guns he purchased and said he had no knowledge of them.\n\n“He lives in the back apartment, we don’t see each other,” he said.\n\n“I’m sorry, I mean, from the bottom of my heart, I mean, I’m devastated and my heart, my thoughts and prayers goes out to all the victims, the families and everybody that got hurt, the community, everybody,” the uncle added.\n\nSuspect contemplated second attack, police say\n\nFollowing the shooting in Highland Park, Crimo left the scene and drove to Madison, Wisconsin, where he “seriously contemplated” committing another shooting, according to Lake County Major Crime Task Force Deputy Chief Chris Covelli.\n\nThe firearm believed to have been used in the shooting was recovered near the scene, but Crimo had another gun in his vehicle during his arrest, police said. That weapon was a Kel-Tec rifle, Covelli said Wednesday. Crimo had approximately 60 rounds of ammunition in his car at the time, Covelli added.\n\nWhen Crimo located another celebration in the Madison area, he “seriously contemplated using the firearm he had in his vehicle to commit another shooting,” Covelli said, though “indications are that he hadn’t put enough thought and research into it.”\n\nThe FBI alerted Madison police Monday afternoon that Crimo was on the run and may be in the area, Madison Police Chief Shon Barnes said Wednesday. “We feel for the grieving families in Highland Park and all those forever impacted by the events of Monday’s shooting. We recognize tragedy very well could have taken place in our own community,” said Barnes.\n\nAfter he was detained Monday evening in northern Illinois, Crimo “went into details about what he had done; he admitted to what he had done” in voluntary statements during questioning to Highland Park police, Covelli said.\n\nCrimo was appointed a public defender and is due in court again July 28.\n\nCovelli declined to address the suspect’s motive Wednesday, telling reporters he didn’t want to go into specific details about what Crimo told investigators.\n\n“However, he had some type of affinity towards the numbers 4 and 7, and the inverse was 7/4,” Covelli said, referring to Monday’s date, July 4. Crimo’s affinity “comes from music that he’s interested in,” said Covelli.\n\nVideo Ad Feedback 'Chilling': CNN's Josh Campbell describes gunman's demeanor at hearing 01:05 - Source: CNN\n\nCrimo had prior contact with police\n\nCrimo had purchased weapons in Illinois despite two encounters with police in 2019 over fears for his safety and that of others, information released by state and local police shows.\n\nHighland Park police received a report in April 2019 that Crimo had earlier attempted suicide, Covelli said Tuesday. Police spoke with Crimo and his parents and the matter was handled by mental health professionals, he said.\n\nIn September that year, a relative reported Crimo threatened family members – to “kill everyone” – and had a collection of knives, Covelli said. Police removed 16 knives, a dagger and a sword from their home.\n\nThe knives were “just a collection,” Crimo Jr. told the Post. “You know, I used to collect coins and baseball cards.”\n\nHighland Park police submitted a “Clear and Present Danger” report about the visit to the Illinois State Police, the state agency said. Family members were not willing to file additional complaints, the state police said in a Tuesday news release.\n\nThe knives confiscated by Highland Park police were returned the same day after Crimo’s father said they were his, the state police said.\n\nOver the next two years, Crimo legally purchased five guns, according to Covelli – including rifles, pistols and possibly a shotgun. Crimo passed four background checks between June 2020 and September 2021 when buying firearms, which included checks of the federal National Instant Criminal Background Check System, state police said Tuesday.\n\nCrimo’s application for a FOID card – sponsored by his father because his son was under 21 – was not denied because there was “insufficient basis to establish a clear and present danger” at the time, state police said.\n\nRinehart, the Lake County state’s attorney, declined to comment Wednesday on whether Crimo’s father or other relatives could face charges.\n\nParents of accused shooters historically haven’t been charged in mass shootings until recently – as in the case of a 15-year-old accused of killing four fellow students at a Michigan high school in November, CNN legal analyst Areva Martin said.\n\nMichigan prosecutors say the negligence of parents Jennifer and James Crumbley allowed their son, Ethan, access to the weapon used in that mass shooting. Each has pleaded not guilty to four counts of involuntary manslaughter.\n\nIllinois prosecutors would have to establish reasonable foreseeability if they want to prosecute Crimo’s father, Martin said.\n\n“The question this prosecutor’s going to have to ask (is) was it reasonably foreseeable that someone who had made a suicide attempt and who had threatened to kill others would lead that person … to commit the crime against the paradegoers,” she said.\n\n“And if the answer to that question is yes … there definitely could be manslaughter charges filed against his dad, who did sign that consent form and gave consent for him to gain access to the high-powered weapon and weapons that were used.”", "authors": ["Travis Caldwell Joe Sutton Rebekah Riess", "Travis Caldwell", "Joe Sutton", "Rebekah Riess"], "publish_date": "2022/07/07"}, {"url": "https://www.usatoday.com/story/entertainment/tv/2022/07/01/stranger-things-season-4-volume-2-recap-finale/7785446001/", "title": "'Stranger Things' Season 4 recap: Who died? What's next for ...", "text": "Spoiler alert! The following contains details from the \"Stranger Things 4\" finale, Episodes 8 and 9.\n\nYou can stop holding your breath! Steve didn’t die!\n\nThe final two episodes of Season 4 of Netflix’s \"Stranger Things\" (streaming now) sent fans into a frenzy of uncertainty over whether their favorite character will live to see another season. Fans of Steve (Joe Keery), Robin (Maya Hawke) and Dustin (Gaten Matarazzo) can now breathe a sigh of relief for the fifth and final season.\n\nThe same unfortunately can’t be said for lovers of Eddie Munson (Joseph Quinn), the free-spirited unapologetic leader of the HellFire club that fans impulsively cherished since the season premiere.\n\nIn a heroic effort to distract the demogorgons so his friends could kill Vecna (Jamie Campbell Bower), Eddie meets his demise after being brutally murdered in the Upside Down. Dustin screaming at the loss of his friend and idol — moments after Eddie told him to never change — made the scene all the more heartbreaking. Dustin tells Eddie’s uncle that his son died a hero and stayed true to himself.\n\nMax (Sadie Sink) came close to joining Eddie in the afterlife after being possessed and nearly killed by Vecna/Henry/001 without the power of Kate Bush’s “Running Up That Hill.”\n\nReview:'Stranger Things 4' loses its magic, and the overlong finale doesn't help\n\nThat song:Kate Bush reacts after 'Stranger Things' gives 'Running Up That Hill' a 'whole new lease of life'\n\nShowrunners Matt and Ross Duffer, who wrote and directed both episodes, temporarily convince fans that Max is dead as Lucas (Caleb McLaughlin) shrieks and holds her still twisted body. After Max’s heart stops beating for a minute, Eleven (Millie Bobby Brown) uses her powers to bring Max back to life.\n\nThe end of Episode 8 includes the death of Eleven’s twisted “Papa” aka Dr. Martin Brenner (Matthew Modine), who is shot repeatedly by military soldiers sent to kill Eleven, who eventually kills them by crashing their helicopter to the ground.\n\nUnpacking those 'Stranger Things' fights\n\nAfter realizing she is supposed to be the fourth victim to open a gate from the Upside Down to Hawkins, Max volunteers to be bait for Vecna. She takes off her headphones so Vecna can possess her mind while Nancy, Steve and Robin try to burn his body.\n\nEleven helps Max by fighting Vecna in the Upside Down while her body is in a tub at a Surfer Boy Pizza restaurant across the country, with Mike (Finn Wolfhard), Will (Noah Schnapp), Jonathan (Charlie Heaton) and Argyle (Eduardo Franco) assisting her.\n\nTo make matters worse, Jason (Mason Dye) threatens to ruin the plan by holding Lucas at gunpoint and demanding he wake up Max, convinced that all the killings going on are related to Lucas and his friend's HellFire club. Lucas brawls with Jason, fighting for his and everyone else’s life before managing to knock Jason unconscious.\n\nViolence warning: 'Stranger Things' receives 'graphic violence' warning ahead of Season 4 after Uvalde shooting\n\nCopying allegations:Is ‘Stranger Things’ a rip-off? Aspiring screenwriter sues Netflix, Duffer brothers for script similarities\n\nVecna almost defeats Eleven, trapping her and forcing her to watch as he tries to kill Max, but Will’s words of belief and vulnerability enable Eleven to triumph. Steve and Robyn succeed at burning Vecna’s physical body while Nancy fires at him with a shotgun, defeating him at last (or at least for this episode).\n\nMeanwhile in the Russian prison, Hopper (David Harbour) slays a full-size demogorgon with a sword. Enzo (Tom Wlaschiha) and Yuri (Nikola Djuricko) rescue Hopper and Joyce (Winona Ryder) via helicopter. It’s also worth mentioning Murray (​​Brett Gelman) scorched multiple demogorgons with a flamethrower.\n\nJoyce and Hopper make it home to Hawkins and reunite with their children.\n\nWhat to expect from Season 5\n\nSeason 4 ends with Hawkins enduring mass destruction caused by Vecna's gate to the Upside Down. The characters see particles floating everywhere, flower fields dying and dark clouds with red lighting consuming the town as Vecna succeeds at opening the gate.\n\nWith a death toll of 22, hospitals flooded and many residents still missing, it's clear the characters are in for one last wild ride for the final season.\n\nMax remains in a coma surrounded by friends, with doctors unsure if she will ever wake up again. Eleven grabs her hand and appears to try to communicate telepathically. Yet with her technically still living, fans can hopefully see her wake up in Season 5.\n\nDuring Mike and Will’s conversation, Mike says Eleven isn’t used to losing the way she did with Vecna, and Will informs him that she will have another chance.\n\n“Now that I’m here in Hawkins, I can feel him and he’s hurt. He’s hurting but he’s still alive,” Will tells Mike. “He’s not going to stop ever. Not until he’s taken everything and everyone. We have to kill him.”\n\nSee also: How the 'Stranger Things' kids navigate monster personal drama, 'shared trauma' in Season 4\n\nMore: Winona Ryder talks being a 'Stranger Things' mom and Gen X icon: 'I was never the first choice'\n\nThe final season likely will show Eleven and the rest of the characters attempting to defeat Vecna for good with a clearer understanding of who he is and his weaknesses.\n\nUnlike the previous three seasons, which end with most of the characters oblivious to the next season’s conflict, Season 4's cliffhanger promises fans a climatic final installment. Hopefully the residents of Hawkins will have peace in the end — but not before more destruction.", "authors": [], "publish_date": "2022/07/01"}, {"url": "https://www.cnn.com/2022/01/09/entertainment/gallery/people-we-lost-2022/index.html", "title": "Photos: People we've lost in 2022 | CNN", "text": "1. How relevant is this ad to you?\n\nVideo player was slow to load content Video content never loaded Ad froze or did not finish loading Video content did not start after ad Audio on ad was too loud Other issues", "authors": [], "publish_date": "2022/01/09"}]}
{"question_id": "20230120_13", "search_time": "2023/01/20/16:37", "search_result": [{"url": "https://www.usatoday.com/story/entertainment/celebrities/2022/04/28/met-gala-2022-theme-how-to-watch/9553882002/", "title": "Met Gala 2022: Gilded Glamour theme details, attendees, how to ...", "text": "Invitations have been sent, the custom gowns and outfits are selected and the stars are ready to dazzle photographers on the steps of the Metropolitan Museum of Art at this year's Met Gala.\n\nThe gala is an annual fundraiser for the Met’s Costume Institute and calls on designers to adorn stars, models and sometimes influencers in the fashions of a selected theme to match a wing of the museum's exhibit. This year's exhibit is a continuation of last year's theme of American fashion and will include \"cinematic vignettes\" created by top Hollywood directors congruent with the \"In America: An Anthology of Fashion” theme.\n\nWhile each year the event, largely considered the Oscars of fashion, has selected co-hosts and honorary hosts, Vogue's editor-in-chief Anna Wintour has been at the helm of the Met ball since 1995 curating a tight-knit invite list, seating arrangement and dress code — which is gilded glamour.\n\nMet's best:Our favorite Met Gala looks of all time, from Rihanna to Princess Diana\n\nLast year's Met Gala, though pared down, occurred in September after being delayed due to the coronavirus pandemic. Stars including Frank Ocean, Kim Kardashian, then-co-chair Billie Eilish and many more showed up with their take on \"In America: A Lexicon of Fashion.\"\n\nBack on schedule on the first Monday in May, the 2022 Met Gala is expected to be a larger event as high-profile celebrities circle around to show off their best Gilded Age looks (thank you, HBO, for the style inspiration).\n\nMet Gala's most outrageous looks: Kim K sparks 'Harry Potter' memes, Grimes wields a sword, more\n\nAhead of the grand event, here's all to know about fashion's biggest night.\n\nWhen is the 2022 Met Gala?\n\nThe Met Gala will take place Monday, May 2, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It's the first time the museum has seen the in-person fundraising event at its scheduled time since May 6, 2019. In 2020 the exhibit went virtual, and in 2021 it took place in September.\n\nBig fashion returns:NYFW and the 2021 Met Gala came, but does anyone care?\n\nHow can I watch the Met Gala?\n\nVogue, owned by one of the Met Gala sponsors Condé Nast, will be live streaming the event on its website starting at 6 p.m. ET. LaLa Anthony, Vanessa Hudgens and fashion journalist Hamish Bowles will sit as co-hosts as they interview the stars and designers upon their arrival.\n\nE! News will also host two live streams with their TikTok stream that will capture celebrities as they leave from The Mark Hotel, a popular launching point for the invitees. The entertainment outlet will also host red carpet coverage on \"Live from E!\" beginning at 6 p.m. ET.\n\nWhat is the Met Gala 2022 theme?\n\nFor the gala itself, attendees will be asked to dress in white tie and \"gilded glamour,\" referring to late 1800s America that was led by industrialization and innovation. While we don't have any sneak peeks of the outfits to come we can expect gold embellishments, excessive ruffles, velvet, tulle, undergarment bustiers and corsets.\n\nMet Gala co-chairs:Ryan Reynolds, Blake Lively, Regina King and Lin-Manuel Miranda tapped for Met Gala\n\nThe Met Gala's official theme \"In America: An Anthology of Fashion\" is slightly different from last year's \"Lexicon of Fashion\" theme anddisplay.\n\nSeptember's \"lexicon\" portion of the museum featured \"approximately 100 men’s and women’s ensembles by a diverse range of designers from the 1940s to the present\" while according to the museum's website, the May opening will feature garments dating back to the 18th century with \"vignettes installed in select period rooms.\"\n\nWho are the Met Gala co-chairs?\n\nDirector and actress Regina King, Hollywood's favorite couple Blake Lively and Ryan Reynolds and director and playwright Lin-Manuel Miranda will serve as co-chairs of the 2022 Met Gala.\n\nThe actors and moviemakers are taking a turn in the Met Gala spotlight as the theme will have a focus on film. Star museum curator Andrew Bolton said eight directors will create what he calls “cinematic vignettes” in the period rooms of the American Wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.\n\n'Heavenly Bodies':Metropolitan Museum of Art opens largest, most ambitious exhibit to date\n\nKing, Sofia Coppola, Martin Scorsese, Chloé Zhao, Tom Ford, Janicza Bravo, Julie Dash and Autumn de Wilde will be key parts of launching the exhibit.\n\nFord, head of Instagram Adam Mosseri and Wintour will continue their Met Gala roles as honorary co-chairs.\n\nLOL, 'House of Gucci':Tom Ford 'often laughed out loud' watching the film, calls out some 'absolute hams'\n\nWho can we expect to attend Met Gala?\n\nWell, the invite list is typically kept top secret. The gala's co-chairs King, Lively, Reynolds, Miranda and the live stream co-hosts are almost certain to be present.\n\nOther stars have been mum's the word about their presence. When asked about the event in an interview with The Cut, influencer and entrepreneur Lori Harvey replied: \"Oooo, am I? We shall see, we shall see.\"\n\nZendaya, who was named CFDA's 2021 fashion icon and who has taken the Met ball carpet by storm in years past, has confirmed to Extra TV that for the second year in a row she will not be at the gala.\n\n\"Sorry to disappoint my fans here, but I will be working,\" she said. \"I'll be back eventually.\"", "authors": [], "publish_date": "2022/04/28"}, {"url": "https://www.usatoday.com/story/entertainment/celebrities/2023/01/18/met-gala-2023-date-co-chairs-theme-karl-lagerfeld/11074260002/", "title": "Met Gala 2023: Date, co-chairs and dress code announced for event", "text": "New York City's Metropolitan Museum of Art is ready to get the full glam treatment in just a few months.\n\nThe Met Gala, the annual benefit for the museum’s Costume Institute that gathers fashion and pop culture's most famous and powerful people, will take place May 1 — following its usual calendar placement on the first Monday in May. The theme, which corresponds with the changing fashion exhibit, will honor late designer Karl Lagerfeld.\n\nVogue Editor-in-Chief Anna Wintour announced the 2023 theme during Paris Fashion Week in September. Vogue announced the date, the famous names who will co-chair the annual fundraiser alongside Wintour and the official dress code on Instagram Wednesday.\n\n\"Paying tribute to Mr. Lagerfeld is not solely a task for the museum’s curators: the 2023 dress code is ‘In honor of Karl,’\" the publication wrote.\n\nHere's everything to know about the Oscars of fashion.\n\nWhen is the Met Gala?\n\nThe 2023 Met Gala will take place May 1.\n\nLast year's Met Gala, themed \"In America: An Anthology of Fashion,\" marked a return to the event's annual schedule for the first Monday in May after the pandemic caused the 2020 gala to be canceled and the 2021 gala to be postponed to September.\n\nWhat is the 2023 Met Gala theme?\n\nStars, influencers and fashion figures attending the Met Gala this year will be honoring late designer Karl Lagerfeld.\n\nThe German-born couturier worked for decades simultaneously as creative director of many fashion houses including Chanel, Fendi and Chloé in addition to helming his eponymous international fashion label. He died in 2019 at 85.\n\nThe Met Gala's exclusivity:How can fashion embrace inclusivity's cutting edge?\n\nThe Met's costume institute exhibit will transform to reflect \"Karl Lagerfeld: A Line of Beauty\" and will see some 150 of his creations assembled together to see his \"stylistic language,\" a Met press release says. Lagerfeld’s original sketches will also be on display.\n\nMore:Met Gala 2023 theme, exhibit will celebrate work of late designer Karl Lagerfeld\n\nWho will co-chair the Met Gala with Anna Wintour?\n\nThe exclusive invite list for the Met Gala is mostly under lock and key until the stars arrive on the red carpet for cameras to see. However, a handful of stars are announced as co-chairs ahead of time.\n\nThis year Michaela Coel, Dua Lipa, Penelope Cruz and Roger Federer will host the extravagant event alongside Wintour.\n\nMore:New Anna Wintour biography reveals inner workings of Met Gala, André Leon Talley friendship", "authors": [], "publish_date": "2023/01/18"}, {"url": "https://www.usatoday.com/story/life/entertainthis/2017/05/01/met-gala-2017-everything-you-need-know-comme-des-garcons-rei-kawakubo/101153952/", "title": "Met Gala 2017: Everything you need to know about fashion's biggest ...", "text": "Maeve McDermott\n\nUSATODAY\n\nThe Met Gala is more than just the fashion world's version of the Academy Awards. The annual fundraiser for the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Costume Institute brings together the biggest names in entertainment, fashion and politics for one night of revelry.\n\nTake the world's biggest celebrities, dress them in couture and stick them in a room together, and sparks are bound to fly. President Trump proposed to Melania during the event in 2004, and Taylor Swift and Tom Hiddleston's romance was borne of their Met Gala dance-off in 2016. Historically, guests are also supposed to dress in the fashions of the event's honored designer, a tradition that often turns controversial.\n\nBefore the stars descend on the Metropolitan Museum of Art in NYC on Monday night, learn more about the annual event.\n\nWhat is the Met Gala?\n\nThe Metropolitan Museum of Art Costume Institute Benefit informally called the Met Gala or the Met Ball, is a black-tie fundraiser for the museum's Costume Institute. The event also celebrates the opening of the Costume Institute's annual fashion exhibit.\n\nThe Costume Institute is housed in the museum's Anna Wintour Costume Center, named after the Vogue editor-in-chief. Wintour has served as the Met Gala co-chair nearly every year since 1995.\n\nThis year's theme\n\nOpening this month, the Costume Institute's new exhibit honors the work of Comme des Garçons designer Rei Kawakubo. The Costume Institute's choice of honoree often sets the tone for the Met Gala, with attendees expected to match the exhibit's theme with their own fashion choices for the evening.\n\nThis year, party-goers are encouraged to honor the bold, architectural designs of Kawakubo, who is the first living designer to be honored by the Costume Institute since Yves Saint Laurent in 1983.\n\nThe exhibition, which runs from May 4 to September 4, will feature 100+ of Kawakubo’s Comme des Garçons womenswear designs, dating back to her first Paris runway show in 1981.\n\nThe celebrity hosts\n\nEvery year since Anna Wintour's first year as Met Gala chair in 1995, the event has also featured honorary hosts from the worlds of entertainment and fashion.\n\nAlong with Wintour, this year's co-chairs are Katy Perry, Pharrell Williams, Tom Brady and Gisele Bündchen, with Kawakubo also serving as honorary chair.\n\nAhead of the gala, Perry also appeared on the May cover of Vogue, honoring Kawakubo in a dedicated Comme des Garçons spread.\n\nThe star-studded guest list\n\nOnly Hollywood's biggest award shows boast guest lists that rival that of the invitation-only Met Gala. Wintour has final say over every attendee, and celebrities from A-list entertainers to political heavyweights mingle together at the event.\n\nWhile 2016's Manus x Machina gala hosted stars including Beyoncé and Jay Z, Taylor Swift, Kanye West and the entire Kardashian clan, a spokesperson for the museum told The New York Times that the guest list for this year's event is expected to be slightly smaller.\n\nWho is Rei Kawakubo?\n\nKawakubo, a 74-year-old Japanese designer who founded Comme des Garçons in 1969, is only the second living designer honored by the Costume Institute, along with Saint Laurent.\n\n“Rei Kawakubo is one of the most important and influential designers of the past 40 years,” said Costume Institute curator in charge Andrew Bolton in a press release. “By inviting us to rethink fashion as a site of constant creation, recreation, and hybridity, she has defined the aesthetics of our time.”", "authors": [], "publish_date": "2017/05/01"}, {"url": "https://www.usatoday.com/story/life/people/2019/05/01/met-gala-2019-everything-you-need-know-fashions-big-night/3572315002/", "title": "Met Gala 2019: Everything you need to know about fashion's big night", "text": "It's not informally known as fashion's Academy Awards for nothing.\n\nThe Met Gala, the annual fundraiser for the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Costume Institute, may be the single biggest night of the year for fashion, bringing together the top names in entertainment, politics and other high-powered industries for one night of peacocking and partying.\n\nThis year's Met Gala unfolds on May 6 in New York, corresponding with the opening of the museum's new fashion exhibit.\n\nRead on for more information about this year's theme and what to expect.\n\nWhat is the Met Gala?\n\nCelebrating its 71st anniversary in 2019, the Metropolitan Museum of Art Costume Institute Benefit, better known as the Met Gala or the Met Ball, is a black-tie fundraiser for the museum's Costume Institute. Last year's gala raised over $12 million for the Met. The event also celebrates the opening of the Costume Institute's annual fashion exhibit.\n\nThe Costume Institute is housed in the museum's Anna Wintour Costume Center, named after the Vogue editor-in-chief. Wintour has served as the Met Gala co-chair nearly every year since 1995, and famously hand-picks the guest list.\n\nHow to watch\n\nFor viewers at home who want to tune in, E! will begin broadcasting live from the red carpet with Giuliana Rancic at 5 EDT on TV and on Hulu and YouTube TV.\n\nViewers without a cable connection can also stream the red carpet via Vogue's Facebook page.\n\nWhat is this year's theme?\n\n2018's blockbuster \"Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and Catholic Imagination\" theme will be hard to top, but the stars will try their best to interpret 2019's theme, \"Camp: Notes on Fashion,\" which has nothing to do with camping equipment.\n\n\"Through more than 250 objects dating from the seventeenth century to the present, The Costume Institute's spring 2019 exhibition will explore the origins of camp's exuberant aesthetic,\" reads the Met's official website. \"Susan Sontag's 1964 essay 'Notes on \"Camp\" ' provides the framework for the exhibition, which examines how the elements of irony, humor, parody, pastiche, artifice, theatricality, and exaggeration are expressed in fashion.\"\n\nSontag, one of the 20th century's most respected authors and critics, defined camp as \"a seriousness that fails,\" the \"taste for the androgynous,\" and \"the love of the unnatural.\"\n\n\"It is interesting when you say to people, 'The exhibition this year is going to be on camp,' and you see their minds going, and they're thinking hiking boots, backpacks, rope,\" Wintour told Jenna Bush Hager on Friday's \"Today\" show. \"It's nothing about nature. It's everything that's completely artificial and fake and not really what you think it means.\"\n\nExpect the stars who decide to adhere to this year's theme to embrace Sontag's theory of camp and embody its outrageous and exaggerated spirit, which will inevitably result in some truly eye-popping sartorial choices.\n\nDuring Friday's interview, Wintour teased the unusual nature of the requests she's received ahead of this year's gala.\n\n\"I know we've had some very strange requests, people arriving on unusual methods of transport,\" she said, adding that she \"of course\" says yes to the bizarre asks of the celebrity attendees. \"We want them to take risks, to be fearless, to have fun with fashion, and we all need to laugh at ourselves a little bit, too.\"\n\nThe celebrity hosts\n\nSince 1995, Anna Wintour has presided over the event alongside honorary hosts from the worlds of entertainment and fashion.\n\nThe eclectic co-chairs of this year's Met Gala are Lady Gaga, Harry Styles and Serena Williams.\n\nIn 2018, Wintour was joined by Amal Clooney, Rihanna and Donatella Versace as co-hosts.\n\nConsidering how Rihanna stole the red carpet show last year with her papal garb, expect this year's slate of celebrity hosts to also appear on many best-dressed lists the morning after.\n\nLast year's gala\n\nWhile style watchers will likely find plenty to love in the campy looks of this year's Met Gala, the 2018 version was a fashion wonderland, from Lena Waithe's instantly iconic LGBTQ flag cape to the many angels, popes and renaissance artworks that walked the carpet.\n\nOther attendees included the Kardashian, Jenner and Hadid clans.\n\nLast year's Met Gala:Best-dressed looks from Rihanna, Amal Clooney, Lena Waithe and more", "authors": [], "publish_date": "2019/05/01"}, {"url": "https://www.usatoday.com/story/life/entertainthis/2018/05/04/met-gala-2018-everything-you-need-know-fashions-big-party/577134002/", "title": "Met Gala 2018: Everything you need to know about fashion's big party", "text": "Maeve McDermott\n\nUSA TODAY\n\nIt's the event where President Trump proposed to Melania, and Taylor Swift danced her way into a romance with Tom Hiddleston. The night that provoked Jay-Z, Beyonce and Solange's infamous elevator fight, a party with enough starpower to inspire Sandra Bullock's fictional heist in this summer's forthcoming movie Ocean's 8.\n\nThe occasion, of course, is the Met Gala, the annual fundraiser for the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Costume Institute which corresponds with the opening of a new fashion-centered exhibit.\n\nTraditionally held on the first Monday in May, the evening brings together the biggest names in entertainment, fashion and politics for one night of revelry in New York, which this year unfolds on May 7.\n\nHistorically, guests are supposed to dress to match the year's exhibit, often courting controversy when they deviate from the theme. This year's theme, \"Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination,\" seems ripe for eyebrow-raising choices from its celebrity attendees.\n\nBefore the stars descend on the Met's steps, learn more about the annual event.\n\nWhat is the Met Gala?\n\nCelebrating its 70th anniversary this year, the Metropolitan Museum of Art Costume Institute Benefit informally called the Met Gala or the Met Ball, is a black-tie fundraiser for the museum's Costume Institute, with last year's gala raising over $12 million for the Met. The event also celebrates the opening of the Costume Institute's annual fashion exhibit.\n\nThe Costume Institute is housed in the museum's Anna Wintour Costume Center, named after the Vogue editor-in-chief. Wintour has served as the Met Gala co-chair nearly every year since 1995.\n\nThis year's theme\n\nThe Costume Institute's spring 2018 exhibition, from which the Met Gala gets its sartorial theme, will be \"Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination,\" exploring the intersections of fashion with the practices and traditions of Catholicism. The exhibit, which will feature papal robes and accessories from the Vatican alongside designs from names including Coco Chanel and John Galliano, will be the largest in the Costume Institute's history, spanning three of the museum's spaces: the medieval galleries, the Anna Wintour Costume Center and the Met Cloisters uptown.\n\nAs far as celebrity fashions go, the suggested dress code for the event is \"Sunday best,\" a wink at the event's holy theme.\n\nThe celebrity hosts\n\nEvery year since Wintour took the reins in 1995, the event has also featured honorary hosts from the worlds of entertainment and fashion.\n\nAlong with Wintour, this year's co-chairs are Amal Clooney, Rihanna and Donatella Versace, with Clooney making an appearance on the May cover of Vogue ahead of the gala.\n\nThe star-studded guest list\n\nOnly Hollywood's biggest award shows boast guest lists that rival that of the invitation-only Met Gala. Wintour has final say over every attendee, and celebrities from A-list entertainers to political heavyweights mingle together at the event.\n\nTwo famous names who skipped last year's Met Gala, Beyoncé and Kanye West, may reappear on the carpet Monday night. The stars who attended the 2017 gala included Selena Gomez, Kendall and Kylie Jenner, Priyanka Chopra, Katy Perry, Chrissy Teigen and John Legend, Madonna and hundreds more, with an estimated 550 people on last year's guest list.\n\nThe Ocean's 8 connection\n\nOcean's 8 is an all-female re-imagining of the Ocean's 11 franchise starring Sandra Bullock, Rihanna and Cate Blanchett, who concoct a plot to infiltrate the Met Gala and steal a diamond necklace from Anne Hathaway's actress character. With Rihanna co-chairing the event, expect to see at least some of the cast unite on the Met Gala carpet.\n\nRevisit the 2017 Met Gala:Best dressed\n\nDisastrous duds:The Met Gala 2017 looks that missed the mark", "authors": [], "publish_date": "2018/05/04"}, {"url": "https://www.usatoday.com/story/life/entertainthis/2019/05/06/met-gala-lady-gaga-cardi-b-2019-best-dressed-camp-theme/1122479001/", "title": "Met Gala: Lady Gaga, Cardi B and more impeccably interpret camp ...", "text": "Who are the kings and queens of camp?\n\nThe theme of Monday's Met Gala celebrated \"Camp: Notes on Fashion.\"\n\nVogue editor-in-chief Anna Wintour explained the theme's meaning to Jenna Bush Hager on \"Today\" last week.\n\n\"It's everything that's completely artificial and fake and not really what you think it means,\" said Wintour.\n\nWe applaud these stars for not being afraid to fully embrace the theme.\n\nLady Gaga\n\nMarch 28, 1986, a Met Gala star was born. Gaga, a co-chair of this year's event wore several looks by Brandon Maxwell. She enlisted the help of several people to help carry her long, hot-pink train. Beneath her overcoat, Gaga hid several more ensembles. She removed her outer layer to reveal a strapless black dress with a fitted, asymmetric bodice. Beneath the black dress, a sleek, pink column gown. Underneath that frock, a black bra and underwear set with fishnet stockings.\n\nMore:Lady Gaga strips down to her bra and underwear on the Met Gala carpet\n\nMore:Met Gala 2019 worst dressed: Kim and Kanye West, Harry Styles and other boring looks\n\nCardi B\n\nAnother singer also knew how to grab eyes on the carpet. Cardi B wowed in a design by Thom Browne that was the antithesis of minimalism – perfect for the night's theme. The crimson look featured a jeweled cap, feathered shoulders and massive circular train.\n\nBilly Porter\n\nPorter spread his gilded wings on the carpet after being carried in by half a dozen men in gold pants, with their chests exposed. The actor/singer has The Blonds to thank for his Egyptian-inspired outfit and Giuseppe Zanotti to thank for his shoes.\n\nAhead of his arrival, the \"Pose\" actor told Vogue of camp: \"When it’s done properly, it’s one of the highest forms of fashion and art.”\n\nRyan Murphy\n\nThe \"American Horror Story\" co-creator showed up ready to suffer in the name of fashion. Murphy's blush and peach Christian Siriano ensemble was a tribute to Liberace. Unfortunately, as Murphy tells it, the look was \"literal hell.\"\n\n\"I had to lay down in the car, it weighs a hundred pounds, and I'm harnessed in,\" he told E! on the carpet. \"But ya know, anything for fashion, right?\"\n\nMore:Anna Wintour reveals Karl Lagerfeld made her Met Gala gown before his death\n\nCeline Dion\n\nOur love for Dion's Met Gala look will (sings) \"go oooonnnnn.\" Being instantly turned into a meme pretty much cements one's place on the best-dressed list at the gala. Dion went for it in an Oscar de la Renta ensemble with glitzy fringe.\n\nMore:Celine Dion hits Met Gala carpet in feathered ensemble - and instantly gets memed\n\nJanelle Monae\n\nHats off to Monae for her whimsical Met Gala look. The singer/actress sported an artsy look by Christian Siriano with pops of pink and red.\n\nKacey Musgraves\n\nThe event might've been a \"Barbie World\" for the \"Rainbow\" singer. Musgraves arrived at her first Met by Barbie pink car. She donned a long, blond wig with wavy locks and a vibrant coat dress by Moschino.\n\nLupita Nyong'o\n\nThe actress made a red carpet statement in a technicolor Versace number featuring bright fuchsia and lime green. Her hair was adorned with a handful of gilded picks.\n\nCara Delevingne\n\nThe model earned her stripes when it comes to nailing a theme. Delevingne's headpiece constructed of fake bananas, eyeballs and teeth complemented her rainbow-striped outfit from Dior Haute Couture.\n\nElle Fanning\n\nFanning brought the funk to the fundraising event in a youthful ensemble. Her look screamed over-the-top from head to toe. Even the silhouette of her Miu Miu ensemble was exaggerated, with its bell sleeves and wide-leg trousers. She accessorized with chunky necklaces and charms on her long nails.\n\nContributing: Maeve McDermott\n\nMore:Katy Perry, wearing a 40-pound chandelier, is literally lit at the Met Gala\n\nMore:Creepy! Jared Leto carries his own head at Met Gala, beard and all", "authors": [], "publish_date": "2019/05/06"}, {"url": "https://www.usatoday.com/story/life/entertainthis/2017/10/26/anna-wintour-says-shed-never-invite-trump-back-met-gala-late-late-show-spill-your-guts/801897001/", "title": "'Late Late Show': Anna Wintour won't invite Trump back to Met Gala", "text": "Erin Jensen\n\nUSA TODAY\n\nPresident Trump shouldn't be checking the mail for an invite to next year's Met Gala according to Anna Wintour.\n\nThe Met Gala co-chair and Vogue editor-in-chief did some spilling of the tea during James Corden's stomach-churning game, \"Spill Your Guts or Fill Your Guts,\" on The Late Late Show Wednesday.\n\nThe rules of the game are pretty simple, either answer a tough question or eat something unappetizing.\n\nWhen the late night talk show host asked his guest who would never be invited back to the Metropolitan Museum of Art Costume Institute Benefit she replied simply, \"Donald Trump\" and avoided eating pickled pig's feet.\n\nMore:James Corden, Jimmy Fallon debunk first lady body-double theory with 'the real Melania'\n\nMore:Julia Roberts, James Corden recreate her acting career, relive 'Pretty Woman,' 'Stepmom'\n\nWintour also revealed that despite what Corden had heard, she hadn't dated Bob Marley and says she never even met him. She did opt to take a nibble on bacon-wrapped pizza when asked to rank designers Tom Ford, Marc Jacobs and Ralph Lauren from best to worst.\n\nTo see that moment and Corden down a whole June bug, watch the clip above.", "authors": [], "publish_date": "2017/10/26"}, {"url": "https://www.usatoday.com/story/entertainment/celebrities/2020/05/06/katy-perrys-met-gala-outfit-wouldve-accentuated-baby-bump/5174550002/", "title": "Katy Perry's Met Gala outfit would've accentuated baby bump", "text": "Katy Perry is mourning what could've been: her Met Gala 2020 outfit.\n\nThe \"Witness\" artist shared a photo to Instagram Monday (the day the Met Gala would've taken place) of what she was supposed to wear to fashion's biggest night before it was canceled due to the coronavirus.\n\n\"What would have been... #TheMetBall2020💔,\" a pregnant Perry captioned the post.\n\nPerry's attire would've consisted of what looks like a Jean-Paul Gaultier classic: a rose-gold cone bra wrap-around with a circular piece that fit over her baby bump.\n\nThe 35-year-old pop star's Met Gala outfit is reminiscent of Madonna's iconic cone bra from 1990, which was designed by Gaultier.\n\nPerry, who first announced her pregnancy in March, revealed last month she was expecting a girl with Orlando Bloom.\n\n\"It's a girl,\" Perry captioned an Instagram post alongside a photo of her fiance's face covered in light-pink icing. The \"American Idol\" judge also tagged the location of her photo as \"Girls Run the World.\"\n\nKaty Perry: Singer talks keeping pregnancy news under wraps how her mom figured it out\n\nThough the first Monday in May is usually reserved for the Met Gala, amid the coronavirus pandemic, the event was reimagined as a YouTube special called \"A Moment With the Met.\"\n\nVogue editor-in-chief Anna Wintour, who first assumed the role of Met Gala co-chair in 1995, was joined in the video special by singer Florence Welch, rapper Cardi B and Virgil Abloh, founder of the label Off-White and Louis Vuitton's Men's artistic director.\n\nVirtual Met Gala: Anna Wintour teams up with Cardi B, Virgil Abloh and Florence Welch for YouTube substitute\n\n\"This is a time of grief and of hardship for millions, and the postponement of a party is nothing in comparison,\" said Wintour, who spoke from her home instead of her usual perch greeting Met Gala guests. \"And yet, one thing that we have learned through this difficult time is that we need each other, that community is essential to who we are. If we are to come out of this pandemic stronger and more resilient, we must emerge from it connected as never before.\"\n\nContributing: Erin Jensen, USA TODAY\n\nMore:Jessica Simpson accuses Vogue of body-shaming her 'for having boobs'; magazine apologizes\n\nWe’re all in this together: Sign up for our Staying Apart, Together newsletter for the best how-to, self-help and joyful distractions", "authors": [], "publish_date": "2020/05/06"}, {"url": "https://www.usatoday.com/story/entertainment/celebrities/2022/05/03/met-gala-red-carpet-after-party-gilded-glamour-anthology/9613393002/", "title": "Met Gala 2022: Reporter inside look at theme, red carpet, after party", "text": "NEW YORK — For the first time since 2019, the Met Gala returned to its traditional home on the first Monday in May. Celebrity attendees brought true glamour — and it was a gilded affair if ever there was one.\n\nAfter a pandemic cancellation in 2020 and a postponement to September last year, the full scope of the red carpet returned as a seemingly endless stream of stars, from Kim Kardashian and Pete Davidson to Blake Lively and Ryan Reynolds, posed for the cameras before trekking up the famed steps of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.\n\nIn line with the theme \"In America: An Anthology of Fashion,\" the invite-only event's white-tie dress code was \"gilded glamour,\" a reference to the Gilded Age in the late 1800s. And while attendees based their fashionable interpretations on the era's gold and wealth, another definition of \"gilded\" — one that focuses on false brilliance and a fanciful exterior hiding a lackluster reality — also informed the night.\n\nAfter a weekend of sunshine, the gala was set against dreary and rainy weather, but that didn't stop the stars from stepping out in their finest on a Monday evening for fashion's biggest night. And from our vantage point on the Met steps, the fashion elite evoked feelings of grandeur that momentarily stopped time.\n\nUnder a large, tented red carpet, the star-studded event was briefly shielded from the realities of American life, as news of a leaked draft of an opinion from the U.S. Supreme Court on the verge of overturning Roe v. Wade coincided with the snaps of camera lenses and the cheers of fans lined up outside the entrance on Fifth Avenue.\n\nMet Gala 2022 best dressed:See Kim Kardashian as Marilyn Monroe, Blake Lively's NYC nod, more stars\n\nThe Met Gala's exclusivity is outdated. How can fashion embrace inclusivity's cutting edge?\n\nThe annual benefit, the backdrop for the latest fashionable and historical display at the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Costume Institute, is always a glitzy spectacle, this year leaning more into the old American glamour.\n\nFrom the celebrities to the moments you didn't see, USA TODAY got a glimpse of the gilded. Here's an inside look at what went down on the carpet (and at the afterparties).\n\nMet Gala 2022:Everything to know as the stars take on 'Gilded Glamour' dress code\n\nWhat really happens on the Met Gala red carpet\n\nOn the jam-packed carpet, which went on for more than three hours, members of the press lined both sides of the grand steps leading up to the museum's entrance, which led to a lavish dinner party for invited guests. The limited list, one of the hottest tickets in town, is approved by Vogue editor-in-chief and honorary Met Gala co-chair Anna Wintour, and tickets for a table can cost upwards of $200,000.\n\nThe first stars to make their way up the carpet Monday were Vanessa Hudgens and LaLa Anthony, who (along with Vogue global editor at large Hamish Bowles) co-hosted Vogue's livestream. Wintour wasn't far behind, her arrival signaling the official start of the steady cascade of celebrities decked out in gilded glam.\n\nMet Gala 2022 co-chairs:Ryan Reynolds, Blake Lively, Regina King and Lin-Manuel Miranda serve as co-hosts\n\nAs one of the evening's co-chairs, Lively aced the carpet with an expert understanding of the theme: Her quick-change gown served as a tribute to New York City, courtesy of Versace.\n\nOther highlights included Billie Eilish, looking as though she just emerged from her sitting room in 1890 to throw a raucous party; Janelle Monáe, glittering in a headpiece and gown from Ralph Lauren; Kerry Washington in Tory Burch; Cardi B, golden in Versace; Bad Bunny, donning an updo and a Burberry ensemble; Lizzo, whose gilded flute was more than just an accessory (she played a tune for reporters); co-chair Lin-Manuel Miranda; Kid Cudi in a stunning royal blue cape; and Rosalia in a corseted Givenchy gown.\n\nWhile many view fashion as simply frivolity – and there tends to be a true excess of the frivolous at the ball – it continues to serve as an important marker in history. The Costume Institute (and the film directors tapped to design parts of the exhibit) tried to highlight that historical context with stories of unsung heroes, particularly women and people of color, in American fashion. The Met Gala and its 2022 theme also provided a stage to recall historical fashion moments and bring them into the current day with new, history-making ensembles.\n\nMet Gala 2022 exhibit:Regina King, Tom Ford, more directors define American fashion\n\nBeyond the clothes, the carpet featured unseen moments among the guests.\n\nReynolds looked lovingly down the steps at his wife as she posed for the cameras. Fellow celeb couple Alicia Keys and Swizz Beatz shared a cozy embrace at the top of the steps, while Kourtney Kardashian waved to onlookers as she held hands with Travis Barker.\n\nCynthia Erivo greeted Met Gala veteran Sarah Jessica Parker, who had laryngitis, she told reporters as she hustled up the steps in her voluminous Christopher John Rodgers gown. Valentino designer Pier Paolo Piccioli adjusted Glenn Close's hot pink look before she stepped in front of the camera for the Vogue livestream.\n\nJimmy Fallon convened with Corey Gamble, Giveon and Kid Cudi, shaking hands and exchanging hugs. When Lizzo spotted Kim Kardashian, she let out a gasp and declared how good the star looked in her gold gown.\n\nKardashian and Davidson made their Met Gala red carpet debut as a couple, with the reality star and businesswoman draped in the same skin-tight gown Marilyn Monroe donned sing \"Happy Birthday\" to former President John F. Kennedy, marking nearly 60 years to the day.\n\nKim Kardashian or Marilyn Monroe? Kim Kardashian, Pete Davidson attend Met Gala\n\nSee the power couples:Joe Jonas, pregnant Sophie Turner turn heads at the Met Gala\n\nAll of Kardashian's sisters came together on the carpet ahead of her arrival, with mom Kris Jenner and her beau Gamble holding court as they waited for everyone to ascend. Kourtney and Khloe Kardashian stood side by side with sisters Kylie and Kendall Jenner, their unity visually echoing the sentiment they avow in their new Hulu reality series: \"Never go against the family.\"\n\nAfterparties feature celeb sightings, performances\n\nMany celebrities get carpet ready at the nearby Carlyle or Mark hotels, just blocks away from the Met — and close to some of the afterparties.\n\nAn Instagram-hosted afterparty at the James B. Duke House featured a DJ set from Anderson .Paak and performance from SZA. Playboy and Cardi B hosted an afterparty at the Boom Boom Room in the Meatpacking District, with guests including Eilish, Awkwafina, Sebastian Stan, Donatella Versace and more.\n\nIn midtown, designer LaQuan Smith hosted another one of the night's few afterparties, decking out Peak at Hudson Yards. Although the start time was officially 11 p.m., guests flowed in for several hours (it is the city that never sleeps, after all). Celebrities at the soiree included Teyana Taylor, Saucy Santana, LaLa Anthony and Billy Porter; each had their own VIP area inside the crowded venue.\n\nGuests were ushered up to the 101st floor for a post-gala shindig, complete with a not-yet-released type of Popeye's chicken sandwich (both Taylor and Santana were spotted indulging in the late-night bite) and signature Remy Martin cognac drinks flowed. Pairs of Smith's slippers and brightly-colored sunglasses were available at $1 a pop in quasi-vending machines for partygoers to grab and wear.", "authors": [], "publish_date": "2022/05/03"}, {"url": "https://www.usatoday.com/story/entertainment/celebrities/2021/09/08/met-gala-2021-everything-you-need-to-know/8247197002/", "title": "Met Gala 2021: How to watch, what to know on fashion's biggest night", "text": "Breathtaking, avant-garde ensembles have served as the focal point for the Met Gala's annual celebration of fashion, celebrities and art – but all eyes are on the must-have accessory of the year: a vaccination card.\n\nThe biggest names in Hollywood are set to descend upon the Metropolitan Museum of Art's carpeted stairs in New York this fall, more than a year after the COVID-19 pandemic upended nearly all entertainment events and canceled the 2020 Met Gala.\n\nFashion's biggest night will mark one of the largest red carpet extravaganzas that we have seen in some time, but things may look a little different this year. All attendees must be fully vaccinated from COVID-19, the museum announced in August.\n\nHere's everything you need to know about the 2021 Met Gala, from this year's theme, to safety protocols and the A-list celebrity co-chairs:\n\nWhen is the Met Gala?\n\nThe Met Gala is normally held on the first Monday of May, but because of the COVID-19 pandemic, the event was pushed back to Sept. 13 for a \"more intimate\" version at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.\n\nThis will mark the first in-person fundraising event since May 6, 2019 after the 2020 Met Gala was held virtually sans celebrities or red carpet.\n\n2020 Met Gala YouTube substitute: Anna Wintour teams up with Cardi B, Virgil Abloh and Florence Welch\n\nWho are this year's Met Gala co-chairs?\n\nBillie Eilish, 19, Timothée Chalamet, 25, Amanda Gorman, 23, and Naomi Osaka, 23, will be co-chairs of this year's Met Gala, the museum announced in May.\n\nFrom Eilish channeling her body image struggles into a cutting edge style to Chalamet's bold red carpet choices, Gorman's iconic yellow inaugural coat and Osaka's versatile flair both on and off the tennis court – all four co-chairs have made waves in fashion in their own ways.\n\nHonorary chairs include American fashion designer Tom Ford, Vogue editor-in-chief Anna Wintour and Adam Mosseri, the head of Instagram, which is sponsoring the gala.\n\n2021 Met Gala co-chairs:Billie Eilish, Timothée Chalamet, Amanda Gorman and Naomi Osaka\n\nWhat is this year's Met Gala theme?\n\nThe 2021 Met Gala is celebrating American fashion.\n\nThis year's theme, \"In America: A Lexicon of Fashion,\" will honor the 75th anniversary of the museum’s Costume Institute and \"explore a modern vocabulary of American fashion,\" the museum said.\n\nAndrew Bolton, the curator behind the Costume Institute, told Vogue in April that \"American fashion is undergoing a Renaissance.\"\n\n\"The emphasis on conscious creativity was really consolidated during the pandemic and the social justice movements,\" Bolton told the outlet. \"And I’ve been really impressed by American designers’ responses to the social and political climate, particularly around issues of body inclusivity and gender fluidity, and I’m just finding their work very, very self-reflective.\"\n\nWho's invited?\n\nThe guest list is as exclusive and secretive as it gets. We won't know who will attend the Met Gala for sure until the actual event, but where's the fun in knowing ahead of time anyway? Expect to see the \"Who's Who\" of entertainment and fashion.\n\nHowever, one person we know won't be at the Met Gala is Zendaya. During an interview last week with Extra for her movie \"Dune,\" the actress shared she would be working instead of walking the red carpet.\n\n\"I will unfortunately not be able to attend because I'll be working on 'Euphoria.' … I wish I could especially since this fashion icon (Timothée Chalamet) is going to be hosting,\" she said.\n\nWhat are the COVID safety protocols?\n\nThe museum requires all visitors age 12 and older to be vaccinated against COVID-19, in accordance to New York's mandate requiring proof of vaccination for indoor activities.\n\nThe same will apply to this year's Met Gala.\n\n\"Currently, all attendees… must provide proof of full vaccination and will also be expected to wear masks indoors except when eating or drinking,\" a spokesperson for The Met confirmed to People earlier this month. \"We will update these guidelines as needed.\"\n\nHow to stream the Met Gala\n\nThe Met Gala is one the hardest invitations to score, but if you are left on the couch like the rest of us, don't fret. The fashion extravaganza will be exclusively streamed by Vogue on Twitter.\n\nThe livestream, hosted by actresses KeKe Palmer and Ilana Glazer, will feature \"unprecedented access to the Met Gala’s famous red carpet,\" including interviews with high-profile guests and a close look at their attire.\n\nHead over to twitter.com/voguemagazine on Sept. 13 at 5:30 p.m. EST to tune in.\n\nAlready looking forward to next year's Met Gala?\n\nAlthough the blockbuster fundraiser will take place in the fall this year, the 2022 Met Gala will return to its traditional date on the first Monday of the month: May 2, 2022.\n\nThe theme will be a continuation of fashion in the United States, \"In America: An Anthology of Fashion,\" the second installment of the two-part exploration.\n\nWhen will the exhibits open to the public?\n\n\"In America: A Lexicon of Fashion,\" featuring ensembles exploring fashion in the United States and the \"deeper associations with issues of equity, diversity, and inclusion,\" is slated to open Sept. 18.\n\nPart two, \"In America: An Anthology of Fashion,\" will open in the museum’s popular American Wing period rooms on May 5, 2022. The collection will explore American fashion, with collaborations with film directors, by \"presenting narratives that relate to the complex and layered histories of those spaces.\"\n\nBoth exhibits will close Sept. 5, 2022.", "authors": [], "publish_date": "2021/09/08"}]}
{"question_id": "20230120_14", "search_time": "2023/01/20/16:37", "search_result": [{"url": "https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2023/01/17/china-population-decline-birth-rate-global-economy-impact/11066270002/", "title": "China's birthrate declines for first time in decades. It could have ...", "text": "China's birthrate has declined for the first time in decades, China's National Bureau of Statistics reported Tuesday, a shift that experts say could influence the global economy.\n\nThe world's most populous country had 1.41175 billion people in 2022, a drop of 850,000 compared with 2021. The birthrate was 6.77 births per 1,000 people, a fall from 7.52 births per 1,000 in 2021, according to the statistics agency.\n\nWhy China's falling population matters\n\nResearchers believe the lower population growth rate could mean higher labor costs in China because of a smaller pool of available workers. A shrinking labor force could make it harder for China's government to fund its public health and welfare costs, which would suppress China's economy. \"Fewer births in China will lead to economic slowdown, manufacturing recession, university bankruptcy, and will also lead to high prices and high inflation in the US and EU,\" Yi Fuxian, a researcher at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and an expert on Chinese demographics, wrote on Twitter.\n\n'Chairman of everything':How China has changed under Xi Jinping\n\nChina's National Bureau of Statistics released separate data Tuesday that showed the country's economy grew by 3% in 2022, well below its 5.5% growth target. China's zero-COVID policy had a major effect on its economic activity in 2022.\n\nWhy is China's population declining?\n\nSeven years after China began ending its one-child policy limiting population growth, women in China are still choosing to have fewer children or opting to have them later in life, according to the YuWa Population Research Institute, a Beijing-based think tank. Among the reasons cited: rising living costs. YuWa has calculated that China is one of the world's most expensive places for child-rearing; the average cost of raising a child to age 18, as of 2019, is $76,629 – or 6.9 times China's per capita GDP that year. (In the U.S., the figure was 4.11 times per capita GDP.)\n\n\"There is a clear trend among young women not wanting to get married and have children anymore, a phenomenon which has been exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic and the harsh lockdowns,\" said Martina Fuchs, a business journalist for Xinhua, a Chinese state news agency. \"They choose their financial independence and social freedom and want to have their own lives and careers.\"\n\nFuchs is at the World Economic Forum's annual gathering this week in Davos, Switzerland. She said China's population decline is a key topic of discussion among the event's business and political leaders. \"Participants are worried about China’s economic performance this year as they pinned their hopes on China playing the role of a growth engine in the current economic crisis.\"\n\nInternational news to watch in 2023:Ukraine. Climate catastrophe\n\nWho will overtake China, and when?\n\nChina has had a large population for a long time. In 1750, it had a population of 225 million, or about 28% of the world's population that year, according to Our World in Data, a research unit affiliated with Oxford University. China has been the world's most populous nation since at least 1950, and it has not seen any measurable decreases to its population since 1961, the final year of China's Great Famine. But the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences forecasts China's population will soon start decreasing by about 1.1%, or 15 million, each year – in 2022 it fell just 0.06% – pushing its 1.41 billion population to under 600 million in 2100.\n\nBy that time, India will have more people than any other country, with a projected population of 1.53 billion. In fact, India is on course to surpass China as the world's most populous country a lot sooner than that, by 2024, when Our World in Data researchers estimate it will have 1.44 billion people.", "authors": [], "publish_date": "2023/01/17"}, {"url": "https://www.cnn.com/2022/09/01/china/china-marriage-registration-record-low-intl-hnk/index.html", "title": "China records fewest marriages since 1986, adding to fears of ...", "text": "CNN —\n\nChina last year registered the fewest marriages since its public records began more than three decades ago – adding to concerns the country faces a looming demographic crisis.\n\nThere were 7.6 million marriage registrations in 2021, data released by China’s Ministry of Civil Affairs last week shows.\n\nThat’s the fewest since 1986, when the ministry began publicly releasing the figures, according to state-run tabloid Global Times. It is a 6.1% decrease from the previous year and the eighth consecutive year marriage rates have fallen.\n\nAt the same time, the average age of newlyweds is inching up, with nearly half of those married last year age 30 and above.\n\nThe figures reflect a trend that is increasingly a cause for concern among officials in the world’s most populous nation, home to 1.4 billion: young people, especially millennials, are increasingly choosing not to get married or have children – and even when they do, they tend to do so later in life.\n\nExperts say the knock-on effect on what is already a shrinking workforce could have a severe impact on the country’s economy and social stability.\n\nIn just six years, the number of Chinese people getting married for the first time fell by 41%, from 23.8 million in 2013 to 13.9 million in 2019, according to China’s National Bureau of Statistics.\n\nThe decline is partly due to decades of policies designed to limit China’s population growth, which mean there are fewer young people of marriageable age, according to Chinese officials and sociologists.\n\nBut it’s also a result of changing attitudes to marriage, especially among young women who are becoming more educated and financially independent.\n\nFaced with widespread workplace discrimination and patriarchal traditions – such as the expectation for women to be responsible for child care and housework – some women are growing disillusioned with marriage.\n\nStatistics show both genders are delaying marriage. From 1990 to 2016, the average age for first marriages rose from 22 to 25 for Chinese women, and from 24 to 27 for Chinese men, according to the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.\n\nGlobal Times also pointed to increasing work pressures for young people, who face stagnating wages, a competitive job market and rising costs of living.\n\nThe decline in marriages adds to concerns over China’s looming demographic crisis as it struggles to raise a falling birth rate.\n\nIn 2014, the country’s working-age population started to shrink for the first time in more than three decades.\n\nThe following year, the Chinese government announced an end to its one-child policy, allowing couples to have two children, then increased that to three children in 2021 – but both marriage and birth rates continued to drop.\n\nChina isn’t the only country struggling with this problem.\n\nJapan and South Korea have also faced falling birth rates and shrinking populations in recent years.\n\nGovernments in all three countries have introduced measures to encourage births – such as financial incentives, cash vouchers, housing subsidies and more child care support – with limited success.", "authors": ["Jessie Yeung"], "publish_date": "2022/09/01"}, {"url": "https://www.cnn.com/2022/01/17/economy/china-population-data-2021-intl-hnk/index.html", "title": "China's birth rate drops for a fifth straight year to record low | CNN ...", "text": "Editor’s Note: 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.\n\nHong Kong CNN Business —\n\nChina’s birth rate plummeted for a fifth consecutive year to hit a new record low in 2021, despite government efforts to encourage couples to have more children in the face of a looming demographic crisis.\n\nThe world’s most populous country recorded 10.62 million births last year, or only 7.5 births per 1,000 people, according to China’s National Bureau of Statistics — marking the lowest level since the founding of Communist China in 1949.\n\nThe number of births was just enough to outnumber deaths, with the population growing by 480,000 to 1.4126 billion. The natural growth rate fell to 0.034%, the lowest since China’s great famine from 1959 to 1961, which killed tens of millions of people and led to a population decline.\n\nNew births in 2021 dropped 11.6% from 12.02 million in 2020 — a gentler decline than the 18% plunge that year, from 14.65 million in 2019. Chinese demographers have warned that if the downward trend continues, China’s population could stark shrinking soon.\n\nNing Jizhe, head of the National Bureau of Statistics, told state media Monday the decline in births stemmed from a combination of factors, from “a decrease in the number of women of childbearing age, a continued decline in fertility, changes in attitudes toward childbearing and delays of marriage by young people,” including due to the pandemic.\n\nThe plunging birth rate comes as the Chinese government ramps up efforts to encourage families to have more children, after realizing its decades-long one-child policy had contributed to a rapidly aging population and shrinking workforce that could severely distress the country’s economic and social stability.\n\nTo arrest the falling birth rate, the Chinese government announced in 2015 that it would allow married couples to have two children. But after a brief uptick in 2016, the national birth rate has been falling year on year, prompting authorities last year to further loosen the policy to three children.\n\nNing, the Chinese statistics official, said in 2021, 43% of the children born were the second child in a family. He said the three-child policy is expected to gradually add births, and that “China’s total population will remain above 1.4 billion for a period of time to come.”\n\nFor decades, local governments forced millions of women to abort pregnancies deemed illegal by the state under the one-child policy. Now, they are churning out a flurry of propaganda slogans and policies to encourage more births. The common incentives include cash handouts, real estate subsidies and extension of maternity leave.\n\nLast year, more than 20 provincial or regional governments amended their family planning laws, including extending maternity leave for women. For example, eastern Zhejiang province offers 188 days of maternity leave for the third child; and in northern Shaanxi province, women can enjoy 350 days paid leave for having a third child, according to state media reports.\n\nBut the policies have failed to convince many women, who worry they’ll be further disadvantaged as companies seek to avoid the extra financial burden.\n\nThe high cost of raising children is also deterring parents from having more of them, especially among the country’s growing middle class.\n\nChina’s high property prices and rising education costs, especially in big cities, have frequently been cited in surveys as the top factors preventing couples from having more children.\n\nBoth sectors have been thrust into the spotlight this year, with the debt crisis surrounding property giant Evergrande and the Chinese government’s sweeping crackdown on the private tutoring industry.", "authors": ["Nectar Gan"], "publish_date": "2022/01/17"}, {"url": "https://www.cnn.com/2022/08/30/health/elon-musk-population-collapse-wellness/index.html", "title": "Elon Musk thinks the population will collapse. Demographers say it's ...", "text": "CNN —\n\nBillionaire Elon Musk tweeted, not for the first time, that “population collapse due to low birth rates is a much bigger risk to civilization than global warming.” Climate change is a serious problem facing the planet and experts say it’s difficult to compare problems.\n\nWhat is clear, demographers say, is that the global population is growing, despite declines in some parts of the world, and it shouldn’t be collapsing any time soon – even with birth rates at lower levels than in the past.\n\n“He’s better off making cars and engineering than at predicting the trajectory of the population,” said Joseph Chamie, a consulting demographer and a former director of the United Nations Population Division, who has written several books about population issues.\n\n“Yes, some countries, their population is declining, but for the world, that’s just not the case.”\n\nPopulation projections by the numbers\n\nThe world’s population is projected to reach 8 billion by mid-November of this year, according to the United Nations. The UN predicts the global population could grow to around 8.5 billion in just 8 years.\n\nBy 2080, the world’s population is expected to peak at 10.4 billion. Then there’s a 50% chance that the population will plateau or begin to decrease by 2100. More conservative models like the one published in 2020 in the Lancet anticipate the global population would be about 8.8 billion people by 2100.\n\nIt’s true that what’s driving current population growth is not a higher birth rate. What drives global population growth is that fewer people are dying young. Global life expectancy was 72.8 years in 2019, an increase of nine years since 1990. That is expected to increase to 77.2 years by 2050.\n\nGlobally, the fertility rate has not “collapsed,” nor should it, according to the UN, but it has dropped significantly.\n\nIn 1950, women typically had five births each; globally, last year, it was 2.3 births. By 2050, the UN projects a further global decline to 2.1 births per woman.\n\nIn some countries, it is lower. In the US the 1950s, it was 3.6 births per woman, it slipped to 1.6 in 2020, according to the World Bank. In Italy, it was 1.2; in Japan, it was 1.3; in China, 1.2. In January 2022, the country announced the birth rate fell for the fifth year in a row, even with the repeal of the one child policy, allowing couples to have up to three children as of 2021.\n\n“Virtually every developed country is below two, and it’s been that way for 20 or 30 years,” Chamie said. Most countries have gone through what’s called a demographic transition.\n\nThe only continent that hasn’t finished this transition, he said, is parts of Africa, where there are 15 to 20 countries where the average number of children couples have is five. But in those countries, children still face high death rates. The infant mortality rate for kids under 5 is 8 to 10 times higher than in developed regions, and maternal mortality is more than double, Chamie said.\n\nIf women in these African regions had more access to contraception, education, and health care, these problems could be addressed and the global population could decline further – but people would be better off in terms of individual health.\n\nThe ‘gold medal’ century\n\nIn terms of population growth, the 20th century was an anomaly.\n\n“That century was the most impressive demographic century ever. It had more gold medals than all the other centuries,” Charmie said.\n\nThe human population nearly quadrupled, something that had never happened before in recorded history. That’s largely because of improvements in public health.\n\nThe world has antibiotics, vaccines, public health programs and improved sanitation to thank for people living longer and more mothers and children surviving birth.\n\nWith contraception, especially in 1964, when the oral pill was widely introduced in the US, couples were now better able to determine when and how many children they had.\n\n“Contraception, the oral pill had a much more significant effect on the world than the car,” Charmie said.\n\nAs more women got an education, worked outside the home and got a later start on children in many countries with access to contraception, couples had fewer children and the population started to decline.\n\nIn 2020, the global population growth rate fell under 1% for the first time since 1950.\n\nThe picture in the US\n\nIn the US, the fertility rate is down in part due to what Ken Johnson, a senior demographer at the Casey School of Public Poilcy and a professor of sociology at the University of New Hampshire, characterized as a “significant” decline in teen births.\n\n“Most demographers would see that as a good thing,” he said.\n\nHe said the other driver was a decline in the number of births to women in their 20s. That trend has been around since 2008. People put off or decided not to have babies in part because of the recession, he said. Covid then exacerbated this trend.\n\nBetween July of 2020 and 2021, the growth rate of the US population was the lowest it’s been in probably 100 years he said.\n\n“Is it a collapse of the number of births? No, I wouldn’t say that,” Johnson said.\n\nHe said there are a few factors at play in the low US growth rate: fewer births, fewer immigrants due to Trump-era policies, and more deaths as the US population is ages. Covid-19 contributed to higher deaths, too.\n\n“It’s almost like a perfect storm if you will,” Johnson said. “Births are way down, Covid pushes deaths way up, and then immigration is quite slow, too, so it is no wonder that the population growth rate is so low when you bring all those factors together at the same time.”\n\nPreventing population problems down the road\n\nAs the population ages and birth rates decline in some areas of the globe, that could put strain on social systems.\n\nThe share of the population over age 65 will rise from 10% in 2022 to 16% in 2050. That’s twice the number of kids under age 5.\n\nGlobally, the trick to make such a population age imbalance work, is that governments will need to be proactive, the UN says. Countries with aging populations need to adapt public programs that will support this growing population of older people. That means shoring up programs like social security, pensions and establishing universal access to health care and long-term care.\n\nIn the US, William Frey, a demographer and senior fellow with Brookings Metro, said he doesn’t see the need for more couples to have more babies to address the age imbalance in the United States. Policies that would support couples that want children – affordable daycare and family leave policies, for example – could help, but that that hasn’t made a big difference in terms of fertility rates.\n\nGet CNN Health's weekly newsletter Sign up here to get The Results Are In with Dr. Sanjay Gupta every Tuesday from the CNN Health team.\n\nFertility is below the replacement rate in the US, meaning couples are having fewer than two children each, but the rate is not as low as it is in most of Europe, he said.\n\n“I don’t think in the US it’s an issue of collapse, because we can certainly open the faucet for more immigrants anytime we want to,” Frey said. “We’ll have no paucity of people who want to come through the door to immigrate here in the future. Immigrants and their children are younger than the population as a whole and so that will help to keep the population from aging as well.”", "authors": ["Jen Christensen"], "publish_date": "2022/08/30"}, {"url": "https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2022/07/11/un-world-population-8-billion-people/10029285002/", "title": "UN: World population to hit 8 billion people in November", "text": "The world is continuing to grow.\n\nThe latest report from the United Nations projects the global population will reach 8 billion people later this year and continue to rise for the next eight decades.\n\nThe World Population Prospects 2022 report, released on Monday by the U.N.'s Department of Economic and Social Affairs Population Division, outlined what countries around the world should expect in the coming years.\n\nThe global population is expected to reach 8 billion by Nov. 15, the U.N. predicts, but it won't stop there. The population could be around 8.5 billion by 2030, 9.7 billion in 2050 and 10.4 billion in 2100, meaning Earth could have a 31% increase in human population by the end of the century.\n\nThe estimated population growth comes as the world's average fertility rate continues to decline. In 2020, the global population growth rate fell below 1% for the first time since 1950. Currently, it's at 2.3 births per woman, down from the average five births per woman in 1950. By 2050, it's expected to slightly fall to 2.1 births per woman.\n\nStill, factors such as the rise of life expectancy are reasons why the global population continues to rise.\n\n\"Globally, life expectancy reached 72.8 years in 2019, an increase of almost 9 years since 1990. Further reductions in mortality are projected to result in an average longevity of around 77.2 years globally in 2050,\" the report reads.\n\n\"Two-thirds of the projected increase in global population through 2050 will be driven by the momentum of past growth that is embedded in the youthful age structure of the current population. Such growth would occur even if childbearing in today's high-fertility countries were to fall immediately to around two births per woman.\"\n\nPeople ages 65 and older are expected to account for 16% of the human population by 2050, up from 10% in 2022. Men currently make up 50.3% of the population, but by 2050, there are expected to be just as many women as men.\n\nHow many people are in the world?: A look at the population in 2022\n\nGlobal population: Elon Musk says there aren't 'enough people,' birthrate could threaten human civilization\n\nWorld's most populated country soon won't be China\n\nChina has long been the most populous country, but that isn't expected to last long, with India projected to be the world's most populous country in 2023. Each country currently has a population over 1.4 billion people, accounting for over 35% of the global population, but China's population is expected to start declining as early as next year.\n\nBy 2050, India is projected to have 1.6 billion people, while China is projected to have 1.3 billion people.\n\nIndia is just one of eight countries – including the Philippines, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Egypt, Ethiopia, Nigeria, Pakistan and the United Republic of Tanzania – expected to see major population growth by 2050. The increase in several sub-Saharan countries is expected to result in the population doubling in the area.\n\nOn the other side of the population spectrum, 61 countries are expected to have a population decrease of at least 1%. Of that list, Bulgaria, Latvia, Lithuania, Serbia and Ukraine are projected to lose at least 20% of their population.\n\nWhat about the United States' population?\n\nNorth America is projected by the U.N. to reach its peak population in the late-2030s and then start declining \"due to sustained low levels of fertility.\" But that won't affect the population of the U.S.\n\nThe U.S. population is currently 337 million people and it is projected to be at 375 million people in 2050, still making it the third most populous country in the world, behind India and China.\n\nFollow Jordan Mendoza on Twitter: @jordan_mendoza5.", "authors": [], "publish_date": "2022/07/11"}, {"url": "https://www.cnn.com/2022/08/26/asia/south-korea-worlds-lowest-fertility-rate-intl-hnk/index.html", "title": "South Korea records world's lowest fertility rate -- again | CNN", "text": "Seoul, South Korea CNN —\n\nSouth Korea has broken its own record for the world’s lowest fertility rate, according to official figures released Wednesday, as the country struggles to reverse its years-long trend of declining births.\n\nThe country’s fertility rate, which indicates the average number of children a woman will have in her lifetime, sunk to 0.81 in 2021 – 0.03% lower than the previous year, according to government-run Statistics Korea.\n\nTo put that into perspective, the 2021 fertility rate was 1.6 in the United States and 1.3 in Japan, which also saw its lowest rate on record last year. In some African countries, where fertility rates are the highest in the world, the figure is 5 or 6.\n\nTo maintain a stable population, countries need a fertility rate of 2.1 – anything above that indicates population growth.\n\nSouth Korea’s birth rate has been dropping since 2015, and in 2020 the country recorded more deaths than births for the first time – meaning the number of inhabitants shrank, in what’s called a “population death cross.”\n\nAnd as fertility rates drop, South Korean women are also having babies later in life. The average age of women that gave birth in 2021 was 33.4 – 0.2 years older than the previous year, according to the statistics agency.\n\nMeanwhile, South Korea’s population is also getting older, indicating a demographic decline that experts fear will leave the country with too few people of working age to support its burgeoning elderly population – both by paying taxes and filling jobs in fields such as health care and home assistance.\n\nAs of last November, 16.8% of South Koreans were over 65 years old, while just 11.8% were age 14 or under.\n\nThat proportion of elderly Koreans is rising rapidly – it increased by more than 5% between 2020 and 2021, according to census data. Meanwhile, the working age population – people between ages 15 and 64 – declined by 0.9% between 2020 and 2021.\n\nIn South Korea and Japan, there are similar reasons behind the decline in births – including demanding work cultures, stagnating wages, rising costs of living and skyrocketing housing prices.\n\nMany South Korean women say they just don’t have the time, money, or emotional capacity to go on dates as they put their career first in a highly competitive job market in which they often face a patriarchal culture and gender inequality.\n\nThe South Korean government has introduced several measures in recent years to tackle the falling fertility rate, including allowing both parents to take parental leave at the same time and extending paid paternal leave.\n\nSocial campaigns have encouraged men to take on a more active role in childcare and housework, and in some parts of the country, authorities are handing out “new baby vouchers” to encourage parents to have more children.", "authors": ["Gawon Bae Jessie Yeung", "Gawon Bae", "Jessie Yeung"], "publish_date": "2022/08/26"}, {"url": "https://www.cnn.com/2022/08/31/health/life-expectancy-declines-2021/index.html", "title": "US life expectancy lowest in decades after dropping nearly a full ...", "text": "CNN —\n\nAfter a historic drop in 2020, life expectancy in the United States took another significant hit in 2021.\n\nAccording to provisional data published Wednesday by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, life expectancy at birth dropped by nearly a year between 2020 and 2021 – and by more than two and a half years overall since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic.\n\nLife expectancy at birth fell to 76.1 years, the lowest it has been in the US since 1996, and the biggest 2-year decline in a century.\n\nCovid-19 was the driving factor, with deaths from the virus contributing to half of the decline from 2020 to 2021, according to the report from the CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics.\n\nThe death rate from Covid-19 was higher in 2021 than it was in 2020, so it wasn’t particularly surprising that life expectancy would fall again, Bob Anderson, chief mortality statistician for the CDC, told CNN.\n\nAlso, drug overdose deaths reached a record high in 2021, killing about 109,000 people. And deaths from unintentional injuries – about half of which are due to drug overdose – was the second-leading cause of the decline in life expectancy.\n\nDr. Nora Volkow, director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, also said it wasn’t surprising, but it is frustrating.\n\n“It is distressing to see a continuing negative impact of drug overdose on the life expectancy of Americans. These deaths often occur in young adults and therefore represent a tragically high number of years of life lost and devastating impact on individuals, families, and communities,” she said. “We have the science and the tools available to help us reverse this trend and reduce the number of overdose deaths in this country. But these tools are not being used effectively.”\n\nEven if expected, the scale of the decline is still extraordinary. In 2021, mortality rates due to influenza and pneumonia decreased, and if not for these “offsetting effects,” the decline in US life expectancy would have been even greater, according to the report.\n\n“Mortality generally, mainly since the 1950s, has changed rather slowly,” Anderson said. Changes of more than a few tenths of a year have been considered substantial.\n\nAn ‘astounding’ decline\n\nThe recent decline among American Indian and Alaska Native people is particularly “astounding,” Anderson said.\n\nThe life expectancy for this group plunged by nearly 2 years between 2020 and 2021 and a startling 6.6 years since 2019 – more than twice as much as it did for the total US population.\n\nAt 65.2 years, the life expectancy for American Indians in 2021 was equal to the overall US life expectancy in 1944.\n\n“When I saw that, in the report, I just – my jaw dropped,” Anderson said.\n\n“It was hard enough to fathom a 2.7 year decline over 2 years overall. But then to see a 6.6 year decline for the American Indian population – it just shows the substantial impact that the pandemic has had on that population.”\n\nDeaths from Covid-19 directly were the leading contributor to the decline in life expectancy among American Indian people in 2021, but deaths due to drug overdose and other unintentional injuries, as well as chronic liver disease, which is often caused by alcohol abuse, were nearly equal contributors for this group.\n\nWhen it comes to the pandemic, Anderson said, “I’m not just talking about Covid-19 necessarily, but also the other factors that seem to have increased during the pandemic.”\n\nExperts say the pandemic exacerbated already existing disparities for American Indians and others.\n\nDr. Matthew Clark, a chief medical officer with the Indian Health Service, said the findings of the new CDC report are concerning, but it has been known that American Indian and Alaska Native people “suffer disproportionately with regard to health outcomes for a broad variety of conditions.”\n\nThere are “unique aspects to addressing health outcomes” in these communities, he said, and this data should be viewed as a “call to action, an opportunity to redouble our efforts” to address a broad range of factors that impact the health of these populations and engage with tribal communities to find solutions.\n\n“Even in the midst of a very concerning report like this, I do think that there’s hope,” Clark said, and “there is an opportunity to move the needle in the other direction.”\n\nTo do that, the goal should be to explore the root causes of those disparities for American Indians and others, said Ruben Cantu, an associate program director with Prevention Institute, a nonprofit focused on health equity.\n\n“A lot of the talk is going to be around the pandemic,” Cantu said. “But we need to think about what has driven the conditions that have allowed certain communities to be more vulnerable” in the first place, like crowded housing, poor access to health care and low-income jobs that don’t allow for paid sick leave.\n\nA separate study, published as a preprint in June, found that the decrease in life expectancy in the US over the course of the pandemic was “highly racialized” and substantially larger than it was for a set of comparable countries. In fact, that study found that life expectancy increased slightly between 2020 and 2021 for the set of 21 peer countries.\n\nDemographic differences\n\nThe new data from the CDC highlights differences in life-expectancy trends by race and ethnicity, as well as by gender.\n\nIn the first year of the Covid-19 pandemic, life expectancy declined least among White people. In the second year of the pandemic, however, this group saw the second-biggest decline in life expectancy – and deaths due to Covid-19 contributed to the drop among White people more than any other racial or ethnic group.\n\nOnce the most vaccinated group, the share of the White population that is fully vaccinated with their initial series now lags behind that of the Black, Hispanic and Asian populations, CDC data shows.\n\nLife expectancy in 2021 was highest among both Asian women (85.6 years) and men (81.2 years), the CDC data shows. Hispanic women were the only other group with a life expectancy greater than 80 years.\n\nGet CNN Health's weekly newsletter Sign up here to get The Results Are In with Dr. Sanjay Gupta every Tuesday from the CNN Health team.\n\nIn the total US population, life expectancy fell more among men than among women in 2021, widening a gap that has been growing over the past decade. The disparity in life expectancy between men (73.2 years) and women (79.1 years) is now nearly six years.\n\nThe life expectancy for American Indian men in 2021 was 61.5 years, lower than any other group. Black men had the next lowest, at 66.7 years.\n\nA recent project by the Prevention Institute focused on the mental health and well-being of men and boys. It found that men and boys of color – especially Black and Native American men – “start out with higher rates of trauma and mental health challenges,” Cantu said, which can make them more vulnerable to other conditions.\n\n“Over the last five or six years, we’ve heard a lot more about diseases of despair – things like substance use, alcoholism and suicide – and a lot of those things are connected,” he said. “It helps to point out how vulnerable certain communities can be to a lot of other conditions.”", "authors": ["Deidre Mcphillips"], "publish_date": "2022/08/31"}, {"url": "https://www.cnn.com/2022/11/15/world/global-population-8-billion-un-intl-hnk/index.html", "title": "World population hits 8 billion, UN says, as growth poses more ...", "text": "CNN —\n\nThe world’s population will reach 8 billion people on Tuesday, representing a “milestone in human development” before birth rates start to slow, according to a projection from the United Nations.\n\nIn a statement, the UN said the figure meant 1 billion people had been added to the global population in just 12 years.\n\n“This unprecedented growth is due to the gradual increase in human lifespan owing to improvements in public health, nutrition, personal hygiene and medicine. It is also the result of high and persistent levels of fertility in some countries,” the UN statement read.\n\nMiddle-income countries, mostly in Asia, accounted for most of the growth over the past decade, gaining some 700 million people since 2011. India added about 180 million people, and is set to surpass China as the world’s most populous nation next year.\n\nBut even while the global population reaches new highs, demographers note the growth rate has fallen steadily to less than 1% per year. This should keep the world from reaching 9 billion people until 2037. The UN projects the global population will peak at around 10.4 billion people in the 2080s and remain at that level until 2100.\n\nMost of the 2.4 billion people to be added before the global population peaks will be born in sub-Saharan Africa, according to the UN, marking a shift away from China and India.\n\nNigera's most populated city, Lagos (pictured), is among African metropolises poised to become the globe's new megacities. Pius Utomi Ekpei/AFP/Getty Images\n\nEnvironmental impact\n\nReaching an 8 billion global population “is an occasion to celebrate diversity and advancements while considering humanity’s shared responsibility for the planet,” UN Secretary General António Guterres said in the UN statement.\n\nHaving more people on Earth puts more pressure on nature, as people compete with wildlife for water, food and space. Meanwhile, rapid population growth combined with climate change is also likely to cause mass migration and conflict in coming decades, experts say.\n\nAnd whether it’s food or water, batteries or gasoline, there will be less to go around as the global population grows. But how much they consume is equally important, suggesting policymakers can make a big difference by mandating a shift in consumption patterns.\n\nCarbon emissions of the richest 1%, or about 63 million people, were more than double the emissions of the poorest half of humanity between 1990 and 2015, according to a 2020 analysis by the Stockholm Environment Institute and non-profit Oxfam International.\n\nResource pressure will be especially daunting in African nations, where populations are expected to boom, experts say. These are also among the countries most vulnerable to climate impacts, and most in need of climate finance.", "authors": ["Tara Subramaniam Cnn Reuters", "Tara Subramaniam"], "publish_date": "2022/11/15"}, {"url": "https://www.cnn.com/2022/10/14/economy/china-party-congress-economy-trouble-xi-intl-hnk/index.html", "title": "China's economy is 'in deep trouble' as Xi heads to Communist Party ...", "text": "Hong Kong CNN Business —\n\nWhen Xi Jinping came to power a decade ago, China had just overtaken Japan to become the world’s second largest economy.\n\nIt has grown at a phenomenal pace since then. With an average annual growth rate of 6.7% since 2012, China has seen one of the fastest sustained expansions for a major economy in history. In 2021, its GDP hit nearly $18 trillion, constituting 18.4% of the global economy, according to the World Bank.\n\nChina’s rapid technological advances have also made it a strategic threat to the United States and its allies. It’s steadily pushing American rivals out of long-held leadership positions in sectors ranging from 5G technology to artificial intelligence.\n\nUntil recently, some economists were predicting that China would become the world’s biggest economy by 2030, unseating the United States. Now, the situation looks much less promising.\n\nAs Xi prepares for his second decade in power, he faces mounting economic challenges, including an unhappy middle-class. If he is not able to bring the economy back on track, China faces slowing innovation and productivity, along with rising social discontent.\n\n“For 30 years, China was on a path that gave people great hope,” said Doug Guthrie, the director of China Initiatives at Arizona State University’s Thunderbird School of Global Management, adding that the country is “in deep trouble right now.”\n\nHostesses stand near images showing Chinese President Xi Jinping at an exhibition highlighting Xi's years as leader, as part of the upcoming 20th Party Congress, on October 12, 2022 in Beijing, China. Kevin Frayer/Getty Images\n\nEconomic slowdown and rare dissent\n\nWhile Xi is one of the most powerful leaders China and its ruling Communist Party have seen, some experts say that he can’t claim credit for the country’s astonishing progress.\n\n“Xi’s leadership is not causal for China’s economic rise,” said Sonja Opper, a professor at Bocconi University in Italy who studies China’s economy. “Xi was able to capitalize on an ongoing entrepreneurial movement and rapid development of a private [sector] economy prior leaders had unleashed,” she added.\n\nRather, in recent years, Xi’s policies have caused some massive headaches in China.\n\nChinese President Xi Jinping waves as he arrives for a reception at the Great Hall of the People on the eve of the Chinese National Day in Beijing, China September 30, 2022. Florence Lo/Reuters\n\nA sweeping crackdown by Beijing on the country’s private sector, that began in late 2020, and its unwavering commitment to a zero-Covid policy, have hit the economy and job market hard.\n\n“If anything, Xi’s leadership may have dampened some of the country’s growth dynamic,” Opper said.\n\nMore than $1 trillion has been wiped off the market value of Alibaba and Tencent — the crown jewels of China’s tech industry — over the last two years. Sales growth in the sector has slowed, and tens of thousands of employees have been laid off, leading to record youth unemployment.\n\nThe property sector has also been bludgeoned, hitting some of the country’s biggest home developers. The collapse in real estate — which accounts for as much as 30% of GDP — has triggered widespread and rare dissent among the middle class.\n\nThousands of angry homebuyers refused to pay their mortgages on stalled projects, fueling fears of systemic financial risks and forcing authorities to pressure banks and developers to defuse the unrest. That wasn’t the only demonstration of discontent this year.\n\nIn July, Chinese authorities violently dispersed a peaceful protest by hundreds of depositors, who were demanding their life savings back from rural banks that had frozen millions of dollars worth of deposits. The banking scandal not only threatened the livelihoods of hundreds of thousands of customers but also highlighted the deteriorating financial health of China’s smaller banks.\n\n“Many middle-class people are disappointed in the recent economic performance and disillusioned with Xi’s rule,” said David Dollar, a senior fellow in the John L. Thornton China Center at the Brookings Institution.\n\nAccording to analysts, the vulnerabilities in the financial system are a result of the country’s unfettered debt-fuelled expansion in the previous decade, and the model needs to change.\n\n“China’s growth during Xi’s decade in power is attributable mainly to the general economic approach adopted by his predecessors, which focused on rapid expansion through investment, manufacturing, and trade,” said Neil Thomas, a senior analyst for China and Northeast Asia at Eurasia Group.\n\n“But this model had reached a point of significantly diminishing returns and was increasing economic inequality, financial debt, and environmental damage,” he said.\n\nA new model is needed\n\nWhile Xi is trying to change that model, he is not going about it the right way, experts said, and is risking the future of China’s businesses with tighter state controls.\n\nThe 69-year old leader launched his crackdown to rein in the “disorderly” private businesses that were growing too powerful. He also wants to redistribute wealth in the society, under his “common prosperity” goal.\n\nXi hopes for a “new normal,” where consumption and services become more important drivers of expansion than investments and exports.\n\nBut, so far, these measures have pushed the Chinese economy into one of its worst economic crises in four decades.\n\nShoppers walk through Taikoo Li Village Mall in Sanlitun in Beijing, China, on Monday, May 30, 2022. Bloomberg/Getty Images\n\nThe International Monetary Fund recently cut its forecast for China’s growth to 3.2% this year, representing a sharp slowdown from 8.1% in 2021. That would be the country’s second lowest growth rate in 46 years, better only than 2020 when the initial coronavirus outbreak pummeled the economy.\n\nUnder Xi, China has not only become more insular, but has also seen the fraying of US-China relations. His refusal to condemn Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine, and China’s recent aggression towards Taiwan, could alienate the country even further from Washington and its allies.\n\nWhat are Xi’s options?\n\nAnalysts say the current problems don’t yet pose a major threat to Xi’s rule. He is expected to secure an unprecedented third term in power at the Communist Party Congress that begins on Sunday. Priorities presented at the congress will also set China’s trajectory for the next five years or even longer.\n\n“It would likely take an economic catastrophe on the scale of the Great Depression to create levels of social discontent and popular protest that might pose a threat to Communist Party rule,” said Thomas from Eurasia Group.\n\n“Moreover, growth is not the only source of legitimacy and support for the Communist Party, and Xi has increasingly burnished the Communist Party’s nationalist credentials to appeal to patriotism as well as pocketbooks,” he added.\n\nBut to get China back to high growth and innovation, Xi may have to bring back market-oriented reforms.\n\n“If he was smart, he would liberalize things quickly in his third term,” said Guthrie.", "authors": ["Laura He"], "publish_date": "2022/10/14"}, {"url": "https://www.cnn.com/2022/12/16/asia/taiwan-fertility-rate-security-risk-invasion-intl-hnk/index.html", "title": "Taiwan's military has a fertility problem: As China fears grow, its ...", "text": "Taipei, Taiwan CNN —\n\nTaiwan has noticed a hole in its defense plans that is steadily getting bigger. And it’s not one easily plugged by boosting the budget or buying more weapons.\n\nThe island democracy of 23.5 million is facing an increasing challenge in recruiting enough young men to meet its military targets and its Interior Ministry has suggested the problem is – at least in part – due to its stubbornly low birth rate.\n\nTaiwan’s population fell for the first time in 2020, according to the ministry, which warned earlier this year that the 2022 military intake would be the lowest in a decade and that a continued drop in the youth population would pose a “huge challenge” for the future.\n\nThat’s bad news at a time when Taiwan is trying to bolster its forces to deter any potential invasion by China, whose ruling Communist Party has been making increasingly belligerent noises about its determination to “reunify” with the self-governed island – which it has never controlled – by force if necessary.\n\nAnd the outlook has darkened further with the release of a new report by Taiwan’s National Development Council projecting that by 2035 the island can expect roughly 20,000 fewer births per year than the 153,820 it recorded in 2021. By 2035, Taiwan will also overtake South Korea as the jurisdiction with the world’s lowest birth rate, the report added.\n\nSuch projections are feeding into a debate over whether the government should increase the period of mandatory military service that eligible young men must serve. Currently, the island has a professional military force made up of 162,000 (as of June this year) – 7,000 fewer than the target, according to a report by the Legislative Yuan. In addition to that number, all eligible men must serve four months of training as reservists.\n\nChanging the mandatory service requirement would be a major U-turn for Taiwan, which had previously been trying to cut down on conscription and shortened the mandatory service from 12 months as recently as 2018. But on Wednesday, Taiwan’s Minister of National Defence Chiu Kuo-cheng said such plans would be made public before the end of the year.\n\nThat news has met with opposition among some young students in Taiwan, who have voiced their frustrations on PTT, Taiwan’s version of Reddit, even if there is support for the move among the wider public.\n\nA poll by the Taiwanese Public Opinion Foundation in March this year found that most Taiwanese agreed with a proposal to lengthen the service period. It found that 75.9% of respondents thought it reasonable to extend it to a year; only 17.8% were opposed.\n\nMany experts argue there is simply no other option.\n\nSu Tzu-yun, a director of Taiwan’s Institute for National Defense and Security Research, said that before 2016, the pool of men eligible to join the military – either as career soldiers or as reservists – was about 110,000. Since then, he said, the number had declined every year and the pool would likely be as low as 74,000 by 2025.\n\nAnd within the next decade, Su said, the number of young adults available for recruitment by the Taiwanese military could drop by as much as a third.\n\n“This is a national security issue for us,” he said. “The population pool is decreasing, so we are actively considering whether to resume conscription to meet our military needs.\n\n“We are now facing an increasing threat (from China), and we need to have more firepower and manpower.”\n\nA unique problem?\n\nTaiwan’s low birth rate – 0.98 – is far below the 2.1 needed to maintain a stable population, but it is no outlier in East Asia.\n\nIn November, South Korea broke its own world record when its birth rate dropped to 0.79, while Japan’s fell to 1.3 and mainland China hit 1.15.\n\nEven so, experts say the trend poses a unique problem for Taiwan’s military, given the relative size of the island and the threats it faces.\n\nChina has been making increasingly aggressive noises toward the island since August, when then-US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi controversially visited Taipei. Not long after she landed in Taiwan, Beijing also launched a series of unprecedented military exercises around the island.\n\nSince then, the temperature has remained high – particularly as Chinese leader Xi Jinping told a key Communist Party meeting in October that “reunification” was inevitable and that he reserves the option of taking “all measures necessary.”\n\nChang Yan-ting, a former deputy commander of Taiwan’s air force, said that while low birth rates were common across East Asia, “the situation in Taiwan is very different” as the island was facing “more and more pressure (from China) and the situation will become more acute.”\n\n“The United States has military bases in Japan and South Korea, while Singapore does not face an acute military threat from its neighbors. Taiwan faces the greatest threat and declining birth rate will make the situation even more serious,” he added.\n\nRoy Lee, a deputy executive director at Taiwan’s Chung-hua Institution for Economic Research, agreed that the security threats facing Taiwan were greater than those in the rest of the region.\n\n“The situation is more challenging for Taiwan, because our population base is smaller than other countries facing similar problems,” he added.\n\nTaiwan’s population is 23.5 million, compared to South Korea’s 52 million, Japan’s 126 million and China’s 1.4 billion.\n\nNot just a recruitment problem\n\nBesides the shrinking recruitment pool, the decline in the youth population could also threaten the long-term performance of Taiwan’s economy – which is itself a pillar of the island’s defense.\n\nTaiwan is the world’s 21st largest economy, according to the London-based Centre for Economics and Business Research, and had a GDP of $668.51 billion last year.\n\nMuch of its economic heft comes from its leading role in the supply of semiconductor chips, which play an indispensable role in everything from smartphones to computers.\n\nTaiwan’s homegrown semiconductor giant TSMC is perceived as being so valuable to the global economy – as well as to China – that it is sometimes referred to as forming part of a “silicon shield” against a potential military invasion by Beijing, as its presence would give a strong incentive to the West to intervene.\n\nLee noted that population levels are closely intertwined with gross domestic product, a broad measure of economic activity. A population decline of 200,000 people could result in a 0.4% decline in GDP, all else being equal, he said.\n\n“It is very difficult to increase GDP by 0.4%, and would require a lot of effort. So the fact that a declining population can take away that much growth is big,” he said.\n\nFighting back\n\nTaiwan’s government has brought in a series of measures aimed at encouraging people to have babies, but with limited success.\n\nIt pays parents a monthly stipend of 5,000 Taiwan dollars (US$161) for their first baby, and a higher amount for each additional one.\n\nSince last year, pregnant women have been eligible for seven days of leave for obstetrics checks prior to giving birth.\n\nOutside the military, in the wider economy, the island has been encouraging migrant workers to fill job vacancies.\n\nStatistics from the National Development Council showed that about 670,000 migrant workers were in Taiwan at the end of last year – comprising about 3% of the population.\n\nMost of the migrant workers are employed in the manufacturing sector, the council said, the vast majority of them from Vietnam, Indonesia, Thailand and the Philippines.\n\nLee said in the long term the Taiwanese government would likely have to reform its immigration policies to bring in more migrant workers.\n\nStill, there are those who say Taiwan’s low birth rate is no reason to panic, just yet.\n\nAlice Cheng, an associate professor in sociology at Taiwan’s Academia Sinica, cautioned against reading too much into population trends as they were affected by so many factors.\n\nShe pointed out that just a few decades ago, many demographers were warning of food shortages caused by a population explosion.\n\nAnd even if the low birth rate endured, that might be no bad thing if it were a reflection of an improvement in women’s rights, she said.\n\n“The educational expansion that took place in the 70s and 80s in East Asia dramatically changed women’s status. It really pushed women out of their homes because they had knowledge, education and career prospects,” she said.\n\n“The next thing you see globally is that once women’s education level improved, fertility rates started declining.”\n\n“All these East Asian countries are really scratching their head and trying to think about policies and interventions to boost fertility rates,” she added.\n\n“But if that’s something that really, (women) don’t want, can you push them to do that?”", "authors": ["Eric Cheung"], "publish_date": "2022/12/16"}]}
{"question_id": "20230120_15", "search_time": "2023/01/20/16:37", "search_result": [{"url": "https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/2018/05/05/kentucky-derby-glory-money-payout-tim-sullivan/580442002/", "title": "The big payout isn't always money in the Kentucky Derby, it's glory", "text": "You can’t put an exact price on prestige, but it does allow for some discounting.\n\nThough Churchill Downs guarantees a minimum purse of $2 million for the Kentucky Derby, it could surely pay less without the race losing its luster. Maybe a lot less.\n\n“They could make it a million and we’d still show up,” trainer Bob Baffert said the other day. “We’re running for glory.”\n\nAmong the surest things in horse racing is the annual acknowledgement that the Derby is the one event that transcends the sport. From the richest occupants of Millionaire’s Row to the humblest groom, horsemen of every economic strata will tell you the first question they hear entails whether they have ever run in the Derby.\n\nQuestion 2: “Have you ever won it?”\n\nMore:This is now the wettest Kentucky Derby ever – and more rain is coming\n\nThus while January’s Pegasus World Cup at Gulfstream Park paid out a record $16 million – or eight times as much prize money as the Run for the Roses – Churchill Downs does not feel compelled to compete for the right to claim the world's richest race. For one thing, the Pegasus World Cup requires owners to put up $1 million apiece for a spot in the starting gate. For another thing, horsemen recognize that the real payoff in winning the Derby is residual and recurring, as reflected by a sharp spike in stud fees.\n\nFurthermore, officials say, the track’s ability to raise purses is restricted by its handle, its schedule and its contractual agreements. Though Churchill Downs Inc. reported net income of $140.5 million in 2017, the $36.5 million in purses distributed by its home track in 2017 were paid out across 70 racing days and 702 races. To load up on the Derby could limit what could be paid for lesser races and/or corporate profit margins.\n\n“It’s obviously a purse we’d like to see grow,” said John Asher, Churchill’s vice president of communications. “The event is one of the premier events in the country and we’d like to see that reflected.\n\n“For the allure of the Kentucky Derby at this point, you could argue that you don’t need to do it. But in terms of whether it should be done, we’re more in that line. As important as this race is to everyone involved, not just on a North American domestic scale, we want to see that purse grow.”\n\nThe Derby’s minimum purse was raised to $2 million in 2005, and has remained there as U.S. racing purses have declined by $100 million during the last decade. Barely a month before the Stronach Group’s record-setting Pegasus payouts, the same company slashed stakes purses at Santa Anita by $600,000.\n\nChurchill Downs President Kevin Flanery has predicted a double-digit percentage increase in purses after the company’s historical racing facility opens later this year on Poplar Level Road.\n\n“We’re pretty confident that the historical racing facility is going to be successful,” Asher said Saturday. “We’re really hoping that if it’s as successful as we anticipate it could be, it will help us with the Derby purse maybe as soon as next year and at least be the next step.”\n\nAs a publicly traded company, Churchill Downs is bound by fiscal responsibilities that do not apply to all of its competitors. The Dubai World Cup, for example, carries a $10 million purse despite a ban on pari-mutuel betting in the United Arab Emirates.\n\n“Dubai is a different model,” Asher said. “I remember there was a press conference and they were asking Sheikh Mohammed about the purse for the UAE Derby. He turned to someone and said, ‘What is the purse?’ They said ‘A million dollars.’ He said, ‘Make it two.’ ”\n\nSo what was the payout for Kentucky Derby 2018?\n\nJustify, the favorite heading into the 2018 Kentucky Derby, won the 144th annual race Saturday at Churchill Downs. A $2 bet to win paid out $7.80. You get get the full payouts here.\n\nHere follow the week’s Top 10 sports quotes. As usual, they are priceless.\n\n10. Don Nelson, former NBA coach, on his weekly poker games with singer Willie Nelson: “He never saw a card he didn’t like. He raises every time, no matter what. Every time it goes by him, it’s $50, $50, $50. I’m conservative. But Willie, man, he’s wild.” (New York Post)\n\n9. Jason Witten, Dallas Cowboys tight end, announcing his retirement: \"There's an old saying in pro football: The circus doesn't stay in town forever. And when you're young, I think it takes on a meaning that, when your opportunity comes, grab it. And as you get older, I think you realize there's a deeper meaning. No man knows when his time has come to walk away. And I'm no different. It's been said, whether right or wrong, it's better three hours too soon than a minute too late.” (News conference)\n\n8. Solomon Hill, New Orleans Pelicans reserve, on teammate Anthony Davis: \"He's not just a franchise player. He's a once-in-a-lifetime player. But the difference between him being a competitive top-three player in the league, and people putting his name routinely in the MVP conversation, is him going out and doing work right here (in the playoffs). If we can go to the Finals, then next year people are taking him seriously.\" (ESPN.com)\n\n7. Nigel Hayes, former University of Wisconsin basketball player, on his team’s near-boycott of an NCAA game: “With all the money that’s being made that the players are not receiving, there’s going to be a point where the players don’t play. It’s going to take the right player or it’s going to take the right team in the right big-game setting, when the timing is right...I think it’s something that if we did go through with it, we’d probably be having a very different conversation right now.” (Aspen Institute panel discussion)\n\n6. Cheryl Reeve, coach/general manager of WNBA champion Minnesota Lynx, on her team not being invited to the White House: \"Let's be real, there are countless other teams that have won a championship that have been invited and already visited the White House. That's the disappointment, is, what's going on here? Let's not perpetuate this antiquated narrative that women are less than men, because we're not. And that has to change.\" (Washington Post)\n\n5. Charles Barkley, NBA analyst, on Golden State’s Draymond Green: “I want to punch him in the face so bad.” (TNT halftime report)\n\n4. Draymond Green, Golden State Warriors center, on Barkley’s (empty) threat: \"A lot of guys talk on TV, stand behind the microphone on the TV screen. Fact of the matter is, if you feel that strongly about something, he's even seen me a million times, then punch me in my face when you see me. If you're not going to punch me in my face when you see me, then shut up. It's no different than somebody sitting behind a computer screen, tweeting, 'I'll knock you out,' and you never see him in life.\n\n\"He's seen me a bunch of times. Punch me in the face when you see me, or if not, no one cares what you would have done. You're old and it is what it is. You ain't going to punch me when you see me, then stop talking about it, period.\" (Post-game news conference)\n\n3. Nick Saban, University of Alabama football coach, on playing golf with Heisman Trophy winner Mark Ingram: “I remember one year we were in a playoff with Georgia Tech to win on about the fifth-extra hole. This was a couple of years ago. And I said, ‘Mark, this is my last hole. I have to go speak, and there’s a whole load of people at the plane and they’re all calling every five minutes, saying we’ve got 1,000 people you’ve got to speak to tonight. We’re going to be late.’ I said, ‘This might be the last hole. We’re going to have to win it on this hole or not.’\n\n“And he looked at me and he said, ‘Coach, you didn’t bring me up that way, man. We’re going to play till the end.’ ” (News conference)\n\n2. Mike Scioscia, Angels manager, on Albert Pujols' 3000th hit: \"I think the guys know the living history that we're seeing every day with Albert. These aren't things that you're going to say 15 years down the road, 'Hey, that was really impressive.' These are things that 15 seconds later you're going, 'Man, this is really special.' It's fun to watch it.\" (MLB.com)\n\n1. Johnny Damon, retired outfielder, on his first-night elimination from Dancing With The Stars: “It’s a gut check. It stinks, but everybody brought their A-game yesterday. You can’t be too disappointed. My kids got to watch it, and now they’re saying, ‘Yay, when’s Daddy going to get home?’ So I’ll be home soon, kids.” (Good Morning America)\n\nTim Sullivan: 502-582-4650, tsullivan@courier-journal.com; Twitter: @TimSullivan714. Support strong local journalism by subscribing today: www.courier-journal.com/tims", "authors": [], "publish_date": "2018/05/05"}]}
{"question_id": "20230120_16", "search_time": "2023/01/20/16:38", "search_result": [{"url": "https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2023/01/18/20-million-mega-millions-jackpot-won-new-york/11074336002/", "title": "$20 million Mega Millions jackpot won in New York for Jan. 17 drawing", "text": "The Mega Millions jackpot has been won – again.\n\nA lucky ticket in New York matched all six numbers to win the $20 million jackpot Tuesday night.\n\nTuesday's win follows the $1.348 billion Mega Millions jackpot that was won in Maine on Friday – which marked the second-highest prize in the lottery game's history.\n\nAfter not having been hit for months, the Mega Millions jackpot has been won in back-to-back drawings.\n\nOne ticket sold in New York in Tuesday's drawing matched all six numbers to win the $20 million jackpot, according to the Mega Millions website. Tuesday's winner can also choice the cash option of $10.6 million.\n\nIt's a far cry from the $1.348 billion Mega Millions jackpot won in Maine on Friday.\n\nIn addition to the jackpot, a ticket sold in Massachusetts matched all five white balls and had the Megaplier to win $3 million.\n\nThe jackpot will reset again to the current starting value of $20 million for Friday's drawing.\n\nMeanwhile, the Powerball jackpot is at $439 million with a cash option of $237.3 million, according to the Powerball website.\n\nAre lottery prizes getting bigger? Here's why the jackpots have grown so large.\n\nFriday:Winning ticket for almost $1.35 billion Mega Millions jackpot sold in Maine\n\nMega Millions winning numbers: 1/17/23\n\nThe winning numbers for Tuesday night's drawing were 2-12-18-24-39, Mega Ball: 18 and Megaplier was 3X.\n\nWhen is next Mega Millions drawing?\n\nMega Millions drawings are held every Tuesday and Friday at 11 p.m.\n\nHow do I play Mega Millions?\n\nThe cost is $2 per ticket, but you can add the Megaplier for $1, which will increase the amount of your potential prize up to five times the original prize (except for the jackpot).\n\nEach player selects five numbers from 1 to 70 for the white balls and one number from 1 to 25 for the Mega Ball. However, you can also have the lottery machine generate a random Quick Pick for you.\n\nPrizes vary from $2 for the matching the Mega Ball to $1 million for matching all five white balls (except in California) to the jackpot for matching all six balls. You can check all the prize payouts on the Mega Millions site.\n\nWhat do you do if you win the lottery? Here's what you need to know.\n\nYou don't need to be a U.S. citizen or a resident a particular state where you purchase your ticket.\n\nWhere can I play Mega Millions?\n\nYou can play the game in 45 states plus the District of Columbia and the U.S. Virgin Islands. The states not offering Mega Millions are: Alabama, Alaska, Hawaii, Nevada and Utah.\n\nMany grocery stores, gas stations and convenience stores sell lottery tickets. Some states allow Mega Millions tickets to be purchased online, but beware of scam websites. Check with your state lottery for more details.\n\nWhat are my odds of winning?\n\nPlaying the Mega Millions can be exciting, but just don't go spending those millions before you win.\n\nThe odds of winning the jackpot are 302,575,350-to-1.\n\nThe odds to match all five white balls are 12,607,306-to-1.\n\nWhat does a lottery's cash option mean?\n\nThe major lotteries in the United States offer two jackpot payout options: annuity and cash.\n\nThe annuity option is paid out over time. There is an immediate payment and then 29 annual payments after that, increasing by 5% each year.\n\nHow much will Mega Millions winner get after taxes? $1.35 billion jackpot shrinks quite a bit\n\nThe cash option is significantly lower than the advertised jackpot, but it is paid in a lump sum. You don't have to wait decades for all the money.\n\nWhat was biggest Mega Millions jackpot?\n\nHere are the Top 10 jackpots ever since the Mega Millions began in 1996:\n\n$1.537 billion, Oct. 23, 2018: Won in South Carolina $1.348 billion, Jan. 13, 2023: Won in Maine $1.337 billion: July 29, 2022: Illinois $1.05 billion, Jan. 22, 2021: Won in Michigan $656 million, March 30, 2012: Three winners in Illinois, Kansas, Maryland $648 million, Dec. 17, 2013: Two winners in California, Georgia $543 million, July 24, 2018: Won in California $536 million, July 8, 20116: Won in Indiana $533 million: March 30, 2018: Won in New Jersey $522 million: June 7, 2019: Won in California\n\nWhat's everyone talking about? Sign up for our trending newsletter to get the latest news of the day\n\nWhat was largest U.S. lottery jackpot ever?\n\nHere's a look at the top jackpots were won in the United States, between the Powerball and the Mega Millions lotteries:", "authors": [], "publish_date": "2023/01/18"}, {"url": "https://www.cnn.com/2022/07/29/us/mega-millions-lottery-jackpot-friday/index.html", "title": "Mega Millions: Here are the winning numbers for the $1.28 billion ...", "text": "CNN —\n\nThe winning numbers for Friday’s Mega Millions drawing for an estimated $1.28 billion were 13-36-45-57-67 with a Mega Ball of 14.\n\nFriday’s jackpot was the lottery’s second-largest prize in its 20-year history, and it came with a cash value option of $742.2 million.\n\nThe next drawing is Tuesday at 11:00 p.m. ET, according to the lottery’s website.\n\nThe Mega Millions jackpot record is $1.537 billion, won by a single ticket sold in South Carolina in 2018. That’s the second-largest jackpot for any US lottery game, though it’s the world’s largest lottery prize won by just one ticket, according to Mega Millions.\n\nThe largest jackpot of any US lottery game was $1.586 billion – a Powerball prize from January 13, 2016, shared by winners in California, Florida and Tennessee.\n\nTimothy Schultz, who won a $28 million Powerball jackpot in 1999 and now hosts a lottery podcast, told CNN winning can “really turn your life on its head.”\n\nHe said after he checked his numbers in the newspaper and realized he won, some of the first calls he made were to attorneys and financial advisers.\n\n“It can change pretty much everything, relationships, your ability to live a life,” he said. “I think it can buy time, which can be invaluable. And, you know, it’s one of the most surreal life changing things that can possibly happen to somebody.”\n\nHe said working with a financial adviser will benefit people who have no experience with millions because an adviser will help the winners understand what they can realistically can do with the winnings.\n\nSchultz said he didn’t consider himself to be materialistic before he won so his most extravagant purchases were some cars and real estate.\n\n“I found that for myself and for a lot of people that I’ve met and interviewed that if you win the lottery jackpot it magnifies, or at least it can magnify, your personality. It doesn’t necessarily change who you are,” he said.\n\nHe said while he rarely plays the lottery these days, he did buy one ticket for Friday night’s drawing.\n\nMega Millions jackpots start at $20 million for the annuitized prize and grow based on game sales and interest rates for 30-year US treasuries. The odds of winning the jackpot are 1 in 302,575,350.\n\nThere are seven other less valuable prizes that depend on how many and what type of balls a ticket matches. Odds of winning a $1 million runner-up prize – if a ticket matches the five white balls but not the Mega Millions ball – are 1 in 12,607,306.\n\nMega Millions tickets are sold in 45 states, Washington DC, and the US Virgin Islands, with drawings on Tuesday and Friday. Tickets are sold online in Georgia, Illinois, Kentucky, Michigan, New Hampshire, North Carolina, North Dakota, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and DC, but the purchaser must be in that state.", "authors": ["Paul P. Murphy Steve Almasy", "Paul P. Murphy", "Steve Almasy"], "publish_date": "2022/07/29"}, {"url": "https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2022/07/27/810-million-mega-millions-what-to-know/10158602002/", "title": "Keep quiet, hire a financial team: What to do if you win Mega Millions", "text": "What should you do with $1 billion?\n\nThe Mega Millions lottery jackpot ballooned to $1.1 billion after no one matched all six numbers Friday night and won the top prize. That's the fourth time in about as many years the top prize has- topped $1 billion. And if someone wins it tonight, it will be the third largest jackpot in the game’s history.\n\nBut be careful what you wish for. Claiming that much money likely also will draw taxes, grifters, and friends and family members, advisers say.\n\nAll that attention means the first and most important piece of financial advice likely is what you should not do if you hold the winning ticket.\n\n“Don’t shout your win from the rooftop,” Rob Burnette, financial and investment adviser at Outlook Financial Center in Troy, Ohio, said. “If you’re lucky enough to win the lottery, keep it quiet. Get organized and make a plan. Consider staying anonymous, if it’s a possibility.”\n\nInterest rates rising:Why does the Fed raise interest rates? And how do those hikes slow inflation?\n\nMake an offer:As housing cools, some buyers get a second chance to grab their first choice\n\nHow much is the jackpot, what time is the Mega Millions drawing, and what are my odds of winning?\n\nThe $1.1 billion prize is for winners who choose the annuity option, paid annually over 30 years. Most winners opt for the cash option, which for the next drawing Tuesday at 11 p.m. ET is an estimated $576.8 million.\n\nThe single chance of matching all six numbers is roughly 1 in 303 million. Mega Millions tickets – which cost $2 each – are sold in 45 states plus the District of Columbia and the U.S. Virgin Islands.\n\nWhat's the Mega Millions cut off time to buy tickets?\n\nIn many states, eligible tickets are sold until 15 minutes before the drawing takes place. The drawing is at 11 P.M. ET on Tuesday.\n\nHowever, there are exceptions, so it's best to check the rules in your own state. For example, in Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, the cutoff is 9:50 p.m. ET on the day of the drawing.\n\nWhy shouldn’t you tell everyone?\n\nScammers.\n\n“Some of those scammers have falsely identified themselves as being affiliated with Mega Millions,” Mega Millions said. “These scams all have one thing in common: They try to trick you into sending them money or personal information by claiming that you have won a large lottery prize.”\n\nNo representative of Mega Millions would ever call, text, or email anyone about winning a prize, Mega Millions said.\n\nDON'T GET CONNED:Stay alert against financial scams\n\nWINNING:‘We did it again’: Maryland mom wins $100K jackpot for third time in five years\n\nAlso remember, \"no real lottery tells winners to put up their own money in order to collect a prize they have already won,\" it said.\n\nSteve Azoury, owner of Azoury Financial in Troy, Michigan, said he has advised many lottery winners, including a $181 million winner \"who said ‘If I didn’t know you before, I don’t want to know you now.’”\n\nIf you can’t tell everyone you won, what can, or should you do?\n\n“Get a tax attorney and a tax accountant right off the bat and then a financial adviser,” said Azoury. “They’ll work hand in hand to figure out the plan.”\n\nThe plan will include which payout option to choose:\n\nAn annuity option makes an initial annual payment followed by 29 annual payments. Each payment is 5% larger than the previous one.\n\nThe cash option is a one-time, lump-sum payment equal to all the cash in the Mega Millions jackpot prize pool.\n\nThe plan also should include a “fall guy,” Azoury said. “That’s the person or adviser who keeps you from giving loans to anybody, who tells people all the money’s tied up in investments, not available. We have nothing available to help you out and we’re not interested in your project.”\n\nREGULAR PAYOUTS:Are annuities safe in a recession? Sales are surging, here's what to know\n\nSLIM ODDS:7 things more likely to happen than winning the Powerball or Mega Millions lottery\n\nShould you take the lump sum or installment payments?\n\nThat decision depends on your goals, your age, and what lottery rules are for beneficiaries to continue receiving payments, or if you’d likely squander a lump sum.\n\nMark Steber, chief tax officer at Jackson Hewitt, recommends considering the following:\n\nSize of the lottery winning: That can serve as a guide to determining taxes you may owe and the financial security you can derive from it. If the amount is on the smaller side, a lump sum may simply be easier.\n\nCurrent and projected earnings: Consider your ability to earn money and tax rates over your lifetime.\n\nEASY GAMBLING:Online lottery tickets put Texans’ most-played games a touch away\n\nDIFFERENT GAMBLE:'He won the lottery': Ohio 13-year-old sells Mac Jones football card for $100,000\n\nHow much do you bring home?\n\nThat depends on how you decide to take your money and complex state laws.\n\nIf you win the Mega Millions lottery, you’ll likely be propelled into the highest federal tax bracket. Your state of residency and where you bought the winning ticket can greatly impact what you pay in state taxes.\n\nFor example, if you’re a California resident and purchase your ticket there, then you pay the 37% federal tax rate but are in luck because California doesn't tax lottery winnings, Steber said.\n\nNew York, though, has the highest tax rate on lottery winnings.\n\nBut, if you’re a California resident on vacation in Rhode Island and decide to buy a ticket there, you’ll have to include your lottery winnings on your federal and California tax returns and file a nonresident Rhode Island tax return for your jackpot. You should claim a tax credit for the Rhode Island taxes on your California return so you won't be double-taxed on the same income in two states, he said.\n\n“This is where a tax professional really comes in handy,” Steber said. “State taxes can be very tricky.”\n\nTAXING:Senate Dems say boosting taxes on higher income earners will extend Medicare solvency\n\nA MILLION MISTAKE:Man claims $1 million Mega Millions prize from ticket he says was a 'mistake'\n\n\"How long does it take to get your money if you win the Mega Millions?\"\n\nOnce you claim the prize, it shouldn’t take too long, Azoury said. “Maybe a couple of weeks,” he said.\n\nRemember, most people won’t claim their winnings right away because they'll take time to set their plan. Claim periods vary by jurisdiction so people should check with the lottery in the state where the ticket was purchased to get the applicable claim period for that ticket.\n\nMega Millions claim periods range from 90 days to one year from the draw date, the lottery said.\n\nMedora Lee is a money, markets, and personal finance reporter at USA TODAY. You can reach her at mjlee@usatoday.com and subscribe to our free Daily Money newsletter for personal finance tips and business news every Monday through Friday morning.\n\nAssociated Press contributing", "authors": [], "publish_date": "2022/07/27"}, {"url": "https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2022/10/24/lottery-jackpots-powerball-mega-millions-top-10/10589308002/", "title": "Top 10 lottery jackpots for Powerball, Mega Millions: Who won and ...", "text": "If you win: Sign the back of the ticket, keep it safe, speak with trusted advisor, call the lottery\n\nIn eight states, winners can elect to remain anonymous. Florida is not one of those states\n\nA single Mega Millions ticket from South Carolina won the second-largest jackpot in U.S. history\n\n2016 record-setting Powerball win generated more than $114 million for schools in Florida\n\nWe know – whenever lotto fever happens, we Google “Top 10 lottery jackpots.”\n\nWhat we usually get is a list, but we went a step further and compiled a roundup of winners, where the winning tickets were sold and what we know about these grand prize winners.\n\nAs the Oct. 24, 2022, Powerball jackpot climbs to $625 million – with a cash value of $299.8 million – we look back at notable lottery jackpot records (including Mega Millions) in the United States. While the $625 million jackpot is a lot of money, it’s not in the Top 10 biggest lottery jackpots ever. It will be in the Top 10 Powerball jackpots of all time.\n\nAs of Oct. 24, 2022, here are the Top 10 lottery jackpots in U.S. history and some details about the biggest Powerball and Mega Millions winners in the history of the games. In at least one case, one winner’s name became the target of a scam.\n\nJackpot: Winning ticket for $494M lottery jackpot sold in Fort Myers, Florida, weeks after Hurricane Ian\n\nMissing Mega Millions mania?:Try prize-linked savings to party on. Here's how they work\n\n10. $656 million, March 30, 2012\n\nThree tickets sold in Illinois, Kansas and Maryland clinched the $656 million Mega Millions jackpot on March 30, 2012.\n\nOne ticket was purchased by a retired couple in their 60s, Merle and Patricia Butler of Red Bud, Illinois.\n\nThe other winning tickets were sold in Baltimore County in Maryland and Kansas, where winners can remain anonymous.\n\n9. $687.8 million, Oct. 27, 2018\n\nTwo winners from Iowa and New York split the $687.8 million Powerball jackpot, which had a cash option of $396.2 million, in the Oct. 27, 2018, drawing.\n\nAccording to a story in the Delaware News Journal, part of the USA TODAY Network, \"15 tickets matched all five white balls but missed matching the red Powerball ... Thirteen of those tickets won $1 million. The tickets were sold in California (2), Colorado, Florida, Kentucky, North Carolina, New Jersey (2), New York (2), Ohio and Texas (2). Two other tickets sold in Florida and Texas won a $2 million prize because the tickets included the Power Play option for an extra $1.\"\n\nIn addition, the story states, \"there were three $50,000 winners in Delaware, according to the Delaware Lottery's website. In total, there were more than 3.5 million winning tickets across all prize tiers.\"\n\nIowa Lottery officials confirmed Lerynne West of Dexter, Iowa, was one of the two winners who split the nearly $700 million Powerball prize. According to a 2018 story on CNBC, the 51-year-old grandmother of six said she almost lost her lottery ticket — she bought it on a day she was moving to a new home.\n\n8. $699.8 million, Oct. 4, 2021\n\nOne ticket matched all numbers in the Oct. 4, 2021, Powerball drawing to win $699.8 million. It was purchased at Albertsons supermarket in Morro Bay, California, and the retailer received $1 million for selling the ticket, according to The Record in Bergen, N.J., part of the USA TODAY Network. The winner had a cash option of $495,980,160.52.\n\nFive players matched all five numbers without the Powerball. Two of the $1 million tickets were sold in Maryland and the other were sold in Arizona, Florida and Virginia.\n\nWhat's everyone talking about?:Sign up for our trending newsletter to get the latest news of the day\n\n7. $731.1 million, Jan. 20, 2021\n\nAn anonymous group from Maryland won the $731.1 million Powerball jackpot – the largest lottery win in Maryland Lottery history. The winners called themselves “The Power Pack” and bought a single ticket Jan. 20, 2021, at Coney Market in Lonaconing, Maryland.\n\nThe Daily American, part of the USA TODAY Network, reported in January 2021: \"The latest jackpot-winning Powerball ticket, worth $731.1 million, was sold in a struggling coal mining town whose biggest previous claim to fame was being the hometown of baseball legend Lefty Grove... The store will get a $100,000 bonus for selling the ticket.\"\n\n6. $758.7 million, Aug. 23, 2017\n\nThis massive Powerball jackpot smashed a previous record for the biggest win for a single ticket when Mavis Wanczyk of Massachusetts won it on Aug. 23, 2017.\n\nHowever, soon after Wanczyk's $758.7 million win, a stroke of bad luck befell the lottery winner's name via social media.\n\nAccording to a July 2021 story on ABC27.com, after Wanczyk won, \"several fake social media accounts popped up using her name claiming she was giving away money in exchange for personal information. Four years later, new text messages are now circulating claiming Wanczyk is donating $5,000 to 200 random individuals who were selected after a 'spin ball.' The message instructs the recipient to text a number to receive their money.\"\n\nThis was a scam, and experts say people should never give out their personal information via text message or email to strangers. And if the text message or email looks fishy, it probably is.\n\n5. $768.4 million, March 27, 2019\n\nA 24-year-old Wisconsin man, Manuel Franco, won the $768.4 million Powerball on March 27, 2019. Franco bought the winning ticket at a Speedway in New Berlin, Wisconsin. The jackpot was then the third largest in U.S. history, and Franco told reporters in 2019 that winning \"feels like a dream.\" According to news reports, before winning the $768 million Powerball drawing, Franco was just trying to save $1,000 in the bank.\n\n4. $1.05 billion, Jan. 22, 2021\n\nAn Oakland County lottery club claimed the largest prize in Michigan Lottery history, a $1.05 billion Mega Millions jackpot on Jan. 22, 2021. Four people split the prize and chose the lump sum. According to the Associated Press, officials said the winners shared $557 million after taxes and claimed their prize nearly two months after the Jan. 22 drawing.\n\nThe names of the four Oakland County club members were not released. The Wolverine FLL Club had the only jackpot-winning ticket.\n\n“This kind of money will impact the families of our club members for generations to come. We plan to stay humble and pay it forward through charitable giving in southeast Michigan,” attorney Kurt Panouses said on behalf of the winners to AP. “A club member saw a sign that the jackpot was up to $1 billion and remembered that they hadn’t bought their tickets yet so they pulled into the Kroger.”\n\nThe winning ticket was purchased almost as an afterthought at a Kroger grocery store in the Detroit suburb of Novi.\n\nMore: A Virginia man thought he won $600 in a lottery scratch-off. He actually won $1 million.\n\n3. $1.337 billion, July 29, 2022\n\nA single Mega Millions ticket purchased in a Chicago suburb won the record-setting jackpot of $1.337 billion on July 29, 2022.\n\nOn July 29, the Illinois Lottery revealed a gas station in Des Plaines, Illinois, sold the winning ticket.\n\nTwo people who wish to remain anonymous claimed the Mega Millions jackpot, lottery officials reported in September.\n\nThe winners of the July drawing opted to take a lump sum payment of $780.5 million, lottery officials said.\n\n2. $1.537 billion, Oct. 23, 2018\n\nA single Mega Millions ticket from South Carolina won the second-largest lottery jackpot in U.S. history, $1.537 billion, on Oct. 23, 2018.\n\nBut we may never know who bought it. South Carolina is one of eight states where winners can elect to remain anonymous.\n\nThe jackpot fell short of the nation's biggest prize, but the Mega Millions prize is the largest for a single ticket.\n\n\"Our message to the $1.5 BILLION #Mega Millions jackpot winner: Sign the back of the ticket, place the ticket in a safe location, speak with a trusted advisor and CALL THE LOTTERY,\" the South Carolina Education Lottery said on Twitter. \"Take a deep breath and enjoy the moment!\"\n\nThe ticket was sold at a KC Mart in Simpsonville, South Carolina. KC Mart owner C.J. Patel told USA TODAY in a 2018 story that he would receive about $30,000 for his role and had planned to split the proceeds with his four employees.\n\nAlmost three years after the record-setting lottery drawing, the Greenville News reported the man who reportedly sold the winning lottery ticket was arrested and charged with five counts of tax evasion, according to the state's Department of Revenue.\n\nIn the March 2021 story, Patel of Greenville County, was accused of failing to report more than $2 million in sales from 2013 through 2017, warrants show. In doing so, he evaded $123,044 in sales tax, investigators said.\n\nThe winner, described as a South Carolina woman who was visiting Greenville County, opted to get a lump-sum payment of $877,784,124, officials announced in March 2019.\n\n1. $1.59 billion, Jan. 13, 2016\n\nThree winners claimed the Powerball prize that would be the biggest jackpot in history — $1.586 billion split three ways. Maureen Smith and David Kaltschmidt of Melbourne Beach, Florida; Marvin and Mae Acosta of California; and John and Lisa Robinson of Tennessee claimed the three tickets with a cash value of $327.8 million each.\n\nAccording to Florida Today, part of the USA TODAY Network, Kaltschmidt worked as a manufacturing engineer at Northrop Grumman and, in 2016 said he would retire. Smith had referred to herself as a homemaker.\n\nSmith said she played the winning numbers of 4-8-19-27-34 with a Powerball of 10 for many years but she did not play the lottery itself that often. Those numbers, she said, did not have a special significance.\n\n\"I've been playing them for so many years I really don't remember,\" she said.\n\nKaltschmidt said he woke up on the morning of Jan. 14 and found the lottery sheet with the combination without any circles on it, which in their parlance would indicate missed numbers.\n\n\"Oddly enough, I checked the ticket and everything matched up so I said ‘she's messing with me,’” he joked.\n\nThe Powerball generated more than $114 million for schools in the state of Florida. And the Publix at 3830 SR A1A in Melbourne Beach received $100,000 for selling the winning ticket.\n\nContributing: Tamia Boyd, Greenville News; Chris Bonanno, Florida TodayLORIDA TODAY; Associated Press; USA TODAY", "authors": [], "publish_date": "2022/10/24"}, {"url": "https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2022/08/26/no-one-claims-mega-millions-jackpot/7906633001/", "title": "What if no one claims Mega Millions' $1.34 billion lottery jackpot?", "text": "CINCINNATI – It has been weeks since a ticket in Illinois won the $1.34 billion Mega Millions jackpot.\n\nBut no one has come forward to claim the second-largest jackpot in the 20-year history of the game, topped only by the $1.537 billion ticket won in South Carolina in 2018.\n\nRules for claiming a prize, as well as the length of time one has to claim it, vary by state, according to the Mega Millions website. The window for claiming prizes typically ranges from 90 days to one year from the draw date.\n\nIllinois Lottery states that winners may have up to a year to come forward. But winners of more than $250,000 may choose to remain anonymous, so we may never know the identity of the soon-to-be billionaire.\n\nThough the winner still has time to claim the prize, they have only 60 days from the draw date to choose between the cash or annuity options. Because the winning numbers were drawn July 29, they now have 32 days left to decide.\n\nMissing Mega Millions mania? Try prize-linked savings to party on. Here's how they work\n\n'Goose bumps':After historic $1.3B Mega Millions lotto win, dozens flock to lucky Illinois gas station\n\nWhat happens if no one claims the Mega Millions jackpot?\n\nIf a jackpot prize goes unclaimed, each participating state in the Mega Millions game will get back all the money it contributed.\n\nThe states use their unclaimed lottery prizes for different purposes, but unclaimed prize money typically remains in a state's lottery fund.\n\nIn Illinois, roughly a quarter of every dollar played on the lottery goes to public school funding, the state lottery says. Last year, lottery purchases raised $731 million for education in the state.\n\nHow do I get my student loans forgiven? Qualifying for Biden's debt relief, explained\n\nWhat happens if the winning lottery ticket is lost?\n\nMega Millions is not responsible for lost or stolen tickets. Winners are advised to sign the back of the tickets. Unless a ticket is signed, anyone who has the ticket can file a claim. If the ticket is lost before it was signed and someone else finds it, the finder can collect the prize.\n\nSocial Security:Benefits hike could bring retirees extra $1,800 in 2023\n\nHow many unclaimed jackpot prizes have there been?\n\nTo date, there have only been three unclaimed jackpot prizes. Here's a running list of the unclaimed jackpots in recorded Mega Millions history:", "authors": [], "publish_date": "2022/08/26"}, {"url": "https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2022/01/04/powerball-jackpot-jumps-610-million-january-5/9094823002/", "title": "Powerball jackpot jumps to $630 million for January 5", "text": "Strong sales keep pushing the Powerball higher and higher for Wednesday night's drawing.\n\nOriginally projected to be $575 million and then $610 million on Tuesday, the jackpot keeps climbing and is now an estimated $630 million – the seventh largest Powerball jackpot ever.\n\n“We’re thrilled to offer players a jackpot that has hit the $600 million mark,” May Scheve Reardon, Powerball Product Group Chair, said in a statement.\n\nThe cash option will be $448.4 million, according to the lottery website.\n\nLucky month:Of Top 10 largest lottery jackpots ever, 3 were claimed in January\n\nIn Monday's drawing, three tickets matched all five white balls to win million-dollar prizes. Two tickets sold in Connecticut and Texas won $1 million, while a ticket in Montana had the Powerplay to win $2 million.\n\nThe Powerball numbers drawn on Monday, Jan. 3, 2022 were: 2 - 13 - 32 - 33 - 48 and Powerball 22. The Powerplay was 2x.\n\nRecent winner:$699.8 million Powerball winning ticket sold in California\n\nThe Powerball has not been won since a lottery player in California won the $699.8 million jackpot back in October. There have been 39 straight drawings without the jackpot being won.\n\nTickets to play the Powerball cost $2 and are available in 45 states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands.\n\nThere are now three chances to win the Powerball each week. The drawing is held at 10:59 p.m. on Monday, Wednesday and Saturday at the Florida Lottery draw studio in Tallahassee.\n\nMega winner:$108 million Mega Millions winning ticket sold in Arizona\n\nMeanwhile, he Mega Millions jackpot is at $278 million with a cash option of $193 million for Friday night's drawing, according to the Mega Millions website.\n\nUnlucky? Here are 13 crazy things more likely to happen than winning the Powerball jackpot\n\nTop 10 Powerball Jackpots\n\nPowerball, Mega Millions:These are the luckiest states for jackpot winners\n\nJohn Connolly is a breaking news editor for NorthJersey.com. For unlimited access to all the major news happening in North Jersey, subscribe here. To get breaking news directly to your inbox, sign up for our newsletter.\n\nEmail: connolly@northjersey.com\n\nTwitter: @JohnConnolly_22", "authors": [], "publish_date": "2022/01/04"}, {"url": "https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2022/01/26/mega-millions-jackpot-soars-421-m-two-winning-tickets-get-millions/9222146002/", "title": "Mega Millions jackpot soars to $421M, two winning tickets get millions", "text": "No one won the Mega Millions jackpot Tuesday night so the jackpot will climb to $421 million for Friday night's drawing, according to the Mega Millions website.\n\nThe cash option will be $290.9 million.\n\nWhile no lottery player hit the $396 million grand prize, two tickets won million-dollar prizes by matching all five white balls. A ticket sold in Texas won $1 million, while a Rhode Islander had the Megaplier to win $3 million.\n\nThe winning numbers drawn on Tuesday, Jan. 25, 2022 were: 3 - 12 - 38 - 53 - 58 and Megaball 13. The Megaplier was 3x.\n\nRecent Winner:$108 million Mega Millions winning ticket sold in Arizona\n\nThe Mega Millions has not been hit since someone in Lake Havasu City, Arizona won a $108 million jackpot back in October.\n\nWhile life-changing, Friday's jackpot is not in the Top 10 Mega Millions jackpots of all-time (see chart below).\n\nThe Mega Millions costs $2 per ticket and is drawn twice weekly on Tuesdays and Fridays at 11 p.m.\n\nPowerball winner:$632.6 million Powerball jackpot winning tickets sold in California and Wisconsin\n\nMeanwhile, the Powerball jackpot is at $91 million with a cash option of $63.5 million for Wednesday's drawing, according to the Powerball website.\n\nUnlucky? Here are 13 crazy things more likely to happen than winning the lottery\n\nPowerball, Mega Millions:These are the luckiest states for jackpot winners\n\nTop Mega Millions jackpots\n\nJohn Connolly is a breaking news editor for NorthJersey.com. For unlimited access to all the major news happening in North Jersey, subscribe here. To get breaking news directly to your inbox, sign up for our newsletter.\n\nEmail: connolly@northjersey.com\n\nTwitter: @JohnConnolly_22", "authors": [], "publish_date": "2022/01/26"}, {"url": "https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2022/07/25/lottery-mega-millions-drawing-july-26-2022-jackpot/10142048002/", "title": "Mega Millions drawing July 26, 2022: One Ohio ticket matched five ...", "text": "Update, 5:45 a.m.: No one picked all five numbers and the Megaball, so the Mega Millions jackpot of $830 million will continue to grow, but one ticket was sold in Ohio with all five numbers and the Megaplier, making that ticket worth $3 million, according to the Mega Millions website. Information on where that $3 million ticket was sold was not made available early Wednesday.\n\nUpdate, 11:00 p.m.: Winning numbers for the Tuesday, July 26, drawing for a Mega Millions jackpot of $830 million are 7, 29, 60, 63, 66 and the gold Megaball is 15. The Megaplier is 3X. The cash option is $487.9 million.\n\nUpdate:8 p.m. Lottery officials said in a statement that strong sales have pushed the estimated jackpot for tonight’s drawing to $830 million, with a cash value of $487.9 million.\n\nUpdate, 6:30 p.m.: There is still time to buy a ticket for a chance to win the Mega Millions estimated jackpot of $810 million tonight.\n\nThe Mega Millions drawing Tuesday night is at 11 p.m. Ticket sales end at 10:45 p.m. in Kentucky and Indiana. Check back here for winning numbers after the drawing\n\nIn Kentucky, Ohio and Indiana, you can buy a Mega Millions ticket at gas stations, convenience stores and supermarkets until 10:45 p.m. on drawing night.\n\nMore:The first things to do if you win the lottery\n\nIn Kentucky, residents can also purchase tickets online at www.KYLottery.com.\n\nIn Ohio, residents can use Lottery Card available in Kroger, Buehler’s Fresh Foods and Giant Eagle stores. It allows Ohio consumers to enter draw games on their phones and get notified and paid electronically if they win. You can also buy tickets online at www.OhioLottery.com.\n\nGot a Mega Millions prize notification?:Here's how to tell if it's a scam\n\nPrevious reporting: On Tuesday night, the current estimated $810 million jackpot will be up for grabs.\n\nNo one has won the Mega Millions grand prize since April 15, when a ticket in Tennessee won $20 million. The current $810 million jackpot is among the top three largest Mega Millions jackpots ever, according to the lottery's records.\n\nThe cash option is $470.1 million.\n\nThe most recent numbers from the Friday, July 22 drawing were 14, 40, 60, 64 and 66. The Mega Ball was 16, and the Megaplier was 3X.\n\nThere was a Match 5 $1 million winner in Virginia and Match 5 + Megaplier $3 million winners in Delaware, New Jersey and New York.\n\nWhether you've played before, or if this is your first time trying your luck at the lottery, here's what you need to know ahead of the next drawing on Tuesday, July 26.\n\nWhen are the Mega Millions drawings?\n\nMega Millions drawings are Tuesday and Friday at 11 p.m. Ticket sales end at 10:45 p.m. in Kentucky and Indiana.\n\nHow to play the Mega Millions\n\nTickets to Mega Millions cost $2 per play.\n\nThere are nine total ways to win a prize, from the jackpot to $2.\n\nPick five numbers from 1 to 70 and one Mega Ball number from 1 to 25.\n\nChoose Easy Pick or Quick Pick to have the terminal randomly pick numbers for you. You win the jackpot by matching all six winning numbers in the drawing.\n\nWhat's the Megaplier?\n\nMost states offer the Megaplier feature, which increases non-jackpot prizes by two, three, four and five times.\n\nIt costs an additional $1 per play. Before each regular Mega Millions drawing, the Megaplier is drawn. From a pool of 15 balls, five are marked with \"2X,\" three with \"4X\" and one with \"5X.\"\n\nWhere to buy Mega Millions tickets\n\nYou can play Mega Millions in 47 localities: 45 states, plus the District of Columbia and the U.S. Virgin Islands. To find locations, search the Mega Millions website.\n\nIn Kentucky, Ohio and Indiana, you can buy a Mega Millions ticket at gas stations, convenience stores and supermarkets until 10:45 p.m. on drawing night.\n\nIn Kentucky, residents can also purchase tickets online at www.KYLottery.com.\n\nIn Ohio, residents can use Lottery Card available in Kroger, Buehler’s Fresh Foods and Giant Eagle stores. It allows Ohio consumers to enter draw games on their phones and get notified and paid electronically if they win. You can also buy tickets online at www.OhioLottery.com.\n\nWhat was the largest Mega Millions jackpot ever?\n\nIn 2018, one winning ticket in South Carolina sold for a $1.537 billion grand prize, which was the world's largest lottery prize ever won on a single ticket.\n\nIn January 2021, a winning ticket sold in Michigan for $1.05 billion.\n\nWhat happens if I win Mega Millions?\n\nMega Millions offers two options.\n\nYou can take annuity, in which you're paid out as one immediate payment followed by 29 annual payments. Each payment is 5% bigger than the previous.\n\nThere's also the cash option, a one-time, lump-sum payment equal to all the cash in the Mega Millions jackpot prize pool.", "authors": [], "publish_date": "2022/07/25"}, {"url": "https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2022/07/30/mega-millions-results-friday-drawing-billion-prize-jackpots/10183473002/", "title": "Mega Millions: $1.28 billion lottery jackpot. Did anyone win Friday ...", "text": "Did someone hit the jackpot?\n\nWell, yes!\n\nSince April 19, 2022, no one's won the Mega Millions jackpot — and just over three months later, the grand prize was $1.28 billion, the second-largest jackpot in the history of the game. Cash option for those who want the lump sum would be $747.2 million. But on to the question that everyone who's bought a ticket or heard about the jackpot: Who will win?\n\nThe drawing happened at 11 p.m. Friday, and shortly after the Mega Millions lottery website was down with an \"Error 524.\" Several users on Twitter made that quite known. However, by 11:30 p.m. ET, the Mega Millions site was up and running.\n\nDid anyone win the $1.28 billion jackpot? By 8:30 a.m. Saturday, the lottery website said a jackpot winner was in Illinois.\n\nBut it wasn’t all bad news …\n\nHere’s a list of ”Match 5” winners and where the tickets were bought:\n\n• California, 1\n\n• Florida, 2\n\n• Georgia, 2\n\n• Illinois\n\n• Kentucky\n\n• Louisiana\n\n• Michigan\n\n• Minnesota, 2\n\n• North Carolina, 2\n\n• New Hampshire\n\n• New York\n\n• Oklahoma\n\n• Pennsylvania\n\n• Texas, 2\n\n• Wisconsin\n\nHere’s a list of “Match 5 + Megaplier” winners and where tickets were bought:\n\n• Arkansas\n\n• Florida, 3\n\n• Iowa\n\n• Pennsylvania\n\nTop 10 Powerball jackpots and what we know: Who won and where winning tickets were bought\n\nMega Millions winning numbers\n\nThe winning numbers for Tuesday night's (July 26) drawing were 7, 29, 60, 63, 66 and the Mega Ball was 15. The Megaplier was 3X.\n\nThe winning numbers for Friday night's drawing were 13, 36, 45, 57, 67 and the Mega Ball was 14. The Megaplier was 2X.\n\nDid anyone win Mega Millions Friday night?\n\nAccording to the Mega Millions website, the next estimated drawing is valued at $20 million with a cash option of $11.6 million, as of Saturday morning. There was a winner in the July 29 $1.28 billion jackpot.\n\nHmmm:Can Florida Lottery winners remain anonymous? What you need to know about winning the lottery\n\nSingle Powerball jackpot winning ticket worth $473.1 million sold in Arizona\n\nWhen is the next Mega Millions drawing?\n\nThe next Mega Millions drawing after this is Tuesday, Aug. 2.\n\nDrawings are held twice a week at 11 p.m. ET every Tuesday and Friday.\n\nWhen was the last big Mega Millions jackpot in 2022?\n\nAfter months of no winners, one lucky ticket purchased in South Carolina matched all numbers to win $426 million in the Jan. 28 drawing.\n\nHow to play Mega Millions\n\nHere's how to play Mega Millions, according to its website:\n\n\"Players may pick six numbers from two separate pools of numbers — five different numbers from 1 to 70 (the white balls) and one number from 1 to 25 (the gold Mega Ball) — or select Easy Pick/Quick Pick. You win the jackpot by matching all six winning numbers in a drawing.\n\nWhat can you win if you play Mega Millions?\n\nThe mega millions numbers are drawn with five white balls, each with the possibility of a number between 1 and 70. The final gold \"Mega Ball\" is drawn from a set of balls numbered between 1 and 25.\n\nThere are nine ways to win a prize (from $2 to the jackpot) in this drawing:\n\n5 matching numbers + Mega Ball : Jackpot\n\n5 matching numbers: $1 million\n\n4 matching numbers + Mega Ball: $10,000\n\n4 matching numbers: $500\n\n3 matching numbers + Mega Ball: $200\n\n3 matching numbers: $10\n\n2 matching numbers + Mega Ball: $10\n\n1 matching number + Mega Ball: $4\n\nMega Ball matching $2\n\nMoney, money, money:Mega Millions drawing, day, time and jackpot amount explained\n\nTop 10 Mega Millions lottery jackpots\n\nAs of July 29, 2022, here are the Top 10 Mega Millions jackpots:\n\n$1.537 billion — Oct. 23, 2018; South Carolina\n\n$1.28 billion — July 29, 2022; Illinois\n\n$1.05 billion — Jan. 22, 2021; Michigan\n\n$656 million — Mar. 30, 2012; Kansas, Illinois, Maryland\n\n$648 million — Dec. 17, 2013; California, Georgia\n\n$543 million — July 24, 2018; California\n\n$536 million — July 8, 2016; Indiana\n\n$533 million — Mar. 30, 2018; New Jersey\n\n$522 million — June 7, 2019; California\n\n$516 million — May 21, 2021; Pennsylvania\n\nTop 10 Powerball lottery jackpots\n\nAs of July 29, 2022, here are the Top 10 Powerball jackpots, according to powerball.com:\n\n$1.586 billion — Jan. 13, 2016; California, Florida, Tennessee\n\n$768.4 million — Mar. 27, 2019; Wisconsin\n\n$758.7 million — Aug. 23, 2017; Massachusetts\n\n$731.1 million — Jan. 20, 2021; Maryland\n\n$699.8 million — Oct. 4, 2021; California\n\n$687.8 million — Oct. 27, 2018; Iowa, New York\n\n$632.6 million — Jan. 5, 2022; California, Wisconsin\n\n$590.5 million — May 18, 2013; Florida\n\n$587.5 million — Nov. 28, 2012; Arizona, Missouri\n\n$564.1 million — Feb. 11, 2015; North Carolina, Puerto Rico, Texas\n\nTop 10 U.S. lottery jackpots\n\nAs of July 29, here are the Top 10 Powerball and Mega Millions jackpots:\n\n$1.586 billion, Powerball — Jan. 13, 2016; California, Florida, Tennessee\n\n$1.537 billion, Mega Millions — Oct. 23, 2018; South Carolina\n\n$1.28 billion, Mega Millions — July 29, 2022; Illinois\n\n$1.05 billion, Mega Millions — Jan. 22, 2021; Michigan\n\n$768.4 million, Powerball — Mar. 27, 2019; Wisconsin\n\n$758.7 million, Powerball — Aug. 23, 2017; Massachusetts\n\n$731.1 million, Powerball — Jan. 20, 2021; Maryland\n\n$699.8 million, Powerball — Oct. 4, 2021; California\n\n$687.8 million, Powerball — Oct. 27, 2018; Iowa, New York\n\n$656 million, Mega Millions — Mar. 30, 2012; Kansas, Illinois, Maryland\n\nContributing: Anna Kaufman, USA TODAY\n\nPlease consider subscribing to a USA TODAY Network-Florida newspaper at offers.usatodaynetwork.com/network-regional-florida.", "authors": [], "publish_date": "2022/07/30"}, {"url": "https://www.cnn.com/2022/07/30/us/mega-millions-lottery-jackpot-saturday/index.html", "title": "Mega Millions: One ticket in Illinois wins the second-largest Mega ...", "text": "CNN —\n\nThe chase for the second-largest Mega Millions jackpot has ended – with a single ticket sold in the Chicago area for the whole $1.337 billion.\n\nOne ticket bought in Des Plaines hit the top prize in Friday night’s drawing, according to the Illinois Lottery, securing the third-largest jackpot of any US lottery game and ending a buildup that began when Mega Millions last drew a jackpot winner in mid-April.\n\nThe winning ticket was purchased at a Speedway gas station in Des Plaines, roughly a 20-mile drive northwest of downtown Chicago, the Illinois Lottery said Saturday.\n\n“We have not heard from the winner yet. We don’t know whether … they even know that they won a prize. So I encourage everybody to check your ticket,” Illinois Lottery Director Harold Mays told reporters Saturday morning in Chicago.\n\nThe jackpot rose to $1.337 billion late Friday, up from an earlier estimate of $1.28 billion, lottery operators said.\n\nIf the holder chooses a lump-sum cash option, the ticket will yield a one-time payment of about $780 million. Otherwise, the nearly $1.34 billion prize will be spread over an initial payment and 29 annual payments.\n\nFriday night’s winning numbers were 13, 36, 45, 57, 67 and a Mega Ball of 14.\n\nThe Speedway convenience store in Des Plaines will receive $500,000 for selling the winning ticket, Mays said.\n\nThe ticket holder has a year from the drawing to claim the prize, and can choose to withhold his or her name from the public, Mays said. In Illinois, winners of more than $250,000 can ask the lottery to keep their name and hometown confidential.\n\nThe largest ever Mega Millions jackpot of $1.537 billion was won by a single ticket sold in South Carolina in 2018. That’s the second-largest jackpot for any US lottery game, and it’s the world’s largest lottery prize won by just one ticket, according to Mega Millions.\n\nThe largest jackpot of any US lottery game was $1.586 billion – a Powerball prize from January 13, 2016, shared by winners in California, Florida and Tennessee.\n\nVideo Ad Feedback History of the lottery 01:23 - Source: CNN\n\nOther tickets win big prizes\n\nSome other ticket holders also won some sizable prizes Friday.\n\nTwenty-six tickets won a secondary prize of at least $1 million because they matched the first five numbers.\n\nSix of the 26 tickets won $2 million because the buyers matched not only the first five numbers, but also paid an additional $1 to activate the game’s “multiplier,” which elevates non-jackpot prizes.\n\nOne of the 26 tickets, sold in California, did not have the multiplier but still won more than $4.2 million, according to the state’s lottery officials. That’s because all prizes in California must be based on sales and number of winners instead of being a fixed amount.\n\nThe 20 “Match 5” winners without the multiplier were sold in California; Florida (two); Georgia (two); Illinois; Kentucky; Louisiana; Michigan; Minnesota (two); North Carolina (two); New Hampshire (two); New York; Oklahoma; Pennsylvania; Texas (two); and Wisconsin.\n\nThe six $2 million tickets were sold in Arizona; Florida (three); Iowa and Pennsylvania, according to Mega Millions.\n\nFirst MegaMillions jackpot win since April 15\n\nThe jackpot had been rising since mid-April, when the jackpot was hit on consecutive drawings on April 12 and April 15. Since then, no ticket in twice-weekly drawings matched all six numbers – which is tough. The odds of winning the jackpot are 1 in 302,575,350.\n\nThe Mega Millions website on Friday night became inaccessible for several minutes after the drawing. The lottery’s jackpots start at $20 million and grow based on game sales and interest rates, according to its website.\n\nThe next drawing will be Tuesday at 11 p.m. ET, at the $20 million starting point.\n\nMega Millions tickets are sold in 45 states, Washington, DC, and the US Virgin Islands, where drawings are on Tuesdays and Fridays at 11 p.m. ET. Tickets are sold online in Georgia, Illinois, Kentucky, Michigan, New Hampshire, North Carolina, North Dakota, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and DC, but the purchaser must be in that state.", "authors": ["Jason Hanna Keith Allen", "Jason Hanna", "Keith Allen"], "publish_date": "2022/07/30"}]}
{"question_id": "20230120_17", "search_time": "2023/01/20/16:38", "search_result": [{"url": "https://www.cnn.com/2022/04/26/europe/oldest-living-person-nun-sister-andre-scli-intl/index.html", "title": "The world's oldest person is a French nun who enjoys chocolate and ...", "text": "Paris CNN —\n\nA 118-year-old nun living in a nursing home in southern France has become the world’s oldest living person, according to the Guinness World Records.\n\nSister André is also the oldest nun ever, according to a statement released by Guinness on Monday.\n\nBorn as Lucile Randon on February 11, 1904, Sister André has dedicated most of her life to religious service, the statement said. Before becoming a Catholic nun, she looked after children during World War II and then spent 28 years caring for orphans and elderly people at a hospital.\n\nSister André, who lives near the French city of Toulon, is also the world’s oldest Covid-19 survivor. The Guinness World Records statement said she tested positive for the virus at the beginning of 2021, but recovered fully within three weeks, just in time for her 117th birthday.\n\nIn an interview with the French TV channel RMC Story on Tuesday, Sister André appeared to have mixed feelings about becoming the new oldest living person.\n\n“I feel I would be better off in heaven, but the good Lord doesn’t want me yet,” she said, calling the title a “sad honor.”\n\nHowever, she also expressed her joy at being “pampered” by her family.\n\nSister André enjoys chocolate and wine – and drinks a glass every day – her nursing home, Résidence Catherine Labouré, confirmed to CNN on Tuesday.\n\nWhen she turned 118 earlier this year, the elderly nun received a handwritten birthday note from French President Emmanuel Macron – the 18th French president of her lifetime – according to a tweet from the nursing home. There have also been 10 different Popes presiding over the Catholic Church since she was born.\n\nSister André became the world’s eldest following the death of Kane Tanaka, a Japanese woman previously certified as the world’s oldest person, who died at the age of 119 on April 19.\n\nThe title of oldest person ever recorded also belongs to a French woman. Born on February 21, 1875, Jeanne Louise Calment’s life spanned 122 years and 164 days, according to the Guinness World Records statement.", "authors": ["Simon Bouvier Xiaofei Xu Camille Knight Elias Lemercier", "Simon Bouvier", "Xiaofei Xu", "Camille Knight", "Elias Lemercier"], "publish_date": "2022/04/26"}, {"url": "https://www.cnn.com/2022/11/12/us/oldest-living-person-115th-birthday-trnd/index.html", "title": "Bessie Hendricks, oldest living person in US, turns 115 | CNN", "text": "CNN —\n\nBring out the candles – 115 of them.\n\nBessie Hendricks, the oldest living person in the United States, has celebrated yet another turn around the sun. The Iowa supercentenarian turned 115 on November 7, according to CNN affiliate KCCI.\n\nHendricks was born in 1907. Her lifetime has seen 21 presidents, two world wars, and the sinking of the Titanic.\n\nIn addition to being the oldest living person in the United States, she is also the fourth-oldest living person in the world, according to the Gerontology Research Group, which records and certifies supercentenarians (people who have lived to be older than 110).\n\nHendricks celebrated her 115th birthday alongside her three children at Shady Oaks Care Center, according to KCCI.\n\n“I don’t know how you put it into words,” said her daughter, Joan Schaffer, according to KCCI. Schaffer turned 90 the day before her mother’s 115th birthday. “It’s marvelous that we still have her.”\n\nHendricks’ children described her as a hard-working, caring mother. Hendricks’ own mother died when she was just 13 years old, according to KCCI.\n\nCurrently, the title for oldest living person belongs to Lucile Randon, a 118-year old French nun, says the Gerontology Research Group. The oldest person ever recorded was another Frenchwoman, Jeanne Louise Calment, who lived to be over 122 years old, according to the Guinness World Records. Calment died in 1997.", "authors": ["Zoe Sottile"], "publish_date": "2022/11/12"}, {"url": "https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2021/02/10/nun-worlds-second-oldest-person-survives-covid-19-116/6702095002/", "title": "Nun believed to be world's second-oldest person survives COVID ...", "text": "Associated Press\n\nPARIS — A 116-year-old French nun who is believed to be the world's second-oldest person has survived COVID-19 and is looking forward to celebrating her 117th birthday on Thursday.\n\nThe Gerontology Research Group, which validates details of people thought to be 110 or older, lists Frenchwoman Lucile Randon — Sister André's birth name — as the second-oldest known living person in the world.\n\nFrench media report that Sister André tested positive for the virus in mid-January in the southern French city of Toulon. But just three weeks later, the nun is considered recovered.\n\n\"I didn't even realize I had it,\" she told French newspaper Var-Matin.\n\nSister André, who is blind and uses a wheelchair, did not even worry when she received her diagnosis.\n\n\"She didn't ask me about her health, but about her habits,\" David Tavella, the communications manager for the care home where the nun, told the newspaper. \"For example, she wanted to know if meal or bedtime schedules would change. She showed no fear of the disease. On the other hand, she was very concerned about the other residents.\"\n\nNot all of the home's residents shared Sister André's luck. In January, 81 of the 88 residents tested positive for the virus, and about 10 of them died, according to Var-Matin.\n\nOnce doctors declared the nun no longer infected, she was allowed to attend Mass.", "authors": [], "publish_date": "2021/02/10"}, {"url": "https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/bergen/allendale/2021/12/29/sylvia-goldsholl-one-worlds-oldest-covid-survivors-dies/9043663002/", "title": "Allendale woman who survived COVID at age 108 dies on her 110th ...", "text": "Sylvia Goldsholl lived through the Spanish flu, two world wars and the Great Depression, then beat the coronavirus at age 108 to become one of the world's oldest COVID survivors.\n\nEarly Wednesday, just hours after turning 110, the resident of Allendale Senior Living succumbed to old age, dying peacefully before she could be properly feted by the mayor and the nursing facility staff, said David Gillies, director of activities.\n\n\"She was an in-house celebrity, a 'big sister' to many and a vocal advocate for others,\" Gillies said. \"An independent spirit who loved music, dancing and celebrating life with others.\"\n\nGoldsholl grabbed nationwide attention when she beat COVID-19 in April 2020 at age 108. Gov. Phil Murphy at the time hailed \"a tremendous life, a tremendous spirit, a tremendous show of strength.\"\n\n\"I know some readers may recall when she gained great press attention as the world’s second-oldest COVID survivor,\" Gillies said Wednesday.\n\nBut to those who knew Goldsholl best, she was a devoted friend, a loving and involved aunt.\n\n'I didn't miss a thing'\n\nGoldsholl moved to the Allendale home in 2010 after spending most of her life in the Bronx, living in the apartment where she had grown up. She moved to New Jersey when she needed more care.\n\n\"I didn't miss a thing,\" she told NorthJersey.com after her bout with COVID. \"I've done a very good job.\"\n\nGoldsholl in 2020 was a few months older than the 108-year-old New Mexico man who also beat the virus, but several years younger than a 113-year-old Spanish woman who survived it. In the time since, Lucile Randon, a French nun, survived the coronavirus at the remarkable age of 116.\n\nGoldsholl was 6 when the Spanish flu tore through the United States and the world, killing an estimated 50 million people.\n\nAccording to the Gerontology Research Group, which keeps a World Supercentenarian Rankings List that was last updated on Dec. 24, Goldsholl was briefly among the few validated supercentenarians alive. The term usually refers to people age 110 and older.\n\nShe supplanted Hilda Brown, who died in June and previously was the Garden State's sole representative of the supercentenarian club.\n\nGoldsholl embraced her status as a survivor in 2020, telling NorthJersey.com that her family \"knew that I was a wonder. I met their expectations. I represented them in a very well way.”\n\nAll about family and education\n\nAlthough she never married or had children of her own, Goldsholl cherished her family, her niece Nancy Chazen said in 2020.\n\n“She always wanted to have family parties,” Chazen said. “She thought it was important to stay in touch with the family.”\n\nChazen remembers Goldsholl as “a very loving aunt” to nieces and nephews, and said she taught her to play cards.\n\nAt the Allendale center, Goldsholl enjoyed spending time with other residents and almost to her last day retained her zest for life.\n\n“She has a reputation of being an advocate,” Chazen said, adding that Goldsholl used to write letters to government officials about the issues on her mind.\n\nShe was known to emphasize the importance of education, crediting her mother and father with encouraging her to learn.\n\n\"My mom was educated in Russia,\" Goldsholl said. \"She wanted very much to be knowledgeable. My father came from a very high-class background. I made the best of both [backgrounds].\"\n\nGillies said that Goldsholl's death on her birthday represents a good sign in Jewish tradition.\n\n\"A person who passes on their birthday is truly righteous,\" Gillies said.\n\nMatt Fagan is a local reporter for NorthJersey.com. For unlimited access to the most important news from your local community, please subscribe or activate your digital account today.\n\nEmail: fagan@northjersey.com\n\nTwitter: @fagan_nj", "authors": [], "publish_date": "2021/12/29"}, {"url": "https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/health/2021/02/10/covid-news-california-new-york-deaths-vaccines-coronavirus/4457822001/", "title": "COVID news: Pregnant women; vaccinations; CDC; masks; French ...", "text": "Wearing a tight-fitting mask or a double mask can dramatically decrease exposure to and spread of COVID-19, a crucial defense against emerging new variations of the virus, the CDC reported Wednesday.\n\nIn lab tests with dummies, exposure to potentially infectious aerosols decreased by more than 90% when tight or double masks were used, the CDC said.\n\n“Cases hospitalizations and deaths are still very high,\" said Dr. Rochelle Walensky, head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, at a White House coronavirus briefing. \"Now is not the time to roll back mask requirements.\"\n\nThe White House also announced three new mass vaccination sites at sports stadiums in Texas that could deliver a total of 10,000 shots per day. The sites in Dallas, Arlington and Houston will be operated by local health officials supported by federal troops starting Feb. 22. The action comes days after the National Football League said it was working with public health officials to allow use of its stadiums for mass vaccinations.\n\nWhite House coronavirus coordinator Jeff Zients said the administration plans to open similar sites in more states in the coming weeks.\n\nUSA TODAY is tracking COVID-19 news. Keep refreshing this page for the latest updates. Sign up for our Coronavirus Watch newsletter for updates to your inbox and join our Facebook group.\n\nIn the headlines:\n\n►Federal authorities are investigating a massive counterfeit N95 mask operation in which fake 3M masks were sold in at least five states to hospitals, medical facilities and government agencies. The foreign-made knockoffs are becoming increasingly difficult to spot and could put health care workers at grave risk for the coronavirus. These masks are giving first responders “a false sense of security,” said Steve Francis, who works for the Homeland Security Department’s principal investigative arm.\n\n►About 1 in 3 Americans say they definitely or probably won’t get the COVID-19 vaccine, according to a new poll that some experts say is discouraging news if the U.S. hopes to achieve herd immunity and vanquish the outbreak. The poll from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research found that while 67% of Americans plan to get vaccinated or have already done so, 15% are certain they won’t and 17% say probably not. Many expressed doubts about the vaccine’s safety and effectiveness.\n\n►The Super Bowl champion Tampa Bay Buccaneers celebrated their victory Wednesday with a boat parade amid continued concern over the coronavirus pandemic. Mayor Jane Castor emphasized that people attending the parade must wear masks outdoors and observe social distancing rules. It appeared many were abiding by the mask order but many others were not. This follows the controversy that ensued following the game on Sunday, when revelers in Tampa, many maskless and ignoring social distancing guidance, celebrated in the streets.\n\n►About 20,000 pregnant women have been vaccinated for COVID-19 with no \"red flags\" so far, Dr. Anthony Fauci said Wednesday. Fauci, chief medical adviser to President Joe Biden, said pregnant women and children were not included in initial clinical trials. But he said studies involving them are underway with the focus on ensuring the safety and effectiveness of the vaccine for these groups.\n\n►Two-thirds of Americans still believe that returning to a pre-COVID life represents a moderate or large risk, according to the Axios-Ipsos poll. That's the lowest percentage since October. One in three Americans, 34%, now know someone who has died from COVID-19, according to the survey.\n\n►A French nun who is Europe's oldest person has survived COVID-19, just days before her 117th birthday. Lucile Randon, or Sister Andre, tested positive for the coronavirus Jan. 16 in Toulon but didn't develop symptoms, telling local media she \"didn't even realize I had it.\" She isolated separately from other residents in her retirement home in Toulon, southern France but is now considered fully recovered.\n\n►After weeks of vaccine distribution being largely limited to hospitals, health systems and local health departments, COVID-19 vaccines will roll out Friday at major pharmacies, including the nation's two largest chains, CVS and Walgreens.\n\n📈 Today's numbers: The U.S. has more than 27.2 million confirmed coronavirus cases and 471,400 deaths, according to Johns Hopkins University data. The global totals: More than 107.3 million cases and 2.35 million deaths. More than 65.9 million vaccine doses have been distributed in the U.S. and about 44.7 million have been administered, according to the CDC.\n\n📘 What we're reading: How much rent relief will you get? You're more likely to get help if you're white and live in rural America.\n\nCalifornia town OKs controversial 'hero pay' for essential workers\n\nA small town in the Southern California desert approved a so-called \"hero pay\" for certain essential workers Wednesday night.\n\nThe emergency ordinance out of Coachella requires certain agricultural operations, grocery stores, retail pharmacy stores and restaurants — to provide a premium pay of an additional $4 per hour to their employees in Coachella for at least 120 days. The regulation applies to those who employ 300 or more workers nationally and more than five employees in the city.\n\nCoachella follows cities like Long Beach, Oakland and Montebello, which have mandated temporary pay increases for essential workers who have risked their health to work during the pandemic and have been sickened with COVID-19 at high rates. Those cities have faced immediate blowback for their actions.\n\n– Rebecca Plevin, The Desert Sun (Palm Springs, Calif.)\n\nOhio to add up to 4K previously unreported COVID-19 deaths to tally\n\nOhio will add as many as 4,000 previously unreported COVID-19 deaths to the state's tally during the next week after the Ohio Department of Health discovered errors in how coronavirus deaths are confirmed. Most of these deaths occurred in November and December, the agency said in a news release.\n\nState officials were still determining the cause of the problem but released some information Wednesday evening to be transparent, Gov. Mike DeWine's spokesman Dan Tierney said.\n\n\"When there’s been issues, whether it's spoilage with the vaccine or reporting issues like this, we’ve disclosed it to the public,\" Tierney said.\n\nAs of Wednesday, Ohio has reported 11,856 deaths due to COVID-19. But the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention counts 17,222 deaths in Ohio involving COVID-19.\n\n– Jackie Borchardt and Randy Ludlow, The Cincinnati Enquirer\n\nSouth Africa to use J&J vaccine while it's still being tested\n\nSouth Africa’s health minister says the country will begin administering the one-dose Johnson & Johnson vaccine to its front-line health workers next week. The workers will be monitored to see what protection the J&J shot provides from COVID-19, particularly against the variant dominant in the country. Health Minister Zweli Mkhize said Wednesday that South Africa scrapped its plans to use the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine because it “does not prevent mild to moderate disease” of the variant dominant in South Africa. In the U.S., Johnson & Johnson has applied to the Food and Drug Administration for emergency use authorization for its vaccine.\n\nChicago teachers vote to return to classrooms\n\nThe Chicago teachers union grudgingly approved a deal Wednesday that will let the nation’s third-largest school district return to classrooms amid the pandemic. The major issues included widespread vaccinations for the district's 25,000 educators, metrics to gauge school infections and accommodations for teachers who have a person in their household who’s more susceptible to the coronavirus.\n\n\"We did not get what we wanted or what we deserved,\" union President Jesse Sharkey said. \"The fact that CPS could not delay reopening a few short weeks to ramp up vaccinations and preparations in schools is a disgrace.\"\n\nPre-K and special education programs could return as soon as Thursday under the plan. Students in kindergarten through fifth grade would go back to school March 1 and middle schoolers a week later. No return date has been set for high schoolers. The union and district have been arguing for months over a plan to gradually reopen the roughly 340,000-student district.\n\nBritish transport secretary issues ominous travel warning\n\nBritons may not be allowed to vacation abroad until “everybody” in the country has been vaccinated, Transport Secretary Grant Shapps said Wednesday. Shapps said about 13 million of the U.K's 67 million people have been vaccinated so far. Shapps also told BBC Radio 4’s Today show that “people shouldn’t be booking holidays right now – not domestically or internationally.\" That drew sharp responses from the travel industry.\n\n\"Airlines are drowning, but rather than throwing us a life raft, @grantshapps has just thrown a bucket of cold water at us,\" the British Airline Pilots' Association tweeted. \"The UK aviation sector cannot survive another summer with hardly any flying.\"\n\nVariant cases in US spike by 73%; Florida leads the way\n\nThe number of known coronavirus variant cases in the U.S. has surged 73% in the last week alone, according to figures from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The country now reports 944 cases of variants that spread more easily, bypass treatments and immunities, or both. Nowhere has the increase been more noticeable than in Florida, which now has 343 cases of a fast-spreading variant – up from 201 cases reported during Sunday's Super Bowl, which was hosted in Tampa. Florida now has more than twice as many known variant cases as any other state; California is a distant second.\n\nThe vast majority of the country's known variant cases, and all of Florida's, are of the B.1.1.7 variant, which was first detected in the U.K. and has run rampant there. The CDC has said it may become the dominant strain in the U.S. by March. Last month, U.K. researchers said there's evidence the variant may be more deadly than others, and it's also considered at least 50% more transmissible than the original strain.\n\n– Mike Stucka\n\nBiden administration pledges 1M doses for community health centers\n\nThe Biden administration will begin sending coronavirus vaccines directly to community health centers as it boosts distribution and reaches out to underserved communities, the White House announced. At least one center in every state and territory will get vaccines as the program ramps up to include 250 of the more than 1,300 such facilities in the country. The participating centers will receive a combined 1 million doses, starting as soon as next week. In later phases, vaccines will become available to all community health centers. The majority of the patients served by the centers are living at or below the federal poverty line. Most are also minorities, according to the administration.\n\n“This effort … really is about connecting with those hard-to-reach populations across the country,” said Marcella Nunez-Smith, who heads the COVID-19 health equity task force.\n\n– Maureen Groppe\n\nContributing: The Associated Press", "authors": [], "publish_date": "2021/02/10"}]}
{"question_id": "20230120_18", "search_time": "2023/01/20/16:38", "search_result": [{"url": "https://www.usatoday.com/story/entertainment/movies/2023/01/15/critics-choice-awards-best-speeches-brendan-fraser-sheryl-lee-ralph/11061350002/", "title": "Brendan Fraser tearfully accepts Critics Choice best actor award: 'I ...", "text": "A tearful Brendan Fraser accepted best actor for \"The Whale\" at the Critics Choice Awards on Sunday night, gratefully acknowledging his return to acting prominence.\n\n\"I was in the wilderness and I probably should have left a trail of breadcrumbs, but you found me,\" Fraser said from the stage, thanking director Darren Aronofsky for casting him in the critically lauded role. In \"The Whale,\" Fraser, 54, plays an English teacher housebound by severe obesity who tries to restore his relationship with his teenage daughter.\n\n\"The Mummy\" star beat out a field of actors that included \"Elvis\" heartthrob Austin Butler, who took the best drama actor award at last Tuesday's Golden Globes. Fraser said \"The Whale\" is about \"finding the light in a dark place\" and urged those suffering emotionally to take heart.\n\nWhat TV didn't show at the Critics Choice Awards:Kaley Cuoco's date night, Ke Huy Quan tears up\n\n\"For anyone like Charlie, who struggles with obesity, or for anyone who just feels like you are in a dark sea: I want you to know that you too have the strength to just get to your feet and go to the light. And good things will happen.\"\n\nIn the backstage media room, Fraser was asked what the award meant to him. With tears in his eyes, he replied, \"More than I know how to say in words.\"\n\nBrendan Fraser: The 'Whale' actor wants to change hearts and minds\n\nSheryl Lee Ralph thanks Sidney Poitier for calling her 'a damn good actress'\n\n\"Abbott Elementary\" star Sheryl Lee Ralph gave a heartfelt speech about overcoming career struggles when accepting best supporting actress in a comedy series for her role in \"Abbott Elementary.\"\n\nEncouragement by late acting legend Sidney Poitier was crucial.\n\n\"Every back break, every no, every rejection in an industry that, when I was 19 years old, was quick to tell me there was no place for me,\" Ralph recalled. \"Sidney Poitier looked at me and said, 'You're a damn good actress.' \"\n\nRalph, 66, gave thanks to \"Abbott Elementary\" creator and star Quinta Brunson, who accepted the award for best comedy series.\n\nShe ended the powerful speech by urging TV viewers to \"come close to the screen and listen.\"\n\n\"People don't have to like you, people don't have to love you, they don't even have to respect you,\" she said. \"But when you look in the mirror, you better love what you see!\"\n\nThe 6 biggest Golden Globe moments: From Jennifer Coolidge to Jerrod Carmichael's Tom Cruise jab\n\nJeff Bridges cites The Dude, thanks his late actor father, Lloyd Bridges\n\nJeff Bridges channeled his famed character The Dude from \"The Big Lebowski\" when accepting his lifetime achievement award at the Critics Choice Awards. Looking at the critics' trophy onstage, Bridges joked, \"The Dude would say of this, 'Well, that's just, like, your opinion, man.' But I dig your opinion. I love this.\"\n\nBridges, 73, honored his family in his speech, paying tribute to his wife of 48 years, Susan, and his late father, actor Lloyd Bridges.\n\n\"It's my dad's birthday today, January 15. I'm wearing his cuff links. I wouldn't be up here without my dad,\" Bridges said, adding that his father convinced him as a reluctant young man to pursue acting. \"He was so right. I'm so glad I listened to the old man!\"\n\nBridges, who was also nominated for best actor for his role in FX's drama \"The Old Man,\" acknowledged he had to research his many career roles before accepting the lifetime award.\n\n\"I had to look up my stuff on IMDb,\" Bridges said. \"And wow, I've made a lot of movies! My Gosh! All these little lifetimes.\"\n\nSAG Awards nominations:'Banshees of Inisherin,' 'Everything Everywhere' lead 2023 field\n\nNiecy Nash-Betts to doubters: 'In your face!'\n\nNiecy Nash-Betts talked about refusing to limit her acting range after winning best supporting actress in a limited series for Netflix’s \"Dahmer – Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story.”\n\n\"I saw myself doing drama. The industry was kind, but they said, 'Stay in your comedy lane,' \" said Nash-Betts, 52. \"Sometimes people want to leave you where they meet you. I did what I normally do: cry.\"\n\nHer mother was skeptical, but crucially supportive.\n\n\"I said, 'Momma, don't you think I'm a good dramatic actress?' \" Nash recalled. \"And she said, 'Girl, I don't.' She said, 'But you can be! You can find the best acting class in this town and I will work overtime to pay for it.' \"\n\n\"Thank you, Momma. All you need is one!\" Nash said, before giving her doubters a dramatic, \"In your face!\"\n\nWhat's the point of the Golden Globes anymore?The awards show should never have returned", "authors": [], "publish_date": "2023/01/15"}, {"url": "https://www.usatoday.com/story/entertainment/movies/2023/01/16/critics-choice-awards-behind-scenes-kaley-cuoco-ke-huy-quan/11061492002/", "title": "What TV didn't show at the Critics Choice Awards: Kaley Cuoco's ...", "text": "LOS ANGELES – Stars gathered Sunday at the Fairmont Century Plaza hotel dressed to the nines for the second big show of awards season: the Critics Choice Awards.\n\n“Everything Everywhere All at Once” emerged as the night's favorite, clinching five of its 14 nominated categories. “Abbott Elementary” star Sheryl Lee Ralph picked up a best supporting actress win and gave yet another powerful speech – as did Angela Bassett and Niecy Nash, when they both won supporting actress trophies for “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever” and “Dahmer - Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story\" respectively.\n\nA lot happened during the telecast, but even more action occurred in the ballroom that didn’t make it on TV. From stars hyping each other up with selfies to emotional backstage moments, here’s what went down.\n\n'I was in the wilderness': Brendan Fraser tearfully accepts Critics Choice best actor award\n\nAmanda Seyfried snaps selfie with Paul Walter Hauser, Kaley Cuoco and Tom Pelphrey share date night\n\nIn typical Critics Choice fashion, the second the telecast hit a commercial break, stars leaped to their feet, practically skipping across the ballroom to schmooze and jive with other celebs.\n\nDuring one break, Angela Bassett chatted up Janelle Monáe. Keegan-Michael Key and his wife Elle Key made their way to the \"Abbott Elementary\" table to have a conversation with Quinta Brunson and Lisa Ann Walter. And Stephanie Hsu from \"Everything Everywhere All At Once\" shared a hearty laugh with Jenny Slate of \"Marcel the Shell with Shoes On.\"\n\nWhat's the point of Golden Globes anymore?The awards show should never have returned\n\nAfter winning their respective trophies for best actress and best supporting actor in a limited series or movie made for television, Amanda Seyfried and Paul Walter Hauser stood to the side of the ballroom and spoke in hushed tones and animated expressions. At the end of their conversation, the two snapped a selfie.\n\nFor some stars, the show served as a romantic date night. Kaley Cuoco, sporting a growing baby bump, spent most of the night with her partner Tom Pelphrey. During one break, one guest asked Pelphrey to snap a photo of herself with Cuoco, which the actor happily obliged. Nash also worked the red carpet beside her wife Jessica Betts. The two tied the knot in 2020.\n\nKe Huy Quan struggles to hold back tears backstage\n\nThe adrenaline was palpable during the show, as ecstatic stars claimed their trophies and gave heartfelt speeches for the world to see.\n\nThat intensity carried over backstage in the media room, where winners were immediately ushered to take questions and reflect on what their victories meant.\n\nAfter winning best supporting actor, \"Everything Everywhere All at Once\" star Ke Huy Quan became emotional talking to reporters, saying the recognition surpassed his wildest dreams.\n\n\"I just wanted a job,\" he said, his voice faltering and heart \"still pounding.\"\n\n\"I'm so lucky,\" he added, tears welling in his eyes. \"I remember very well what it was like being an Asian actor in the late '80s and early '90s. I just want doors to be open for all those actors like me who just want nothing but a steady job, and I just want all their dreams to come true.\"\n\nQuan wasn't alone in feeling overwhelming gratitude. Ralph, winner for best supporting actress in a comedy series, got emotional as she talked about her late parents. \"If they’re able to look at me from heaven, 'Thank you, Mommy and Daddy, because this one’s for you,' \" she said, raising her trophy to the sky.\n\nPreviously:'Indiana Jones' star Ke Huy Quan waited 'more than 30 years' for 'Everything Everywhere' role\n\nIn? Vibes. Out? New Year's resolutions\n\nNew year, same celebs? On the red carpet, stars including Kerry Washington and Ayo Edebiri told USA TODAY they aren't really into resolutions, at least not for 2023.\n\n“I’m big on intentions for the year,” Washington says. Many share the same sentiment, forgoing the age-old tradition of setting big personal goals at the top of the year.\n\nKate Hudson says she “decided not to do resolutions … I didn’t do any of that this year, I’m just gonna come in hot.”\n\n“All American” star Calesha \"Bre-Z\" Murray tells us her resolution was to “eat better,” but it’s not going too well. Why? “I just don’t feel like it,” Bre-Z says with a laugh. Co-star Samantha Logan shared she was trying to eat better in the new year, too, along with having a better sleep schedule, but at the end of the day, the duo agreed it’s all about balance.\n\n“The plan is to be happy. Whatever makes you happy,” Bre-Z says. “Life is about balance.”\n\nLogan adds: “My body is going to fluctuate, and my skin is going to do whatever it wants to do, and that makes me human, and I don’t really care anymore.\"\n\nEdibiri says she also didn’t make any resolutions, but what’s “in” for her this year is being “nice to myself.” What’s out for the star of “The Bear”? Screen time, specifically TikTok.\n\nSAG Awards nominations: 'Banshees of Inisherin,' 'Everything Everywhere' lead 2023 field\n\nThe Critics Choice crowd was A-list, but the menu wasn't\n\nWhat do A-list celebrities get served for dinner at the Critics Choice Awards? Definitely not a five-course meal.\n\nEvery table was stocked with plenty of Fiji water, a couple of bottles of wine and a big bottle of champagne. The food options weren’t as abundant as the beverage selection, though: In addition to a cracker basket at each table, celebrities feasted on an array of dips including hummus and baba ganoush.\n\nIn case hummus wasn’t filling enough, there was plenty of Cold Stone ice cream to go around. Aside from a mini ice cream stand right outside the ballroom, Cold Stone cups were also passed around inside during commercial breaks.\n\nIt wasn’t until after the show when stars finally got to indulge in a little more sustenance. As soon as the telecast ended, stars exited the ballroom to find flatbreads, sushi rolls and dessert tables flooding the reception area.\n\n‘Abbott Elementary’ star Janelle James on Gritty, Beyoncé and why we all want to be Principal Ava", "authors": [], "publish_date": "2023/01/16"}, {"url": "https://www.usatoday.com/story/entertainment/movies/2022/12/20/the-whale-brendan-fraser-new-role-obesity/10905530002/", "title": "'The Whale': Brendan Fraser lays it all on the line for new role", "text": "MIDDLEBURG, Va. – The first time Brendan Fraser watched “The Whale,” alone in a screening room, he had a new first-time experience in his 30-year movie career.\n\n“I didn't recognize myself. I didn't know what the man on the screen was going to say next,” the actor says. And it was more because of the emotions left on screen than the transformation of Fraser, 54, into a middle-aged, 600-pound man. \"I felt that I had accomplished what I set out to, which is to give it everything I had like it's the first and last time I ever will.\n\n\"There's nothing else I can prove because I don't have any other moves left,\" Fraser adds with a laugh. \"That's all I got.\"\n\n'The Whale' review:Brendan Fraser's soulful, Oscar-ready performance will blow you away\n\nDirector Darren Aronofsky’s drama (in select theaters now, nationwide Wednesday) stars Fraser as Charlie, a dangerously obese gay writing instructor with congestive heart failure who reaches out to his estranged teen daughter, Ellie (Sadie Sink), in a quest to redeem himself in her eyes. The role’s won him rave reviews, scoring best actor nominations from the Golden Globes and Critics Choice Association and putting him in the pole position for an Academy Award.\n\nAn essay about “Moby-Dick” is a significant narrative element in the film, writer Samuel D. Hunter's adaptation of his 2012 play. So is winning an Oscar the actor's great white whale? The soft-spoken Fraser chuckles before, fittingly, quoting Herman Melville. “I know not all that may be coming but come what will, I will go to it laughing,” he says during an interview with Hunter at the Middleburg Film Festival. “He said it best. That and he said, ‘Ignorance is the father of fear.’ ”\n\nFor Fraser, who came up in 1990s comedies like \"Encino Man\" and \"Airheads\" and found blockbuster fame with “The Mummy” movies, being a dad to three sons was integral for his performance. “To have a 20-year-old with special needs, an 18-year-old who's a senior, and a 16-year-old who's picked up a guitar and can thrash now, I need only shudder to imagine if I had made life choices that Charlie had done, how I would feel at that time in my life. Which is foreign to me but it fueled my performance absolutely. That's all fair game in the weird alchemy of acting.”\n\nRanked:The 10 best movies of 2022, from Tom Cruise's 'Top Gun: Maverick' to 'The Whale,' 'RRR'\n\nHunter saw an important ingredient in Fraser: kindness. “I don't know if a cynical actor could pull off this role. It would be a very different performance,” the writer says.\n\nFilming “The Whale” was a physically and emotionally taxing 32 days for Fraser. His actual “great white whale,” in fact, was the concluding scene, Charlie’s contrition to Ellie, and Fraser had to film it over two days because, on the first, “I was all pedal and no gas.” Comparatively, the “heavy cumbersome stuff” was a piece of cake: On set, there were 70 steps from the chair in the makeup room to Charlie's couch, and clad in a mass of prosthetics, “I needed to be wheeled there by a team of five people who were like a pit crew with water (and) constant touchups,” Fraser says.\n\nHe wore a cooling suit similar to what race car drivers use, “which was a challenge in itself because once you start to overheat, the cold sensation of the water creates like a weather system: The cold front and the hot front collide, and then you've got a storm going on,” Fraser adds with a chuckle. “But I just dealt with it. It worked because Charlie is not comfortable. Any way he sits, he has such difficulty taking to his feet, which is a major plot point.”\n\n'My brain was misfiring':Brendan Fraser tells Adam Sandler he was 'starved of' carbs for 'George of the Jungle'\n\nFraser would feel vertigo when he removed the suit at the end of a day. “I felt this undulation that stayed with me for days after we wrapped,” he says. And although he could take it off, “I had a pretty close sensory understanding of what it is like to live with obesity. It did change me and it did make me feel for those who live in that body that they need to be incredibly strong. I learned a respect I was not anticipating.\"\n\nMost importantly for the actor, \"The Whale\" needed to avoid what has happened in the past with portrayals of obese people in movies: “One-note, butt-of-the-joke characters who wore silly costumes filled with cotton batting that we use in stuffed animals so that an athletic performance could be given,” he says. “Whatever neurological reason, our brain goes, ‘Oh, dichotomy, hilarious.’ But it doesn't sustain. What we did is the absolute opposite of that.”\n\nPreparing to play Charlie, Fraser had Zoom calls with almost a dozen people who gave him testimonials about their lives: “Some spoke about food as it was their addiction. Some spoke of food that it was a genetic disorder that brought them to where they were. Some spoke of food that it is still their love and they don't want to give it up.” Filmmakers also worked with Rachel Goldman, a mental health expert for the Obesity Action Coalition, who helped with sensitivity issues and also gave notes on makeup and the screenplay.\n\nGolden Globes:'The Whale' nominee Brendan Fraser says he won't attend after 'history' with HFPA\n\nThat education was key when Fraser performed one haunting scene where Charlie’s binge eating veers scarily out of control. “It drives home the point that he is not eating for pleasure or because he is hungry,” he says. “This is an act of self-harm.\"\n\nFraser realizes “The Whale” is a polarizing film that will “command attention” and “ask the thorny questions, and it's been the subject of backlash: People online labeled the movie “fat-phobic,” and New York Times writer Roxane Gay called it “an inhumane film about a very human being.”\n\nAsked about the criticism, Fraser says he’d be “more concerned with those opinions if they were prevalent after actually having seen the film.\"\n\nHunter acknowledges that his plays have often drawn mixed reactions. \"I have very little interest in writing something that is just a crowd-pleaser. I want my writing to have utility for people and that means going to some difficult places with it emotionally.”\n\nFraser hopes that “not only can we maybe amend or change the dialogue surrounding how we discuss and how we refer to people who live with obesity, it could send someone to a place where they could get help. It's not a film that's a public service announcement, but it is a film that does challenge us to change our hearts and minds.”", "authors": [], "publish_date": "2022/12/20"}, {"url": "https://www.cnn.com/2022/09/05/entertainment/brendan-fraser-whale-venice/index.html", "title": "Brendan Fraser gets emotional after standing ovation for 'The Whale ...", "text": "1. How relevant is this ad to you?\n\nVideo player was slow to load content Video content never loaded Ad froze or did not finish loading Video content did not start after ad Audio on ad was too loud Other issues", "authors": ["Lisa Respers France"], "publish_date": "2022/09/05"}, {"url": "https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2023/01/16/nepal-crash-ukraine-mlk-california-storms-biden-documents/11061897002/", "title": "MLK, Biden's classified documents, Nepal, Ukraine, California ...", "text": "Local officials say a flight data recorder and a cockpit voice recorder have been retrieved from the site of the crash of a passenger plane in Nepal. Also in the news: House Republicans are asking for more information about President Joe Biden's handling of classified documents and a look at Martin Luther King Jr.'s life and legacy.\n\n🙋🏼‍♀️ I'm Nicole Fallert, Daily Briefing author. What if a 16-foot python was your co-star?\n\nNow, here we go with Monday's news.\n\nSearch for the missing underway in Nepal plane crash ruin\n\nA spokesman for Nepal’s Civil Aviation Authority says a flight data recorder and a cockpit voice recorder have been retrieved from the site of the crash of a passenger plane that went down on its approach to the tourist town of Pokhara, killing 68 of the 72 people aboard. The devices will be handed over to investigators and the cause of the crash is still unknown. Social media video appears to show the plane starting to roll as it approached the ground. Officials said many of the bodies retrieved were burned beyond recognition and the search for the four missing people will continue Monday. Read more\n\nPhoto gallery: Dozens killed in Nepal plane crash.\n\nStorm-battered California is 'not done'\n\nWaves of heavy precipitation are expected to bring threats of flooding and landslides to storm-weary California. “We’re not done,” said Gov. Gavin Newsom Saturday as he urged Californians to be on alert for a few more days as the last of the nine atmospheric rivers were expected to move through. The stormy weather has already caused at least 19 deaths and a 5-year-old boy was still missing Sunday after being swept out of his mother’s car by floodwaters in San Luis Obispo County. A change in the weather pattern will start Tuesday as some dry weather is forecast to return to the drenched state. Read more\n\nMore news to know now\n\n🌤 What's the weather today? Check your local forecast here.\n\nBiden documents: Republicans want more information\n\nRepublicans said Sunday the White House needs to provide more information about Biden's treatment of classified information, as Biden allies said the GOP is trying to use the case to undercut an investigation of Donald Trump and top secret material.\n\nBut Democrats say the president and his attorneys turned over classified documents as soon as they were discovered, a marked contrast with how Trump handled sensitive records that should have been sent to the National Archives.\n\nIn a Sunday letter to the White House, Rep. James Comer, R-Ky., chairman of the House Oversight Committee, wrote that Biden's \"mishandling of classified materials raises the issue of whether he has jeopardized our national security.\"\n\nRep. James Comer, R-Ky., chairman of the House Oversight Committee, wrote that Biden's \"mishandling of classified materials raises the issue of whether he has jeopardized our national security.\" Republican House investigations are taking shape. In a letter addressed to Attorney General Merrick Garland, the House Judiciary Committee requested documents related to the discovery of the documents and Garland's appointment of special counsel Richard Hur to review the handling of the documents.\n\nIn a letter addressed to Attorney General Merrick Garland, the House Judiciary Committee requested documents related to the discovery of the documents and Garland's appointment of special counsel Richard Hur to review the handling of the documents. Biden has lawyered up. The president has chosen top Democratic attorney Bob Bauer to serve as his personal lawyer following the Justice Department's investigation.\n\n❓ What's going to happen in Washington over the next 2 years? Americans don't expect much.\n\nUkrainian officials report Russian missile attack on Kyiv\n\nA Ukrainian official says the death toll from the weekend Russian missile strike on an apartment building in the southeastern Ukrainian city of Dnipro has risen to 37. The regional governor said Monday that rescuers continued searching through the rubble for more victims. At least 75 people were wounded and 35 others were still missing after Saturday’s strike. About 1,700 people lived in the multi-story building. Residents say there were no military facilities at the site. The strike on Saturday came amid a major barrage of Russian cruise missiles across Ukraine. Read more\n\nJust for subscribers:\n\nThese articles are for USA TODAY subscribers. You can sign up here. Already a subscriber and want premium content texted to you every day? We can do that! Sign up for our subscriber-only texting campaign.\n\nRemembering Martin Luther King Jr.'s life and legacy\n\nRev. Martin Luther King Jr. made history as a defining leader of the Civil Rights movement who preached a message of nonviolent resistance. His hand in organizing a number of significant protests, marches and speeches helped bring about landmark legislation — most notably the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 — and his message continues to resonate today. On April 4, 1968, King, 39, was fatally shot on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee. Today, in honor of King's birthday on Jan. 15, the nation pauses to reflect on the life, death, and legacy of the towering historical figure. Read more\n\n📷 Photo of the day: Critics Choice Awards 2023 📷\n\nOn the heels of Golden Globes, Hollywood stepped out Sunday to celebrate the best in movies and television, this time at the Critics Choice Awards in Los Angeles. Check out all the best looks on the red carpet, starting with Angela Bassett.\n\nBrendan Fraser tearfully accepts Critics Choice best actor award: ''I was in the wilderness.''\n\nOne more thing\n\nNicole Fallert is a newsletter writer at USA TODAY, sign up for the email here. Want to send Nicole a note? Shoot her an email at NFallert@usatoday.com or follow along with her musings on Twitter. Support journalism like this – subscribe to USA TODAY here.", "authors": [], "publish_date": "2023/01/16"}, {"url": "https://www.usatoday.com/story/entertainment/movies/2023/01/19/bafta-film-awards-nominations-2023/11080853002/", "title": "'All Quiet on the Western Front' leads race for BAFTA film awards ...", "text": "Jill Lawless\n\nAssociated Press\n\nLONDON — Visceral World War I German-language drama \"All Quiet on the Western Front\" got a field-leading 14 nominations on Thursday for the British Academy Film Awards, with genre-bending comedies \"The Banshees of Inisherin\" and \"Everything Everywhere All At Once\" each nominated in 10 categories.\n\n\"All Quiet,\" an unflinching adaptation of a classic antiwar novel about life and death in the trenches, is up for awards including best film and best director, for Edward Berger.\n\nIts tally of nominations is the highest ever for a film not in the English language.\n\nWhy remake a 92-year-old Oscar-winning movie? 'All Quiet on the Western Front' director explains\n\nMartin McDonagh's Irish tragicomedy \"Banshees\" has nominations including best picture, best director and best actor, for Colin Farrell. Nominations for madcap metaverse adventure \"Everything Everywhere\" include nods for co-directors Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert — known jointly as \"the Daniels\" — and a best-actress nomination for Michelle Yeoh.\n\nBaz Lurhmann's flamboyant musical biopic \"Elvis\" is up for nine awards, including best picture.\n\nThe BAFTAs are Britain's equivalent of Hollywood's Academy Awards. The winners will be announced Feb. 19 at a ceremony in London.\n\nThe nominations help cement \"Banshees\" and \"Everything Everywhere\" as awards-season favorites, following momentum-building wins at the Golden Globes and multiple nominations for the Screen Actors Guild Awards.\n\n'The Banshees of Inisherin' review:Colin Farrell, Brendan Gleeson bring friendly fire to dark comedy\n\n'Everything Everywhere' review:Michelle Yeoh's reluctant heroine powers dazzling, dizzying film\n\nThe BAFTA best-picture nominees are \"All Quiet on the Western Front,\" \"The Banshees of Inisherin,\" \"Elvis,\" \"Everything Everywhere All at Once\" and Todd Field's symphonic psychodrama \"Tár.\"\n\nThe 10 nominees for outstanding British film, a separate category, include Charlotte Wells' 1990s family drama \"Aftersun,\" Sam Mendes' semi-autobiographical \"Empire of Light\" and Sophie Hyde's smart sex comedy \"Good Luck to You, Leo Grande.\"\n\nBritain's film academy introduced changes to increase the awards' diversity in 2020, when no women were nominated as best director for the seventh year running and all 20 nominees in the lead and supporting performer categories were white.\n\nGolden Globes diversity wins:Ryan Murphy honors LGBTQ stars; Ke Huy Quan, more earn prizes\n\nThe voting process was rejigged to add a \"longlist\" round in the voting before the selection of the final nominees that are voted on by the academy membership of several thousand industry professionals. For the best film prize, academy members choose a 15-film longlist that all members must watch before voting for the winner.\n\nThis year there are 11 female directors up for awards across all categories, including documentary and animated films. But just one of the main best-director nominees is female: Gina Prince-Bythewood for \"The Woman King.\" The other nominees are Berger, McDonagh, Kwan/Scheinert, Field and Korean filmmaker Park Chan-wook, for \"Decision to Leave.\"\n\nUnlike some awards, including U.K. music prizes the Brits, the BAFTAs have retained separate male and female acting categories, though that is under review.\n\nLeading actress contenders are Yeoh; Cate Blanchett for \"Tár\": Viola Davis for \"The Woman King\"; Danielle Deadwyler for \"Till\"; Ana de Armas for \"Blonde\" and Emma Thompson for \"Good Luck to You, Leo Grande.\"\n\nThe best-actor category pits Farrell against Austin Butler for \"Elvis\"; Brendan Fraser for \"The Whale\"; Daryl McCormack for \"Good Luck to You, Leo Grande,\" Paul Mescal for \"Aftersun\" and Bill Nighy for \"Living.\"\n\nAwards speeches:Brendan Fraser tearfully accepts Critics Choice best actor award: 'I was in the wilderness'", "authors": [], "publish_date": "2023/01/19"}, {"url": "https://www.cnn.com/2022/12/21/opinions/the-whale-fatphobia-brendan-fraser-ctrp-stewart/index.html", "title": "Opinion: The backlash against 'The Whale' is telling us all something ...", "text": "Editor’s Note: Sara Stewart is a film and culture writer who lives in western Pennsylvania. The views expressed here are solely the author’s own. View more opinion articles on CNN.\n\nCNN —\n\nAs Darren Aronofsky’s “The Whale” – which has been in select theaters – opens in theaters around the country this week, the film could become a powerful empathy generator. Just perhaps not in the way it was intended.\n\nSara Stewart Todd Thompson\n\nThe film, which has garnered significant praise even as it’s prompted notable controversy, stars Brendan Fraser as Charlie, a 600-pound gay man slowly eating himself to death. It’s adapted from a play of the same name by Samuel D. Hunter, and one of its most-discussed features has been the fat suit Fraser wears.\n\nThe film has been a flashpoint for controversy since it debuted at the Venice Film Festival this summer. While critics and the public seem nearly unanimous in their desire for nice guy Fraser to get all the awards for his dedicated performance, a mounting chorus has described the film’s tone and content as fatphobic.\n\nI have not yet seen “The Whale,” as I’m not located in one of the two cities it’s been playing in prior to its expanded release this week. Given the acclaim the film’s received and my desire to see Fraser thrive after what he’s been through, I had originally planned to see it when I could. But after spending some time reading and listening to how harmful fat people say the portrayal is to them, I’m taking another look.\n\nThe fat suit isn’t the same as a lived experience\n\nBy many accounts, the film plays Charlie’s weight as an absolute tragedy and a visual horror show.\n\n“Aronofsky turns up the foley audio whenever Charlie is eating, to emphasize the wet sound of lips smacking together. He plays ominous music under these sequences, so we know Charlie’s doing something very bad indeed,” wrote Katie Rife in Polygon. “In case viewers still don’t get that they’re supposed to find him disgusting, he recites an essay about ‘Moby-Dick’ and how a whale is ‘a poor big animal’ with no feelings.”\n\nFrom the beginning, the film apparently humiliates Charlie abjectly: He’s shown nearly dying from a heart attack while masturbating to porn. “It was crystal clear that Mr. Hunter and Mr. Aronofsky considered fatness to be the ultimate human failure,” asserted Roxane Gay in the New York Times, “something despicable, to be avoided at all costs.”\n\nSo maybe it’s a good occasion to devote some effort to listening to, reading and amplifying voices from the fat community regarding their thoughts on “The Whale.”\n\nIt’s not like there’s any dearth of commentary about how bad being fat is, from official government warnings to comedians like Ricky Gervais who’ve made it one of their pet subjects. In a more novel development, though, early news of “The Whale” this year coincided with an uptick in discourse around both fat acceptance and open criticism of Hollywood’s history of generally horrific portrayals of fatness, most prominently in its use of the fat suit. Earlier this year, Sarah Paulson and Emma Thompson came under fire for wearing prosthetic body suits, the former as Linda Tripp in “Impeachment: American Crime Story,” and the latter as Miss Trunchbull in Netflix’s “Matilda.”\n\nHunter, who also wrote the film, told Entertainment Weekly, “I understand why people have some of those reactions because, look, the history of portraying people suffering with obesity in cinema is not good,” but argued that the film is an “invitation” to “be with” Charlie. For viewers who “do take that invitation and go inside,” he said “I think you’ll find that this is the diametric opposite of the way obesity has traditionally been portrayed and dealt with in cinema.”\n\nTo me, the best thing that could come out of all the publicity surrounding “The Whale” is the centering of the opinions of fat people on the film. Are they planning to see “The Whale”? What are other people saying to them about the movie? How will this affect them, and the way we all think about fatness? And shouldn’t those of us who haven’t had that lived experience maybe just… shut the F up?\n\nA lot of us need to listen to these voices\n\nAubrey Gordon, author of the forthcoming book “‘You Just Need to Lose Weight’ and 19 Other Myths About Fat People” and co-host of the excellent podcast “Maintenance Phase,” has been a crucial voice on the subject. In a 2021 episode of the show, she examined the obesity epidemic, including the ways in which research data has been misused over the past two decades to gin up a moral panic about fatness.\n\nFor me, Gordon and her co-host, Michael Hobbes, have been instrumental in evolving the way I process stories and information (and misinformation) about weight, “wellness,” and the loudest cultural voices speaking about health and lifestyle. Their episode on Dr. Oz is a smart, hilarious jumping-in point.\n\nIn discussing the discourse around “The Whale” on Twitter, Gordon pointed to another Hollywood movie that involved a fat suit: 2001’s “Shallow Hal,” the Farrelly brothers comedy whose running gag is that a guy (Jack Black) is hypnotized into believing a very fat woman (Gwyneth Paltrow, wearing the suit) is beautiful.\n\nWhen accused of being fatphobic, the filmmakers of “Shallow Hal” said that the “movie’s heart is in the right place.” That, said Gordon on Twitter, is beside the point. “It’s deeply telling & extraordinarily disheartening that so many people take thin creators saying ‘we didn’t mean to hurt fat people’ as saying they somehow DIDN’T or CAN’T hurt fat people. It’s deeply telling & extraordinarily disheartening that, after 20+ yrs, that still works.”\n\nIn the release of “The Whale,” she continued, “so much of the discourse this time around consists of fat people saying ‘this is going to make life harder for me’ and the response from people who aren’t fat is largely ‘no, it’s humanizing you.’ I would argue that’s our call to make.”\n\nGuy Branum, an actor, TV host and comedian who had a role in the recent romantic comedy “Bros,” has also been outspoken about his objections to “The Whale” and its portrayal of fat people. In an interview with NPR’s Glen Weldon, he noted Aronofsky’s citing health risks on set as his reason for putting an actor in a fat suit, rather than just casting a bigger actor. “I desperately pleaded with Nick Stoller, the director of ‘Bros,’ to take out a full page ad in Variety attesting to the fact that he had worked with me for four months,” he told Weldon, “and I did not explode once on set from fatness.”\n\nBranum has also shared his experience of reading the play the film is based on: “Part of me hoped it might be good, insightful about a life like mine. Instead it was a sad, pathetic story of a sad, pathetic man. I got sad for the main character, Charlie, and how little the author’s imagination offered his life, trapped in a bad apartment, eating fried chicken endlessly,” Branum wrote on Instagram, following it up with a description of taking the play on trips with him so it might enjoy a little happiness for a change.\n\nCritic Sean Donovan, who identifies as fat and queer, wrote movingly of his experience watching the film, particularly his dismay at its “soap opera” plotting around Charlie’s martyrish refusal to seek medical treatment so he can leave all his money to his daughter (Sadie Sink), who hates him.\n\nAs Donovan pointed out, there are other, more plausible reasons a man like Charlie might avoid hospitals: “The shame felt in medical spaces is a real danger to queer and fat populations, causing us to avoid them precisely when they are the most needed. These contexts never come up in ‘The Whale,’ to its detriment, as they could have invested the film with the breath of true challenges and barriers facing queer and fat people in the world.”\n\nAnti-fat bias has real-world casualties\n\nDonovan’s assertions are backed up by Scientific American, whose weight stigma reporter Virginia Sole-Smith has covered the many ways in which medicine is tainted by anti-fat bias, from doctors who admit they’re “disgusted” by overweight patients to the “obesity paradox,” which refers to findings that in some cases, “fat people [are] not dying of heart disease like we’re always told they will,” and that in fact being physically active is more important for heart health than how big your body is.\n\nIt’s in Aronofsky’s failure to engage any of these viewpoints – and he’s done a lot of talking about the movie since its release – that he makes clear how little connection there is between “The Whale” and living, breathing fat people.\n\nGet our free weekly newsletter Sign up for CNN Opinion’s newsletter. Join us on Twitter and Facebook\n\nSo instead of seeing this film I’m making plans to read and listen to writers who are working to change the perception and portrayal of fat people. In addition to Gordon’s book and podcast, there is critic Clarkisha Kent’s memoir “Fat Off, Fat On: A Big Bitch Manifesto,” coming out next March, and journalist and author Evette Dionne’s new book “Weightless: Making Space for My Resilient Body and Soul.” Also worth a read: “Shrill,” by Lindy West (which later became an Aidy Bryant-starring TV show), a memoir that became an instant classic when it published in 2016.\n\nI think West should have the last word here, from her 2011 essay on fat-shaming, “Hello, I Am Fat.” Her words describe why, despite whatever may be great about “The Whale,” I don’t want to see it.\n\n“This is what’s behind this entire thing—it’s not about ‘health,’ it’s about ‘eeeewwwww.’ You think fat people are icky. Eeeewww, a fat person might touch you on a plane. With their fat!… And sorry, I reject your eeeeeewwww.”", "authors": ["Sara Stewart"], "publish_date": "2022/12/21"}, {"url": "https://www.cnn.com/2022/04/24/entertainment/johnny-depp-amber-heard-defamation-trial/index.html", "title": "Johnny Depp to return to the stand in his defamation case against ...", "text": "CNN —\n\nActors Johnny Depp and Amber Heard are in a contentious defamation trial in a Virginia court, with proceedings set to resume on Monday.\n\nDepp is suing Heard, his ex-wife, for $50 million over a 2018 op-ed she wrote for The Washington Post in which she described herself as a “public figure representing domestic abuse.” Though Depp was not named in the article, he claims it cost him lucrative acting roles.\n\nBoth Heard and Depp, who met in 2009 and were married from 2015-2016, accuse the other of acts of physical violence during their relationship. They have both denied the other’s claims.\n\nThe former couple settled their divorce in August 2016, releasing a joint statement which read in part, “Our relationship was intensely passionate and at times volatile, but always bound by love.”\n\nThe trial, which started on April 11, is set to last six weeks. Heard has not yet testified.\n\nDepp began his testimony on April 19, and he is expected to continue being cross-examined by Heard’s attorney on Monday.\n\nHere’s some of what came up during his testimony so far.\n\nFrequent arguments\n\nHeard alleged in 2016 that Depp was “verbally and physically abusive” to her, according to a complaint she filed that year, alleging Depp bruised her face after throwing a phone at her in their Los Angeles home.\n\nDepp denied the allegation and was not charged with any crime.\n\nDepp testified Tuesday that the couple frequently argued but said, “Never did I myself reach the point of striking Ms. Heard in any way nor have I ever struck any woman in my life.”\n\nAudio recordings of some of their heated exchanges have been played in court, including one in which Heard discussed striking Depp.\n\nAmber Heard speaks to one of her attorneys at the Fairfax County Circuit Courthouse on April 19. Jim Watson/Pool/AFP/Getty Images\n\n“You didn’t get punched; you got hit. I’m sorry I hit you like this, but I did not punch you,” Heard purportedly said.\n\nLaurel Anderson, a clinical psychologist who worked with Depp and Heard in 2015 as their marriage counselor, testified in a video played in court on April 14 that Heard told her she “fought back” after Depp would become physical. Anderson said the former couple “engaged in what I saw as mutual abuse.”\n\nDepp has also claimed he physically defended himself at times, speaking about one incident in which Heard said her nose was injured. Depp said in court that his head connected with Heard’s forehead while he was trying to “restrain” Heard.\n\n“There was not an intentional head butt,” the actor said.\n\nA severed finger\n\nDepp testified that his finger was severed by shattered glass in 2015 after Heard allegedly threw a bottle of vodka at him. He sought medical care but said in court that he told others at the time that he injured his finger by slamming it in a door.\n\n“I didn’t want to disclose that it had been Ms. Heard that had thrown a vodka bottle at me and then took my finger off,” he said during his testimony. “I didn’t want to get her in trouble. I tried to just keep things as copacetic and easy as possible for everyone. I didn’t want to put her into that mix.”\n\nJohnny Depp displays the middle finger of his hand in court, injured in 2015. Evelyn Hockstein/Pool/AFP/Getty Images\n\nDepp said he has had multiple surgeries to repair the finger and contracted Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) during recovery. MRSA causes staph infections that are resistant to some antibiotics and often are difficult to treat.\n\nDr. David Kipper, who has treated Depp, corroborated portions of Depp’s story in a deposition played in court this week.\n\nHeard’s lawyers have referenced statements Depp made to ER doctors at the time to argue that Depp cut off his own finger. Depp denies this.\n\nDepp was also asked about his actions following his injury, including when he used his injured finger to write on the walls with a mixture of his blood and paint. Depp confirmed in court that he had done so.\n\nText messages\n\nHeard’s attorney Ben Rottenborn introduced several text messages Depp sent to friends and staff members as evidence on Thursday, one of which referenced Heard’s “rotting corpse.”\n\nDepp testified he was “embarrassed” by the messages read in court and said he uses “dark humor” at times to express himself.\n\nJohnny Depp during testimony on April 21. Jim Lo Scalzo/Pool/AFP/Getty Images\n\nOther text messages were shared in which Depp discussed his drug use and alcohol use with friends like actor Paul Bettany and musician Marilyn Manson.\n\n‘Pirates of the Caribbean’\n\nAs Depp’s lawsuit focuses on the damage that has been done to his once lucrative career, some conversation was focused on “Pirates of the Caribbean,” the popular franchise that Depp led for five films over 15 years.\n\nRottenborn, Heard’s lawyer, argued that Depp was aware he was “likely out” of the sixth film or that Disney would drop or shrink his role in it, prior to the publication of Heard’s op-ed. Depp denied this.\n\nJohnny Depp as Captain Jack Sparrow in \"Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl.\" Disney Pictures\n\n“I would be a real simpleton to not think that there was an effect on my career based on Ms. Heard’s words, whether they mentioned my name or not,” Depp said on the stand.\n\nDepp sheepishly admitted in his testimony that he has not seen the first film in the “Pirates” franchise. He said, however, “I believed in the character wholeheartedly.”\n\nHowever, when asked by Rottenborn, “If Disney came to you with $300 million and a million alpacas, nothing on this Earth would get you to go back and work with Disney on a ‘Pirates of the Caribbean’ film, correct?”\n\n“That is true, Mr. Rottenborn,” Depp replied.\n\nDepp added on his career: “One day you’re Cinderella so to speak and then in zero point six seconds you’re Quasimodo. I didn’t deserve that and nor did my children, nor did the people who had believed in me all these years.”", "authors": ["Chloe Melas"], "publish_date": "2022/04/24"}, {"url": "https://www.cnn.com/2022/04/08/entertainment/will-smith-academy-sanctions-decision/index.html", "title": "Actor Will Smith banned from attending Oscars for 10 years", "text": "CNN —\n\nWill Smith will not be allowed to attend the Academy Awards for the next 10 years, as a result of his slapping comedian Chris Rock on stage during this year’s Oscar ceremony, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences announced in a statement obtained by CNN.\n\n“The Board has decided, for a period of 10 years from April 8, 2022, Mr. Smith shall not be permitted to attend any Academy events or programs, in person or virtually, including but not limited to the Academy Awards,” Academy President David Rubin and CEO Dawn Hudson said in a statement on Friday.\n\nThe decision was made during a Board of Governors meeting held earlier in the day in Los Angeles. The meeting, initially scheduled for April 18, was expedited after Smith announced his resignation from the Academy last week.\n\nSmith issued a quick, concise statement on his ban from the Oscars for the next decade.\n\n“I accept and respect the Academy’s decision,” the actor said in a statement to CNN.\n\nCNN has reached out to Rock’s representatives for comment.\n\nThe decision came following “tons of debate” on what the consequences of his on-stage slap should be, a board member tells CNN.\n\nThe Academy’s letter added: “The 94th Oscars were meant to be a celebration of the many individuals in our community who did incredible work this past year; however, those moments were overshadowed by the unacceptable and harmful behavior we saw Mr. Smith exhibit on stage.”\n\n“During our telecast, we did not adequately address the situation in the room,” the letter went on to state. “For this, we are sorry. This was an opportunity for us to set an example for our guests, viewers and our Academy family around the world, and we fell short — unprepared for the unprecedented.”\n\nThe Board of Governors said in a previous statement that they wanted the matter to be “handled in a timely fashion.”\n\nSmith’s resignation means that he is no longer part of the Academy’s voting body, but it does not prevent the Oscar winner from being nominated in the future, a source with knowledge previously told CNN.\n\nSmith can also still be nominated despite being barred from attending the Oscars because “the standards of conduct rules” at play in today’s action “do not apply to awards eligibility,” a source close to the Academy with direct knowledge of the rules told CNN on Friday.\n\nTypically, the previous year’s best actor winner presents the current year’s best actress award (and the reigning best actress presents to the best actor trophy). With Smith’s ban, the Oscars will have to break that tradition.\n\nWhat happened and what came next\n\nThe actor struck Rock as the comedian was on stage presenting at the Academy Awards on March 27 after Rock had made a joke about Smith’s wife, Jada Pinkett Smith’s, close-cropped hair.\n\nPinkett Smith suffers from hair loss due to alopecia.\n\nRock has not spoken in depth publicly about the incident.\n\nDays after it occurred, Rock appeared at a comedy show in Boston as part of his “Ego Death Tour” and said “I don’t have a bunch of s*** about what happened, so if you came to hear that, I had like a whole show I wrote before this weekend. And I’m still kind of processing what happened, so at some point I’ll talk about that s***. And it’ll be serious and it’ll be funny, but right now I’m going to tell some jokes.”\n\nSmith publicly apologized to Rock the day after the incident via social media.\n\nSmith also reached out the next morning to the show’s producer, Will Packer, apologized and expressed his embarrassment, the producer told “Good Morning America.”\n\nDuring the interview with “GMA,” Packer said officers from the Los Angeles Police Department were prepared to arrest Smith for battery, but Rock said he didn’t want that.\n\nIn its letter, the Academy expressed “deep gratitude to Mr. Rock for maintaining his composure under extraordinary circumstances.”\n\n“This action we are taking today in response to Will Smith’s behavior is a step toward a larger goal of protecting the safety of our performers and guests, and restoring trust in the Academy,” the letter concluded. “We also hope this can begin a time of healing and restoration for all involved and impacted.”", "authors": ["Chloe Melas Lisa Respers France", "Chloe Melas", "Lisa Respers France"], "publish_date": "2022/04/08"}, {"url": "https://www.cnn.com/2022/10/24/entertainment/leslie-jordan-dead/index.html", "title": "Leslie Jordan, beloved actor and social media star, dead at 67 | CNN", "text": "CNN —\n\nLeslie Jordan, beloved comedian and actor known for his work on “Will and Grace,” has died, his agent announced.\n\nHe was 67.\n\n“The world is definitely a much darker place today without the love and light of Leslie Jordan. Not only was he a mega talent and joy to work with, but he provided an emotional sanctuary to the nation at one of its most difficult times. What he lacked in height he made up for in generosity and greatness as a son, brother, artist, comedian, partner and human being. Knowing that he has left the world at the height of both his professional and personal life is the only solace one can have today,” Sarabeth Schedeen, Jordan’s talent agent, said in a statement to CNN.\n\n“Beyond his talents, Leslie’s gifts of bringing joy to those he touched, his ability to connect with people of all ages, his humility, kindness and his sweetness will be sorely missed by all,” his attorney Eric Feig said in a statement.\n\nJordan was involved in a car accident on Monday morning in Hollywood and was pronounced dead at the scene, according to the LA County coroner, who identified Jordan, and a spokesperson for the LA Fire Department.\n\nJordan’s move to Hollywood\n\nIn his 2009 book “My Trip Down the Pink Carpet,” Jordan documented his move from Tennessee to Hollywood in 1982. He “boarded a Greyhound bus bound for LA with $1,200 sewn into his underpants and never looked back,” a publisher’s description of the book read.\n\nThe actor found work on television in shows like “The Fall Guy,” “Designing Women” and “The People Next Door.”\n\nJordan originated the role of Earl “Brother Boy” Ingram in the award-winning play “Sordid Lives,” which he reprised in the 2000 independent film adaption.\n\nMegan Mullally and Leslie Jordan in \"Will and Grace.\" Tina Thorpe/NBC/Getty Images\n\nHe was a fan-favorite for his recurring role as Karen’s friend Beverley Leslie on “Will & Grace.” He also appeared in “American Horror Story” and “The Cool Kids.”\n\nHis star shone even brighter during the height of the pandemic when his social media presence took off on Instagram, garnering him millions of followers.\n\nVideo Ad Feedback Leslie Jordan talks internet fame with Anderson Cooper 21:32 - Source: CNN\n\nThe platform also became a place where Jordan shared about his struggles, memories and family stories (many about his beloved mama) through the prism of humor.\n\nJordan talked to CNN’s Anderson Cooper about his past substance abuse and being sober for more than 20 years.\n\n“People say ‘Well how do you get sober, what’s the best way,’” Jordan said. “Yeah, well 120 days in the jailhouse in Los Angeles. That will sober you up.”\n\nIn one post, Jordan recalled a guard who took pity on how much Jordan disliked incarceration and informed him that they had Robert Downey Jr. (who decades ago made headlines for a few brushes with the law) in custody and would be releasing Jordan and giving Downey Jr. his bed.\n\n“Pod A, cell 13, top bunk,” Jordan recalled. “I feel responsible for most of Robert Downey Jr.’s success. Honey, I gave him a bed.”\n\nHis last posting on Instagram was him singing a hymn with artist Danny Myrick on Sunday.", "authors": ["Lisa Respers France Chloe Melas", "Lisa Respers France", "Chloe Melas"], "publish_date": "2022/10/24"}]}
{"question_id": "20230120_19", "search_time": "2023/01/20/16:38", "search_result": [{"url": "https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2023/01/16/sicilian-mafia-boss-matteo-messina-denaro-arrested-italian-police/11061899002/", "title": "Italy arrests Sicilian Mafia boss Matteo Messina Denaro after 30 ...", "text": "Associated Press\n\nROME – Italy’s No. 1 fugitive, convicted Mafia boss Matteo Messina Denaro, was arrested on Monday at a private clinic in Palermo, Sicily, after 30 years on the run, Italian paramilitary police said.\n\nMessina Denaro was captured at the clinic where he was receiving treatment for an undisclosed medical condition, said Carabinieri Gen. Pasquale Angelosanto, who heads the police force’s special operations squad.\n\nMessina Denaro was taken to a secret location by police immediately after the arrest, Italian state television reported.\n\nA young man when he went into hiding, he is now 60. Messina Denaro, who had a power base in the port city of Trapani, in western Sicily, was considered Sicily’s Cosa Nostra top boss even while a fugitive.\n\nHe was the last of three longtime fugitive top-level Mafia bosses who had for decades eluded capture.\n\nMessina Denaro, who was tried in absentia and convicted of dozens of murders, faces multiple life sentences.\n\nHe is set to be imprisoned for two bombings in Sicily in 1992 that murdered top anti-Mafia prosecutors, Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino. Among other grisly crimes he was convicted of is the murder of a Mafia turncoat's young son, who was strangled and his body dissolved in a vat of acid.\n\nThe arrest Monday came 30 years and a day after the capture of convicted “boss of bosses” Salvatore “Toto” Riina, in a Palermo apartment after 23 years on the run.", "authors": [], "publish_date": "2023/01/16"}, {"url": "https://www.theweek.co.uk/news/crime/959272/matteo-messina-denaro-fugitive-mafia-boss-behind-bars-at-last", "title": "Matteo Messina Denaro: the most-wanted Mafia boss finally behind ...", "text": "The last “godfather” of the Sicily’s Cosa Nostra Mafia is facing life in prison after being captured following more than three decades on the run.\n\nMatteo Messina Denaro has been linked to more than 50 murders and went into hiding following a series of bombings in 1993 that left ten people dead and 93 injured. The 60-year-old was Italy's most-wanted Mafia killer before finally being arrested on Monday, after police discovered that he was attending a private medical clinic in Palermo under a false name for cancer treatment.\n\nMessina Denaro – who once boasted that he had “filled a cemetery all by myself” – “calmly admitted his true identity” when confronted by police, The Times's Rome-based correspondent Tom Kington reported.\n\nWho is Matteo Messina Denaro?\n\nMessina Denaro was born into a “very powerful and well-respected” Mafia family on 26 April 1962 in Castelvetrano in western Sicily, said The Sun. Nicknamed Diabolik, after an uncatchable criminal in an Italian comic book, he is “alleged to have learned to use a gun at 14, and committed his first murder at 18”.\n\nThe Times's Kington said he also gained “a reputation as a serial seducer of women while “rising through the ranks” of Cosa Nostra, the criminal organisation that terrorised Sicily in the late 1980s and early 1990s, to become head of the Trapani clan and a member of the ruling “Cupola” council.\n\nIn 1993, Messina Denaro took part in the kidnapping of Giuseppe di Matteo, the 12-year-old son of a turncoat. The boy was held prisoner and tortured for more than two years in a bid to prevent his father from giving evidence, before finally being strangled to death and his body dissolved in acid.\n\nMonths before the kidnapping, the ambitious mafioso had taken over day-to-day running of the Cosa Nostra after his mentor, Salvatore “Totò” Riina, was arrested. But Messina Denaro was forced into hiding later that year following a deadly wave of bombings against Cosa Nostra targets in Rome, Florence and Milan.\n\nThe Mafia boss was convicted in absentia and sentenced to life in prison for the bomb attacks, the victims of which included leading prosecuting judges Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino.\n\nWhere had he been for hiding for 30 years?\n\nMessina Denaro “was widely speculated to have fled abroad, undergone plastic surgery to have changed his face, or even died in secrecy”, said the Financial Times (FT)..", "authors": ["The Week Staff"], "publish_date": "2023/01/16"}, {"url": "https://www.cnn.com/2022/01/05/tech/gioacchino-gammino-google-maps-italy-mafia-intl-hnk/index.html", "title": "Gioacchino Gammino: Google Maps helps Italian police capture ...", "text": "1. How relevant is this ad to you?\n\nVideo player was slow to load content Video content never loaded Ad froze or did not finish loading Video content did not start after ad Audio on ad was too loud Other issues", "authors": [], "publish_date": "2022/01/05"}]}
{"question_id": "20230120_20", "search_time": "2023/01/20/16:38", "search_result": []}
{"question_id": "20230120_21", "search_time": "2023/01/20/16:38", "search_result": [{"url": "https://www.theweek.co.uk/news/science-health/959320/cake-in-the-office-as-bad-as-passive-smoking", "title": "Cake in the office 'as bad as passive smoking' | The Week UK", "text": "Taking cake to work to share with colleagues causes as much harm to health as passive smoking, the chair of the Food Standards Agency has warned.\n\nProfessor Susan Jebb told The Times that people often “undervalue” the impact that their environment has on their choices. “If nobody brought in cakes into the office, I would not eat cakes in the day, but because people do bring cakes in, I eat them,” she said.\n\nJebb said that the issues of unhealthy eating and passive smoking were not identical, but added that the latter inflicts harm on others “and exactly the same is true of food”.\n\nThe comparison has drawn criticisms, however. Dr Helen Wall, a GP in Bolton, told the BBC that “if somebody's smoking next to you, you can't help but inhale that”. But “if someone's got a cake next to you”, Wall continued, “you don't have to eat it”.\n\nWatchdog boss Jebb also accused the government of damaging public health, by delaying a planned 9pm watershed ban on TV and online junk food advertising. Advertising junk food is “undermining people’s free will”, she told The Times. Allowing advertising “with no health controls” had resulted in a “complete market failure”, she argued, “because what you get advertised is chocolate and not cauliflower”.\n\nRishi Sunak faced a “furious backlash from health experts” in December after announcing that the implementation of the ban was being pushed back from 2023 to 2025, The Guardian reported.\n\nChris Askew, chief executive of the charity Diabetes UK, told the paper that the “disgraceful” delay would “disproportionately impact the lowest income households, who have less access to healthy food and are targeted by a greater amount of advertising of unhealthy food”.\n\nA ban on multibuy promotions on foods and drinks high in fat, salt, or sugar was also delayed last May by Boris Johnson. Barbara Crowther of the Children’s Food Campaign accused the then prime minister of “playing politics with children’s health”.", "authors": ["Kate Samuelson"], "publish_date": "2023/01/18"}, {"url": "https://www.cnn.com/2022/04/10/health/covid-19-ventilation-matters-wellness/index.html", "title": "Ventilation: A powerful Covid-19 mitigation measure | CNN", "text": "CNN —\n\nTwo-plus years into the Covid-19 pandemic, you probably know the basics of protection: vaccines, boosters, proper handwashing and masks. But one of the most powerful tools against the coronavirus is one that experts believe is just starting to get the attention it deserves: ventilation.\n\nRespiratory backwash\n\n“The challenge for organizations that improve air quality is that it’s invisible,” said Joseph Allen, director of the Healthy Buildings Program at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.\n\nIt’s true: Other Covid tools are more tangible. But visualizing how the virus might behave in poorly ventilated spaces can help people better understand this mitigation measure.\n\nAllen likens it to cigarette smoke. “If I’m smoking in the corner of a classroom and you have low ventilation/filtration, that room is going to fill up with smoke, and everyone is breathing that same air.”\n\nThen apply that to the outdoors.\n\n“I could be smoking a cigarette, you could be a couple of feet from me, depending which way the wind was blowing, you may not even know I’m smoking.”\n\nIf you’re indoors, you could be breathing in less fresh air than you think.\n\n“Everybody in a room together is constantly breathing air that just came out of the lungs of other people in that room. And depending on the ventilation rate, it could be as much as 3% or 4% of the air you’re breathing just came out of the lungs of other people in that room,” Allen said.\n\nHe describes this as respiratory backwash.\n\n“Normally, that’s not a problem, right? We do this all the time. We’re always exchanging our respiratory microbiomes with each other. But if someone’s sick and infectious … those aerosols can carry the virus. That’s a problem.”\n\nIt’s airborne\n\n“We’ve known for decades how to keep people safe in buildings from infection, from airborne infectious diseases like this one,” Allen said.\n\nFrom the beginning of the pandemic, Allen and other experts have waved red flags, saying that the way we were thinking about transmission of Covid-19 – surfaces, large respiratory droplets – was missing the point.\n\n“Hand washing and social distancing are appropriate but, in our view, insufficient to provide protection from virus-carrying respiratory microdroplets released into the air by infected people. This problem is especially acute in indoor or enclosed environments, particularly those that are crowded and have inadequate ventilation,” hundreds of scientists stated in an open letter in July 2020.\n\nEventually, the World Health Organization and the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention acknowledged what the experts had been saying all along: that Covid-19 could also spread by small aerosolized particles that can travel more than 6 feet.\n\nThe coronavirus itself is very small – about 0.1 microns – but that doesn’t affect how far it can travel.\n\n“The size of the virus itself doesn’t matter because, as we say, the virus is never naked in air. In other words, the virus is always traveling in respiratory particles that develop in our lungs. And those are all different sizes,” Allen said.\n\nSinging or coughing can emit particles as large as 100 microns (almost the width of a human hair), he said, but the virus tends to travel in smaller particles – between 1 and 5 microns.\n\nThe size of these particles affects not only how far it can travel but how deeply we can breathe it into our lungs, and how we should approach protecting ourselves from this virus.\n\n“When you’re talking about an airborne disease, there’s the what’s right around you, you know, the sort of the people who you know can cough in your face, the 6 feet thing, and then there’s the broader indoor air, because indoor air is recirculated,” said Max Sherman, a leader on the Epidemic Task Force for the American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air-Conditioning Engineers.\n\nDilute and clean\n\n“Outdoors is safer than indoors” has become an accepted mantra with Covid-19. Allen points out that protecting ourselves indoors is where our focus should always be, even beyond the pandemic.\n\n“We’re [an] indoors species. We spend 90% of our time indoors. The air we breathe indoors has a massive impact on our health, whether you think about infectious disease or anything else, but it just has escaped the public consciousness for a long time,” he said.\n\nMaking sure our indoor air is healthy is not that complicated, Sherman said. “You just want to reduce the number of particles that might be carrying Covid or any other nasty [virus].”\n\nThe way you do that is through ventilation and filtration.\n\nFiltration – just like it sounds – is filtering or cleaning the air, removing the infected particles. But think of ventilation as diluting the air. You’re bringing more fresh air in to reduce the concentration of those particles.\n\nDilution is exactly why we haven’t seen superspreader events outdoors, Allen says.\n\n“We have hardly any transmission outdoors. Why is that? Unlimited dilution, because you have unlimited ventilation. And so, even in crowded protests or outdoor sporting events like the Super Bowl, we just don’t see superspreading happening. But if we did, we’d have the signal be loud and clear. We just don’t see it. It’s all indoors in these underperforming, unhealthy spaces.”\n\nHealthy spaces\n\nEven before the advent of HVAC systems, ventilation was integrated into many building designs.\n\nThe 1901 Tenement Housing Act of New York required every tenement building – a building with multifamily households – to have ventilation, running water and gas light.\n\nBuilders added ventilation to many of these buildings with a shaft in the middle that runs from the roof to the ground, allowing more airflow.\n\n“In the late 19th century, people are finally starting to understand how disease spreads. So airshafts and the accompanying ventilation were seen as a solution to the public health crises that were happening in tenement buildings,” said Katheryn Lloyd, director of programming at the Tenement Museum. “There were high cases of tuberculosis, diphtheria and other diseases that spread. Now we know that spread sort of through the air.”\n\nToday, we’re facing the same challenge.\n\n“Getting basic ventilation in your home is important, full stop,” Sherman said.\n\nOne of the easiest, cheapest ways to do that is to open your windows.\n\nOpen doors or windows at opposite ends of your home to create cross-ventilation, the Environmental Protection Agency advises. Opening the highest and lowest windows – especially if on different floors – of a home can also increase ventilation. Adding an indoor fan can take it even further.\n\n“If a single fan is used, it should be facing (and blowing air) in the same direction the air is naturally moving. You can determine the direction the air is naturally moving by observing the movement of drapes or by holding a light fabric or dropping paper clippings and noting which direction they move,” the EPA says.\n\nJust cracking a window can help a lot, Allen says: “Even propping a window open a couple inches to really facilitate higher air changes, especially if you do it in multiple places in the house, so you can create some pressure differentials.”\n\nIt’s important to note that if you have an HVAC system, it must be running to actually circulate or filter the air. The EPA says that these systems run less than 25% of the time during heating and cooling seasons.\n\n“Most of the controls these days have a setting where you can run the fan on low all the time. And that’s usually the best thing to do because that makes sure you’re getting you’re pushing air through the filter all the time and mixing the air up in your in your home,” Sherman advised.\n\nThis could be something to keep in mind if you’re going to have visitors or if someone in the household is at higher risk for severe illness.\n\nChoose the most efficient filter your HVAC system can handle, and make sure you routinely change the filters.\n\nFilters have a minimum efficiency reporting value, or MERV, rating that indicates how well they capture small particles. The American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air-Conditioning Engineers recommends using at least a MERV-13 filter, which it says is at least 85% efficient at capturing particles from 1 to 3 microns.\n\nIf that’s not an option, portable air filters can also work well, but the EPA says to use one that is made for the intended room size and meets at least one of these criteria:\n\nDesigned as high-efficiency particulate air (HEPA)\n\nCADR rated\n\nManufacturer says the device will remove most particles below 1 micron\n\nFinding a safe space\n\nWhen you walk into a space, there’s no good rule of thumb to look around and gauge how well-ventilated it might be, and that can be a challenge when people have been tasked with assessing their own risk.\n\nAllen suggests starting with the basics: Make sure you’re up to date with vaccinations and aware of where Covid-19 numbers stand in your community.\n\nBut then it gets harder. Even the number of people in a space isn’t a giveaway of a higher-risk situation.\n\n“The more people in there could be higher-risk because you’re more likely to have someone who’s infectious, but if the ventilation is good, it really doesn’t matter.”\n\nVentilation standards are based on “an amount of fresh air per person, plus the amount of fresh air per square foot,” Allen explained. “So if you have a good system, the more people that enter the room, the more ventilation is brought in to the room.”\n\nOne tool that can help you assess ventilation in a room is a CO2 monitor, something Allen wishes he saw more in public spaces. He likes to carry a portable one, which you can order online for between $100 and $200.\n\n“If you see under 1,000 parts per million, generally, you’re hitting the ventilation targets that are the design standard. But remember, these are not health-based standards. So we want to see higher ventilation rates.”\n\nAllen prefers to see CO2 at or under 800 parts per million. He also notes that just because a space has low CO2 levels, it might not be unsafe if filtration is high, like on an airplane.\n\nA gamechanger for schools\n\nAtlanta Public Schools Superintendent Lisa Herring says the installation of 5,000 air filtration units – enough for every classroom – in her school district is “a gamechanger.”\n\nThe district had begun upgrading HVAC systems in several schools even before the pandemic, but federal funding allowed it to add filtration units during a crucial time when masks have become optional.\n\n“It gives a greater level of confidence for us as a system to know that our air filtration systems are in place,” Herring said.\n\nSchool districts all over the country have been jumping at the opportunity for ventilation upgrades made possible by an influx of federal funding.\n\nAn analysis in February by FutureEd, a think tank at Georgetown University’s McCourt School of Public Policy, found that public schools had earmarked $4.4 billion for HVAC projects, which could grow to almost $10 billion if trends continued.\n\nNew Hampshire’s Manchester School District is pouring almost $35 million into upgrading HVAC systems, and interim Superintendent Jennifer Gillis says federal funding is “absolutely key.”\n\n“You think about a district of our size with all the competing demands and the need to be fiscally responsible, a $35 million project, that’s a large project to introduce to our budget. Having those funds available to us lets us do 19 projects – and 19 projects in a very short span of time.”\n\nFor Gillis, ventilation has been an important mitigation strategy and an unobtrusive way to keep people safe.\n\n“It’s something that most in the building don’t think about, but it’s a very passive way for us to create safety within the schools. Since the beginning, the goal was always ‘let’s get our kids in, let’s get our staff in, but let’s do it in a way that’s safe for all of them.’ “\n\nGood ventilation isn’t only about keeping students safe from Covid-19, Sherman says. It can also improve their performance in school.\n\n“They’re going to learn better; they’re going to be awake more; they’re going to be more receptive. They’re going to be healthier if they’ve got good indoor air quality,” he said.\n\nFinally front and center\n\nHelping solidify ventilation’s role in the Covid-19 battle, the Biden administration announced a Clean Air in Buildings Challenge last month.\n\nThe challenge calls on building operators and owners to improve ventilation by following guidelines laid out by the EPA.\n\nGet CNN Health's weekly newsletter Sign up here to get The Results Are In with Dr. Sanjay Gupta every Tuesday from the CNN Health team.\n\nThe main actions include creating a clean indoor air action plan, optimizing fresh air ventilation, enhancing air filtration and cleaning, and engaging the building community by communicating with occupants to increase awareness, commitment and participation.\n\nThe message may seem overdue, but it’s one that Allen enthusiastically welcomed.\n\n“The White House used its pulpit to say unequivocally that clean air and buildings matter. That’s massive. Regardless of what you think about what will happen next with implementation or what happens with the funding. That is a crystal-clear message that is already being heard by businesses, nonprofits, universities and state leaders. I see these changes happening already.”", "authors": ["Amanda Sealy"], "publish_date": "2022/04/10"}, {"url": "https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2015/05/14/making-weight/25741977/", "title": "Health is more than absence of illness", "text": "Daniel P. Finney, dafinney@dmreg.com\n\nMORE MAKING WEIGHT: Current updates to this blog are here\n\nTHURSDAY, MAY 19, 2016\n\nRedefining health\n\nThank you to everyone who turned out earlier this month for our Making Weight event at the Wellmark YMCA of Greater Des Moines.\n\nIt was a wonderful evening of conversation between myself, members of my medical team and readers who’ve followed this journey for more than a year.\n\nWe spent most of the session answering questions from the audience. It was a thoughtful public discussion of obesity, mental health and wellness.\n\nI offer my deepest thanks to dietitian Jacque Schwartz of Mercy Weight Loss and Nutrition Center in Clive, physical therapist Stefanie Kirk of Mercy South Physical Therapy, Dr. Eric Barlow, psychiatrist from Compass Clinical in Urbandale, and trainer Nate Yoho of CrossFit Merle Hay.\n\nRegular readers have read many a praiseful paragraph about these people, as well as Dr. Shawna Basener, my family doctor, who could not attend, and my psychologist, who chooses to remain anonymous in these columns.\n\nThe event allowed a lot of people to learn just how spectacular these people are and how much the care about not only my personal health but that off all their patients and clients.\n\nOne of the points I emphasized in response to an audience question is one that I want to make here: It is essentially that you connect with your healthcare providers on an intellectual and emotional level.\n\nI’m not a fan of the word “providers” when describing the people have helped me to lose nearly 100 pounds in the last year. I prefer the term “partners.”\n\nThis isn’t just semantics. A partnership is a dynamic in which both people involved benefit from progress. I believe every member of my team is invested in my continued improvement. And if you can’t say that about your doctor, your coach or mental health professional, they it might be time to make a change.\n\nAn intimate relationship with your team is essential. You have to be able to trust doctors and therapists with your worries, be open about uncomfortable things in your life, with your body and goals.\n\nBarlow brought up an interesting point during the event. He said he wished he could have similar meetings with the health care teams that worked with his regular patients.\n\nThe realities of the daily practice of medicine prevents regular face-to-face meetings between physicians, mental health professionals, trainers and dieticians.\n\nBut all professionals present agreed the holistic approach would benefit patients. Hopefully, as the medical field continues to evolve from reactive care to preventative care, we will figure out better ways for medical professionals to communicate more effectively between offices and across disciplines.\n\nThe most surprising question of the evening came from my dear friend Tyler Teske, a fellow East High School alumnus, who showed up to support his old locker mate.\n\nTyler asked me if my experiences working to curb morbid obesity, contain my mood disorders and other issues helped me redefined the meaning of health for me.\n\nThe question gave me pause.\n\nThe truth is I don’t think I ever gave much thought to a definition of health until mine failed me. I never thought about the long-term consequences of what I put in my body, how sedentary my life had become or the psychological consequences of those actions or inactions, as the case may be.\n\nI think I thought healthy simply meant not being sick. But now I know it is much more than that. It is more than just diet, exercise, medicine and maintenance.\n\nHealth, to me, is not merely the absence of illness, but the presence of wellness. And wellness, like life itself, is not a destination but a journey.\n\nHere is to Year 2 of Making Weight. As always, I thank you for reading and wish you the love, dignity and respect all humans deserve.\n\nTHURSDAY, MAY 12, 2016\n\nAnxious days\n\nI’ve really been struggling with my anxiety disorder the last week or so.\n\nThat’s bad news on multiple fronts.\n\nFirst, panic attacks stink. My heart races. I sweat. My hands shake. It feels as if I’m in the middle of a life-threatening situation just sitting in my apartment trying to watch the NBA Playoffs.\n\nThe worst attacks feel like my skin is itching on the inside.\n\nSecondly, anxiety spurs binge eating. Panic attacks are chemical imbalances in the brain. Biologically, my body will do whatever it thinks is necessary to restore proper chemical balance.\n\nMedication helps. But in the throes of the attack, I’m prone to hit the fridge or drive the restaurant. And I’m not likely to pick green beans or broccoli when I get there.\n\nI’m looking for a tiny boost of serotonin, the most common and one of the most powerful naturally occurring mood regulators in the brain.\n\nSometimes that comes from fried food or pizza or whatever.\n\nOne day last week, in a fit of anxiety, I plowed through a pound of boneless chicken wings and a pound of taco meat slathered on cheese sauce.\n\nIt felt great for all of 15 minutes. The good vibes from the short serotonin burst quickly faded. The anxiety again churned my gut. This time the cause was simple: I’d ingested a lot of calories at a time when I’m trying to lose weight.\n\nThe third thing I do when my anxiety is bad is buy things I don’t need with money I don’t have. The effect on mood is the same as overeating. It feels really great to get a new toy, book or movie for my collection.\n\nBut again the anxiety resurges, because I’ve spent money meant for rent, groceries, retirement or other necessities.\n\nAs I have written many times, you can spend yourself into bankruptcy and eat yourself into an early grave.\n\nThe most obvious question here that if I recognize the destructive nature of these patterns, why, then, don’t I simply stop them?\n\nI’ve written before about schema. These are the behavior patterns we all develop to negotiate the world. A simple schema would be not putting our hands on hot burners to avoid being burned.\n\nThese schemata form when we’re young. And you really can’t change them. What you do is build new ones to create new behavior patterns that are more constructive.\n\nLet me assure you typing that sentence is a lot easier than acting on it. My schemata are deeply rooted and hard to override.\n\nI won’t get into the details of my childhood other than to say it was chaotic. I learned to take pleasure in food and presents. These things gave me the security and comfort in ways my family situation did not.\n\nThe trouble is the emergencies of my childhood have long since passed, but the patterns of behavior remain. And so, too, does the nagging anxiety.\n\nSometimes I can tell what causes a panic attack. I can trace it to an incident or problem I’m having. Other times, panic seems to strike me from what I like to call “free-floating anxiety.”\n\nOne afternoon last week, I dozed off during a basketball game. I woke up in a full-blown panic attack. Was I ruminating on some troublesome problem in a dream? It’s impossible to say.\n\nThe good news is I have a terrific support system in place. Parents 2.0, the kindly east Des Moines couple who raised me after my first set of parents died, are always there for comfort and support. My girlfriend takes many late night calls, as does my saintly therapist who helps me break the cycle of anxiety.\n\nStill, these cycles are exhausting. The drain my creative energy and I find myself cold, distant and detached from the people I love the most.\n\nI should also mention that the transcranial magnetic stimulation treatments, or TMS, that I underwent last year do not directly treat anxiety.\n\nI consider that treatment a resounding success. It sent my depression into remission or, at least, severely curtailed it. I have not suffered a major depressive episode since I completed the treatment in December.\n\nI controlled the anxiety with prescription medication. And my talk therapist and I work every two weeks to find ways for me to break the negative thoughts that spiral into dark thinking.\n\nThere was, at least, one spot of positive news on the Making Weight front. At my latest weigh in, I lost 11.8 pounds in a month.\n\nThat brings my total weight loss up to 99.8 pounds since the journey began more than a year ago.\n\nI know there is a long way to go before I’m anything approaching fit. I also know all too well there will be bad days ahead, both mentally and physically.\n\nBut even an anxiety junkie like me can say losing nearly 100 pounds is a good day.\n\nFRIDAY, MAY 6, 2016\n\nTalking ' Making Weight'\n\nDaniel Finney recently spoke to Iowa Public Radio about his one year anniversary of Making Weight. Take a listen to the conversation below:\n\nMAKING WEIGHT EVENT\n\nJoin Register columnist Daniel Finney for a talk about a year in his effort to lose weight and regain his health. Meet some of the people who've helped him along the way, including trainer Nate Yoho, physical therapist Stefanie Kirk, dietitian Jacque Schwartz, physician Dr. Shauna Basener and psychiatrist Dr. Eric Barlow. The talk, which is free and open to the public, is scheduled for Thursday, May 12 from 5 to 6 p.m. at the Wellmark YMCA of Greater Des Moines, 501 Grand Ave. To register, visit: https://tickets.desmoinesregister.com/e/making-weight-one-mans-journey-from-fat-to-fit/tickets.\n\n\n\nTHURSDAY, MAY 5, 2016\n\nFat jokes\n\nCriticism comes with being a columnist. It’s only fair. This newspaper gives me a lot of space to share my opinions. It’s reasonable some people will disagree, even vehemently so.\n\nBut there’s one trend I notice in negative responses I receive that I struggle to understand.\n\nFor example, a reader who disagreed with my column in which I said convicted murderer Joseph “Jo-Jo” White Jr. should never be released from prison wrote this email response:\n\n“I find it difficult to believe that one who has done such damage to his own body can pass judgment on another judged by the state to have committed a terrible crime against another human being.”\n\nThat's a whopper of a non-sequitur, but if I translate this correctly, it really says, “You’re fat. You shouldn’t have an opinion about a murderer getting released from prison.”\n\nAnother reader, who described himself as a 31-year journalist, did not care for my profile of Drake University President Earl “Marty” Martin. After he finished his criticism of that piece, he added:\n\n“Eagerly awaiting your next ‘Really folks, I’m trying to lose weight … oops, I gained 7 pounds’ series. I do wish you good health.”\n\nAside from having severe doubts about the sincerity of the writer’s wishes for my good health, I’m stumped by those sentences.\n\nA generous reading of the email might suggest he’s simply not a fan of anything I write for the paper. Or perhaps in the heat of writing an email — that “firing off a note” cliche comes from somewhere — his desire to get a really cutting line typed overcame his sense of decorum.\n\nI can understand that. It’s happened to me as a writer more times than I would like to admit.\n\nBut I think he threw in the dig about my recent gain of 7 pounds as simple spite.\n\nIt is as if he did not have enough confidence in his original criticism and decided, “You know what? I'll throw the fat thing in there, too.”\n\nThis is where I get confused. I understand disagreement with my work. But I don’t understand the base need to attack me or anyone else because of their weight, body size or appearance.\n\nPlease don’t read this as “woe is me.” It isn’t. As I said, I understand criticism comes with job.\n\nBut cruelty does not — and it shouldn’t come with anyone’s job. It genuinely troubles me that people think pointing at fat people and laughing is still acceptable.\n\nI’ve written before how I cringed when retired late night TV host David Letterman riffed on New Jersey Gov. Chris Cristie’s weight. There are many things about Christie ripe for lampooning, but his weight seems the least and laziest of topics.\n\nBut it isn’t just comedians and emailers. Making fun of fat people for sport is commonplace.\n\nThe cruel website peopleofwalmart.com posts unflattering pictures of shoppers at the retail chain, many of them holding obese people up for ridicule.\n\nI have a friend who once posted a picture of an obese woman riding her scooter through the drive-through of a fast food restaurant. He made comments I thought were mean and I posted a response. We argued a bit. Nothing came of it.\n\nSomeone will almost certainly accuse me of being politically correct for pleading with the public to be kind to obese people, myself included.\n\nI am OK with that. Political correctness, though it can be overdone, is simply people asking others to describe them with dignity and respect. All people deserve that.\n\nUnderlying all these “fat funnies,” I believe, is the myth that obesity is a simple problem of self-control. Put down the fork. Eat less. Move more.\n\nIf you’re fat, the thinking goes, it’s your fault.\n\nThere are reams of scientific research that show obesity has roots in genetics, changes in the makeup and portions of food we eat, socio-economic status, childhood trauma and a host of other issues.\n\nBut instead of scientific evidence, which the public seems all too eager to ignore, I will appeal on humane grounds.\n\nI am not an overly religious person, but I believe the Sermon on the Mount attributed to Christian savior Jesus Christ is probably the finest treatise on how humans should treat one another ever written.\n\nI won’t quote it here because this is not Sunday School. I encourage you to Google it sometime and keep an eye on the lines about mercy.\n\nThen consider whether we might not have a much better world if we focused on mercy instead of fat jokes.\n\nTHURSDAY, APRIL 21, 2016\n\nControlling hunger\n\nSometimes it’s tough having a former U.S. Army Ranger as your psychologist.\n\nI sank into his recliner last week feeling glum.\n\nMy weight was up. I worked with my nutritionist. We decided to trim my daily calorie goal by 200 in an effort to restart the weight loss.\n\nBut I was really feeling the difference. I found myself thinking about eating a lot more than I had at any point since I began this effort to lose weight and regain my health.\n\nI complained of the problem to my therapist, who asks not to be identified in these columns because of the work he does with public safety agencies.\n\nMy therapist told me a story about Ranger survival training when he and his troop were on one ration a day.\n\n“The first few days, you were so hungry you would drink swamp water just to have something in your stomach,” he said.\n\nWell, then. I guess it isn’t all that bad after all.\n\nEating is a biological necessity. But hunger pangs can be controlled in much the same way I work to wrangle anxiety when it bubbles in my brain.My therapist wasn’t going with tough love, though. He was making a point.\n\nThe best tactic I’ve found for stemming panic attacks before they blossom – besides prescription medication, of course – is by breaking the cycle of thinking that causes panic to spiral.\n\nSometimes this is phoning a friend. Other times it’s distracting myself with a good book or even taking a nap.\n\nI’ve found the same tactics in nursing my way through attacks of hunger pangs, with a few exceptions.\n\nTV is rarely a good pick because if you’re feeling hungry there are a lot of commercials about food and none of them are particularly healthy options.\n\nBut favorite movies on DVD or a Netflix binge watch is much better than a food binge in the kitchen.\n\nConversation is always good, but don’t ruminate on food. I might call my girlfriend and complain about being hungry, but we switch topics fairly quickly to the latest antics of her cats.\n\nI call my friend Paul in Memphis to talk about how bad the summer movie slate looks. And so on.\n\nI want to make a couple of points here. I’m not talking about starving myself. That’s just as unhealthy as eating junk food.\n\nI’m talking about the hunger pangs that come not from the biological need to eat but thinking about food, being tempted by the smell of a favorite dish or the reflex desire to eat out of sheer boredom.\n\nI struggle with bored eating lot. I find myself looking into the refrigerator for entertainment rather than sustenance.\n\nAnother appetite control technique I’ve learned: Avoid fast foods. I don’t mean the drive-through restaurants. I mean premade foods that you can pop in the microwave or tear into like potato chips or other snack food.\n\nMost of my grocery bill goes to fresh veggies, meats, a few fruits, eggs and so on. The only quickie foods I have on hand are protein bars, which are low in calories and high in nutrients. So if I do break down and have an unnecessary snack, noshing on one of those isn’t a terrible choice.\n\nThe best thing, though, is a distraction. And the good thing about my apartment it is that it’s stacked ceiling to floor with books, movies and music. I can always find something to do besides eat.\n\nSo far it’s worked. As of this writing, I’ve stayed within my new calorie goal for 21 consecutive days. We’ll see how well it’s paid off at my next weigh in in a week or so.\n\nTHURSDAY, APRIL 14, 2016\n\nA setback amid celebrations\n\nLast week, we celebrated the one-year anniversary of Making Weight, my ongoing effort to recover from morbid obesity.\n\nI wrote a big front-page story in the April 10 edition. We hosted a Facebook Live chat on Facebook.com/DesMoinesRegister. (Click here to watch a replay.)\n\nI received dozens of emails, letters and phone calls. Almost all praised me and several readers shared their own experiences.\n\nIt felt great.\n\nThis doesn’t: I’ve gained 7.2 pounds since my last weigh in.\n\nIt is the biggest single weight gain I’ve had between benchmarks since I started the process.\n\nI can easily find where I got off track.\n\nI bought foods that I shouldn’t have, like peanuts, which are high in nutrients but also heavy in fats. In the recommended servings, they’re a fine snack.\n\nBut the recommended serving is very small. But I take a handful and then another and then another. And pretty soon a half pound of nuts has been consumed.\n\nThey are a poor choice to have in the house.\n\nI didn’t do much better eating out. A while back, I had some nachos for the first time in a while. It was like an alcoholic trying to take a single drink.\n\nPretty soon nachos were regular meals. Sometimes, I’m ashamed to admit, those nachos were “appetizers” followed by full meals.\n\nI got sick in late February and early March. I missed several sessions at the gym. And I didn’t eat well during that down time.\n\nI looked at MyFitnessPal, the smartphone app I use to track calories. Some days I hadn’t logged all my calories. Other days, I blew my calorie goal.\n\nI think I blew my calorie goal for seven out of 10 days at one point in March.\n\nNow, the weight gain is not all bad. The computer at Mercy Weight Loss and Nutrition Center in Clive gives me information about water weight and muscle mass.\n\nSince my workouts with Nate Yoho, owner of CrossFit Merle Hay, began in February, my muscle mass has increased by more than 6 pounds.\n\nThat’s terrific news. As Nate says: “You don’t get stronger by adding fat.”\n\nI am getting stronger. But I’ve also added some fat.\n\nI worked with dietitian Jacque Schwartz at the Nutrition Center. I decided to reduce my daily calorie goal from 2,700 to 2,500.\n\nAs of this writing, I’ve stayed at or below that goal for 13 days in a row.\n\nBut that’s come with its own side effect: I’m hungry.\n\nSince this journey began, I’ve been able to lose weight largely without major hunger pangs.\n\nYet I feel them with this 200-calorie cut. They’re manageable. If I get too hung up on them, I do what I always do when I get locked into a pattern of negative thinking: I phone a friend.\n\nSometimes it’s my therapist. Sometimes it’s a text message to Nate. Sometimes I call my girlfriend or my buddy, Paul, in Memphis, Tenn.\n\nWith my girlfriend and Paul, we don’t necessarily talk about eating and food. Sometimes we talk about movies, TV and sports — just anything to break the loop of thinking.\n\nPretty soon I forget about being hungry.\n\nWhat I don’t want to forget, however, is that are these lapses are natural.\n\nI’m not going to spend a lot of time beating myself up about this. Yeah, I gained some weight. But I have all the tools in place to lose that again and make more progress.\n\nAnd I’ve already taken action to stop the current slide. There’s been a lot of broccoli and green beans consumed in my house recently. My George Foreman Grill is getting a lot more work.\n\nWith hard work and continued vigilance, I’ll have a lot better news to report the next time I step on that scale.\n\nTHURSDAY, MARCH 31, 2016\n\nThrowing weight around\n\nI stayed in bed Monday morning and pulled the covers over my head.\n\nI fiddled with a “Star Wars” video game on my smartphone when the alert from my calendar popped up. It was time to go to the gym.\n\nI did not want to go. I spent part of the weekend, as did many of my colleagues, covering the deaths of four people in a tragic head-on crash on Interstate 80 near Waukee.\n\nAmong the dead were two Des Moines police officers. I did not know the officers personally, but I worked as a police reporter for several years before eventually becoming a columnist.\n\nMy uncle Larry was a Des Moines cop. I’ve spent years learning about police procedure, tactics, their mindset, the challenges and struggles of the job.\n\nIn the process, I’ve gotten to know some law enforcement professionals very well. Some I call close friends. And I felt their grief even though it was not mine to carry directly.\n\nI was having a hard time with my emotions after writing about the incident. In fact, my brain chemistry was so jumbled up that I took some time off just to attempt to relax.\n\nI want to be very clear: I do not equate the emotional state I was in with that of those who lost loved ones, including the police.\n\nMy struggles were insignificant and infinitesimal compared to those who lost a son, a daughter, a mother, a father, colleague, friend and so on.\n\nStill, I did, in fact, have an emotional reaction to those officers’ deaths, and the last thing I wanted to do was go to the gym.\n\nBut I thought of the officers who reported for duty the next day and did a job far tougher than stacking paragraphs. The absolute minimum I could do was get out of bed and go to the gym.\n\nWhen I arrived at CrossFit Merle Hay, my coach, Nate Yoho, spotted something off about me right away as we began warm-up stretching.\n\n“You look like you have a lot on your mind,” he said.\n\nWe talked about the sad events of the weekend and where my head was at.\n\nNate knows tragedy. I first met him after his wife, Laura, died of brain cancer and their daughter, Caralyn, was born by surrogate a few months later.\n\nNate, of course, isn’t a therapist. But he’s a smart man and one whose experiences grant him good perspective.\n\nWe talked while I worked out. As the sweat ran, my heart rate picked up and my blood pumped, I was able to focus on something other than the confused set of emotions rattling around in my mind.\n\nNate put me through paces on a deadlifting exercise. For some time, I’ve joked to Nate that I was looking forward to the day when I could throw weights on the floor.\n\nThe fitter and more experienced athletes in Nate’s gym do a variety of lifts that after they’re done, they simply let the heavy weights fall to the ground rather than risk injury by trying to lower them to the ground.\n\nUntil that session, Nate worked gingerly adding weight to my deadlifts because of my tender, oft-injured back.\n\nPerhaps sensing I was ready for a challenge or simply that I needed to put my mind to work on something other than sadness, he challenged me with the heaviest weight I had deadlifted to that point.\n\n“When you’re done with your reps, I want you to drop that bar on the ground,” Nate said.\n\nHe showed me the proper technique. I lifted. I focused on breathing and form. And when my reps were done, I let loose of that bar.\n\nIt slammed into the rubberized floor with a satisfying clatter. I lifted my arms in the air with some sense of relief.\n\nThrowing that weight on the floor did not erase my sadness. But it sure helped.\n\nAnd my exchanges with Nate that day made me realize how much I had come to trust this man with both my physical health but also as a friend and confidant.\n\nThat epiphany did lift my mood. Because among the best medicine for sadness is the knowledge that you are not alone in this world.\n\nTHURSDAY, MARCH 24, 2016\n\nMental, physical health linked\n\nI recently wrote about a woman who is dying of lung cancer. Someone asked me if the subject of my story smoked. She didn't.\n\nThe question is, in a way, a natural outgrowth of decades of anti-smoking campaigns. The link between smoking and lung cancer is scientific fact.\n\nBut an unintended consequence of those campaigns is that when people suffer from lung cancer, there is almost an attitude of, “Well, they deserved to die wheezing because they were stupid enough to smoke.”\n\nI thought about the question in the context of my own ongoing recovery from morbid obesity. Writing about this publicly has brought scores of kind notes and letters from readers who share the same struggle, know of others who do or empathize with the journey.\n\nBut occasionally — and mercifully rarely — I will hear from the reader who believes this ongoing chronicle is self-indulgent and displacing real news. After all, the argument often goes, obesity is my own fault.\n\nIn essence, I’m fat because I ate too much and I deserved it.\n\nThere is some truth to that. I have overeaten for much of my life and rarely exercised. But no one reaches 563 pounds — the weight at which I began changing my life to avoid crippling myself at 40 — simply by overindulgence.\n\nThere is a growing body of research that links childhood trauma with obesity. Kaiser Permanente, a health care company in Oakland, Calif., did some groundbreaking investigations into the link in the early 1980s and was the subject of a Time magazine profile in 2010.\n\nThe data essentially says people with high adverse childhood experiences have higher risk for a host of negative health problems as adults, including alcohol and other drug abuse, chronic depression, heart disease, smoking and, yes, obesity.\n\nAdverse childhood experiences describe a wide array of problems ranging from verbal, physical and sexual abuse to problems related to poverty, abandonment, family history of mental illness and drug abuse and other issues.\n\nI took a 10-question survey at acestoohigh.com, a very good website about adverse childhood experiences, and scored a 4. That’s the highest category measured by the Kaiser Permanente ACE Study.\n\nWithout going into unnecessary detail about my childhood, it was, to say the least, a challenge.\n\nAnd, no, I’m not blaming me being obese directly on childhood trauma. But I absolutely believe in the link.\n\nWhen you suffer trauma as a child, you do what you can to feel safe and comfortable. The things I did most often to feel safe and comfortable was eat and buy things: toys, comic books, movies and so on.\n\nThese actions, my behavioral therapist tells me, create a chemical reaction in the brain that calms me, even if briefly.\n\nThe problem is, of course, you can spend yourself into bankruptcy and you can eat yourself into the grave.\n\nI work with my therapist twice a month to learn new ways to cope with stress. He takes a call from me two or three times a week when I face an anxiety situation that could spiral into negative thinking that could lead to anything from overeating to suicidal thoughts.\n\nJust the act of talking out those thoughts helps them dissipate and remove the chance of me acting on them.\n\nOne knee-jerk reaction might be to say, “Look, childhood was a long time ago. Get over it already.”\n\nCognitive function, alas, is more complicated than that.\n\nI am also 40 years old. That means I’ve been acting on a series of behaviors ultimately bad for my health for a very long time.\n\nPsychologists called these learned behaviors schemata — a learned cognitive response to certain stimuli.\n\nHere’s the tricky thing about schemata. They can’t be changed. Once they’re in place, you’re stuck with them.\n\nWhat you can do, though, is build new ones. This is a tough task. I’ve been in therapy off and on since I was 15 years old.\n\nMy behavioral therapist, who asks I not name him because of the work he does with public safety agencies, is the best medical professional I’ve ever worked with.\n\nThe work we’ve done in our two years of sessions is some of the most important and life-changing in my life.\n\nAnd still I find myself reaching out to him when I am on the precipice of or in the middle of a panic attack. That is, in fact, part of a new schemata that’s under construction. When the cycle of negativity starts, find a way to break it.\n\nSo, to bring this back to the obesity battle, yes, I ate too much of the wrong things for a long time. And sometimes I still indulge where and how I should not.\n\nBut like a smoker who is trying to quit or a cancer sufferer trying to survive, I am working as hard as I can to find a new path to a healthier life while fully realizing I will stumble and fall often along the way.\n\nAs for the idea that a smoker who gets lung cancer or an obese person with health problems “deserve them,” I think of Clint Eastwood’s line before he kills Gene Hackman’s sadistic sheriff in “The Unforgiven:”\n\n“Deserves got nothin’ to do with it.\"\n\nTHURSDAY, MARCH 17, 2016\n\nEnjoying exercise? It happens\n\nBoy, it felt good to get back to the gym last week.\n\nAnd that’s a sentence that I never expected to type. I mean I’m the kid who used to walk the mile in middle school. I rarely even tried in P.E.\n\nBut there I was last Monday at the gym eagerly putting on my shoes and getting ready for the day’s activity.\n\nI missed nearly two weeks of workouts because of a heavy chest cold that left my lungs wheezing. Two rounds of steroids and antibiotics and three doctor visits finally got me back on my feet.\n\nAs a side note, as someone who lives with an anxiety disorder, the heavy stimulants in steroids and oral inhalers made for a very edgy couple of weeks without much rest.\n\nBut once Nate Yoho, my coach and owner of CrossFit Merle Hay, started putting me through my paces, I started to feel spectacular.\n\nIn fact, I think I got an exercise high. This is a rush of endorphins in the brain spurred by exercise. Runners talk about it a lot when they push to a new level of exertion.\n\nI’d never experienced it before. But it felt great.\n\nThat I actually enjoy exercise and look forward to it as a part of my thrice weekly routine is a compliment to Nate.\n\nHe designs workouts that are varied. I rarely do the same thing twice in our three sessions.\n\nNate also excels at the human touch. On my second day back, the weather was pleasant. We took a short walk in the parking lot as a cooldown activity.\n\nNate told me my confidence of movement was improving. I didn’t know what that meant.\n\nHe said I approach activities less tentatively than I did when we started working together. I pick up weights without fear of injury, he said.\n\nI thought about what this meant. I came to Nate after finishing physical therapy with Stefanie Kirk at Mercy South Physical Therapy.\n\nThe pain of limited movement was fresh in my mind. I also had a mindset that an injury meant I had to stop, rehab and restart the process.\n\nBut as I’ve gotten more comfortable working with Nate, I’ve begun to realize that some nagging problems — such as knots in my calves — can be treated on the spot.\n\nNate “rolls out” the knots with a special tool he has. It’s unpleasant, but it’s an intense discomfort in the short term to avoid limping for a full day.\n\nI felt my calves, which had been dormant with the rest of my body during my illness, tighten up during a stepping exercise Nate gave me.\n\nI told Nate they were right on the edge of knotting up. He adjusted the workout to more upper body and core challenges and we avoided aggravating the calves further.\n\nAt the end of the day, I drank my protein shake. I had a couple extra bananas that evening as snacks. The calves felt acceptable the next day. They were sore, but not injured. We got on with the business of working out.\n\nThe key lesson here is the clear line of communication between Nate and I. I feel comfortable telling him, “Hey, this isn’t working.” And I trust him to challenge me to get better.\n\nThe blessing of this is that it allows me to focus on continuing to recover from morbid obesity without relying on the singular metric of how much I weigh.\n\nYes, I’m still morbidly obese. But in just a couple of months, my strength, flexibility and mobility have all improved that even I, the ultimate skeptic in recognizing my own personal improvement, can notice the difference every day.\n\nThis is an important and somewhat risky period in the recovery, I think. Once I cross the 100-pound mark for weight loss, there is a temptation to let up, to look back at how far I’ve come and rest on my laurels.\n\nThat’s why I’m so blessed to have Nate and his gym in my life. Nate is a master of thinking both day-to-day and big picture. He comes up with the workouts that get me sweating and stressing three times a week.\n\nBut then he talks about what I think is patently impossible: pull-ups, competing in CrossFit Games and so on.\n\nI tend to keep my focus in the present. I’m not even sure I want to compete as an athlete. But having someone looking that far ahead does make it easier for me to avoid feeling too satisfied and, instead, keep moving forward.\n\nWEDNESDAY, MARCH 9, 2016\n\nBetter even when sicker\n\nOddly enough, I appreciate the improvements to my physical health most when my body fails me.\n\nHere’s what I mean: For almost two weeks, I’ve been plagued by a bronchial infection that I can’t shake. My lungs sound like a saw cutting through old wood.\n\nThe breathing problem curtailed my workouts with my coach, Nate Yoho at CrossFit Merle Hay, for more than a week.\n\nIt’s tough to exert yourself when you can barely get a chest full of air.\n\nStill, I think of how much worse I would have been if I were still carrying the 94.8 pounds I’ve lost over the last 11 months.\n\nI am by no means svelte, but I am definitely stronger. Even with diminished lung capacity, I’m able to walk to and from my car without stopping. I’m able to walk into the doctor’s office without assistance or breaking out in a fugue of sweat.\n\nI like how many of those sentences begin with “I’m able.”\n\nAn infection like this would have totally incapacitated me a year ago.\n\nI’ve been sickly to be sure, but I’ve mostly been able to work.\n\nMy voice hasn’t been strong, but my body has had enough strength for short bursts of energy needed to get things done: Pick up prescriptions or supplies at the grocery store and so on.\n\nI remain morbidly obese, of course, but the progress from March 2015 to March 2016 astounds me most when I hit a challenge such as illness.\n\nThen there’s this strange feeling: I actually miss the gym. Early in the lung ailment, I pushed through a workout and I got sicker. It wasn’t my brightest move, but I have come to enjoy my time with Nate.\n\nHis gym is as he promised: a place where anybody of any ability level can feel comfortable getting stronger.\n\nI’ve come to look forward to my thrice weekly appointments there the way I used to look forward to hanging out with my high school sports teammates or my weekly Dungeons & Dragons group.\n\nThere is a camaraderie. The gym is absent of judgement and heavy on encouragement.\n\nSo that I haven’t been able to go due to illness has been a disappointment both physically and socially.\n\nI really want to round off a full 100 pounds before the end of March, when the year anniversary of Making Weight rolls around.\n\nI still hope to pull that off, but this lung problem slowed that, to be sure, but Nate checks in on me nearly every day. That’s dedication.\n\nAnd I must admit, I’ve been blessed with a good cross-section of people who work very hard to help me get better.\n\nWhen the cold first started to migrate to my chest, I went to an urgent care clinic. The doctor prescribed a round of medications. But as that course wound down, it was clear the problem wasn’t working.\n\nI groused about this on Facebook and got a surprising response.\n\nMy family doctor, Shauna Marie Basener of Mercy Westown Internal Medicine Clinic, messaged me and told me to get into see her at once.\n\nDoes that count as a house call in the social media age?\n\nI don’t know. I guess we’ll see when the bill arrives.\n\nBut I must appreciate a doctor who is paying close enough attention to my health that she reads my status updates.\n\nI did, in fact, go to see Shauna and she got me on a new round of medicine. A chest X-ray showed no signs of pneumonia. That’s good, though I’m still wheezing as of this writing.\n\nStill, I feel pretty good, at least from a mental standpoint. Just as I appreciate the physical transformation spurred by Nate and physical therapist Stefanie Kirk at Mercy South Physical Therapy, I am grateful for Shauna’s doting care.\n\nIn fact, I’m so enamored with Shauna’s work that I’m going to follow her when she changes offices in April and moves to an office in Ames.\n\nSure, it’s a few extra miles on my Dodge, but when you develop a relationship with a good doctor – or any healthcare provider – you do what you can to preserve it as long as possible.\n\nSo my message to my fellow travelers on the journey back from obesity is that there are good people out there – doctors, therapists, trainers and others – whose mission in life is to help you get better.\n\nWho are we to turn our back on such open acts of kindness?\n\nTHURSDAY, MARCH 3, 2016\n\nNow we're getting somewhere\n\n\"Have you tried on some of your old pants?\" said Mom 2.0, the kindly east Des Moines hairdresser who raised me after my first set of parents died.\n\n\"No,\" I said.\n\n\"Well, you should,\" she said. \"These are getting pretty baggy. The cuffs are dragging on the ground.\"\n\nThis conversation repeated itself a half dozen or so times in the last two or three months. She asked. I said, \"No.\"\n\nI still had several smaller sizes of khakis hanging in my closet at home. But I refused to pull them off the hanger.\n\nI was too scared.\n\nYes, I'd lost weight since my efforts to recover from morbid obesity began nearly a year ago. But I refused to recognize it.\n\nI looked in the mirror and did not see what I was, but remained haunted by what I was not.\n\nThis is the way of things for a lot of people in a vain culture. But it is an especially acute problem for the obese. I simply could not see any difference.\n\nSure, when my physical therapist, Stefanie Kirk of Mercy South Physical Therapy, pointed out specific things I could do after working with her that I couldn't do months ago, I intellectually understood that to be true.\n\nBut I didn't feel it. I still felt like the same lumpy, hopeless fat guy who was a few french fries away from a heart attack.\n\nSometimes, I still do.\n\nEven now, when my fitness coach Nate Yoho works me out three days a week at his CrossFit Merle Hay gym, I see great leaps forward in physical abilities.\n\nA major part of Nate's program is retesting me on exercises we've done a few weeks earlier to see how much stronger and faster I've become.\n\nHe posts the numbers to a private Facebook page that only he, Stefanie and I can see. We talk about the improvements.\n\nI really do feel stronger. I notice it in small ways, like the ease in getting up from a chair or getting out of my car.\n\nAt the beginning of this journey, it must have looked like my Dodge Charger was giving birth to a 563.2-pound baby elephant every time I got out of it.\n\nI once needed my arms to pull myself to a standing position because my poor, overburdened and arthritic knees couldn't take the strain.\n\nNow, I just stand up without so much as a sigh or groan. That's a credit to the paces both Stefanie and Nate put me through.\n\nBut this pants thing was too much for me. I was afraid that despite all that progress, I would somehow slip on that smaller size and they would be as tight as they were when I pushed them to the back of the closet with the other \"maybe someday\" clothes.\n\nI finally acquiesced to Mom 2.0's request after a session at Nate's gym. He takes videos of me doing various exercises to show me what I'm doing right and wrong with form.\n\nHe showed me squats from my first week working with him and squats about a month later. I happened to be wearing the same shirt and shorts in both videos.\n\nI noticed my belly was visibly flatter in the profile shots. I made Nate show me both videos multiple times. He agreed. There was much less Finney in the second than the first.\n\nStill, it was hard for my brain to accept it. I showed the videos to my girlfriend. She reminded me she had been telling me for months that I'd slimmed out in the face and my belly was less bulky.\n\nSo I went home and pulled that pair of pants a size smaller and pulled them on. They fit marvelously, maybe even a hair looser than I would have expected.\n\nAfter that, I decided it was time to do something I'd been avoiding since December: Get weighed.\n\nI knew my diet had faltered during the holidays and my exercise evaporated before I started working with Nate.\n\nBut now it was late February and I was wearing slightly smaller pants. Progress seemed to be lurching in the proper direction. I might as well test the theory with an actual measurement.\n\nThe result: I was down 13 pounds between Dec. 14 and Feb. 23. I've lost a total of 94.8 pounds since this journey began nearly a year ago.\n\nI want to knock out that last 5.2 pounds before the year is up, just to get a nice triple-digit loss.\n\nBut, of course, I immediately got a vicious chest cold that sidelined me at the gym for several sessions.\n\nStill, the momentum is shifting in the right direction. It's going well enough that even I can see it.\n\nFRIDAY, FEB. 19, 2016\n\nChallenge, encouragement hallmarks of workouts\n\nIt still feels weird to call Nate Yoho “my personal trainer.”\n\nNate owns CrossFit Merle Hay, where I’ve taken up an exercise regime in my latest effort to recover from morbid obesity.\n\nThere is something very gauche about the phrase, like showy jewelry or riding around in a stretch SUV limo. I guess I’m just aggressively middle class that way.\n\nThe term I prefer is “coach,” because it feels both more accurate and less pretentious. And it describes my relationship with the man.\n\nThe best coaches are teachers. And Nate definitely teaches me with each session.\n\nEarly on, my legs burned and my back ached so bad I wanted to quit.\n\nNate taught me about protein drinks. I always thought protein drinks were for body builders.\n\nNot so, Nate said. Science says a high-protein drink within 45 minutes of an intense workout will help build muscle and encourage recovery.\n\nI was skeptical. But I went off to the grocery store and bought a few of the Hy-Vee brand plastic jars of whey protein that were low in sugar and carbohydrates and high in the nutrients Nate recommended.\n\nI put two scoops in some water, shake it up and drink it after workouts.\n\nAnd … wow.\n\nThe difference was awesome. My muscles were still sore after workouts, but the searing pain from lactic acid buildup was gone.\n\n“Recovery,” Nate said, “is just as important as the workout.”\n\nThese protein drinks gave me new life for workouts. I don’t tolerate pain well.\n\nAnd since I live with general anxiety disorder, my brain chemistry malfunctions tend to take a rational caution about pain and turn it into a paralyzing fear.\n\nNow that I knew the protein shakes work just like my coach said they would, I could embrace workouts with greater vigor.\n\nOne of the things I enjoy most about working with Nate is the way his mind seems to be always working on the parallel processes of challenging me and encouraging me at the same time.\n\nEarly in our workouts, we did a cycle of exercises that were timed. I performed four cycles of belly crunches, calorie burning on a rowing machine and ring rows, which require me to pull myself up to a standing position from an incline using gymnast’s rings.\n\nI was to do four cycles, taking breaks as I needed.\n\nThe first time we did this on Jan. 26, it took me 13 minutes, 38 seconds. I gasped for air the entire time and took many water breaks.\n\nI confess I needed the water less than I was simply stalling for time to get my breath back.\n\nWe retested the cycle about two and a half weeks later on Feb. 11. I made the cycle 2 minutes, 36 seconds faster than the last time.\n\nNate said he typically doesn’t retest this quickly on exercises. But that’s where the encouragement side of his challenge-encouragement dynamic comes in.\n\nNate wanted to show me that I was making progress even if my brain stubbornly refused to see it.\n\n“The numbers don’t lie,” he said.\n\nAnother little touch Nate offers: He checks in every day by text.\n\nHe texts after workouts to see how my body is feeling.\n\nHe texts before workouts to check my mental readiness.\n\nHe texts on off days just to ask how I’m holding up.\n\nThe other day I told him I had some soreness in my triceps after some bench press work we did.\n\nI told him it didn’t hurt. In fact, it felt kind of cool. It reminded me, “Oh, yeah. I worked out and that was cool.”\n\nNate replied: “You’re body is starting to figure out what’s going on.”\n\nAnd maybe my brain will follow along soon, too.\n\nTUESDAY, FEB. 9, 2016\n\nLife after my 'brain zap'\n\nMany readers have asked me how my “brain zap” treatment for chronic depression went.\n\nI hesitated to answer right away because I wanted to get more data before I gave a definitive answer.\n\nBut more than a month after I finished transcranial magnetic stimulation, or TMS, under the direction of Dr. Eric Barlow at Compass Clinical Associates in Urbandale, I can safely say the treatment was a resounding success.\n\nA brief recap: TMS uses magnetic pulses to stimulate the nerves in the brain to make them more receptive to the naturally occurring mood-regulating chemicals swirling around in our gray matter.\n\nI live with what is known as progressive depressive disorder and general anxiety disorder.\n\nThat simply means that I sometimes get very sad or very scared beyond what is reasonable for what’s going on in my life.\n\nA portion of this problem is caused by chemical imbalances in my brain. I’m essentially not getting enough of the juices that make me better at handling stress or grief.\n\nI took TMS five days a week for six weeks and once a week for another several weeks.\n\nOthers noticed the change in my mood before I did. My Grandma Newcomb said I seemed like my old self. Barlow said after a couple weeks that I was a lot more animated and brighter than I had been when the process began.\n\nI remained skeptical, in part because that’s how a good paragraph stacker should be, and in part because hope is a tough thing to embrace for people who live with depression.\n\nNow, though, having lived life after treatment, I would say my depression is in remission.\n\nI don’t know if that’s a term Barlow or the medical community would use, but that’s how I feel.\n\nRemission feels like the right noun because I recognize my depression is not cured. It’s a condition I live with like high blood pressure or Type II diabetes.\n\nI can do what it takes to keep those conditions in check, but they’re still a part of my health profile.\n\nI still have down days. But that’s it. It’s a day or two at the most. It isn’t a month or three months.\n\nI’m much better at recognizing when I’m down and acting to break the cycle. Sometimes this involves changing activities. Sometimes it means taking a nap.\n\nI still see a cognitive behavioral therapist twice a month. The other part of mental illness is understanding how you think, why you think that way and developing new ways to cope with the world.\n\nI liken the process to being asked to run 10 yards on a football field loaded with dozens of tackling dummies.\n\nAfter a while, you get winded because there are so many obstacles you can’t make progress.\n\nTMS removed half or more of those tackling dummies from my path. I work in therapy sessions to either dodge those other obstacles or find new ways to cope with them.\n\nI’m not the kind of person who endorses medical procedures. That’s a personal choice that individuals need to make in consultation with their medical team, family and their own values.\n\nI will say this: My behavior therapist is deeply skeptical of TMS and believes I am experiencing a strong placebo effect.\n\nHe might be right. I trust my behavioral therapist with my life. And he’s by far the best therapist I’ve ever had, and one of the finest men I’ve had the pleasure to know.\n\nHe might also be wrong. TMS, placebo or otherwise, helped me be more comfortable with who I am.\n\nIt didn’t make me a cheerful person. My coworkers and editors will attest to that.\n\nBut it allowed me to be more comfortable with who I am and accept myself, foibles and all.\n\nAnd that’s a wonderful thing, when I used to spend days ruminating on what a crummy person I am.\n\nOne side note: though anxiety and depression often occur together as mood disorders, they are separate conditions.\n\nMy anxiety is probably about the same as it always has been. It ebbs and flows, spiking and dropping based on what’s going on my life.\n\nI still find myself calling my talk therapist when I get into a mess of persistent ruminative thoughts — that is, getting stuck in a rut of negative thinking that tends to take a small problem and expand it to the worst possible ending.\n\nBut even my talk therapist agrees that I am getting better at recognizing those periods of gloomy rumination and breaking the cycle by calling him to talk it through.\n\nSo for now, I’m embracing life without the burden of feeling like I’m a bum, but I’ll always be braced for the possibility such thoughts will reoccur.\n\nTHURSDAY, FEB. 2, 2016\n\nWanting to quit\n\nSometimes I feel like Humpty Dumpty, the fairy-tale egg man who fell off a wall and required all the king’s horses and men to reassemble him.\n\nI propped my right knee on pillows and gingerly leaned back into my bed.\n\nTwo weeks of training at my friend Nate Yoho’s CrossFit Merle Hay studio left me with a swollen knee, knots in both calves and the return of the lower back pain that started me on my journey to recover from morbid obesity.\n\nI was ready to quit. I wanted to quit. I was hurt, humbled and ashamed.\n\nI knew joining a gym and working with a personal trainer would be a challenge for my obese body.\n\nI just did not realize how much my body would rebel against the change – and how hard the emotional repercussions of that rebellion would hit me.\n\nFirst, I should note that Nate is an excellent trainer. He speaks in a clear, gentle voice and explains all the exercises, lifts and other activities to me in clear instruction.\n\nHe focuses on proper form and injury prevention just as much as my physical therapist, Stefanie Kirk, of Mercy South Physical Therapy.\n\nThe problem is my body. I carry a lot of weight in the front of my torso – my gut. Over years of hauling this girth around, I’ve developed the bad habit of leaning back slightly to balance out the extra weight that pitches me forward.\n\nThe problem is all that leaning back has compressed my spine in the lower back. And those compressed vertebrae pinch nerves. This leads to shooting pain that I sometimes feel all the way to my finger tips and toes.\n\nIt also makes sitting, standing or any kind of movement from a prone or supine position exceptionally painful.\n\nI aggravated my back doing a lifting exercise. When fatigue sets in, I start to rush. When I rush, I lose form. And when I lose form, I hurt myself.\n\nIn this case, I leaned back a few too many times while lifting weights.\n\nNate didn’t notice it at the time because I didn’t feel pain and didn’t grimace. Conversely, when knots developed in my calves, he stopped the exercise right away because he saw the pain in my face.\n\nBut over a few days, the back injury caught up with me. I became immobile.\n\nThat’s when the fear and shame crept in.\n\nNate has made every effort to make his gym as comfortable and inviting to me as possible. But there are mirrors and I see myself. I may have lost a lot of weight to this point, but I still don’t like my own reflection. That’s a self-esteem problem and I’m working on it.\n\nWhen the back injury returned, I knew exactly what happened. I overcompensated for that weight on my gut pulling me forward.\n\nIt felt as if my own body betrayed me. I got emotional. My thoughts spiraled to unrealistic finalities. Had I done so much damage to my body that getting from fat to fit was actually impossible?\n\nI was ready to quit the gym and just crawl under my blanket and hide from the world.\n\nEnter all the king’s horses and men.\n\nThe first call I made was to my therapist. I told him my dilemma. He suggested that maybe the exercise was too much for my current weight.\n\nI told him I was worried that I liked him saying that because it was what I wanted to hear. I wanted to quit.\n\nIf I quit, though, I wanted it to be because I was injured or was really overwhelmed, not because I was afraid.\n\nMy therapist replied: “Then you’re going to make the right decision whatever you decide because you’re asking the right question.”\n\nI texted Stefanie and told her of the injury. I confessed I was thinking about quitting.\n\nShe urged me to stick with it. Care for the injuries, she said. Tend to the pain. But I had to keep moving.\n\n“There were days in the first five sessions with me that we didn’t make any progress but you kept coming back,” Stefanie wrote.\n\nIt may be cliché, but it is often difficult for men to talk to other men about emotions. Still, I confided to Nate my emotional worries along with my physical ones.\n\nHe, too, urged me to come in for my final workout of the week. He said we didn’t have to go hard. We could even meet for lunch. He just wanted the conversation going.\n\n“It’s OK to be emotional about it,” he wrote. “How could it not be? I think if you continued your old ways making it to 50 would be pushing it. Look at what you’ve done in the past six to nine months. You’re on the right path.”\n\nHow could I turn my back on a man who was working so hard to convince me to get better?\n\nFinally, I called my primary care provider, Dr. Shauna Basener at Mercy Internal Medicine in Clive. She thought exercise – at a reduced level – was OK.\n\nShe renewed a muscle relaxant prescription and another anti-inflammatory that is slightly stronger than over-the-counter stuff.\n\nSo, I iced my knee. I took my medicine. And with a mixture of trepidation and resolve, I went to my last workout of the week.\n\nNate put together a cycle of exercises that didn’t require much bending. He constantly checked on the condition of my back. We both remained vigilant on spine position.\n\nThe workout was not as intense as previous sessions. But it did not matter.\n\nFor that day, winning was just getting through the door.\n\nFRIDAY, JAN. 29, 2016\n\nTHE NEW GYM\n\nI barely slept the night before I reported to CrossFit Merle Hay to work with my new trainer Nate Yoho.\n\nAnticipation is the worst part of starting anything especially for a chronic anxiety junkie like me.\n\nI passed off my trembling upon walking in the studio as an effect of the cold weather. The truth was I had no idea how this was going to go.\n\nI half expected to leave on a stretcher.\n\nThe activity started off poorly. The first thing Nate did was take my picture, front, profile and side.\n\nI enjoy having my picture taken about as much as I enjoy listening to a dental drill at top volume on a movie theater speaker system.\n\nNate said they were to mark my progress. He posted them to a Facebook page that only he and I are a member of.\n\nWe started with some stretches. I managed to get through that without breaking into flop sweat.\n\nNate explained every step calmly and articulately. I started to settle.\n\nNext were something called box squats. Per Nate’s instruction, I held my hands over one another and sat down on a box.\n\nThis is not as easy as it reads, especially for someone who carries his weight in his doughy middle.\n\nNate cautioned me to be mindful of form. He told me which muscles to use and how to rotate my legs.\n\nThe sweat the fell by this point was from exercise rather than nerves.\n\nWe moved to standing push-ups. He put a weight bar on a rack. I leaned forward into it and pushed back to a standing position. This too is not as easy at reads.\n\nAgain, Nate directed my form. I followed directions as best I could. My editors wouldn’t believe how easy I was to command.\n\nThe bench press came next. I just did the standard 45-pound bar. We rotated between the bench press and a stepping drill similar to one I had done many times in physical therapy with Stefanie Kirk over at Mercy South Physical Therapy.\n\nWe finished with some dumbbell exercises. I was beat. I pulled my towel out of my gym bag and changed my shoes.\n\nDay 1 was finished. I had survived.\n\nStefanie texted me: “I haven’t received an SOS call, so I’m guessing everything went OK.”\n\nIt did. The workout was good. I felt like I’d really done something.\n\nThe second day brought a new set of exercises. Nate introduced me to deadlifting technique. We worked just with the bar again focusing on form rather than strain.\n\nI got plenty of strain anyway.\n\nWe worked on a shoulder exercise before we advanced to the toughest part of the workout.\n\nNate sets a series of exercises out. This time it was something called “ring rows,” crunches and using a rowing machine.\n\nRing rows involve grabbing metal rings attached to straps that are lashed to a metal frame. I leaned back to about a 45 degree angle and pulled myself up to standing position. I did that eight times in a row.\n\nThen I hustled over to do 10 crunches — what old people like me used to call sit-ups with a slightly different technique that involves a special pillow to support the lower back.\n\nWhen I finished that, I switched to the rowing machine, where my goal was to burn eight calories.\n\nThe goal was to complete four sets of all three exercises. I wheezed and groaned my way through it. I stopped to get water. Nate made me stop once to catch my breath.\n\nThe whole thing took 13 minutes, 38 seconds. We finished with a 300 meter walk.\n\nNate said we’ll revisit that work out in a few weeks and mark the progress by how much more quickly I’m able to work through the cycle.\n\nThings went along fine, but I don’t think I truly trusted Nate until my third day at his shop.\n\nWe worked a step exercise and I felt my right calf muscle pull. It was a familiar feeling. It happened several times in physical therapy with Stefanie.\n\nBut Nate caught my grimace right away. He asked what hurt. I told him. We stopped. I laid prone on the floor.\n\nNate worked the calf muscle with a piece of PVC pipe, rolling the knot out similar to the way Stefanie used to torture me with these metal tools.\n\nHe cautioned me that when I feel something off, I needed to tell him. The goal was always to avoid injury.\n\nAnd this is a weird thing to say about your trainer, but in that moment I felt safe with him. I knew he cared about my health. He offered to train me after all.\n\nBut here he was working on the injury, telling me how to handle it and looking for ways to keep the workout moving forward without causing a bigger problem.\n\nThis is the kind of moment that builds a bond between coach and “athlete.” (Nate calls all his clients athletes. I don’t feel like one, but it’s not wise to contradict the guy who spots you when you lift weights.)\n\nWe finished the last day with some rope climbing. I sat on a bench. My goal was to pull myself into a standing position by mostly using my arms.\n\nIt was tough.\n\n“This is the first step to you one day being able to do a pull-up,” Nate said.\n\nI told him that my life has been pull-up free for 40 years. It’s never happened. I couldn’t even do it in high school when I weighed 190 pounds, played basketball and regularly jogged.\n\nNate smiled.\n\n“I’ll take that as a challenge,” he said.\n\nAnd I had this odd feeling that he might just get me to pull it off.\n\nTHURSDAY, JAN. 21, 2016\n\nUNCERTAINTY ABOUND\n\nMy nerves are really getting to me now.\n\nBy the time these paragraphs reach our print edition, I will have graduated from physical therapy for a second time.\n\nThe next step is work with personal trainer Nate Yoho of Crossfit Merle Hay in Urbandale.\n\nAnd I am terrified.\n\nI can’t get a good handle on why. I know some of it rests with a fear of failure.\n\nAnd if I’m honest, I’ve let nutrition and exercise slide in recent months.\n\nThat enthusiastic burst this summer faded in the fall and all but evaporated in winter.\n\nThis is true for lots of people who exercise and struggle with weight.\n\nThe holidays provide so many irresistible treats. The weather discourages activity.\n\nBut I’m in a funk and I won’t deny it anymore. Weight loss plateaued in October.\n\nI’ve probably gained a few pounds because more fried foods, fatty foods and carbohydrates have found their way onto my plate and into my stomach.\n\nNo, that’s not the right way to say it. Food isn't animated. It didn't jump down my throat. It was me. I chose and chose poorly.\n\nEven Mom 2.0, the kindly east Des Moines hairdresser who raised me after my first set of parents died, has had to scold me not to go for a third bowl of her delicious chili.\n\nI haven’t made an appointment with my nutritionist, Jacque Schwartz at Mercy Weight Loss & Nutrition Center in Clive, since late November.\n\nI put it off using the holidays as an excuse. The truth is I didn’t want to look at that number, because I knew it went in the wrong direction or, if I was very lucky, just stayed the same.\n\nJacque has again and again admonished me not to take my weight as the end all, be all of my health.\n\nBut I do. Everybody does. Thinner and leaner is better. Rounder and plumper is not.\n\nSo I’ve avoided going to see her because I’m afraid to face the number.\n\nI know, I know. I should just suck it up and go and get back on track.\n\nI should. And yet I don’t.\n\nBecause not knowing gives me a slim hope that I haven’t undone as much work as I think I have.\n\n(And given my penchant for anxiety-driven self-flagellation, I’ve practically convinced myself I weigh more than I did when I started this process last March.)\n\nI’ve enjoyed my work with physical therapist Stefanie Kirk at Mercy South Physical Therapy. She’s the best. She really is.\n\nAside from my talk therapist, I cannot think of a better relationship I’ve had with a medical professional in my life.\n\nStefanie has worked with me as much as possible on this transition from her clinic to Nate’s gym.\n\nShe went as far as to talk to Nate on the phone about what we’ve done, what I can do and where I need to improve.\n\nShe tries hard to convince me I’m in better shape than I feel. But my anxiety is stubborn even when controlled by medication.\n\nI am afraid I am going to fail. I am afraid I’m not going to get any better and the slide to immobility will begin again.\n\nThis is the reality of the recovery. I’ve written about this many times: “Rocky” movies have montages. Life does not.\n\nRight now, I feel like I’m playing the same note over and over again. It’s tedious. It’s tiring. I want to give up. I just want to roll over, pull the covers up and go back to sleep.\n\nBut Stefanie stares me down with her big brown eyes and reminds me I once couldn’t walk more than 156 feet without stopping because of pain.\n\nNow I’m doing balancing exercises that weren’t even possible back in May when I discharged from physical therapy the first time.\n\nI try hard to keep these positives in mind. But I have a mirror. And I don’t like what I see. And every little comment, even the ones by people I don’t know and shouldn’t care about, seems to hit like a punch.\n\nI spoke to a fraternal group the other day. The first question from an audience member — the first damn question — was “how much do you weight?”\n\nI answered, but I felt like an exhibit at a freak show. I feel that way more often than I’d like to admit.\n\nI wish I could type inspiring paragraphs for readers every week with a smile on my face and joy exploding from my fingertips.\n\nBut that isn’t how this works. There are highs, lows and everything in the middle.\n\nI’m in a low right now and have been for longer than I’d like to admit.\n\nSo I’m going to have to take some of my own advice. When you get low, you’ve got to ask for help.\n\nStefanie has taken me as far as she can. Now I turn to Nate and his skills.\n\nAnd I’ll have to find the fortitude somewhere to keep moving forward.\n\nWEDNESDAY, JAN. 13, 2016\n\nTOUGH TALK\n\nA reader wrote in to ask my advice on a delicate question.\n\nI’ll pause for regular readers to stop laughing.\n\nThe reader carries a few extra pounds herself and has followed this blog as I write about my efforts to recover from morbid obesity.\n\nShe noted that a friend of hers is obese. The woman loses her breath walking from her desk to the restroom.\n\nThe reader wanted to know my advice for talking to her friend about the subject.\n\nWell, that is dicey, isn’t it? The reader knew that.\n\n“I know that when people would tell me that I needed to lose weight, it only saddened me — making me more likely to eat more,” the reader wrote.\n\nI am afraid I don’t have very good advice here.\n\nObesity is absolutely a life-threatening health condition.\n\nBut unlike most diseases, it comes with a great deal of shame and scorn.\n\nI don’t want to get into the victim culture debate when it comes to obesity. But no one blames someone who gets cancer for getting cancer.\n\nWell, unless they smoke. I always find it odd and crude after someone dies of lung cancer to have someone ask, “Did he smoke?” If so, I guess he must have deserved to die.\n\nAnyway, there is, of course, some measure of personal responsibility in maintaining a healthy weight.\n\nBut to argue that a person is obese simply because they overeat oversimplifies a complex disease.\n\nAnd yes, I call obesity a “disease.” Because that’s what it is. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention agrees with me.\n\nObesity has roots in genetics, food portions, the chemistry of food and even trauma.\n\nSure, the No. 1 reason I am morbidly obese is because of overuse of my excellent hand-to-mouth coordination.\n\nBut the underlying causes: including a chaotic childhood and depression and anxiety conditions that I’ve written about here are just as important.\n\nI overeat when I’m stressed. I binge eat to feel better. I make poor food choices when I’m anxious or depressed. These are all part of a holistic approach to treating the problem.\n\nSo the first bit of advice I’d give: Don’t assume obesity is just because the person lacks self-control.\n\nThe second thing, and this is very important, remember that the person knows they are obese, or at least fat.\n\nNobody ever had to tell me I was fat. I knew. I thought about it every time I saw a reflection in the mirror or a window.\n\nI knew it every time my arthritic knees cracked and popped when I stood up or my embattled back cried out when I tried to shop for groceries.\n\nAnd, as the reader noted of her own experience, when people brought it up to me, I just slipped into a deeper depression, ate more and was more self-destructive.\n\nI had a good friend tell me point-blank that I was too fat and he was worried he was going to have to attend my funeral soon.\n\nI knew it came from the heart and he meant it from the deepest part of personal concern.\n\nI ignored him. I ignored the doctor who diagnosed me with Type II diabetes, too.\n\nI only sought help with my body broke down to the point that I could not do my job and could barely function.\n\nI don’t believe it has to come to that for everybody.\n\nI do believe that everyone has to come to terms with their disease in their own way.\n\nI would never discourage a friend from expressing concern over the health of another friend.\n\nBut be forewarned: Even if you do it in the kindest possible way, with the gentlest language or with blunt force honesty, there’s every chance there will not lead to immediate change.\n\nSo, yes, dear reader, talk to your friend about your concerns about her health. But take extraordinary pains to make sure she knows your words come from a place of love and not judgement and scorn.\n\nBecause believe me, she’s doing enough of that to herself already.\n\nTUESDAY, JAN. 5, 2016\n\nMOST IMPROVED\n\nNate Yoho was busy with a client when I arrived at his gym shortly before 10 a.m. Tuesday.\n\nNate owns Crossfit Merle Hay, located on the backside of the former Carlos O’Kelly’s restaurant in a strip mall south of the Interstate 35-80 bypass.\n\nI took a seat on one of the barstools – still emblazoned with the defunct O’Kelly’s logo. I watched the action.\n\nA woman easily taller than 6 feet jumped on a wooden box that looked to be about 3 feet tall.\n\nThe woman looked like an athlete. Her body size and shape reminded me of the late Missy Lange, a former Drake women’s basketball player who was 6-foot-4 whose former coach, Lisa Bluder, once described as “having the perfect body for basketball.”\n\nThe woman jumped on the box about 30 times. She didn’t grunt once. Her balance was impeccable.\n\nShe moved from the box jumps to deadlifting what appeared to be 225 pounds. She sweat, but she was in total control – strong, powerful and determined.\n\nBehind her, another fit man was squatting on one leg in a balance exercise that looked nigh impossible to me.\n\nMy first thought, my only thought, was to get the hell out of there. This place was not for me. This was for fit people, not fat slobs who injure their back lifting 10-pound barbells.\n\nNate was a minor league baseball player. He was a real athlete. I was never a real athlete. I played basketball and baseball as a boy, but I was terrible. I just wanted to be on the team with the other guys. It was something to do other than go home.\n\nI won “Most Improved Player” my sophomore year at Winterset High School. This is because I went from making zero of 10 free throws at the beginning of the season to four of 10 free throws by the end of the season.\n\nNate finished with his client and took me next door to a quieter room. His 2-year-old daughter, Caralyn, was with him. She ran around with adorable boots with animal faces on the toes.\n\nNate had kind eyes and a gentle manner. He shares the same gift of making a person feel welcome and at ease possessed by Mom 2.0, the kindly east Des Moines hairdresser who raised me after my parents died.\n\nStill, I could not conceal my nervousness. I felt overwhelmed at the sight of the powerlifters next door.\n\nNate assured me.\n\n“You won’t start there,” he said. “If anything, the first few days are going to be kind of easy. I would rather have that than you going too hard and getting hurt.”\n\nNate opened with a thorough interview. He wanted to know what kind of exercise I’ve been doing in physical therapy, how I hurt myself most recently and my comfort level with various stresses on knees, my back and so on.\n\nNate is good at his job. I can tell because when he talked, I actually believed I could do whatever he put in front of me. I feel the same way when I work with my physical therapist, Stefanie Kirk of Mercy South Physical Therapy.\n\nYet as I walked out to my car, I felt overwhelmed again. I was never, ever going to be powerlifting like those people I saw today. I remembered trying out for the East High School basketball team my junior year.\n\nI was so slow in sprints that Coach Chuck Sutherland, after two days of tryouts, offered to let me be team manager. I was much better at taping ankles and handing out towels and Gatorade than playing sports.\n\nI had a talk therapy appointment after meeting with Nate. My therapist asked me what I was so afraid of.\n\nI said I was afraid of getting hurt and I was afraid I couldn’t do it.\n\nMy therapist said what I was really afraid of was embarrassment. He said I was focused on the wrong thing.\n\n“Embarrassment is an emotion, not a measure of performance,” he said. “You’re right. You may never be able to do what those other people in the gym can do. But that isn’t the goal. The goal is to improve your health.”\n\nI thought about this. He’s right. I’m not shooting for varsity here. I’m just trying to fit into movie theater seats and build up the strength and endurance for everyday life.\n\nCome to think of it, “strength for everyday life” was a phrase Nate used.\n\nSo, in a few weeks, I’ll be at Nate’s gym. I’ll be the one in the back, covered in flop sweat and going about an eighth of the speed of everybody else.\n\nBut if everything goes well, I might just win Most Improved Player again.\n\nTHURSDAY, DEC. 31, 2015\n\nRECLUSE NO MORE\n\nI start work with personal trainer Nate Yoho, who owns Crossfit Merle Hay in Des Moines, as soon as I discharge from my latest round of physical therapy, which looks to be about Jan. 22.\n\nI meet with Nate soon to look at his gym and talk about training techniques. The occasion will mark the first time we’ve met in person despite the fact that I’ve written four stories about him as both reporter and columnist.\n\nRegular readers will remember the beautiful, tragic love story of Nate and his wife Laura. They met while working at a gym. They fell in love.\n\nNate’s proposal was so romantic a jewelry store later recreated it for a commercial. But Laura got aggressive brain cancer. She died in July 2013. Their daughter, Caralyn, was born in November that year by surrogate.\n\nThe story is easily the most heart-wrenching and beautiful I’ve written in my career. But I never met Nate.\n\nThe first time I wrote about him, I was on a tight deadline trying to beat the TV competition. The other times, though, well, that’s a little hard to talk about.\n\nREAD THE SERIES:\n\nWhen I was writing about Nate, I was at the peak of my obesity: more than 560 pounds. I was having a real hard time getting around physically.\n\nThe walk from the parking garage to the office, about a block, was almost too much for me at the beginning and ending of my workdays.\n\nNagging and cyclic injuries often laid me up for days at a time.\n\nSo whenever possible, I did my interviews over the phone, even on stories as sensitive as this one.\n\nThere were many reasons for this. One was that I was afraid wherever I met people, there would not be a chair strong enough to hold my weight.\n\nThis was a real concern. Once I was at an assignment where I was sitting on a metal folding chair. It collapsed beneath my weight. I landed flat on my back in a room full of laughing school children.\n\nThere is a sort of slapstick humor to that, of course. Even I can see it.\n\nBut there is an underlying truth that is far more terrible: I was so ashamed of my body and appearance that I didn’t want to be seen.\n\nThat’s a horrible feeling to have.\n\nNate, for his part, was always kind to me. He actually wanted to meet me after one of the stories I wrote about him.\n\nAnd I admitted to him something that I never told anyone: I was afraid to meet him because I didn’t feel worthy.\n\nNate is a guy who is doing life right. He was a pro baseball player in the Milwaukee Brewers system. He takes care of his body.\n\nHe married a beautiful, loving woman who shared his passion for fitness. He tended to her until her last moments.\n\nAnd he dotes on their daughter.\n\nI look at Nate and see all the things I am not, especially physically.\n\nI don’t know why I opened up to Nate in this way. Like I said, we’d never met before in person.\n\nBut he trusted me with his intensely personal story about his wife and daughter. There was a connection there beyond the paragraphs.\n\nNate asked me some time ago if I was a recluse when I felt ashamed, even around the people I trust.\n\nI did and I do. I never want the people I love to see me at my worst.\n\nBut that was a long time ago. I’ve lost 82 pounds since then. I can do things physically that I thought were impossible when I first spoke with Nate.\n\nSo finally I took Nate up on his offer to help me get fit. That’s what he does for a living at Crossfit.\n\nAnd hopefully he will help me show myself and the people I love me at my best.\n\nTUESDAY, DEC. 22, 2015\n\nBAD MATH\n\nI sat down at Jethro’s BBQ near Drake University for dinner with a pal last week.\n\nI opened up MyFitnessPal, the smartphone application that I use to track my calories. A new feature popped up.\n\nIt allowed me to search restaurants in my area based on the GPS location of my phone.\n\nThis is a major development.\n\nSince I began using the app, back in March when the weight-loss journey began, I’ve been forced to estimate the calories in foods at my favorite restaurants.\n\nI eat out a lot, more than I should. This would, at least, provide me with a consistent baseline.\n\nThat was the good news.\n\nThe bad news was I was vastly underestimating the calories of several of my favorite foods.\n\nNot all the restaurants in my area are on the app, but Jethro’s is. And a few of my favorites are heavier in calories that I figured.\n\nThis goes a long way to explaining the lengthy plateau in weight loss. I was guessing wrong and it was going against me. I was treading water instead of making meaningful strokes to the other side.\n\nThe truth is I’ve probably been blowing my calorie goal more often than I thought for months.\n\nThis was a frustrating revelation, but it is better to know than to constantly be wondering what is going wrong.\n\nOnce you know what’s going wrong, then you can make adjustments.\n\nSpeaking of adjustments, my work with physical therapist Stefanie Kirk at Mercy South Physical Therapy continues to go well.\n\nI’d been sick with a fever and some gastrointestinal issues and missed our last session.\n\nI don’t like missing appointments with Stefanie. No matter what my mood is going in, I’m usually feeling centered and sharper going out.\n\nThe rest was doing well. My posture has improved as well as my form in walking.\n\nIt is still a strange thing for me to think about so many different things as I walk.\n\nTighten the abs. Adjust the pelvis to a neutral position. Flex the gluteus muscles as part of my stride. Keep my hips steady and not swaying. Force my toes to point forward.\n\nWhat a list to consider just to take a step.\n\nBut bad form leads to injuries and that leads to more setbacks. This plateau has gone on long enough. It feels too much like wallowing. It’s time to break through to the next level.\n\nHoliday eating is always a challenge. I was frustrated enough with my plateau in November to skip one Thanksgiving meal with my Uncle Larry and Aunt Sharon and have a scaled-down, healthier offering with Parents 2.0, the kindly east Des Moines couple who raised me after my parents died.\n\nI have two Christmas celebrations planned this season. I’ll have lunch – pork loin is the main course – with my parents.\n\nMy folks are watching their weight, too. Mom 2.0 is a type II diabetic like me, so she’s mindful of carbs and sugars in her offerings.\n\nMom 2.0 also will be cooking the meal for the other Christmas gathering, set on Dec. 28, which brings Dad 2.0’s side of the family to my folks’ stately east-side manor.\n\nThere will be more foods to avoid at that gathering than our Christmas Day festivities, but I think I’ll manage.\n\nI find my appetite can be slaked by good helpings of foods that I like and are low in calories and high in nutrients. I just have to be mindful of portions.\n\nBut if the story MyFitnessPal tells me is true, then I’ve got a lot of work to do to get my diet changes back in order.\n\nI eat out to socialize, either with friends or with the acquaintances I meet among bartenders and servers.\n\nMy girlfriend is changing jobs soon and that means she’ll be working fewer nights. We are committed to eating healthier.\n\nThe easiest way to do this is to make our own meals. I think it’s time I started putting my crock pot to use as well as my George Foreman Grill.\n\nI’m sure there will be plenty of trips to Jethro’s, Tasty Tacos and other favorite haunts.\n\nBut now is the time to hunker down and get serious about this recovery. I’ve made great progress to be sure, but this isn’t the time to start feeling satisfied.\n\nFRIDAY, DEC. 18, 2015\n\nCHANGING DIRECTIONS\n\nAnxiety precedes every visit to my primary care doctor.\n\nThis is not a reflection on Dr. Shawna Basener of Mercy Westown Internal Medicine Clinic. She is an excellent doctor with a terrific, upbeat attitude whose approach to medicine matches mine: The best medicine is no medicine.\n\nUnder her care, I’ve already shed an expensive cholesterol medication and a diabetic pill. In my latest visit, she encouraged me to drop an iron supplement because my blood hemoglobin numbers are strong.\n\nStill, I get very worked up before every visit. I feel like going to the doctor is like going to the mechanic. She's going to find something wrong and it’s going to be very expensive.\n\nThe night before doctor visits, I’m rife with anxiety. I sleep fitfully if at all. I drive myself to the brink of a crack-up just to get a checkup.\n\nThe news came in mostly good. My A1C, the critical measure for diabetes, was down to 5.3, lower than my September visit. My blood pressure, the doctor said, was perfect.\n\nBut the weight, well, it was the same. Actually, it was up two-tenths of a pound. That’s such an insignificant number that it could be thrown off by how big a cup of water I had when I took my morning medications.\n\nStill, I was discouraged. For nearly three months, I’ve been unable to move that number on the scale.\n\nI know. I know. Plateaus are a part of weight loss. My nutritionist tells me that. My physical therapist tells me that. Social media commentators tell me that.\n\nStill, I feel like I’m in a car that just won’t start.\n\nMy eating habits aren’t horrible. My blood work shows that. I’ve excised most sugars and carbohydrates from my diet. I keep to my daily calorie goal of 2,700. I’m usually much lower.\n\nInjuries have hampered my physical activity. I reinjured my back going too hard on the elliptical machine at my gym. I went back to my physical therapist to get it worked on. She’s focused on form and balance.\n\nThis involves a lot of awkward retraining of my posture. Tuck the pelvis in. Tighten the butt muscles. Squeeze the hips. It feels silly and weird. But if there’s a person in this world I trust to get me on the right physical path, it’s Stefanie Kirk of Mercy South Physical Therapy.\n\nStefanie and I are going to be working through the end of the year and maybe slightly into the new year.\n\nAfter that, well, I need to change my fitness routine in a significant and meaningful way.\n\nMy attitude toward exercise is soured. I don’t know if it is the colder weather or the rain and gray skies or simply apathy. But home seems so warm and comfortable and the gym seems so dull and uncomfortable.\n\nStill, if this weight loss effort — and this column, for that matter — is going to be anything more than complaining about not having the mojo to exercise, I need to do do something different.\n\nAs soon as I’m discharged from physical therapy, probably in mid-January, I’m going to start working out with my friend Nate Yoho.\n\nRegular readers might remember Nate from a story I wrote about him and his late wife, Laura, who died of cancer. Their daughter, Caralyn, was born by surrogate a few months after Laura died. It’s probably the most popular and touching story I’ve ever written.\n\nNate and I have kept in touch. He is a former minor league baseball player and fitness guru who owns his own gym. Several times, he’s offered to develop a program for me. I always turned him down.\n\nI gave lots of lame reasons. But the truth was basic: I was afraid.\n\nNate is the real damn deal when it comes to fitness. The guy has arms like steel cable.\n\nAnd, well, I’m a wimp. I was afraid I would get hurt or be embarrassed.\n\nBut these days, it’s pretty embarrassing to write once a week about how I haven’t really been exercising and I haven’t lost any weight.\n\nSo I finally took Nate up on his offer.\n\nTo his credit, he’s got the same upbeat attitude Dr. Basener has when I visit her. So maybe I’m worried about nothing.\n\nIn a way, this is only fair.\n\nNate trusted me with the most intimate story of his life. The very least I can do is trust him to help in my ongoing effort to save my own life.\n\nFRIDAY, DEC. 11, 2015\n\nDEPRESSION SPECTER\n\nI’ve lived with chronic clinical depression for a long time.\n\nThe transcranial magnetic stimulation, or TMS, treatments I took under the direction of Dr. Eric Barlow at Compass Clinical in Urbandale seem to have done their job.\n\nTo recap, TMS uses magnetic pulses to stimulate the nerve endings in the brain to make them more receptive to mood-regulating chemicals such as serotonin.\n\nI took acute treatment five days a week for six weeks. I’m finishing the year taking maintenance treatments once a week.\n\nI think it worked. I would like to declare it an unqualified success, but, like I said, I’ve lived with depression for a long time. I’ve had breaks in the blackness only to fall right back down that bottomless elevator shaft.\n\nIn real, measurable terms, I feel less depressed. And that, in itself, is a strange thing to feel.\n\nSometimes I think depression is stalking me, just outside the periphery of my vision, waiting to strike if I let my guard down.\n\nSo far, that hasn’t happened.\n\nBarlow is so pleased with my progress, he suggested we begin to taper my antidepressant medication and sleeping pills.\n\nI am wary of this, but also excited.\n\nThe excitement comes from the fact that many antidepressants, including the ones I take, come with a side effect of increased appetite and weight gain. Since I’m fighting morbid obesity as it is, it would be nice to remove one of the obstacles, no matter how small it is.\n\nBut the wariness is great as well. I feel pretty good right now. Do I dare tamper with it?\n\nIn the short term, anyway, the answer is yes.\n\nNot long after I finished the acute treatments, I noticed I was sleeping a lot.\n\nSleeping a lot is a behavior I associate with depression, especially the deeper varieties that include anhedonia — loss of interest in things that previously gave me pleasure.\n\nI would put on a ballgame and sink into the recliner. I would be asleep in moments. Sometimes I would sleep for a few minutes. Other times, it was for hours.\n\nThe thing was, I didn’t feel low. I wasn’t in a “woe is me” mode. I was just sleepy and, on the positive side, so relaxed that I drifted off to sleep.\n\nThere are far worse fates than this, of course. But I wanted the lift of depression symptoms to correspond with a bit more pep. I love to read and when I was in the thick of the major depression episode, I couldn’t concentrate enough to stay with a story for more than a page or two — even a comic book.\n\nAnd my exercise mojo seemed to have evaporated completely. If it weren’t for my physical therapist, Stefanie Kirk of Mercy South Physical Therapy, working on my posture and strengthening my bum right hip and groin, I wouldn’t be moving much at all.\n\nSo, Barlow and I consulted and we decided to halve my sleeping pill and drop my antidepressant down by a quarter.\n\nThis has corresponded with a slight uptick in anxiety.\n\nUnfortunately, TMS treatments don’t address anxiety directly. Anxiety and depression are two heads of the same mood disorder dragon. But the chemicals that cause panic attacks are different than those that cause depression.\n\nSo, I know anxiety is probably always going to be a part of my life. It’s something I’ll have to manage, like high blood pressure or cholesterol.\n\nI am worried that the drop in my antidepressant is contributing to my anxiety. Then again, we’re in a chicken-or-egg argument, aren’t we? Is a lower dose of antidepressant causing more worry or is me worrying about a lower dose of antidepressant causing the worry?\n\nI don’t know. The only thing I can do is stay the course. I show up for my maintenance treatments and meet regularly with Barlow to talk things over and keep the brain juices in a proper cocktail.\n\nHopefully, one day, I’ll stop looking over my shoulder for the bad juju of depression.\n\nBut for now, I try to enjoy the relief, but keep one eye on the rear-view mirror.\n\nFRIDAY, DEC. 4, 2015\n\nBALANCING ACT\n\nI lean left, but not in the way Register columnists are usually accused of.\n\nInstead of a political sensibility, it is an issue of physical balance.\n\nI favor my left leg. Much of the time I find myself standing with most of my weight on my left leg and my right leg dangling almost like a kickstand.\n\nThe lean may seem harmless enough, but it’s the latest focus of my ongoing effort to recover from morbid obesity.\n\nI reinjured my back by taking on aggressive workouts at my gym. The setback frustrated my efforts to lose more weight, leaving me stalled for more than a month.\n\nFurther, it brought back the same pain – though not at the same level – that led me to seek treatment for the health issue in March.\n\nI was happy to be working with my physical therapist, Stefanie Kirk of Mercy South Physical Therapy, again. But I was annoyed that I wasn’t able to keep healthy.\n\nStefanie, as she usually does, saw the problem right away: my butt.\n\nSpecifically, the gluteus muscles weren’t firing when I was climbing stairs or walking.\n\nThis was likely caused by bad posture I assumed when I weighed more than 530 pounds.\n\nThese are the small, harmful changes in your body that you don’t realize occur when you’re obese. You can see the fat. You mop up the flop sweat. You know your endurance is low.\n\nOne of the many things I really didn’t understand about my condition was how much damage the extreme weight was and continues to do to my physical structure.\n\nMorbidly obese people make all sorts of adjustments to their posture and movement. They’re slight and almost imperceptible, but over time there are terrible consequences.\n\nMy bulging belly forced me to carry myself in a poor posture, which in turn changed my gait.\n\nThis wasn’t a problem when I was content to wheeze a few hundred feet to the car or mailbox and be done with movement for the day.\n\nBut when I started doing more walking outside and on the elliptical machine at the gym, the out-of-whack walking style caused my back to break down on me again.\n\nThe weight loss also has one negative side effect: My center of gravity changes with each handful of pounds that come off. That means my body is relearning balance on a regular basis.\n\nStefanie has me working on a variety of posture-improving techniques, strengthening my gluteus muscles and my hip flexors.\n\nSince I’ve been so large for so long, one of the bad habits I’ve picked up is sitting with my hips splayed wide open. This is particularly acute when I’m driving my car.\n\nStefanie tells me the body has something called a neutral position, similar to a car transmission. However, my neutral positions are out of alignment with the center of my body.\n\nMy right hip – which I used to work the pedals in my car – is especially open.\n\nThis might all sound rather technical, but what it boils down to is that when you don’t stand and move the way the body was designed, you injure yourself.\n\nThis round of physical therapy with Stefanie is a lot different than my first. I was much more passive then. I just did what my physical therapist told me. I was happy to get any movement.\n\nNow I’m trying to move the right way. It’s the difference between throwing a baseball casually with a buddy in the park and throwing nine innings for a major-league club.\n\nI ask a lot of questions. And the physical therapy sessions are less sweaty endurance tests and more about the right form, concentrating on making sure the right muscles are firing at the right time.\n\nI have a lot of problems with my hips. They dip and sway in the wrong way. Some days it feels like Stefanie is one of the censors on the old “Ed Sullivan Show” and I’m Elvis Presley trying to break all the rules.\n\nStill, the constant correction is helpful. It feels awkward to concentrate on every step.\n\nI have a list of things I’m supposed to do just when I walk. Tighten my abdominal muscles. Make sure my shoulders are back. Tighten the glutes, especially when I’m climbing stairs. Unlock the knees. Point my toes forward and force my hips to move in the proper direction.\n\nI bet I look pretty silly watching my feet when I make a stride just to see if my toes are in the right place.\n\nI don’t remember how old I was when I learned to walk, but I’ll likely always remember that at 40, I had to learn to walk all over again.\n\nTUESDAY, NOV. 24, 2015\n\nBRAIN BUILDING\n\nI wrote a column earlier this month about how transcranial magnetic stimulation, or TMS, helped ease my chronic depression symptoms.\n\nBut I want to make an important clarification: I am not cured of depression.\n\nI’m not even in remission, which by definition is the absence of symptoms over a sustained period.\n\nI feel fine, better than I have in a long time, but I’m not free of depression or anxiety. In fact, I still have quite a bit of anxiety in crowds and in social situations.\n\nTMS is not meant to be a cure. It is, like prescription medications, a tool in helping rein in a sometimes debilitating health problem.\n\nDepression and anxiety are controlled on two fronts. The first is medicine and treatments such as TMS.\n\nThose treatments address brain chemistry. Severe depression occurs when the brain is deprived of serotonin — the brain’s mood-regulating hormone.\n\nA plethora of medicines exists to try to regulate this. Many of them are very effective. But my depression was treatment-resistant and my psychiatrist, Dr. Eric Barlow, suggested TMS.\n\nTMS uses magnetic pulses to stimulate neurons in my brain, making them more receptive to natural levels of serotonin and other mood hormones.\n\nAnd, so far, that feels pretty good.\n\nWhat it did not do, however, was change my thinking patterns. As we grow up, our brain develops ways of dealing with the world. These are called schema.\n\nA simple example of a schema is learning about a hot stove. At some point in your childhood, you probably touched the burner of a stove despite the warnings of your parents. The pain that resulted led your young brain to build a schema that said, simply, “Don’t touch hot stoves.”\n\nBut I had a chaotic childhood. Along with the more common “hot stove schema,” I developed some schemata to deal with the struggles associated with a mother who was addicted to prescription pain killers, suffered violent mood swings and memory loss, and had other boundary issues that I choose to keep private.\n\nI developed schema to survive these situations.\n\nFor example, if I recognized my mom was lashing out angrily, saying cruel things, I learned to keep quiet and make myself scarce, but a part of me believed my mother’s erratic behavior was triggered by me being a bad little boy.\n\nThis is a reasonable response to what seemed like a threatening situation as a boy. But as an adult, I have a job that often leads me into conflict with people.\n\nHonorable people disagree, but sometimes, especially behind the veil of social media, unkind things are said and feelings are hurt. My reaction is often to either withdraw or lash out.\n\nAnd always there is a rush of self-loathing, assuming that I am still a bad person because of the flawed schema I developed under a now outdated set of circumstances.\n\nSuch self deprecation is not particularly helpful in fostering productive, civil dialogue.\n\nSo while I hope TMS has given me a long-term break from major depression, I still have plenty of mental health work to do with my talk therapist.\n\nFor example, when I was a boy, I often felt uneasy or nervous. My parents quelled this disquiet by giving me toys or taking me out to dinner at a fast food restaurant.\n\nSo the schema my brain built included thinking that the way to feel safe and loved is to buy things and eat. And, to a degree, that still works in that I get a serotonin rush from a buying spree or a food binge.\n\nBut it is not a particularly effective way to live as an adult because it drains my bank account and expands my waistline.\n\nThe work I’m doing with my talk therapist now is focused on building new schema. My therapist said you can’t remove an old schema. You can only create new ones.\n\nThis all seems rather technical, but the brain is a complicated organ. And I like that my medical team explains the science to me.\n\nKnowledge is power. I like the idea that I can take more control of how I think by understanding why I think that way.\n\nThere are still bad days. An incident arose just the other evening that had me on the phone with my therapist for a half hour.\n\nI was in a loop thinking I was a bad person. The truth was, I had run into an old thinking pattern triggered by a current conflict.\n\nI was somewhat downtrodden that I was still struggling with these same kinds of thinking errors, but my therapist reminded me that I’m getting better at catching these moments when thoughts start with a relatively minor incident and then increase in awfulness until I’m nearly panicked.\n\nAnd he reminded me that now that my brain chemistry is under better control, I can more freely work on better thinking.\n\nThat is very good news … I think.\n\nFRIDAY, NOV. 20, 2015\n\nGIVING THANKS\n\nThanksgiving is associated with overeating more than any other holiday.\n\nAnd why not? Such a bounty of delights: turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes, scalloped potatoes, sweet potatoes, cranberry sauce, green bean casseroles, pumpkin pies, pecan pies and, for the sadistic, mincemeat pies, and, of course, delicious gravy.\n\nMy mouth waters at the thought of a heaping plate with heavy dollops of everything and then some.\n\nBut I’m fighting morbid obesity. I’ve lost nearly 82 pounds since March. Nothing I could eat on Thanksgiving could undo all that work.\n\nStill, my journey is long. I have 220 pounds to go before I’m outside the obese range. Thanksgiving poses a challenge for which I have no good answer.\n\nI could attend a family event Wednesday night at my aunt and uncle’s Bondurant home. I could, as I did at my family’s annual July 4 celebration, map out what I was going to eat in advance and limit myself to that.\n\nI could stick to the green veggies and salad and skip the pie altogether. My family would understand. They’re a good family like that.\n\nI needn’t worry about them being uncomfortable at the chow line while I poke at a few slices of turkey, green beans and salad.\n\nNo, the problem is with me. I want to eat big and bad. And I don’t trust myself at the event. My family might remind me of my goals if I forget in a frenzy of pie, but I don’t want them to have to do that, either.\n\nWhat I want to do is feel confident enough to eat sensibly at Thanksgiving or any other day. And the truth is I just don’t right now.\n\nMy weight-loss efforts have been stagnant since fall began. Plateaus are commonplace in weight loss. This one seems too long to me.\n\nI have to admit my culpability in that. I eat out too often. Wings, which is fried food, are my kryptonite. I’ve indulged too often.\n\nMeanwhile, injuries and a general malaise have stymied my exercise efforts. I’ve lost my workout mojo. Some of it is just plain laziness. Some of it is a cramped schedule the past six weeks while I went through an intense new treatment for my chronic depression and anxiety issues.\n\nRegardless, I’m moving less and while I’m not necessarily eating more, I’m definitely not eating as well as I should be.\n\nSo this Thanksgiving, I’m taking a knee. I’m sitting it out. Parents 2.0, the kindly east Des Moines couple who raised me after Parents 1.0 died, and I will have a quiet dinner together Thanksgiving Day. My apologies to Uncle Larry and Aunt Sharon, but this year I’m won’t be at the table.\n\nThey’ll understand and I’m thankful for that.\n\nIn fact, despite recent foibles and the occasional unkind gripe from disgruntled read", "authors": [], "publish_date": "2015/05/14"}, {"url": "http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2016/12/09/paula-cooper-executioner-within/93650408/", "title": "Indiana killer Paula Cooper: The Executioner Within", "text": "Robert King\n\nrobert.king@indystar.com\n\nThis 13-chapter story, told as a real-life novel, raises questions about race, justice, poverty and abuse. But it is also the story about the human capacity for forgiveness and a young woman’s struggle to find peace.\n\nStill shrouded in darkness, she sat alone in her car, parked between night and day, between this world and the next.\n\nBehind her, a family of teddy bears sat strapped in by a seat belt. In the front seat next to her was a digital recorder. And a gun.\n\nShe picked up the recorder and clicked it on.\n\n\"This is Paula Cooper.\"\n\nA short introduction, a simple statement. Even though nothing had been simple about being Paula Cooper.\n\n\"I believe today is the 26th; 5:15 will be my death.\"\n\nShe saw it clearly now, even in the pre-dawn gloom. She'd spent so much of her life searching for peace. But early on the morning of May 26, 2015, the end was in sight. She would reach it before sunrise.\n\nShe just had a few things left to say.\n\n—\n\n\"My sister. My queen. My everything.\"\n\nEvery morning she spoke to Rhonda. Why should this morning be different?\n\n—\n\n\"My mother, I felt like you didn't love me. You didn't care about me. You cut me off. You judged me. You didn't want me at your church. You hurt me about the man I loved. But I still love you.\"\n\nOthers had forgiven Paula. Yet she never felt it from the woman who mattered most.\n\n—\n\n\"To Monica, I'm so sorry. This pain that I feel every day. I walk around. I'm so miserable inside. I can't deal with this reality.\"\n\nMonica had been like a godmother in the fairy tales — someone to fill the void in the absence of a mother's love.\n\n—\n\n\"LeShon, I love you. … You showed me how to love.You showed me how to be a woman.\"\n\nLeShon looked beyond Paula's past. As if it had never occurred.\n\n—\n\n\"Michael, I'm so proud of you. And thank you for apologizing.\"\n\nMichael was her first love. She wanted a life with him; he wanted something else.\n\n—\n\n\"Meshia … you helped me when I was down, but I explained to you better than anybody how I feel.\"\n\nMeshia knew Paula's pain; she'd just been unable to stop it.\n\n—\n\nThese were the people Paula loved most. And to each one she had revealed part of herself, but never the whole. It was a select list from a life populated by characters: Her brutal father and her innocent victim; the judge who condemned her and the man who forgave her. There were friars and a bishop and a pope; jailers and journalists; people who were zealous to save her life and people eager to end it. There were too many to consider, really. And the sun would be up soon. She could wait no longer.\n\n\"Forgive me,\" she said in a recording that would soon become part of a police investigation. \"I must go now.\"\n\nHer coda finished, Paula stepped out of the car and into the shadows. She took a seat against a blighted tree. She felt the breeze in her hair. She felt the gun in her hand.\n\nShe was familiar with death. She'd seen it up close. She'd been condemned to it, resigned to it and reprieved from it. She had debated its merits and come to terms with it. Never had she stopped thinking of it.\n\nBut the question that would vex those she was leaving behind was maddeningly simple.\n\nWhy, after all she had endured and all she had survived, after all she had done and seemed capable of doing, had she chosen to die now?\n\nTo empower the journalism behind IndyStar, please consider a subscription.\n\nThe garden spot in the woods — where her father grew vegetables and beat his daughters — was only an occasional venue of torture.\n\nMore often, for Paula Cooper, it happened at home.\n\nAs a child, Paula went to bed night after night next to her sister, listening to their parents argue, listening to her father make threats to come after them. Sometimes her mother would talk him out of it. Sometimes the man's wrath ebbed and they fell asleep. Sometimes they would be jarred awake at 3 o'clock in the morning, her father standing over them, ready to beat them.\n\nPaula believed there were other kinds of families out there. She watched the people on \"The Cosby Show,\" and they seemed to have such a nice family. But that was television. This was real. This was her family. And it looked as if there was no escaping it.\n\n—\n\nPaula was born in Chicago to Herman and Gloria Cooper on Aug. 25, 1969. Her sister, Rhonda, was three years older. Early on, the family lived in Michigan City, but by the time Paula was old enough for school they had moved to Gary.\n\nThe girls attended Bethune Grade School, a stone's throw from home. They went to nearby New Testament Baptist Church, where Paula sang in the choir and helped with the little children's Bible classes.\n\nBy the late 1970s, Gary's downward spiral from a midcentury boomtown was picking up speed. Manufacturing jobs were disappearing. White families were fleeing to the suburbs. Crime was rising. Like many black families still in the city, the Coopers were left in the wake of all this.\n\nGloria worked as a lab tech at a hospital. She had an assortment of health problems, none of them helped by the drugs and booze she added to the mixture.\n\n\"One day my mother be nice, the next day she be angry,\" Paula would tell Woman's Day, years later, when her story was national news. \"And the next day she be real strange-acting.\"\n\nHerman worked for U.S. Steel and worked construction, but his employment was sporadic. He had a girlfriend on the side and would be gone for long stretches. When he returned, chaos followed. Herman and Gloria were a volatile pair, drinking hard and arguing often, creating an atmosphere that was not just unstable, but dangerous.\n\nThe result, as Paula would say later, was that the girls had to \"fend for themselves.\" Sometimes, on evenings when Herman was gone and Gloria worked late, Paula took meals with the next-door neighbors, who allowed her to stick around and watch TV. Most of the time the girls had food and nice clothing. But, as Rhonda would say later, \"we hardly ever had any love.\"\n\nExcept from each other.\n\nIn the middle of all the darkness, Paula and Rhonda clung tightly to each other. They found moments to giggle together, play pranks together and share secrets.\n\nMore than just a sister, Rhonda became Paula's caregiver. Yet, through their early years, they were unaware of an important family secret: Rhonda was the child of a different father. It was a secret Gloria took great pains to hide, even though she allowed Rhonda's father, Ronald Williams, to visit occasionally. She said he was her uncle.\n\nBefore Herman came along, Ronald and Gloria were engaged. They broke it off, as Williams would later tell a courtroom, because he felt Gloria had a \"split personality.\" In short, he thought she was crazy.\n\nLiving with Herman Cooper didn't help.\n\nHerman beat everyone in the house. He beat Gloria in front of the girls. He beat the girls together. He beat them separately, sometimes in front of their mother. Sometimes Gloria seemed to egg on the violence.\n\n\"We did everything we was supposed to do, but it just wasn't never good enough for her,\" Paula told Woman's Day many years later. \"… She get mad at us and he'd beat us. 'Be a man,' she'd tell him. 'Take care of it,' she'd say. And he'd take care of it.\"\n\nThe girls grew up unable to remember a time before the abuse. When they were little, Paula would later say, Herman beat them \"for the things little kids do.\" When they were older, Rhonda remembered, he beat them for forgetting to take out the trash, for not doing the dishes and for skipping school.\n\nHerman employed an assortment of tools for punishment, whatever he could get his hands on — shoes, straps, sticks, a broom. Sometimes he used an electrical cord from an air conditioner.\n\n\"He'd triple it up and go to work,\" Paula would say later. \"It got to the point I was so used to it I didn't cry anymore.\"\n\nTo heighten the pain, Herman sometimes ordered the girls to remove their clothes before a beating. Questioned later, he denied that he ever abused the girls at all.\n\n—\n\nThis stark picture of Paula Cooper's childhood emerges from several sources; the courtroom testimony from Rhonda and her father; testimony from Dr. Frank Brogno, a clinical psychologist who discussed what he learned from examining Paula. Some of the glimpses into the darkness come from now-yellowed news clippings. Others come from anecdotes Paula shared with friends and loved ones and the few journalists she favored. Finally, there's the freshest source of insight into Paula's world — more than 100 personal letters she wrote to a treasured friend that were reviewed by IndyStar.\n\nTaken together, they amount to a catalog of horrors. Her father's beatings, Paula said, left her \"close to death so many times.\" With no apparent means of escape, she seemed to stop fearing death at all. \"I just cried,\" she wrote, \"until all my tears were gone away.\"\n\n—\n\nIn 1978, when Paula was 9, the tears were still flowing. Her parents separated, but it was often fuzzy as to when they were back together and when they were apart. Once, when Herman returned home to find the doors locked, he forced his way in. According to testimony Rhonda gave in court, Herman entered their home, beat up their mother and raped her in front of the two girls.\n\nThe incident seems to have been a tipping point. Not long after, Gloria began telling her daughters the world had nothing to offer them. Instead, she said, they'd all be better off going to heaven. On this point, Rhonda would say later, Gloria began pressuring her daughters. Eventually, the girls came to believe, like their mother, they had nothing to live for.\n\nGloria phoned Ronald Williams, Rhonda's father and steady friend. It was late. She'd been drinking and taking pills. She was crying. Herman had been giving her problems, she said, and things weren't good at work.\n\nShe was thinking of killing herself.\n\nWilliams had heard this kind of talk from Gloria before. Always, he had been able to console her, to talk her back from the precipice. He reminded her that she had Paula and Rhonda to think about. What would happen to them? His question made Gloria think. But only for an hour.\n\nShe called Williams back. Between her tears and her wailing, Gloria said: \"I finally found out what I'm going to do with the kids.\"\n\nWilliams was alarmed. He demanded to know what she meant.\n\n\"I'm going to take them with me,\" she replied. \"I'm going to let you speak to your daughter and Paula for the last time.\"\n\nThe girls took the phone in turns. They were crying, too. Rhonda said they were going to heaven with their mother.\n\n\"Don't do nothing drastic,\" Williams told them. \"Let me speak to your mother, OK.\"\n\nThe phone went dead.\n\nWilliams panicked. Gloria and the girls had recently moved. She hadn't shared their new address. He didn't know where to find them, how to stop her.\n\nHe called the operator and asked for his last call to be traced; it was no good. He called Gary police. Without an address, they could do nothing.\n\nThere was nothing anyone could do. Williams waited. For three weeks, he waited. He feared what had become of them.\n\nHad Gloria killed them all?\n\n—\n\nAfter she hung up the phone, Gloria decided not to act right away; she'd wait until morning. When she awoke, Gloria took the girls out to the car in the garage. She put them in the back seat and started the engine. The garage door remained closed.\n\nFrom there, accounts differ. Williams testified that a friend told him neighbors noticed something and called the fire department. Rhonda testified that, as the fumes gathered, the girls drifted off to sleep. They thought they were going to heaven; instead, they woke up in bed. How they got there isn't clear. Rhonda said Gloria had changed her mind. When the girls awoke, she said, their mother was coughing on the lawn.\n\nFrom then on, Williams tried to coax Gloria into letting him have the girls. Rhonda was his daughter, and he was fond of Paula, too. Gloria would have none of it.\n\n\"I'd rather see them both dead,\" she said.\n\n—\n\nThe girls survived their first brush with death. But Paula and her sister were being shaped in a world without hope. And now their mother had planted a seed: The ultimate escape was death.\n\nRhonda looked around at this nihilist world and began seeking a way out. Several times she tried to run. Soon, she began taking Paula with her. \"I couldn't take it no more in that house,\" she would say, \"and I didn't want her to, either.\"\n\nBy 1982, when both girls were teenagers, they made an unsuccessful attempt to run and were sent — together — to the Thelma Marshall Children's Home in Gary. Within a short time, they were returned to the Coopers. For Paula, it was the beginning of a cycle — of running and being returned home. For Rhonda, that cycle ended only when she learned Ronald Williams was her biological father. At her first opportunity, she left the Coopers to live with him.\n\nIf the move helped Rhonda, it had grievous consequences for Paula, then 13. Her sister had been the most stable person in her home. Now she was gone. Paula came to believe her parents blamed her for Rhonda's departure. Now that her father's anger had one less target, Paula's beatings grew more frequent and more brutal. Even as her parents divorced, Herman never quite left the picture. And his handiwork began to show.\n\nAt school, Paula revealed to an administrator a rash of injuries — a bruise on her thigh, a welt on her arm, a rug burn on her elbow.\n\nWhen a welfare caseworker visited the Cooper home, Herman and Gloria cursed at her. They blamed Paula's problems on interference from the courts, from the school psychologist and from the welfare department itself. When the caseworker recommended family counseling, Gloria said she'd rather go to jail.\n\nAt various times, Gloria and Herman seemed to vacillate between wanting Paula and considering her a curse. Paula began running away on her own. After one attempt, welfare officials wanted to send Paula home, but her mother objected. If Paula returned, Gloria vowed to leave.\n\nOn another occasion, when Rhonda made a rare visit to spend a weekend with Paula and her mother, arguments ensued and Williams returned for Rhonda. He couldn't find her there, but he found Paula. She was crying so loudly he heard her without going in. Gloria, who stood in front of the house fuming about Paula, simply said: \"I'm going to kill that bitch.\"\n\nPaula emerged and, seeing Williams, ran to him and jumped into his arms. He asked her if her mother would really hurt her.\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\nWilliams told her to get in the car. Gloria charged out toward them and began to threaten Paula. \"I'm going to kill you and if I don't (Herman) will.\"\n\nWilliams considered it serious business to take Paula. He lived in Illinois and assumed it would be a crime to take a child across the state line without permission of the parents. He took her anyway. Gloria and other family members threatened to phone the police.\n\nAt his home, Williams asked Paula what she wanted to do. They talked about the logistics of her staying with him without her mother's permission. It would be impossible for her to go to school. Then there was the trouble Williams might face. With tears, Paula looked at Williams and said, \"It's best for me to go home … I don't want to get you in no trouble.\" Paula's respite lasted only a few hours.\n\nEven though he wasn't keeping Paula, Williams couldn't fathom returning her home. Instead, he just let her walk away. She was young, no more than 13, but Williams believed she was safer on the streets of Chicago than at home. Under scrutiny for making such a choice, Williams later told a courtroom he thought Paula was in danger there. \"I would rather see her in the street as a slut than for her mother to blow her brains out.\"\n\nFor several days, Paula survived on her own. Inevitably, she wound up back home.\n\n—\n\nBy 1983, when Paula turned 14, she stayed away from home as much as possible. She was smoking cigarettes and drinking. She smoked marijuana almost daily. Tall, but heavy, she took speed to lose weight. She tried cocaine. She skipped school routinely. She was sexually active. Years later, she would warn others against making similar choices. But for the moment, it was her life.\n\nAnd it was a rootless life. She spent six months at a children's home in Mishawaka and three months in a juvenile detention center. She was removed from one home after only six days after she threatened a staff member and another resident — with a knife.\n\nWith each new address, Paula changed schools. She attended four high schools without ever finishing the 10th grade. Her schoolwork, decent at first, nosedived. She called a teacher \"crazy,\" resulting in a suspension. She struggled to keep friends. She developed a reputation as a bully. All the while, Paula struggled to wake up in the mornings. When she was evaluated for the problem, a doctor at a local hospital asked if she ever thought of killing herself.\n\n\"Yes,\" she replied.\n\nFor that answer, she was sent to a mental hospital. Released four days later, she returned home.\n\n\"I told people I needed help and to talk, but all they did was move me from home to home,\" Paula would write a few years later. \"I didn't care about life or trouble or consequences at all.\"\n\n—\n\nPerhaps the pinnacle of Paula's abuse came, ironically, after her father visited Gary police seeking advice on how to deal with a wayward child. Paula was 14, and Herman Cooper couldn't keep her reined in. Frustrated, he asked the police what he should do with her. It was a family matter, they said; he should do what he thought was right.\n\nFor Herman Cooper, that meant one thing: another beating. But for what he had in mind this time, he'd need some privacy. He took Paula to a woody patch near a spot where he kept a garden. Paula had been there before; so had Rhonda.\n\n\"If you scream where I take you,\" he told Paula, \"no one will hear you.\"\n\nSeveral times in her life, Paula thought her father was going to beat her to death. This was one of them. \"He just kept beating me and beating me,\" she would tell the clinical psychologist, for what seemed like half an hour. Instead of the cord or a broom or a stick, this time Herman beat her with his bare hands.\n\nWhen he was done, Herman put Paula in the car to take her home. But as they drove through the darkening streets of Gary, Paula knew she couldn't go back there. Not when the possibility of more punishment lay ahead in the Cooper house of horrors.\n\nAs Herman pulled the car up to the house, Paula jumped out and took off running into the night. Running and screaming. Herman gave chase, but porch lights began to click on. Up and down the street, neighbors stepped out to investigate the commotion. The neighbors had seen this show before; it never seemed to end. This time, though, Herman retreated.\n\nPaula ran until she wound up where the night had begun — at the police station. She told officers there about the beating, told them she couldn't go home. At least not while Herman was around. The state pulled her away from the Coopers. It isn't clear from the record where she was placed. But soon, she was sent back home.\n\n—\n\nIn the summer of 1984, when Paula turned 15, she felt as lonely as ever.\n\nAdrift, Paula briefly took up with a guy she hoped might offer her a haven. Later, she would tell others he was a rough character who dealt drugs and treated her poorly. The one thing he did for Paula was leave her pregnant.\n\nMany teenage girls would consider pregnancy a tragedy; Paula saw it as a blessing. She had almost forgotten how to care about anyone. She wanted a family, wanted someone to belong to. The child growing inside her represented someone she could love, someone who would love her in return.\n\nAnd then it was gone.\n\nGloria had been dead set against the pregnancy; she wanted Paula to end it. Paula refused and ran off — perhaps to seek help from a woman she knew in Chicago. Her mother tracked her down and, as Paula would write years later in a letter and tell friends, forced her to have an abortion.\n\nPaula was several months into the pregnancy; the procedure nearly killed her. \"She took something that would have completed my life,\" Paula would write later, \"and after that I felt I had no one.\"\n\nTo empower the journalism behind IndyStar, please consider a subscription.\n\nRuth Pelke was gentle, an old woman with silvery hair and horn-rimmed glasses. As her stepson Robert and his wife pleaded for her to leave Gary, she listened.\n\nRobert pledged to do everything necessary to make her house ready for sale — the legal stuff, the touch-up jobs, whatever. She listened as they talked to her about how dangerous her neighborhood had become.\n\nBut Ruth didn't really need reminding. Her Glen Park neighborhood was still one of the better places to live in Gary, although that wasn't saying much, given the city's downward lurch. There were abandoned houses now. There were burglaries. Her own home had been hit five times in recent years, including when her husband, Oscar, was still alive. Now, at 78, she was widowed and alone, and things were only getting worse. But Ruth had been in Glen Park for 41 years; it was home. She still had some good neighbors. Just as important, she had a mission.\n\nFor decades, she'd opened her home and heart to the neighborhood children. She'd taught them the Bible using felt cutouts of Bible characters that she stuck to a flannel board. She'd given the kids candy when they memorized Scripture. She'd driven them to church. She believed these were children who needed hope, and they could find it in Jesus. No, she finally said that night after her stepson's plea — she wouldn't be leaving the home in her neighborhood.\n\n\"I'll stay here until I go there,\" she said.\n\nRuth Pelke was pointing a finger to heaven.\n\n—\n\nThe next day, Tuesday, May 14, 1985, Ruth's doorbell rang.\n\nShe answered it and found three teenage girls standing on her porch. She didn't recognize them, but she opened her door. One of the girls said, \"My auntie would like to know about Bible classes. When do y'all hold them?\"\n\nRuth wasn't up to teaching anymore, but she wanted to help the girls. \"Come back on Saturday,\" she said. And closed the door.\n\n—\n\nThe girls — Karen Corder, Denise Thomas and Paula Cooper — walked back across the alley. Sitting on a porch, April Beverly was waiting.\n\nThe foursome — all ninth- and 10th-graders at Lew Wallace High School — left school at lunchtime that afternoon with no intention of going back. The girls walked the 10 blocks or so to an arcade near 45th and Broadway where they spent what little money they had on games and candy. When their money was gone, they headed back to the house where April was staying with her sister.\n\nThey were a ragtag bunch.\n\nAt 16, Karen Corder — known to her friends as \"Pooky\" — was the oldest. More than two years earlier, she'd given birth to a baby boy whom she'd delivered in a toilet. She'd managed to keep the pregnancy secret from her parents until the child was born, according to court records.\n\nAt 15, April Beverly was seven months pregnant. She was part of a divided family with 11 children, and she bounced between two homes, her father's and her sister's. Her mother was dead, her father had remarried. On occasion, April benefited from the kindness of the old lady across the alley. She'd listened to Ruth Pelke's Bible lessons. And the old woman had brought food over to April and her siblings when she was concerned they might be hungry.\n\nAt 14, Denise Thomas was the youngest of the four and the smallest. The others were mature young women — at different places on the spectrum of teen motherhood. Denise still looked very much like a little girl. In the context of this group, some would later describe her as a tag-along.\n\nAnd, of course, there was Paula Cooper. At 15, she was only months removed from an unwanted abortion that had nearly killed her. She was tall, somewhat heavy and had the bearing of a girl beyond her years. She would be described as the \"prime mover\" of the quartet — the ringleader. But it was a label she'd never cop to.\n\n—\n\nTo date, the sum total of their illicit behavior was strictly small-time. Karen had tried her hand at shoplifting. Paula, Karen and April had pulled off a burglary a few days before that netted them $90. Mostly, the girls were truants. And on this Tuesday afternoon away from school, their immediate priority was to raise some money so they could go back to the arcade.\n\nTheir first attempt was a harebrained scheme April cooked up to get some cash from a woman up the street. All four girls had gone to the woman's door. April introduced Denise, the small one, as her daughter. April claimed the woman's husband had taken $20 from Denise and they'd come to collect it. For added zest, April threw in this detail: The woman's husband had been naked when he stepped into the street to take Denise's money.\n\nThe woman didn't go for it.\n\nAfter that failure, April turned her focus to Ruth Pelke. She seemed to recall the lady keeping a jar of $2 bills. She thought the woman might even have some jewelry. The question was how to get to it all.\n\nAs they sat on the porch at her sister's house, April asked Paula to come inside — she might know where there was a gun. For the girls, a gun crime would be a considerable step up the criminal ladder. But the gun wasn't where April thought it was; she couldn't find it. Then it occurred to April: Something else might do.\n\n\"I have a knife you could scare the lady with,\" she said.\n\nSoon, April produced a 12-inch butcher knife. It was sharp and had a curving blade that graduated to a fine point. It was a cooking tool, but also a potentially lethal instrument. Paula took the knife and hid it in her light jacket. Out on the porch, she and April explained to the other girls: This was their new weapon of choice. And Karen came up with another approach to getting inside the old lady's home: They would ask her to write down the time and place where the Bible classes would be.\n\nIn all this planning, Paula and the other girls would forever swear, the subject of killing the old woman never came up. The most they would admit, according to Corder, was that they'd knock out the woman and rob her. Still, the reality of what they were planning — to con their way into her house, pull a knife and take the old woman's valuables — was fraught with danger.\n\nAs their scheme unfolded, April stayed back again, resting on her sister's porch; she didn't want the old woman to recognize her. Karen, Paula and Denise crossed the alley.\n\nThey rang the bell, and soon Ruth Pelke appeared at the door. This time, when she answered, Karen said: \"My auntie wants to know where the Bible classes are held at. Could you write it down for me?\"\n\nRuth said she no longer taught the classes, but she knew of a lady. \"I'll look up her telephone number for you.\" She invited the girls to come in. And she turned to walk to the desk on the far side of the room.\n\n—\n\nRuth Pelke looked for all the world like the kindly grandmother drawn up in children's books. She was also a woman whose Christian faith was essential to who she was. She went to church on Wednesday nights and twice on Sundays. She visited church members who were too old or too sick to get out. She sang in the choir. She hosted missionaries in her home on their trips back from foreign lands. She took her own missionary journeys, going deeper into the heart of Gary to share her faith with children.\n\nWhat followed — recorded in statements to police, testified to in court, reported in newspaper accounts and, in brief instances, described in letters Paula would write years later — was a scene that would shock Northwest Indiana and the rest of the state.\n\nAs Ruth Pelke crossed her living room to the desk where she kept phone numbers, she felt a pair of arms wrap around her neck.\n\nPaula had put her jacket on the couch and run up on Ruth, grabbing her from behind. For a moment, the teenager and the old woman struggled. Ruth still tended a garden and did a little work outside the house to keep fit, but she was in no shape for a chunky 15-year-old girl who now had her in a headlock.\n\nPaula threw Ruth to the floor.\n\nOn a table nearby sat an item some would describe as a vase but others likened more to a triangular snow globe. One of the girls picked it up and hit Ruth Pelke over the head. Prosecutors would allege it was Denise Thomas; Paula took the blame.\n\nPaula demanded to know where Ruth kept her valuables. She threatened to cut her with the knife. \"Give me the money, bitch,\" she said.\n\nRuth looked up and said simply: \"You aren't going to kill me.\" She began hollering for help. Paula's anger rose now. Then she looked at Ruth's head. Blood was streaming from the place where she'd been hit with the vase. Paula saw the blood and reacted in a way she would struggle to explain for the rest of her life.\n\nTo police investigators, she would say she entered \"a blackout stage.\"\n\nTo a judge, she would say, \"Something clicked in on me.\"\n\nTo a psychologist, she said the sight of the blood altered her perception of whom she was attacking: \"I saw somebody else inside of that body.\"\n\nSeveral friends and supporters who heard similar explanations from Paula concluded that, in this moment, Paula no longer saw the meek and mild Bible teacher in front of her. They believed Paula saw the woman who watched her suffer so many beatings and did nothing to stop them, the woman who took away the baby she'd wanted to love. They were convinced that, in the defenseless woman pinned to the floor, Paula saw her mother.\n\nWhatever she saw, Paula reached for the knife. She grabbed it by the handle and began slashing. She sliced open the old woman's cheek. She stabbed at her head, without deep penetration. Ruth fell back, flat on the floor. And Paula went to work, cutting her arms and legs.\n\nThe other girls stood by in disbelief.\n\nKaren Corder, the oldest, told Paula to stop.\n\nDenise Thomas, the youngest, cried and screamed for Paula to quit. Later, she would claim she yelled, \"I'm getting out of here,\" only to be met with a withering threat from Paula: \"Leave and you're dead.\"\n\nPaula's barrage was relentless. She stabbed the old woman in the belly and, finally, thrust the blade deep into the side of Ruth's chest. With that, Paula stopped; she pulled back from the carnage.\n\n\"I can't take it no more,\" she said.\n\nPaula looked at Denise; she told her to come hold the knife. But Denise refused. She looked at Karen, communicating the same message. Karen knelt beside the wounded woman. The blade remained lodged in her chest. And Karen held it in place.\n\nApril Beverly, who concocted the robbery scheme, initially held back. After the others went inside, she had come up to Ruth's porch and acted as lookout. Now she entered the house. The old woman was lying on her back, her dress covered in blood, her arms and legs still moving. Karen, she noticed, held the knife as it protruded from the woman's side. To April, it appeared that Karen wasn't just holding it: She was wiggling the knife back and forth. Out of some morbid curiosity, she would tell police later, Karen pushed the blade farther into the hole to see how deep it would go. At one point, she concluded, \"The bitch won't die.\"\n\nKaren estimated she held the knife in Ruth Pelke's side for upwards of 15 minutes; Paula thought it closer to 30.\n\nRuth Pelke moaned through most of this. The old woman's torn and tortured face was too much for the girls to bear. One of them went to the bathroom and got a towel to cover Ruth's face — and try to smother the last breaths of life from her. Paula and Denise said it was Karen; Karen said it was Paula.\n\nIn her dying moments, Ruth Pelke managed to share a few last words. Denise heard her saying the Lord's Prayer.\n\n\"Our Father, which art in heaven …\"\n\nPaula had stalked in and out of the room, and the last words she heard from Ruth were something else. Words that would haunt her the rest of her life.\n\n\"If you kill me,\" she heard Ruth say, \"you will be sorry.\"\n\nTo empower the journalism behind IndyStar, please consider a subscription.\n\nPaula and Denise began tearing the house apart, rifling through drawers, ripping items off shelves and upending furniture.\n\nFor Paula, it was a mad search for some reward for the awful business she'd just concluded. There had to be some money somewhere. Maybe some jewelry. But as she continued her desperate search, a nervousness began to grow inside her. Whether it was regret for the killing or the chilling final words of her victim, she felt uneasy. And she didn't like it. As they were going through the upstairs rooms, Paula tried to pull herself away. But the only place to go was back downstairs, where the source of her angst lay dead on the floor. She resumed the treasure hunt and soon managed to turn up some cash — all of $10. She came across a key and thought it might start the old woman's Plymouth in the garage. She ran out to give it a try. Nothing.\n\nApril joined in the search and quickly turned up another key. This time when Paula tried it, the engine stirred to life. April went inside to fetch the other girls.\n\nBy then, Karen and Denise were alone with Ruth Pelke's body. Karen had watched the rise and fall of the old woman's chest until it grew shallower. Finally, it stopped. Maybe April sensed some new panic; she sternly warned the other girls: \"If you tell anyone, I'll kill you.\"\n\nThe girls had spent roughly an hour in the old woman's house. They hadn't found a jar of $2 bills. They hadn't found a trove of jewelry. But it was time to go. Someone might come looking. Before they could leave, Karen grabbed one last item.\n\nShe knelt down again beside Ruth. The butcher knife was planted firmly in the left side of her chest, just below her breast. Karen grabbed the handle. She pulled it out. As they headed out to the car, Karen carried the knife at her side. She climbed into the back of the car and dropped it to the floor. The blade was still coated in blood.\n\n—\n\nPaula Cooper was 15. She was too young to drive. But with her three accomplices as passengers, she managed to steer Ruth's car out of the neighborhood and onto 45th Avenue. They were just down the street from Lew Wallace High School. School was out now and, almost immediately, they saw a classmate walking along the street. Almost reflexively, they waved to Beverly Byndum. And Beverly waved back.\n\nThis was the paradox they now faced. They were teenagers in possession of a car, the apex of adolescence. Yet they had acquired it in the most horrific way imaginable. Years later, Paula would say things just \"got out of control.\" But here she was — a killer. Now that the deed was done, now that they had a few bucks, Paula and the others seemed in no mood to enjoy it.\n\nBefore they arrived at the video arcade, Karen asked Paula to let her out of the car; she wanted to go back to April's house. Paula let her go, but not before asking her to perform a little task: Go back to the old lady's house and get the jacket Paula had left inside.\n\nNext, Denise said she wanted to go home. She asked Paula to let her out at a convenience store and she would make her way from there.\n\nWhen Paula and April pulled up to Candyland Arcade, they were alone. For a few minutes, they just sat there, talking about what they'd done. April hadn't witnessed everything that went on inside the house. It's not clear how many of the missing details Paula shared.\n\nPaula said she needed to use the restroom, and she ventured into the arcade. When she returned, five girls from school were standing around the car. One of them was Beverly Byndum, whom they had passed on the street. Her sister, Latesha, asked where they had come by the car. Paula said it was her sister's.\n\nWithin minutes, Karen walked up to the arcade out of breath, as if she had been running to catch up with the crew. Wherever she had been, she hadn't stayed long. Paula pulled her aside and asked if she'd gone back to the house, if she'd picked up the jacket. No, Karen replied. It was probably the last place on Earth she wanted to go. And she didn't hang around long enough to talk further about it. In a few minutes, she caught a bus for home.\n\nWhether Paula remembered it or not, she had left more than her jacket in the house. Inside one of its pockets was a newly filled prescription for birth control pills — her pills. She had picked them up earlier that morning before school. It was just one of the clues she had left for investigators to find.\n\nPaula and April looked around at the girls and asked if anyone wanted a ride home. Eagerly, their friends piled into the Plymouth. Latesha Byndum was among those who jumped into the back. As she did, she felt her foot brush across something on the floor. She reached down to pick it up. It was a knife. And there was blood on it. There was also blood on her shoe. Latesha looked at Paula and April in the front seat and asked, \"What you all do? Just kill somebody?\"\n\nThe girls looked back at Latesha.\n\nNo, they replied.\n\nAnd, in a response that would reverberate across the community, Paula and April laughed.\n\n—\n\nPaula and April dropped off their passengers at various addresses around Gary. But details about where and how they spent their next two days are choppy and imprecise.\n\nProsecutors would characterize their time in the car as a joy ride. But from this point on, Paula and April seemed to have a different sense of what to do next.\n\nApril wanted to go to a park in Hammond; she wanted to see her brother Tony; she wanted to see her boyfriend. When she found $40 in Ruth Pelke's glove box, she wanted to spend it. When they picked up April's boyfriend and he brought some alcohol, she drank it.\n\nPaula wanted to go to a girl's home where she had lived for a time; she wanted to pick up some friends there. But she quickly decided she and April needed some time to focus on what to do next. When April found the money, Paula thought they should save it for gas. While April got drunk, Paula wanted nothing to drink. She was too nervous.\n\nMost symbolic of their division, perhaps, is what happened to the money from Ruth's glove box. The girls wrestled over it, and one of the $20 bills was torn. Paula gave up the fight. April could keep the money and do with it what she wanted.\n\n—\n\nOn Wednesday morning, the day after the crime, Robert Pelke phoned Ruth's house to check up on her. She didn't pick up the phone, and he decided to check on her in person. Just three days before, he and a large portion of the extended Pelke family had taken Ruth out for a Mother's Day dinner. Just two days earlier, Robert and his wife had pushed Ruth to think about selling her house and leaving Gary. Robert rang the doorbell, with no idea how prescient that conversation had been.\n\nThere was no answer, so Robert opened the mail slot on the door and called inside. There was only silence. But through the mail slot, something caught Robert's eye: The dining room was torn apart. He went to fetch a spare key Ruth kept hidden outside. Looking around the place, he noticed Ruth's car was missing from the garage, and he assumed Ruth must be gone, too.\n\nHe found the key, unlocked the door and stepped into the house. The place appeared to have been ransacked. Pictures that had adorned the walls were now scattered about the floor. Cushions from the couch had been pulled up and cast about. And then his eyes turned to the dining room floor.\n\nThe cloaked figure of a woman lay there motionless. Her dress was caked in blood. Her arms were slashed. A towel masked her face.\n\nRobert knelt down next to her. He pulled the towel away and called her name. Still, there was no movement. He touched her, and the body was cold. He knew she was dead.\n\nRobert got up and went for the phone. In an age when every phone was a landline, Ruth's had been ripped from its place on the wall. He stepped outside and began going door to door, looking for someone who would let him use their phone. But at house after house, he found nobody. Finally, Robert looked farther up the street and saw a man and a woman getting out of a car. He approached them and asked them to call the police.\n\nHis stepmother had been murdered.\n\n—\n\nRobert's son, Bill Pelke, arrived home just after 3 o'clock from his shift at Bethlehem Steel and soon received a phone call. It was one of his uncles. Nana, he said, was dead.\n\nNana was the term of endearment everyone in the family used for Ruth. Bill had grown up listening to her Bible stories. He'd loved her flannel board tales of the three men in the fiery furnace, of Noah and the ark and his favorite — Joseph and the coat of many colors.\n\nEven as a 37-year-old man, he still loved to go to Nana's house for the holidays, to warm himself beside her fireplace and congregate there with the rest of the family. His grandfather had passed almost two years before, but Nana was still a magnet. She could still bring the family together. And now, suddenly, she was gone.\n\nAt such moments of shock, the brain's processor goes into hyperdrive. And some key facts rushed through Bill's head: Nana had been 78; she was the oldest Pelke; she'd had a good life; it must have been her time. But that instant of comfort evaporated quickly. He sensed something else in his uncle's voice that was borne out in his next words: There'd been a break-in at Nana's house. He didn't know if there was a connection.\n\nBill hung up and turned on the television, wondering if there might be some news about it. Sure enough, his father appeared on camera. He was saying something about it being a terrible murder. For Bill, everything else was a blur; he had to go. He had to be with his family.\n\nAs it turned out, Ruth Pelke had been dead for a full day.\n\n—\n\nBy that spring of 1985, crime was a painful reality in Gary. Its murder rate was among the highest in the country. It was on its way to becoming the murder capital of the United States.\n\nGary was a city in decline; poverty was growing like a cancer. But the violence was being spread through an influx of gangs with names such as The Family and the Black Gangster Disciples.\n\nYet as accustomed to crime as the city had become, the murder of Ruth Pelke shocked and angered people in a whole new way. There was the innocence of Ruth herself — the elderly Bible teacher. As one observer put it, she was a grandma to the neighborhood. The killing's effect also might have been amplified because it happened in Glen Park, which a prosecutor later described as a \"last bastion\" of the white population in a city from which white residents had disappeared.\n\nOn the day after the discovery of Ruth's body, The Post-Tribune in Gary devoted two front-page columns to the story: \"Bible teacher, 77, murdered in her home.\" It had her age wrong, but the dominant image on the page was a picture of Ruth — silver-haired and smiling behind her horn-rimmed glasses from another era.\n\nThe newspaper reported that neighborhood children \"were visibly upset and shaken by the murder.\" They spoke of Pelke as \"meek and mild,\" serving cookies during summer Bible classes and giving out boxes of candy to the children who memorized Scripture.\n\nAs for who might be responsible, the initial story carried some important nuggets: Police were searching for a 15-year-old girl who'd been seen driving Pelke's blue Plymouth. They weren't releasing her name, but the girl was a student at Lew Wallace High and lived in Gary's Marshalltown neighborhood.\n\n—\n\nPaula Cooper lived in Marshalltown.\n\nAs they combed through Ruth's house, police found the jacket with the prescription in the pocket. Eyewitnesses had seen Paula and the other girls in a car that matched the description of Ruth's missing Plymouth. And on the day Ruth's body was discovered, Gloria Cooper phoned police to report her 15-year-old daughter missing; she'd been missing since the day before.\n\nThe ink was barely dry on the newspaper stories when Karen Corder, walking around school on Thursday, two days after the crime, began looking for someone on whom she could unload her conscience. She had opted out of the joy ride and gone home and had a couple of restless nights' sleep. She found a gym teacher who'd been nice to her and said they needed to talk; she'd witnessed a murder. Soon, police were at the school. They took Karen and Denise into custody. And Karen was telling her story about the crime.\n\nIn the two days since the killing, Paula and April — with April's brother, Tony — had driven aimlessly from Gary to Hammond and to various parts of Chicago's South Side. They'd had no real sense of direction.\n\nTony pressed on in Ruth's Plymouth until the gas needle dropped well below empty. Then he pushed it some more. Finally, the car died. Their money gone, they found a phone and called April's sister. Thursday night, with the police dragnet closing around them, she took the girls to see the Gary police.\n\n—\n\nDetective William Kennedy Jr. had been looking for Paula Cooper and April Beverly for the better part of two days. When his phone rang around midnight, the news was good: They'd turned themselves in.\n\nIn addition to being a cop, Kennedy worked security at Lew Wallace High School. He'd seen Paula Cooper walking the halls. He never knew her name, but they'd exchanged hellos. Now, he was tidying up the loose ends of a case for murder against her.\n\nWhen he arrived at the station, Paula's parents were waiting. Kennedy asked Herman and Gloria Cooper if Paula could make a formal statement about the crime. Herman, speaking for everyone, declined. They were interested in talking to a lawyer, and he seemed annoyed at the article in the morning paper, which he felt pointed a finger at Paula even if it didn't name her.\n\nThe Coopers met briefly with Paula, then returned to the waiting room. Soon, Rhonda arrived at the station. She'd read the papers. She knew Paula was in jail. And she was upset. She wanted to see her sister.\n\nGloria was OK with that but urged her to persuade Paula to talk about what she'd done. When the police wouldn't let Rhonda see her sister without a parent, Gloria agreed to go with Rhonda.\n\nAfter so many years of turmoil and strife, Gloria and her two daughters were together again — for a moment alone in a police interrogation room. What they said isn't clear. But when Kennedy, the detective, rejoined them, Gloria gave Paula a nudge.\n\n\"Say something,\" she said.\n\nPaula hesitated. She said she didn't want anyone looking at her. So Kennedy turned 45 degrees and looked at a wall. Paula began to speak. She kept speaking for 15 minutes. She laid out the essential elements of Ruth Pelke's murder, described the girls' desire for money and a car, described how they came up with the Bible class as their way in. She described how she got the knife and stabbed the old woman more times than she could remember. She talked about the aftermath, when they took the car and gave rides to their friends. At one point, according to the account the detective would later make from his \"mental notes,\" Gloria Cooper asked Paula in front of the detective: Were you and Karen basically responsible for the lady's death?\n\nPaula's answer: \"Yeah, you could say that.\"\n\nWhen Paula was done, Kennedy left the room. Her mother and her sister left, too. As Paula stood alone in the interrogation room, April Beverly was giving a statement in a room nearby. When Kennedy returned to Paula, she was newly animated. She began unloading a rapid-fire addendum to her confession to the detective.\n\n\"April is lying. She's lying on me, so I'm going to tell you where the murder weapon is. It's at the McDonald's in Hammond on Calumet Avenue, next to the police station. Her brother threw it out the car right by the drive-thru window side. It was by a tree right there.\"\n\nFor Paula, this was the start of one of the great grievances of her life — her claim that the other girls lied. A few details aside, their stories largely matched up. But in the discrepancies, Paula saw injustice. And correcting the narrative to fit her exact version of the truth would become an obsession.\n\nThe legal ramifications of what she'd shared, in her two statements, were that Paula had essentially confessed to the key elements of the murder. She had gift-wrapped a case for the authorities. She also had put herself in the cross hairs of a zealous prosecutor. She had no idea just how precarious her own life had become.\n\nTo empower the journalism behind IndyStar, please consider a subscription.\n\nJack Crawford — with a swooping, blow-dried haircut that gave him an appearance not unlike the televangelists of the era — came before a bank of reporters with material certain to make a splash.\n\nA rising star in Indiana's Democratic Party, Crawford had swept into the Lake County prosecutor's job years before, having pledged to get tough on crime. Since then, he had pursued the death penalty more than any other prosecutor in the state. In the first five months of 1985, he'd already won four death penalty convictions.\n\nNow, flanked by a pair of cops, Crawford came before the gathered media with an announcement sure to make headlines: For the first time in Lake County, his office was charging four girls with murder. He would seek the death penalty against the oldest — 16-year-old Karen Corder — and if the other girls were moved out of juvenile court, he'd likely seek death for them, too.\n\n\"I've been a prosecutor for seven years,\" Crawford told the media, \"and we've never had a case like this before.\"\n\nAs zealous as he was, Crawford privately acknowledged that same day that his chance for death sentences had already taken a big hit. That's because the clerk's office announced that the judge handling the Ruth Pelke cases was Superior Court Judge James C. Kimbrough Jr.\n\nKimbrough was a former public defender and NAACP lawyer who'd grown up in the civil rights heartland of Selma, Ala. More important than all of that, everyone around the courts — from prosecutors and public defenders to reporters and clerks — knew Kimbrough hated the death penalty. Hated it for its unfairness. Hated it for its inability to deter crime. And in a county where other judges had shown themselves willing to brandish the ultimate weapon, Kimbrough hadn't sent anyone to the electric chair during 12 years on the bench. Only once had he come close: Kimbrough sentenced a man to death who had been convicted of a double murder. Soon, though, the judge reversed himself and gave the man a new trial. Eventually, he was set free.\n\nSo, at word of Kimbrough's assignment, Jack Crawford and his team murmured that the path to a death sentence was a steep one. \"We certainly thought we had an uphill climb,\" he would say later.\n\n—\n\nIn the Lake County Juvenile Detention Center, Paula Cooper's life behind bars was getting off to a rough start.\n\nShe was no stranger to jail, having spent three months in the same detention center two years earlier after she ran away from home. She was a bit weepy then, even tender, the guards remembered. But this 15-year-old version of Paula Cooper was angrier, explosive and cocky. She acted as if she owned the place. She was a handful.\n\nTwo weeks after the crime, Paula took a seat next to two of her friends in the jail during \"quiet hour.\" Soon they grew noisy. A guard told them to shut up and disperse; Paula refused. The guard ordered her back to her cell. But as she stepped into the hall, Paula struck the guard across the bridge of the nose. She fought until reinforcements arrived to pull Paula off. As they were dragging her away, Paula issued a warning: They'd better transfer the guard or she would get a knife and come after her.\n\nThe dust-up prompted a transfer for the girls — from the juvenile center to the Lake County Jail. It also made the local papers, which didn't help the cause of saving their lives.\n\nBy the end of July 1985, the cases against all four girls were formally moved to adult court. Crawford, after sifting through the ample evidence, made his purpose clear: He would seek the death penalty against all four.\n\nThe case had pricked the public's consciousness of crime at a new level.\n\nCrawford's decision made news on the Chicago television stations; it made headlines across Indiana. The public defender assigned to represent Paula, Kevin Relphorde, was incredulous. \"They must be the youngest females in the country facing the death penalty,\" he told reporters.\n\nBy then, Paula and Karen, sharing a cell in the Lake County Jail, had been locked up two months. They began telling jail staff they were considering suicide. On cards they were given to report health problems, they wrote things such as \"Give me the electric chair\" and \"Give me that shock. I want to die.\"\n\nAs a precaution, jail officers took their personal belongings and stripped them to their underwear; they were on suicide watch.\n\nPaula and Karen responded by banging on the bars and making noise. To calm them, a nurse broke out the oral sedatives. Karen took hers; Paula refused. The guards teamed up to hold down Paula so the nurse could give her a shot. But as they tried to restrain her, Paula jumped up and hit one guard in the shoulder.\n\n\"Oh you tough, huh?\" the guard replied. \"You stabbed an old lady.\" It was less than professional, but it was a gut reaction.\n\n\"Yeah, I stabbed an old lady,\" Paula replied. \"And I'd stab that bitch again. I'd stab your fucking grandmother.\"\n\nThe jail incidents were part of a pattern to be repeated in years to come. Paula didn't respond well to restraints; she bucked authority. In such instances, she could be aggressive and hostile. A psychologist noted her tendencies and something else plain to see: Battered and badgered as a girl, she was now mistrustful and suspicious.\n\nSoon, Paula's interaction with the jail staff would grow more complicated. By August 1985, about the time she turned 16, Paula began receiving a series of private visitors. Two were male corrections officers. Another was a male recreational therapist. They weren't visiting just because of their jobs.\n\nThey were coming for sex.\n\n—\n\nOutside the jail, the stories about the angry young prisoners seemed only to add to the public's contempt. And as the details of their crime emerged, they were already easy to hate. Especially the girl who had wielded the knife — Paula Cooper.\n\nPaula had not just killed Ruth Pelke; she had stabbed her 33 times, according to the coroner. Some of the cuts on her arms looked like saw marks, as if the knife had been pulled back and forth. In other instances, the 12-inch knife had been wielded with such ferocity that the tip of the blade went through Ruth's body, pierced the carpet on which she lay and chipped the wood flooring beneath. Worst of all, it appeared Ruth Pelke survived the torturous assault for more than 30 minutes. The Post-Tribune called it \"possibly the most brutal killing in Gary history.\"\n\nIf all that wasn't bad enough, two of the girls had bragged about the killing at school. As defendants go, they were about as unsympathetic as they come. With guilt hardly in doubt, letters began appearing in the Gary newspaper debating the punishment. Some asked for mercy; others wanted severe justice. One letter directed at Paula appeared under the headline, \"She should pay.\"\n\nAll of it left Kevin Relphorde, Paula's lawyer, searching for a viable strategy to save Paula's life. The evidence was overwhelming, and the prosecutor was determined, which made a plea deal unimaginable. Paula's childhood had been bad, but it didn't seem to add up to an insanity plea. Her youth and relatively clean prior record were assets, but they looked meager compared to the brutality of the crime. Then there was the jury. Any panel drawn from across Lake County would be mostly white. And Paula was a black teenager who had killed an old white woman. All of it added up to a grim outlook.\n\nAs best as Relphorde could figure, the only thing Paula had going for her was the judge. Relphorde knew of Kimbrough's opposition to the death penalty. Ultimately, he suggested to Paula a stomach-churning strategy: Plead guilty.\n\nRelphorde was a part-time public defender who'd never handled a death penalty case. But he figured Paula's chances were better in the hands of a liberal judge than with 12 angry jurors.\n\nAs risky as it sounded, Relphorde wasn't the only person who sized things up the same way. David Olson, who was Karen Corder's attorney, came to a similar conclusion. He'd had a nightmare about Karen, he told the Post-Tribune in March 1986, and awoke fearful of \"losing her.\" His fears were amplified when he attended the trial of Denise Thomas, the first suspect to answer for the death of Ruth Pelke.\n\nJust before the case against Thomas went to trial, in November 1985, prosecutors withdrew the death penalty charge, concluding she'd been more of a bystander to the crime.\n\nBut that didn't stop the jurors from reacting strongly to the horrific details of Pelke's death. They quickly found Denise guilty. Olson didn't want to risk that with death on the line for his client. So in March, 10 months after the crime, Karen went before Kimbrough with a guilty plea. Her sentencing would follow two months later.\n\nHow well Paula understood the risks of her plea — and how much say she had in it — is now a matter of dispute. Relphorde said he met with Paula regularly to talk strategy and that the plea was ultimately her decision. Years later, Paula would recall only three brief meetings with her attorney, who she said assured her the judge opposed the death penalty and would be sympathetic to a black girl. If she pleaded guilty, she said she was told, she wouldn't get a death sentence.\n\nOn April 21, 1986, Paula appeared in court to plead guilty to murder.\n\nHerman Cooper came to the courtroom that day; so did Paula's sister, Rhonda. But Gloria Cooper, Paula's mother, was nowhere to be found. She had moved to Georgia and stopped answering the calls of Paula's attorney.\n\nWhen the hearing began, Kimbrough asked Paula more than once if she knew she could be sentenced to death. Each time, Paula answered yes. To the most important question — How do you plead? — she never hesitated: Guilty.\n\nFor the record, Paula retold the story of the crime — the scheme to get into the house; what she did to Ruth; how the girls took the car.\n\n\"We went to commit a robbery, you know,\" she told the judge.\n\nWas there any discussion in advance about what you'd do with Mrs. Pelke? he asked.\n\n\"No. It wasn't a discussion to go and kill anyone, you know.\"\n\nKimbrough accepted the plea. Paula's life was now in his hands. But she would have to wait months for an answer. Relphorde left convinced Paula had made her best play: \"We were basically throwing ourselves on the mercy of the court.\"\n\nPaula's strategy seemed to appear sound when, in May 1986, Kimbrough spared Karen Corder's life, giving her 60 years in prison. In fact, three of the girls had escaped with their lives. Denise Thomas, found guilty at trial, received a 35-year sentence. April Beverly, who conceived the robbery but waited outside during the killing, pleaded guilty in exchange for a 25-year prison term.\n\nOnly Paula's fate remained unresolved.\n\nLost in the news of Corder's reprieve, perhaps, was some language the judge used in reference to Paula. It seemed ominous. Kimbrough said it had been \"conceded by all that Paula Cooper was the leader of this group of four young ladies. That Paula Cooper was the dominant factor in the crime.\" He said Corder was \"operating under the substantial domination of Paula Cooper.\" Despite such words, the prevailing view in legal circles was that Kimbrough would spare Paula's life.\n\n—\n\nAs her judgment approached, there were hints that Paula Cooper's case was starting to resonate beyond Indiana. Jack Crawford's first clue came when his secretary stepped into his office with an unusual message: \"There's a man outside who says he's from the Vatican. He's dressed like a monk and wants to talk to you about Paula Cooper's case.\"\n\nCrawford took a look. Sure enough, in a brown tunic bound at the waist with a cord, there stood a Franciscan friar. He told Crawford he was from Rome. He offered a letter validating his credentials. And he brought a simple message: Pope John Paul II and the Vatican weren't pleased with Crawford's decision to seek the death penalty.\n\nCrawford was Roman Catholic. He'd gone to Notre Dame. He knew the church's opposition to the death penalty. But, as he explained to the friar, this was a legal decision, not a religious one. The friar left unsatisfied. He would not be the last Franciscan to stand with Paula.\n\nMore surprising than the friar's appearance was the visit Crawford received in June 1986 from Paula's attorney, Kevin Relphorde.\n\nIt was just weeks before Paula's sentencing, and Relphorde had few cards to play in Paula's defense. This time, though, it appeared he might have a game changer.\n\n\"You can't execute Paula Cooper,\" he said.\n\n\"Well, why is that, Kevin?\" Crawford asked.\n\n\"She's pregnant.\"\n\n—\n\nThe sex scandal at the Lake County Jail erupted in June 1986.\n\nFor months, corrections officers Vernard Rouster, 25, and Parmaley Rainge, 27, had been coming to see Paula for sex, officials discovered. So, too, had Michael Dean Lampley, a recreational therapist from a mental health center. Their encounters occurred even as a 40-year-old female corrections officer and a police patrolman were supposed to be maintaining security for the state's highest-profile murder suspect.\n\n—\n\nOne of the guards admitted the sex began when Paula was still a week shy of 16 — the age of consent in Indiana. That people working in the jail were having sex with a captive wasn't illegal in Indiana in 1986. After the revelation, the jail workers resigned their jobs and the therapist was fired, but no one was prosecuted. Supervisors on the jail floor were suspended — for 15 days.\n\nFor all of its tawdriness, the scandal had the potential to affect Paula's case. State law prohibited the execution of a pregnant woman; punishment would have to wait. And while a death penalty appeal was certain to outlast a pregnancy, the strange episode raised the possibility of a sentencing delay.\n\nKimbrough ordered a medical exam for Paula. Quickly, the matter was put to rest: She wasn't pregnant. But, in a sign of the times, public discussion about the scandal seemed to focus less on the culpability of the jailers than on the promiscuity of the 16-year-old girl in jail.\n\nJames McNew, a deputy in Crawford's office who prosecuted the case, told the Post-Tribune he suspected Paula Cooper tried to get pregnant to stir up sympathy and avoid death.\n\nHowever it came about, the sex scandal prompted a change in state law: It became a crime for jailers to have sex with their prisoners. Soon, though, the jailhouse sex scandal would become little more than a footnote before a judgment heard around the world.\n\nTo empower the journalism behind IndyStar, please consider a subscription.\n\nBill Pelke sat on the wrong side of the courtroom.\n\nHis grandmother was the murder victim. Unwittingly, Bill took a seat on the side of the murderer. He was unfamiliar with the trappings of the courtroom. And unlike some in the community — in his own family — Bill carried no blood lust into the chamber. He thought people who committed murder should die. And Paula Cooper had killed his beloved Nana. But he wasn't fuming about it.\n\nBill had stayed away from the previous court hearings, but decided this was one he shouldn't miss. It was July 11, 1986. And for Paula Cooper, it was judgment day.\n\nCourtroom 3 of Lake Superior Court was a small space. The gallery, oriented outside a circle where the business of the court was conducted, had seats for just 43 onlookers. This day, it was packed to overflowing. People stood, straining to hear, just outside the public entrance. Lawyers and other court personnel did the same just outside the doors normally used by the judge and juries. All wanted to know the fate of a 16-year-old girl who faced a potential death sentence.\n\nInto this cauldron, Paula Cooper entered under the escort of a jail matron. She didn't need to look around to see she had few friends in the room. Her sister and her grandfather were there, but neither of her parents was present. Her mother had moved to Georgia, her father to Tennessee. As Paula entered, the matron said something that made the young defendant smile. The gesture surprised Bill Pelke; it struck him as unbefitting for the moment. When this day is done, he thought to himself, she's not going to be smiling.\n\nDeputy Prosecutor James McNew began the proceedings by calling Bill's father to testify. Robert Pelke hadn't missed a hearing — for Paula or any of the other girls. He had been the family spokesman, and he wanted a death sentence for Paula. He described going to Ruth Pelke's home when she hadn't answered the phone, finding her home in disarray and her body on the floor. He described her bloody dress and the towel wrapped around her head. When the attorneys finished questioning him, Robert asked to read a statement to the court.\n\nThis, Robert Pelke said, was a crime that deserved the maximum sentence the law would allow. He quoted the Bible about submitting to authorities and God's vengeance and punishing evildoers. He said Paula gave Ruth no second chance, and he saw no reason to give Paula one.\n\n\"Paula reveled in her doings and enjoyed it,\" he said. He spoke of ridding society of those who would prey upon the innocent. \"This is a tragedy that should never have happened,\" he said, \"and a tragedy that family and friends will never forget.\"\n\nNext, one of the girls from Lew Wallace High School testified about seeing Paula and the others on their joy ride and about finding the bloody knife on the floor of the car.\n\nA crime lab technician discussed grisly photos from the scene — pictures of Ruth Pelke, of the knife-torn carpet and the gouge marks in the hardwood floor.\n\nThe prosecution introduced into evidence the autopsy report, which expressed the damage done by the 33 stab wounds. There was also an anatomical diagram noting the points where Ruth had been wounded — so many it looked like a star chart.\n\nJailers who had been attacked and threatened by Paula detailed her bad behavior; they recounted her admission about stabbing \"an old lady.\"\n\nEntering into evidence the grisly details of the crime and the accounts of Paula's callous behavior was part of the prosecution's effort to build a case that the only just punishment was death.\n\nIn Paula's defense, only three witnesses spoke.\n\nRhonda Cooper gave a picture of how she and Paula grew up terrorized in the home of Herman Cooper. She testified to the beatings, to their father's raping their mother in front of them, to their mother's suicide attempt and to their attempts to run away.\n\nRonald Williams, Rhonda's biological father, testified that he wanted to take Paula away from the misery, but her mother refused. He spoke of Gloria's threats against Paula and of the suicide attempt.\n\nDr. Frank Brogno, a Gary psychologist who examined Paula, described how Paula's abuse left her angry and confused, depressed and hostile. He said she was prone to confusion and bizarre thinking, even drifting into fantasies. Still, he said, Paula knew right from wrong. There was still hope for her, but also a real danger she could become a sociopath.\n\nMcNew, on cross-examination, ripped into the doctor. He pointed out how Brogno had testified in Karen Corder's case that Paula was the \"prime mover\" in the crime.\n\n—\n\nRelphorde made a plea for Paula's life, saying she had gone to Ruth Pelke's home to rob, not kill. He said the other girls were intensely involved in the crime and their lives had been spared. The death penalty, he said, was applied at the whim of prosecutors. He said Ruth Pelke, a woman of faith, wouldn't want Paula to die. In the end, he said, Paula was the handiwork of an abusive home and a system that failed her.\n\n\"I don't think Paula was born violent,\" he said. \"I think Paula was a product of what was done to her.\"\n\nMcNew, closing the prosecution's case, checked all the boxes needed for a death sentence: Paula wasn't crazy. She wasn't doing someone else's bidding. She'd struck the death blows. She had a criminal record, as far as a juvenile goes, for skipping school and running away from home. And Paula's abusive childhood? To use that for an excuse, McNew said, was to insult everyone who has endured similar treatment and found a way to overcome the horrors. Giving Paula the death penalty, McNew said, would have a sobering effect on others who might be considering crime. But McNew said there was one reason, above all, for a death sentence.\n\n\"I am not seeking a deterrence to crime when I ask the death penalty on Paula Cooper. I seek justice for the family of Ruth Pelke.\"\n\n—\n\nWith the attorneys done, Kimbrough asked Paula if she had anything to say. And Paula did not shrink from the moment.\n\nShe hadn't wanted a trial, Paula began; she only wanted to tell the truth. \"Now my family life, it hasn't really been good. … Nobody understand how I feel.\"\n\n\"This man,\" she said, pointing to the prosecutor, \"sit here and say he want to take my life. Is that right? I didn't go to Mrs. Pelke's house to kill her. It wasn't planned. I didn't go there to take somebody's life. It happened. It just happened. Something. It wasn't planned. We didn't sit up and say we was going to go and kill this innocent old lady. I didn't even know the lady. But everybody put the blame on me.\"\n\nShe said Jack Crawford had described her in the newspaper as the ringleader. \"I wasn't the ringleader. I didn't make those girls go,\" she said. \"They went on their own.\"\n\nLooking around at the people in the courtroom, Paula seemed disgusted. \"Well, where was all these people at right here when I needed somebody? Where was they at? They turned their backs on me and took me through all this. All I can say is now, look where I am now, facing a possible death sentence.\"\n\nShe pointed at the Pelke family and repeated her plea that killing wasn't her intention. \"I hope you all could find some happiness in your hearts to forgive me. And I know your mother was a Christian lady, and she is in heaven right now. I read my Bible. How do you think I feel? I can't sit here and tell you I understand how you feel because I don't.\"\n\nShe acknowledged that \"sorry\" would never be good enough.\n\nPaula looked to Judge Kimbrough. But, as Bill Dolan would report in the Post-Tribune the next day, the judge \"didn't return her gaze.\" \"I don't know what the decision is going to be today, or whenever you make your decision. I know justice must be done. And whatever the circumstances, or whatever your decision is, I will accept it, even if it is death.\" She acknowledged she couldn't change what happened: She hoped to get out one day and start life over, maybe even finish school.\n\n\"Will I have a chance?\" she asked. \"Will I get a chance?\"\n\nFor a couple of minutes, Paula rambled. She repeated that she hadn't forced the other girls to act; she felt it important everyone know she wasn't a gang member. Then she reined it back in for one final thought: \"I am sorry for what I did. And I know my involvement in this case is very deep. But all I can ask you is not to take my life. That is all I can ask you. That is all I can ask is to spare my life.\"\n\nSuddenly, a commotion broke out in the courtroom. There was shouting in the gallery. \"My grandbaby, my grandbaby.\"\n\nBill Pelke looked at the wailing man near him and saw the tears run down his cheeks; the visage burned into Bill's memory. He watched the man as the bailiff escorted him out of the courtroom.\n\nIt was Paula's grandfather, making one final plea on Paula's behalf.\n\nNow it was up to the judge.\n\n—\n\nJudge James C. Kimbrough had been wading through the sordid details of Ruth Pelke's murder for more than a year. He'd parsed the depressing narrative, and people had speculated whether he had a death penalty in him, especially for a girl. Now they were about to get their answer.\n\nThere was no doubt about Paula Cooper's guilt. Kimbrough dispatched that with his first breath. The murder had been disturbing: Paula had inflicted the 33 stab wounds in the body of 78-year-old Ruth Pelke.\n\nThose were the strikes against her.\n\nBut the defendant had no prior criminal history, and she was 15 at the time of the crime.\n\nThose were factors to consider on her behalf.\n\nThe other requirements for the death penalty, Kimbrough said, didn't work in the defendant's favor. She acted of her own free will. She wasn't under the influence of drugs. Her mental problems didn't rise to the level of incompetence. But all those things, Kimbrough said, were legalities. Ultimately, he said, death penalty cases boil down to a \"political utterance.\"\n\n\"This case has received an unusual amount of publicity,\" Kimbrough said. \"There is worldwide interest in the outcome of these proceedings today. And the court is certainly aware of that interest.\"\n\nWhen he left law school in 1959, Kimbrough said, he had been \"totally against\" the death penalty — and most of the country shared the view.\n\nNearly 30 years later, he said, public sentiment had changed, perhaps because of the violent activities of people such as Paula Cooper. Now, the vast majority of the public favors the death penalty, Kimbrough said, Normally, he wrote out his sentences in advance. But this case had challenged him to the point he'd been unable to do so.\n\nKimbrough praised the deputy prosecutor for speaking \"eloquently\" — he said McNew brought the matters into focus \"better than all of the turmoil that I have been through in the last several months.\"\n\nHe criticized state law for being too general when it came to giving minors the death penalty. It left him unsure what to do on that fundamental question. \"I don't know what the right political answer to that question is.\"\n\nThen Kimbrough, in a moment of vulnerability judges don't always reveal, showed some insight into his restless mind. \"I don't believe I am ever going to be quite the same after these four cases. They have had a very profound effect on me. They have made me come to grips with the question of whether or not a judge can hold personal beliefs which are inconsistent at all with the law as they were sworn to uphold. And for those of you who have no appreciation of it, it is not a simple question. It is not a simple question for me.\"\n\nKimbrough interrupted his confessional to take issue with something Robert Pelke said: \"I do not believe the failure to impose the death penalty today would be unbiblical. … I don't profess to be an expert in religion. But I know the Bible has passages which are merciful, and do not demand or mandate an eye for an eye.\"\n\nReturning to his inner turmoil, Kimbrough said he'd concluded that a judge must decide a case based on facts, regardless of whether it satisfies him. \"I will tell you, very frankly now, on the record, that I do not believe in the death penalty.\"\n\nThis seemed to launch Kimbrough on a rant. \"Maybe in 20 years, after we have had our fill of executions, we will swing back the other way and think they are unconstitutional. Maybe.\"\n\nAt about this point, Jack Crawford, sitting at the prosecutor's table, was ready to give up hope for a death penalty. He turned to McNew, he remembered later, and whispered into his ear.\n\n\"He's not going to give it.\"\n\nThen Kimbrough directed his eyes to the girl awaiting his judgment.\n\n\"Stand up, Paula.\"\n\nShe had stabbed Ruth Pelke 33 times, he said. He was concerned about her background. She had been \"born into a household where your father abused you, and your mother either participated or allowed it to happen. And those seem to be explanations or some indication of why you may be this type of personality that you are.\"\n\n\"They are not excuses, however.\"\n\nHowever.\n\nThat word caught Crawford's attention. So did the fact that Kimbrough's shoulders seemed to slump, as if the weight of the moment was getting to the judge. Crawford leaned in and whispered again to McNew.\n\n\"I think he's going to give it. I think he's going to give it.\"\n\nKimbrough continued.\n\n\"You committed the act, and you must pay the penalty,\" Kimbrough said. Briefly, he trailed into some legalese about the charge. Then he gathered himself for the final judgment.\n\n\"The law requires me, and I do now impose, the death penalty.\"\n\n—\n\nThe courtroom erupted.\n\n\"What did he say?\"\n\nPaula Cooper looked at Kevin Relphorde for help; amid the chaos, she wasn't sure what had just happened. She looked back for the judge; he had already left the bench. She asked Relphorde what had happened. He delivered the verdict again: He gave you the death penalty.\n\nThe smile Paula wore into the courtroom was gone, indeed. Bill Pelke took note of that. Instead, he saw a river of tears streaming down her cheeks. As she was led from the courtroom, the tears soaked the top of her blouse.\n\nJust like that, Paula Cooper — at 16 years, 10 months and 16 days — became the youngest person ever sentenced to death in Indiana; she was now the youngest female on death row anywhere in the United States. In this age before the cellphone, news reporters from national outlets raced out of the courtroom to the nearest bank of pay telephones. It took a few hours, but the verdict soon circled the globe.\n\nIn the hallway outside the courtroom, Rhonda Cooper yelled in anguish at members of the Pelke family and the prosecutors nearby.\n\n\"Are you satisfied now?\"\n\nThey seemed satisfied.\n\nStrangely, one of the most unsatisfied people in the building was the source of the commotion: Judge Kimbrough.\n\nAfter delivering the verdict, he darted out of the courtroom and into the hallway leading to his chambers. There, between the two rooms, he spotted William Touchette, a public defender who handled appeals. Kimbrough told Touchette to follow him.\n\nTouchette (pronounced TOO-shay) had been among those outside the courtroom straining to hear the proceedings. Like so many local lawyers, he was friendly with the judge; they'd socialized outside of work. He followed Kimbrough into his chambers.\n\nThe judge was angry. As angry as Touchette had ever seen him. Angry that the defense hadn't given him enough to spare Paula Cooper's life. Then Kimbrough uttered seven words Touchette would never again hear from a judge.\n\n\"I want you to get me reversed.\"\n\nTo empower the journalism behind IndyStar, please consider a subscription.\n\nPaula Cooper's death sentence was one of Indiana's biggest news stories in 1986. It garnered network television news coverage. Once it hit the international news wires, it was picked up by newspapers in Europe, where it inspired protests.\n\nBut Monica Foster, working for a nonprofit death penalty defense group in Downtown Indianapolis, somehow missed all that. To her, it was as if the Paula Cooper case had never happened.\n\nIt wasn't that Foster was uninterested in current events or that she was dull. In fact, Foster was a wunderkind. She'd graduated from high school at 16, college at 19 and law school at 22. She'd come to work for the Indiana Public Defender Council, researching and offering advice to lawyers with death penalty cases, even before finishing her law degree. But at 27, she had a tendency to get absorbed in her work. And when that happened, the outside world ceased to exist.\n\nSo when William Touchette, the Lake County attorney preparing Paula Cooper's appeal, called the council looking for some help, Foster knew nothing of the case. Without hesitation, Foster agreed to be Touchette's local connection to Paula, who was being held at the Indiana Women's Prison on the city's east side. Foster even said she'd donate her time, seeing the client on evenings and weekends, as a sideline.\n\nFoster didn't realize she'd just signed on to the case that would become the most noteworthy of her career.\n\nWhen the case file arrived in her office, Foster began reading about Paula Cooper. Right away, she was puzzled.\n\nHere was a black girl from Gary who had been sentenced to death by a black judge whom even Foster knew to be one of the most liberal, anti-death penalty jurists in the state. The girl had brutally murdered an elderly woman during a robbery, but Foster told the people in her office that to get a death sentence from this judge Paula Cooper had to be some kind of rabid animal.\n\n\"She must be frothing at the mouth.\"\n\nFoster decided to go to the prison and see Paula Cooper for herself.\n\n—\n\nPaula had arrived at the Indiana Women's Prison — America's oldest women's prison — five days after her sentencing.\n\nEstablished shortly after the Civil War, it was originally in the countryside east of Indianapolis. Over time, brick storefronts and wood-frame houses sprang up around the prison's series of boxy brick buildings — situated around a grassy courtyard — and now the prison was landlocked in the middle of an urban neighborhood.\n\nAwaiting Paula was a cell tucked away on the second floor of the segregation unit. It was stark: block walls and tile floor; aluminum sink and toilet; a desk and a chair; all of it packaged in a space slightly bigger than a walk-in closet.\n\nShe had one window to the outside world. Depending on which side of the hallway she was assigned at the time, it featured either a view of the courtyard or, just beyond a fence topped by razor wire, the backside of a row of decaying houses.\n\nPaula's cell had two metal doors. One was made of bars, the other was solid. Most of the time, the solid door remained open, allowing her to talk through the bars to passing guards and nearby prisoners. But when the solid door was closed, it was as if she was locked in a vault. Worse, the prison had no air conditioning. As summer temperatures outside climbed into the 90s, the only air moving through the wing was pushed by a floor fan at the end of the hall. Most of the time, the place felt like the inside of a cook stove.\n\nHere, Paula Cooper spent 23 hours a day. In the remaining hour, she had 30 minutes to shower and 30 minutes for recreation, which meant a short walk to a larger room where she could play Ping-Pong or cards with other prisoners. Meals were delivered to her cell.\n\nShe was 16 years old and, in the grand scheme of things, set apart from the rest of the human race.\n\nThe treatment was harsher than what Paula's three co-defendants in the murder of Ruth Pelke faced. They were housed elsewhere in the prison, with the general population. They had greater freedom of movement, time outdoors and an ongoing interaction with other people. Paula was allotted 10 hours of visits per month, but she wasn't sure who would fill the time. Her sister had moved to Minnesota. Her mother had moved to Georgia. Her father had moved to Tennessee. Paula was as alone as she could be.\n\nYet she faced a struggle greater than isolation and heat. She lived in fear that the executioner was coming for her any minute. Whatever she'd been told about the appeals process hadn't registered. She thought she was about to be taken away and killed. She existed moment to moment, in dread the guards were about to drag her away to the electric chair. In letters, she would describe her situation in the bleakest of terms — \"a mental hell.\" Paula needed hope. She needed a friend. But who?\n\n—\n\nMonica Foster entered the security checkpoint at the Indiana Women's Prison and was shown to the glass-walled consultation room. In short order, she watched as a guard escorted her client in to meet her.\n\nPaula Cooper was nothing like she expected. Monica came looking for the heartless killer who had murdered an old woman in cold blood, fought the guards at the county jail and been given a ticket to the chair by the most liberal judge in Lake County.\n\nInstead, Foster found a girl, sobbing uncontrollably, who had been on suicide watch. Foster tried to calm her. After some questioning, she gathered the reason for the emotional meltdown: Paula thought they were coming any time now. To kill her.\n\nFoster's blood boiled. She realized that, since the sentencing, no one had explained to Paula the years of appeals; the good chance for a reprieve; and, should all else fail, the notice she would receive well ahead of an execution. Foster felt sorry for Paula. She explained the process. Above all, she told Paula she'd never be ambushed by the executioner.\n\nPaula went back to her cell in a little better shape, but Foster left the prison rattled. She couldn't believe how she had misjudged her client. She realized that her role in this case was about more than legal counsel. She would need to offer her client a shoulder to cry on, an ear to listen.\n\nFoster began going to the prison on weekends, sitting and talking with Paula for hours. She listened to Paula talk about being depressed, and she tried to buck her up. She listened to Paula's troubles with the prison administration and offered advice on ways to get along. She listened to Paula describe the abuses of her childhood, and Foster shared some of the tougher aspects of her own. The conversation wasn't always heavy. Sometimes they talked about places they dreamed of going and about men Foster was dating. Paula, in particular, was quick with a jab about Foster's romantic failures. Even in a maximum security prison, with one of them facing death, they spent a good deal of time laughing. And Foster found Paula's laugh to be infectious. That she could laugh at all impressed Foster. The girl seemed to have some kind of resiliency. After a while, Foster could deny it no longer: She liked Paula Cooper.\n\n—\n\nBill Pelke felt no such affection.\n\nIn the 18 months since Paula Cooper killed his grandmother, Bill had lost the ability to think of Ruth Pelke as the sweet person she'd been; he could only see the murder victim. He couldn't remember the warmth of Ruth's home; he could only think of it as a crime scene. When Paula Cooper received her sentence, Pelke felt justice had been served. His father, Robert Pelke, warned him that the justice wouldn't last. On a trip to Florida they took to get away from it all, Robert Pelke said Paula would probably never see the electric chair. \"Some do-gooder will probably come along and help get her off death row,\" he'd said. Bill struggled to imagine it; he just tried to get on with his life.\n\nBut moving on wasn't easy. And at 39, Bill already had other things on his mind that bothered him. He'd dropped out of college and wound up in Vietnam during the height of the war. As a radio operator, he was supposed to take cover during the fighting and call in air support. But he still carried shrapnel in his side from the wounds he suffered. Worse than that, he carried memories of the Army buddies who'd never come back. The experience left him sick of death. When he returned home, he'd married and started a family, but his marriage failed. So many things in his life hadn't gone as he'd planned. One afternoon in November 1986, all of this seemed to coalesce in Bill's mind.\n\nBill worked in a steel mill as a crane operator. He sat 50 feet above the manufacturing floor in the cab of his crane, moving heavy loads as the need arose. But on this Sunday night shift, things were slow; his mind began to drift. He wondered why life was so hard, why God had allowed Ruth to suffer such a horrendous death. He wondered why his family — his good family — was made to suffer in the wake of the crime. It was an unlikely perch for prayer, but Bill closed his eyes and began seeing images in his mind. He saw the courtroom where Paula had been sentenced to death. He remembered the outburst of her grandfather and the tears streaming down the man's face. He remembered Paula's reaction and the tears streaming down hers, how they soaked her blouse.\n\nA hard realization hit Bill: Ruth wouldn't have wanted these things. She had invited Paula and the girls into her home to help them find faith. It occurred to Bill that Ruth would be more interested in Paula's salvation than her execution. He was certain, too, that Ruth would have hated seeing Paula's grandfather in anguish.\n\nBill thought of the Bible stories Ruth had taught and the lessons he'd learned from a lifetime in church. He remembered Jesus taught that you shouldn't forgive someone just seven times, but 70 times seven — in other words, forgiveness should be a habit. He remembered being taught that the measure of forgiveness we show others is the measure by which we shall be judged. He remembered hearing about Jesus on the cross, offering salvation to the man dying next to him, offering grace to those who sought his death. \"Forgive them,\" Jesus had said, \"for they know not what they do.\"\n\nAnd then Bill realized something: Paula hadn't known what she was doing. Nobody in their right mind would take a 12-inch butcher knife and stab someone 33 times. It was crazy. Senseless.\n\nIn his mind, Bill began to see a new image: It was the picture of Ruth, the one published countless times since her death — silver hair, horn-rimmed glasses, sweet smile. Except now, he saw her face in the picture with tears running down her cheeks. Bill felt certain Ruth wanted someone from her family to show love to Paula and hers. Bill wasn't capable of it right then, but he thought he should try. He was a blue collar guy — a steelworker — and now he was at work crying a river of his own tears. From his seat in the cab of the crane, Bill prayed: \"God, give me love and compassion for Paula Cooper and her family.\" In return, he promised God two things. First, Bill would give credit to God for giving him the ability to forgive Paula whenever success came his way. Second, he'd walk through whatever door opened as a result of forgiving Paula.\n\nEventually, the sweet memories of Ruth would come back to Bill. He would be able to put aside the horror story. First, though, he felt he had to take a greater leap of faith. He had to get in touch with his grandmother's killer. He had to reach out to Paula Cooper.\n\nTo empower the journalism behind IndyStar, please consider a subscription.\n\nThe next day, Bill phoned Paula's attorney. He wanted her prison address, and he was willing to do whatever it took to help save Paula's life. Kevin Relphorde's response wasn't encouraging: \"It's kind of late for that.\"\n\nUndeterred, Bill took the address and sat down at a desk in his Portage home to write perhaps the most intense letter of his life. He told Paula he had forgiven her; he wanted to visit her; there were Bible verses his grandmother would want him to share. He also wanted to meet her grandfather, he of the tearful courtroom outburst.\n\nBill dropped the letter in his mailbox and, at some level, thought that would be the end of it. But in the days following, he found himself checking his mailbox almost daily. Ten days after he sent his letter, an envelope showed up. The return address said: \"Ms. Paula Cooper.\"\n\nThe envelope was thick. Inside, he found a letter dated Nov. 10, 1986, six pages of a teenage girl's loopy cursive, written in pencil, on pink stationery. The contents were far from a schoolgirl's bubble gum dreams. It was a snapshot of Paula's mind on death row. Her thoughts darted back and forth — between apologies and self-pity, between empathy for those who hated her and preachiness about why they should forgive her. Much of the letter was frenetic. Sentences ran on and on like the transcriptions of a nervous talker. Her misspellings and limited punctuation seemed to reflect the erratic schooling of someone who'd been on the run since eighth grade. But it also bore the hallmarks of a mind in overdrive, overloaded with conflicting emotions. Here are some excerpts. Periods have been added for clarity.\n\nBill 11/10/86\n\nHello how are you? fine I truly hope. me I'll survive, I received your letter today & it was nice of you to write me. one of Ms Pelkes friends wrote me also, I answered it back also. Im not the mean type of person your family thinks I am but I can except that. I really do. your cousin Robert was something else & what he said about not knowing if Ms Pelke would forgiving me. Ive read my bible & I know it says the way you judge others the Lord will judge you the same way. Ive prayed for your family. a lady in a wheel chair use to visit me at the jail. she said God would be pleased if I prayed for all of you, I am doing fine. They treat me ok & I am always isolated 23 hrs a day. thats how it is on death row, it is a mental hell because no one cares except for themselves. I am thankful to the Lord for them letting the others have a little time, because I've had hell all my life. so it really doesnt matter if I live or die because Im ready any time they come …\n\nIn his initial letter, Bill expressed a desire to save Paula from her death sentence. But in her reply, Paula told Bill he need not write, travel or speak on her behalf; she just wanted his forgiveness. She seemed proud of her performance in court — how she looked his family in the face and apologized. She seemed to excuse her parents for missing her sentencing. Although they had beaten and neglected her, Paula said, her actions affected them, too.\n\nAt various times, her words ranged from fatalistic to self-pitying:\n\nI cant stay here like this & I don't want to be here, I deserve a chance one that Ive never had before. but one day Ill be free even if its when Im dead…\n\nI cry every time I think of your grand mom. the others think it's a joke because you all let them be free. Im not an evil person, or what ever you think of me to be, Im just some one who is real angry, angry with life & all the people around me …\n\nIve never done anything wrong before except ask for help, I was turned away & introduced into a life of drugs, sex & crime, but now its too late for help. Im dying inside because of this but I only hope for the best for others.\n\nIn closing, she made it clear she wanted more interaction with Bill, even if she was passive about it. She would put him on her list of allowable prison visitors; she would write him whenever he wrote her; she offered her grandfather's phone number and address. In a dark world, it was as if she had seen a flicker of light.\n\nWell, Ill go now, Ill continue to pray for all of you.\n\nTake care\n\nPaula\n\nTheir first exchange was the start of a surprising correspondence that would span years and delve into the core themes of Paula's life — searching for forgiveness; grappling with remorse; her closeness with death; her search for peace.\n\nThe letters also chart the course of a relationship that many people would struggle to understand, especially Bill Pelke's father.\n\n—\n\nAfter a second exchange of letters with Paula, Bill felt compelled to share with his parents the news of his surprising correspondence: His father had once warned of a do-gooder who would get Paula off death row. Now it appeared Bill wanted to be that do-gooder.\n\nAt first, his parents were speechless. \"We don't understand why you are doing this,\" his mother, Lola, said. Surprisingly, his father acquiesced.\n\n\"Do what you got to do,\" Robert said.\n\nBill wrote Clarence Trigg, the superintendent of the Indiana Women's Prison, a letter that spent most of a page describing Ruth Pelke's faith and her commitment to sharing it. He concluded with a request:\n\nClarence, if Ruth Pelke could speak with you right now, I am sure she would say, \"Please let Billy see Paula.\"\n\nThank you for your consideration\n\nIn the name of Jesus and His Love\n\nWilliam R. Pelke\n\nBut the prison doors weren't about to open to Bill anytime soon. Corrections officials didn't know what to make of his request — a murder victim's grandson seeking an audience with her killer. They suspected he had another motive, such as revenge.\n\n—\n\nThe aftermath of Paula's case was confounding in other ways. Since giving Paula a death sentence, Judge James C. Kimbrough had been very public about his discomfort with his own ruling. Based on the law and the case in court, he said Paula qualified for the death penalty. But he hadn't been able to square it with his own opposition to capital punishment. The decision was costing him sleep. In an interview with the (Gary) Post-Tribune, published Aug. 4, 1986, a reporter noted the judge's nervous appearance.\n\nHe fidgeted in his chair. His gaze varied — at times less steady and slanted toward the desktop. He removed his glasses, toying with them.\n\nFriends who knew Kimbrough said the judge was different than he'd been before the Paula Cooper sentencing. The man they knew as friendly and jovial, even gregarious, was more reclusive, less outgoing. \"It weighed heavily on his mind,\" said Earline Rogers, a state legislator and a friend. \"That was something he felt legally he had to do but, personally, he would not have taken that path.\"\n\nSome in the legal community began to think there was a good chance Paula's death sentence would be overturned. But Kimbrough wouldn't live to find out.\n\nOn April 30, 1987, less than a year after his judgment of Paula, Kimbrough drove his car into the back of a semi and was killed. He had been drinking. The tragedy cast a pall over the Lake County courts, but it also landed hard at the Indiana Women's Prison. When Monica Foster told Paula her judge was dead, Paula was inconsolable. Days later, in a letter to Bill Pelke, she shared her thoughts about the judge.\n\n\"all I could do was cry, even though Kimbrough sentenced me to die. I felt a closeness to him as if he were my father. I have been sentenced to die many times by a lot of people and it's only words. We are all on Death Row and the last day of April his death sentence was completed & it should teach a lot of people we all have a date that is already planned & the way it will happen.\"\n\nPaula's own father had been cruel; at least Kimbrough had agonized over the punishment he gave.\n\nThe letter about Kimbrough was the 20th she'd written to Bill Pelke in less than six months. She was surprising herself at her output: \"I didn't even know I had a good handwriting or a great vocabulary until I was locked up.\"\n\nBy then, she was 17 and a condemned killer with hours to contemplate her past, present and future. Several themes recurred in her writing.\n\nLife on death row. She struggled to sleep, to breathe, to deal with the noise. \"To be on death row is worst than when I was in a mental hospital. At least it was quiet.\" She had ailments from toothaches to a bad back. Mostly, she was confused and on edge. Life on the row made her feel like \"a walking time bomb.\"\n\nMemories of the murder. Her thoughts were plagued by it. She described what she did to Ruth Pelke as \"awful.\" She wished she could erase it. \"Every day,\" she said, \"I see my nightmare.\"\n\nDeath. It was constantly on her mind, whether by execution or by her own hand. She alternated between dread of the electric chair — \"I hope it never happens to me\" ­— and anticipation of it — \"sometimes I wish they would just go ahead & do it. They continue to put this death threat on my life and I'm tired of it.\"\n\nSuicide. She seemed to ponder the merits of killing herself. She wasn't sure what it would solve but, in words that seemed to echo from her mother, she said, \"there isn't anything here for me.\" She talked about hanging herself but acknowledged she couldn't follow through. \"I know that if I do that I might go to hell (and) I don't want that to happen.\"\n\nMeanwhile, people from across the country wrote her. Some, including a death row inmate in North Carolina, wanted a romantic relationship. Some wanted answers to the plague of juvenile crime. Others sent her Bibles and tried to save her soul. Yet her faith — another frequent topic — had grown cold. As a child, she read her Bible often, she said, but \"my faith started to shatter because of a lot of feelings, hopes and unanswered prayers. I love the Lord but we aren't rea", "authors": [], "publish_date": "2016/12/09"}, {"url": "https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/50-states/2022/10/17/bear-attack-thwarted-inmate-escape-rescued-pup-news-around-states/50844653/", "title": "Bear attack, thwarted inmate escape, rescued pup: News from ...", "text": "From USA TODAY Network and wire reports\n\nAlabama\n\nHoover: A police officer was shot multiple times Sunday after police responding to a report of gunfire on an interstate faced off with a suspect at an apartment complex, police said. The officer with the Hoover Police Department is expected to survive. Hoover is just south of Birmingham. Hoover police Lt. Daniel Lowe said a driver reported that someone fired multiple shots at his vehicle on Interstate 459 Sunday morning. No one was injured. Officers had information about the vehicle used in the shooting and located a possible suspect at an apartment complex in Hoover. As they attempted to make contact with the person, he produced a weapon and opened fire, Lowe said in a news release. One officer was struck multiple times, but his injuries were not believed to be life-threatening. Hoover police returned fire, though it wasn’t clear whether the suspect was hit, Lowe said. Police evacuated some apartments and advised other residents to stay inside on the belief that the suspect was still at the complex. The department announced later on its Twitter page that the suspect was in custody.\n\nAlaska\n\nAnchorage: The Elders and Youth Conference is underway in Anchorage this week, KNBA-Anchorage reports. For the last two years, the pandemic kept them from meeting in person. On Sunday, the First Alaskans Institute held a “Warming of the Hands” reception at the Alaska Native Heritage Center to celebrate the start of the conference. The head of the Alaska Native Tribal Health Consortium thanked the institute for requiring masks and proof of vaccination, according to the news outlet. The conference, now in its 39th year, is a way for both young and old to make a personal connection through their love of Alaska Native culture.\n\nArizona\n\nTucson: A $1,150 reward is being offered for information leading to an arrest in the killing of a radio collared bobcat that was part of a Tucson research project, according to authorities. The Arizona Game and Fish Department said the bobcat was found fatally shot on Sept. 28. Officials said the research project, which is partially funded by a state Game and Fish grant, is studying how bobcats use the wildlife-urban interface on the west side of Tucson. Department officials said the maximum penalty for illegally killing wildlife is four months in jail and a $750 fine and civil penalties could also apply. The Arizona Game and Fish Department manages managing more than 800 native wildlife species.\n\nArkansas\n\nDecatur: A 71-year-old man was fatally shot by a northwest Arkansas sheriff’s deputy who found him driving a tractor and displaying a handgun, authorities said. Nelson Amos was fatally shot Saturday by a Benton County sheriff’s deputy, according to Arkansas State Police. State police said Sunday that they were investigating the shooting. State police said that sheriff’s deputies had been called after someone reported hearing gunfire on Amos’ property. State police said that when a deputy later encountered Amos driving a tractor on a local road and brandishing a handgun, the deputy fired his rife, killing Amos. State police said their investigation will be submitted to the Benton County prosecutor, who will determine whether the use of deadly force by the sheriff’s deputy was consistent with the law.\n\nCalifornia\n\nWhittier: A person suspected of being under the influence while riding a horse through city streets was arrested after leading police on a pursuit in Southern California, authorities said. Officers in a patrol car chased the suspect Saturday in Whittier, about 20 miles southeast of downtown Los Angeles, according to police. “An intoxicated person on a horse, galloping through traffic… refusing to pull the horse over… that was our afternoon,” Whittier police posted on Instagram. The pursuit ended with the DUI suspect in custody and the horse receiving lots of love from officers, police said. Accompanying photos showed officers leading the brown horse with a saddle on its back from the scene and offering it water.\n\nColorado\n\nPueblo: The city of Pueblo and Pueblo School District 60 are seeking to improve safety and accessibility to a pair of East Side schools through a grant application to the Colorado Department of Transportation. The Pueblo D60 board directors voted unanimously Thursday to apply for a Safe Routes to School grant to add sidewalks, Americans with Disabilities Act-compliant ramps, bike lanes and road markings at various places along Monument Avenue where Park View Elementary and the Risley International Academy of Innovation are located. The total project area spans from East Second Street to East 12th Street along Monument Avenue. During a Pueblo D60 board work session Thursday, Pueblo Area Council of Governments (PACOG) Transportation Director Eva Cosyleon explained the need for creating a “pedestrian and bicycle safe corridor” in the project area. “We have broken sidewalks, we have missing sidewalks at driveways and alleys, and also missing ADA curb ramps – which poses a huge issue for people with a handicap,” Cosyleon said. “They need to have accessibility for wheelchairs or even mothers who have strollers and are trying to take their kids to school.” Cosyleon also presented traffic-crash data from the past five years to board directors. From 2017 to 2022, there have been 280 accidents within a two-mile radius of the Monument Avenue corridor and two people have been killed. Among those crashes, seven involved pedestrians, two involved school-aged children, two involved bicyclists and one involved an individual in a wheelchair.\n\nConnecticut\n\nMorris: A 250-pound black bear mauled a 10-year-old boy playing in his grandparents’ backyard in Connecticut and tried to drag him away before the animal was fatally shot by police, authorities said. The child was attacked about 11 a.m. Sunday in the town of Morris, the state Department of Energy and Environmental Protection said. He was taken to a hospital for treatment of injuries that were not life-threatening. Officers from the state police and DEEP’s environmental conservation force responded and shot the bear, authorities said. The boy’s grandfather described the harrowing attack to the Republican-American of Waterbury. James Butler said his grandson was playing near a trampoline when the bear emerged from thick woods behind the house. “I heard him yell ‘bear’ and when I looked up, I saw his leg in the bear’s mouth and the bear trying to drag him across the lawn,” Butler said. Butler, who uses a wheelchair, wheeled his chair toward the bear and threw a metal bar at its head, he told the newspaper. The bear released the boy but then grabbed the child a second time and used its claws to try to roll the boy onto his back, the grandfather said. A neighbor alerted by the boy’s screams raced over and scared the bear off by brandishing a pipe and yelling, Butler said. The bear was fatally shot by police a short time later. Butler, and his wife, Christina Anderson, who was inside the house when the bear attacked, said the boy suffered a puncture wound to one thigh, bite marks on a foot and ankle and claw marks on his back. State biologist Jenny Dixon said the risk of negative bear-human interactions is increasing as the state’s expanding bear population becomes acclimated to humans and develops a taste for their food.\n\nDelaware\n\nMiddletown: One person is dead and two others were seriously injured in a crash involving two trucks early Saturday morning in Middletown, according to Delaware State Police. State police said at approximately 4:23 a.m., a 2005 Dodge Ram 1500 driven by an unidentified 24-year-old was traveling south on Route 13/South Dupont Highway. At about the same time, a 2018 Ford F-150 had entered the left lane of Route 13 from Hyetts Corner Road headed north. A police investigation determined that, at some point north of the Route 1 overpass, for an unknown reason, the Dodge left the southbound lanes, crossed the grass median and entered the northbound left lane of Route 13, where it collided with the Ford. Police found that neither the 24-year-old driver of the Dodge nor a 26-year-old front-seat passenger were wearing their seat belts. They were both seriously injured and taken to an area hospital. The 67-year-old driver of the Ford, who was wearing his seat belt, was pronounced deceased at the scene of the collision, police said Sunday. His identity was being withheld pending notification of next of kin. Route 13 was closed for almost four hours while the crash was investigated and the roadway was cleared.\n\nDistrict of Columbia\n\nWashington: A man was reunited with his 5-month-old puppy after police say he was robbed and shot at last Wednesday in Northeast D.C., WUSA-TV reports. “Thank you to everyone who submitted tips to help find this furry friend,” D.C. police tweeted out Monday. D.C. police worked with the Humane Rescue Alliance and received community tips to safely locate the puppy that had been missing since Oct. 12 when the dog’s owner was allegedly robbed at gunpoint in the 4500 block of Polk Street, Northeast D.C. According to the police report, the robber got away with the dog and shot at the owner as he ran away. The dog owner was not injured. The case is still being investigated, according to the news outlet.\n\nFlorida\n\nFernandina Beach: Two men face attempted murder charges for allegedly firing into each other’s vehicles on a busy highway and wounding each other’s daughters, who were passengers in their back seats. William Hale, of Douglasville, Georgia, and Frank Allison, of Callahan, Florida, were charged last week with attempted second-degree murder in the Oct. 8 confrontation on U.S. Highway 1 in Nassau County. A witness told Nassau County sheriff’s deputies that both vehicles were being driven so erratically and engaging in a “cat and mouse” chase that he called the authorities out of concern, according to an incident report. Hale, driving a truck with relatives as passengers, told deputies that he and Allison were “brake checking,” or braking in front of each other repeatedly, during the confrontation. He said at some point, he heard a “pow” at his back door, so he grabbed a gun he kept in his center console and fired out of the driver’s window, according to the incident report. “It was an instant reaction,” Hale said, noting that he fired “everything that was in the clip,” deputies reported. Allison told deputies that he fired his gun at the truck’s bed or tire after a water bottle was thrown into his car. Before the water bottle was thrown, his wife had been “flicking them off,” he said. “Mr. Allison said his goal of firing the shot was to ‘get out of the whole situation,’ ” the deputies reported. Hale’s daughter suffered a wound to her upper calf, while Allison’s daughter suffered a collapsed lung, according to the report. There was no attorney listed for Hale in an online docket. An attorney for Allison didn’t immediately respond to an emailed inquiry on Monday.\n\nGeorgia\n\nAtlanta: Four people were hurt, including three students, in a shooting during Clark Atlanta University’s homecoming outside a campus library early Sunday, authorities said. A large group of people were listening to a DJ near Atlanta University Center’s Robert W. Woodruff Library around 12:30 a.m. when officers on patrol in the area heard gunshots, Atlanta police said. A preliminary investigation found three students and another person were injured when shots were fired from a vehicle, Clark Atlanta University said. Atlanta police said multiple people were shot. One of the victims was grazed and refused medical attention. Three others were taken to a hospital, though they were conscious and alert. Clark Atlanta is part of Atlanta University Center’s consortium of historically Black colleges.\n\nHawaii\n\nMaui: Maui County’s race for mayor is turning into the most contentious in the state, HawaiiNewsNow reports. In Saturday’s debate, organized by Akaku Maui Community Media, incumbent Mayor Mike Victorino defended his record, and retired judge Richard Bissen accused Victorino of being a passive mayor. The candidates had similar views on land swapping for properties facing erosion, homelessness, supporting reservations and fees to manage over-tourism, according to the news outlet. The general election will be held on Nov. 8.\n\nIdaho\n\nBoise: The state Department of Agriculture announced that it plans to crack down on the sale of pet CBD, the Idaho Statesman reports. The department began having new conversations about pet CBD when the Legislature passed a law legalizing industrial help. The agency sent out a letter in July warning sellers that enforcement would begin Nov. 1, according to the news outlet. Supporters of pet CBD say it eases their animals’ anxiety and pain.\n\nIllinois\n\nSpringfield: The second and final Illinois gubernatorial debate is set for Tuesday, potentially the last time that Democrat Gov. JB Pritzker and Republican challenger Darren Bailey will share a televised stage at the same time. Recent polls indicate Pritzker has a sizable lead over Bailey, a Xenia state senator, with a possibility to win in November by similar margins to his 2018 victory over former Gov. Bruce Rauner. Public Policy Polling conducted a poll on the behalf of the Chicago Sun-Times/WBEZ, which found the Democrat with a 49% to 34% lead over his opponent. In 2018, Pritzker received 54.5% of the vote compared to 38.8% going to Rauner, the Republican incumbent. With election day now a little more than three weeks away, University of Illinois-Springfield political science professor emeritus Kent Redfield says the upcoming debate provides both candidates with an opportunity to gain, maintain or lose support.\n\nIndiana\n\nEvansville: Firefighters were battling a large fire Monday in southwestern Indiana that’s left an Evansville warehouse and neighboring buildings in ruins and produced a smoke plume visible for miles around. Evansville Fire Department spokesman Mike Larson said about “every truck in the city” as well as one fire unit from Henderson, Kentucky, was called to the scene of the warehouse fire along Morton Avenue. He said the fire was contained as of 9:15 a.m. CDT and no longer a threat to spread, but fires were still burning inside the warehouse and neighboring buildings. Dozens of firefighters would likely remain at the scene for hours, Larson told the Evansville Courier & Press. Larson said there were no reported injuries, and there was no word yet on a possible cause of the fire in the city about 170 miles southwest of Indianapolis. The fire, which was reported about 4:40 a.m., produced a smoke plume so thick it was clearly visible on weather radar in the city. Video footage of the scene showed that flames were still rising by mid-morning from multiple collapsed buildings across a large area and producing smoke plumes. Authorities closed the Lloyd Expressway near the Evansville’s Division Street and U.S. 41 exits and asked motorists to avoid the area.\n\nIowa\n\nCedar Rapids: U.S. Rep. Ashley Hinson, of Iowa, has been hospitalized with a kidney infection, her office said Monday. Hinson’s chief of staff, Jimmy Peacock, issued a statement saying Hinson was admitted Sunday night to a hospital in Cedar Rapids. “She is looking forward to being back on the road soon,” Peacock said. Hinson’s congressional office confirmed that Hinson, a Republican, remained hospitalized Monday morning. The office did not respond to a question about when she was expected to be released. Hinson is running for reelection to Iowa’s 2nd Congressional District seat and is being challenged by Democrat Liz Mathis, state senator.\n\nKansas\n\nTopeka: Kansas will begin winding down a COVID-19-era rental assistance program, a move that was expected but still has housing advocates worried about whether renters and the nonprofits that help support them will be prepared. The Kansas Emergency Rental Assistance program was created in March 2021 as the latest iteration in a series of efforts to provide aid to renters affected by the adverse economic conditions created by the pandemic. Backed by $200 million in federal funds and run by the Kansas Housing Resources Corporation, the program’s launch was rocky at first due to limited staffing and high demand, though things eventually stabilized. State officials announced Wednesday the program was entering a “hold phase,” where the agency has received enough applications to exhaust its funding. All current applications under review will be put on pause unless more money becomes available. “We may not have the funds to ultimately be able to review or fund those applications,” Ryan Vincent, executive director of the KHRC, told KMUW. “We’ll have them ready, and if we end up receiving any additional funding … we can go back and fund some of those applications in the second hold phase.” The prospect of obtaining additional federal funds is uncertain. Congress could ultimately choose to appropriate more funds for the program, though such a move seems unlikely. The U.S. Treasury Department has also reallocated money from states that have been slower to spend their funds or declined to participate in the program.\n\nKentucky\n\nFrankfort: A county’s court operations that have been closed since historic flooding in July will resume this month. The Knott County Office of Circuit Court Clerk will reopen Oct. 31 in the county Judicial Center. Circuit and district court proceedings will be conducted remotely due to ongoing repairs to the center. Proceedings may be heard in person in another county if all parties agree, according to the Administrative Office of the Courts in Frankfort. The Supreme Court issued an administrative order amending the emergency order that suspended court operations after the flooding. The order clarifies that the clerk’s office was legally closed from July 28 to Oct. 30 for time computation purposes and allows the presiding judge to grant additional time extensions. Gov. Andy Beshear said last week that 43 people from six counties died in the flooding that hit parts of eastern Kentucky in late July. He said one person remains missing.\n\nLouisiana\n\nLafayette: Republican Tim Temple, a wealthy insurance executive from Baton Rouge, will run against incumbent GOP Louisiana Insurance Commissioner Jim Donelon in 2023 with the state mired in a homeowners insurance crisis. Temple posed a strong challenge to Donelon in 2019 by spending $2 million of his own money, but Donelon pulled out another win with 53% of the statewide vote. Donelon first won the office in 2006. “Over the last 17 years, Louisiana auto rates have soared to the most expensive in the country, while recently we’ve seen an explosion of homeowner rate increases and an expansion of attorneys promising quick claim settlements and loosely regulated public adjusters,” Temple said in a news release. “Just last week, the current commissioner approved a 63% homeowner’s insurance rate increase,” Temple said. “Continuing to recycle old plans ignores the actual problems and shortcomings altogether, and these issues are too serious to ignore. More than ever Louisiana needs an insurance commissioner with experience in the insurance industry, that will be honest, transparent, accountable, and put the people of this state ahead of insurance companies.” While it’s true Donelon approved a 63% rate hike for customers in the state’s quasi-government safety net insurance company Citizens, he had little choice. By law, Citizens’ prices must be 10% above the highest market rate in each parish or the actuarial rate, whichever is higher. Citizens provides insurance to homeowners who can’t secure protection in the private market.\n\nMaine\n\nKittery: Town leaders have taken steps to ensure a diverse range of reading materials stay on shelves of the historic Rice Public Library as book-banning efforts have surged nationally. A formal “Freedom to Read” policy was adopted by the Town Council at its Oct. 12 meeting. “The freedom to read is essential to our democracy,” the policy states in part. “The Town of Kittery is devoted to reading and wishes to assert the public interest in the preservation of the freedom to read,” it reads. “We trust our Kittery residents to recognize propaganda and misinformation and to make their own decisions about what they read and believe. The freedom to read is guaranteed by the Constitution.” Approved by the Town Council in tandem with the policy was a step-by-step book challenge process, which outlines how Kittery’s Library Advisory Committee receives and evaluates contested reading materials. Only Kittery residents are permitted to initiate a challenge. “The library considers material objectionable only if the material taken as a whole lacks serious literary, artistic, political or scientific value,” the challenged materials policy reads. Lee Perkins, the town library director since 2010, noted Rice Public Library previously followed the American Library Association’s “Freedom to Read” statement. Because the library officially became a town department in 2019, however, the Town Council had to approve the town’s own “Freedom to Read” library policy “to carry forward this commitment,” according to a report to the council from Town Manager Kendra Amaral.\n\nMaryland\n\nSalisbury: The Maryland Department of Transportation State Highway Administration has launched a survey to receive public input on preliminary improvement concepts and highway needs for the expansion of Route 90 (Ocean City Expressway). The survey, which was announced in an Oct. 12 news release, is available to the public through 11:59 p.m. Nov. 10. Results will be used to form preliminary improvement concepts. The survey is part of the MD 90 Planning and Environmental Linkages (PEL) Study. Expansion of the entire 12-mile corridor between Coastal Highway and Route 50 is a part of the state’s long-term “Reach the Beach” plan. Improvements include general road safety, traffic congestion relief, and allowing first responders such as police, firefighters and EMTs to respond to emergencies swiftly. As stated by the Maryland Department of Transportation’s State Highway Administration, the western end of Route 90 at Route 50 carries roughly 33,000 vehicles per day throughout the summer season. By 2045, the highway’s average daily traffic volume is expected to increase by 10%.\n\nMassachusetts\n\nSwampscott: Police came to the rescue of a person who was out walking their dog over the weekend when they were surrounded by a pack of coyotes. Police in Swampscott received a call at about 9:30 p.m. Saturday from the dog walker who said they were surrounded and the coyotes were “not backing down,” police said in a Facebook post. Responding officers counted at least nine coyotes. They were apparently scared off by the arrival of the cruisers with their lights flashing. Police escorted the dog walker and their pet to their home with no additional danger. The dog walker’s name was not made public. Police also posted a series of tips from the Humane Society for how to deal with bold coyotes, urging residents to be aware of their surroundings when walking their dogs, especially during evening hours when coyotes are most active. Police also recommended that people bring noisemakers, squirt guns or pepper spray with them to scare coyotes away.\n\nMichigan\n\nDetroit: Michigan students, and particularly those experiencing homelessness, continue to attend school at a lower rate than they did before the COVID-19 pandemic. The statewide school attendance rate for the 2021-22 school year fell to 88%, down 4.1 percentage points from the previous school year, when attendance hovered at 92.9%. The decline marked a 4.3-percentage-point drop from 2019-20’s attendance rate of 93.1%, according to state data released in September. It is the first time in at least five years that the statewide attendance rate has dipped below 90%. Economically disadvantaged students attended school at a rate of 88% last school year, down from 90.7% in 2020-21. Students experiencing homelessness attended school at a rate of 79.8% in 2021-22, a decline of 5.4 percentage points from the prior year’s rate of 85.2%. State attendance rates are calculated by dividing the total days students could attend school by the total days students actually attend. “There has to be a recommitment to intentionally addressing chronic absenteeism here in this great state of Michigan,” said Delsa Chapman, deputy superintendent at the Michigan Department of Education.\n\nMinnesota\n\nSt. Cloud: Mayor Dave Kleis announced Friday the city was awarded $1.09million in state grant funds for the installation of green hydrogen and renewable natural gas demonstration projects. Funding came from the Minnesota Environment and Natural Resources Trust Fund as recommended by the Legislative-Citizen Commission on Minnesota Resources. These technologies will reduce operating costs, keep user rates low, provide additional revenue opportunities, provide economic growth opportunities for the community, reduce dependence on natural gas and high carbon fuel sources, reduce carbon dioxide emissions and increase energy resiliency, according to a press release from the city.\n\nMississippi\n\nOxford: A pickup truck struck two University of Mississippi students in a parking lot in downtown Oxford, killing one of them and injuring the other, police said. Two suspects, both from Collierville, Tennessee, were arrested by Monday in the crash, which occurred early Sunday, authorities said. Tristan Holland was taken into custody Sunday in Shelby County, Tennessee, on accessory after the fact. He will face extradition to Oxford, according to the Oxford Police Department. Seth Rokitka was taken into custody Monday after investigators found his wrecked truck in Marshall County, Mississippi, between Oxford and Collierville. The Oxford Police Department said it would provide more information after Rokitka is charged. It was not immediately clear whether either Holland or Rokitka had an attorney who could comment on their behalf. Oxford police said the department received an emergency call after 1 a.m. Sunday from passersby who saw two people injured in the parking lot behind City Hall. Mayor Robyn Tannehill said the student who died was 21-year-old Walker Fielder of Madison, Mississippi. Fielder was a 2020 graduate of Jackson Academy in Jackson, Mississippi. The injured student was transferred to a hospital in Memphis, Tennessee. Oxford police told WRAL-TV that she is 20-year-old Blanche Williamson of Raleigh, North Carolina. Williamson graduated from Episcopal High School, a boarding school in Virginia.\n\nMissouri\n\nSpringfield: Two teenagers were killed Saturday evening when the vehicle they were in traveled off Farm Road 170 near Republic and struck a tree. Two other teenagers were taken by ambulance to CoxHealth Hospital in Springfield. According to the Missouri State Highway Patrol, a total of four teenagers – ages 15 and 16 – were riding in the 2005 Honda Accord. At 6:15 p.m. Saturday, the vehicle was traveling east on Farm Road 170, just east of Republic, lost control, traveled off the left side of the roadway, and struck a tree, the patrol reported. The Republic district provided some details to teachers, staff and parents late Sunday. The two students killed were a 16-year-old male from Republic and a 15-year-old male from Billings.\n\nMontana\n\nBillings: A police officer shot an armed man at the Billings Clinic Emergency Department on Sunday, the Billings Gazette reports. When officers responded to a report of an armed man at the hospital, the man fired one round. An officer fired one round, hitting the suspect, who was then taken into custody, according to a social media post from police. Police said no hospital staff or patients were injured in the incident, according to the news outlet.\n\nNebraska\n\nOmaha: Record-low temperatures are expected Tuesday in Omaha, Lincoln and Norfolk, the Omaha World-Herald reports. “A cold front dropping down from Canada will be sitting right over the top of (eastern Nebraska) Tuesday morning,” Taylor Nicolaisen, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service office in Valley, said Sunday. “The records for Omaha, Lincoln and Norfolk could be in trouble, especially Lincoln.” The low temperatures for all three cities were set in 1972 – Omaha recorded 20 degrees, Lincoln 21 and Norfolk 18. But the cold won’t last. Highs in eastern Nebraska expected to rebound into the 50s to low 60s on Wednesday, according to the news outlet.\n\nNevada\n\nReno: Nevada reported far fewer coronavirus cases in the week ending Sunday, adding 1,130 new cases. That’s down 11.9% from the previous week’s tally of 1,283 new cases of the virus that causes COVID-19. Nevada ranked 46th among the states where coronavirus was spreading the fastest on a per-person basis, a USA TODAY Network analysis of Johns Hopkins University data shows.\n\nNew Hampshire\n\nPortsmouth: New Hampshire public health officials say they see a dangerous combination ahead: a winter rise in COVID-19 cases, hospitalizations, and deaths, and low interest in coronavirus booster shots, especially the new bivalent dose targeted at omicron. Approximately half of Granite Staters eligible for the first booster have gotten one and far fewer, about 35%, have received a second, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The agency has not reported state-level uptakes of the new bivalent booster but has put the national rate at just 4%. “It’s one thing to have the vaccine,” said Dr. Sally Kraft, vice president of population health at Dartmouth Health, in a briefing on the bivalent booster Tuesday. “It’s another to get that vaccine in people’s arms.” On Friday, the New Hampshire Department of Health and Human Services asked lawmakers for approval to use $8.9 million in federal pandemic aid to expand access to vaccines and antiviral medications.\n\nNew Jersey\n\nTrenton: Democrats in competitive Garden State congressional races vastly outraised and outspent their Republican challengers in the three summer months after the state’s primary. In the 7th Congressional District, Rep. Tom Malinowski – who faces a tough reelection effort after redistricting added more Republican-leaning towns to the district – raised more than anyone else in the state, at over $1.8 million, and spent $3.3 million, according to the latest Federal Election Commission filings, due Saturday, which cover campaign activity from July through September. He collected more than twice as much in donations as his challenger, Thomas Kean Jr., who raised $866,000, and spent three times the $1 million that Kean paid vendors. Rep. Mikie Sherrill of the 11th District spent more than any other congressional contender over the summer, $3.7 million, more than 21 times what her Republican opponent, Paul DeGroot, managed with $175,000. She raised $970,000 to DeGroot’s $171,000. Rep. Josh Gottheimer of the 5th District continued to stockpile an eye-popping amount of money, with more than $14 million in the bank after raising another $1.1 million and spending $1 million in the third quarter.\n\nNew Mexico\n\nRoswell: Roswell officials say the city’s UFO Festival had an economic impact of more than $2 million. The Roswell Daily Record reports the Roswell City Council’s finance committee looked earlier this month at an economic report for the event. It indicated more than 40,000 visitors came to the four-day festival, which ran June 30-July 3. The cost for the city to mount it was more than $200,000. Officials applauded the results as a “10 to 1 return on your money.” Staff who put together the report reviewed gross receipts taxes, occupancy or lodgers’ tax, ticket sales and other factors. They also analyzed data from trash collection to estimate the number of visitors. This year’s festival marked the 75th anniversary of the alleged Roswell Incident. Something crashed at what was then the J.B. Foster ranch in 1947, with the U.S. Army announcing it had recovered a “flying disc” but later saying the debris was merely the remnants of a high-altitude weather balloon. Speculation about extraterrestrials and government cover-ups has existed ever since, inspiring books, movies and TV shows. The milestone anniversary brought various businesses and groups together to organize 34 events for the UFO Festival.\n\nNew York\n\nNew York City: Are your New York state license plates peeling or falling apart? The New York state Department of Motor Vehicles will replace them for free. “We are encouraging New Yorkers who have peeling license plates to get new ones, without any charge, to avoid the risk of being ticketed and having to pay a fine,” DMV Commissioner Mark J.F. Schroeder said. A driver can be ticketed if their plate number is no longer clearly readable. Customers who want the next available standard plate number for free can email the DMV at dmv.sm.peelingplates@dmv.ny.gov.\n\nNorth Carolina\n\nSalisbury: Two people were shot and others were injured as they fled gunfire that broke out at a North Carolina college homecoming concert on Saturday night, officials said. Officers called to the campus of Livingstone College in Salisbury around 11 p.m. found two people shot and others who were hurt as attendees fled the gunfire, city officials said in a statement. Officials didn’t release details of their conditions. There was a fight during the concert and one person, who isn’t a Livingstone student, fired one or more shots, police and school officials said in a joint statement. The school’s priority is to ensure students’ mental health and evaluate public safety measures to create a safe environment, Livingstone President Dr. Anthony J. Davis said in a statement. The college is cooperating with police as they investigate, he said. “I am saddened because our students, alumni, family and friends were exposed to this senseless act of violence,” Davis said.\n\nNorth Dakota\n\nBismarck: Republican Congressman Kelly Armstrong has raised nearly $2 million for his reelection bid for North Dakota’s lone U.S. House seat, the Bismarck Tribune reports, outraising his independent challenger, former Miss America 2018 Cara Mund. Recent campaign finance reports indicate Armstrong has more than $1.8 million to Mund’s $77,790. This is the first official comparison of the two candidates’ fundraising efforts, according to the media outlet.\n\nOhio\n\nCincinnati: Democratic Rep. Jeff Crossman says he would drop an appeal of the state’s six-week abortion ban if elected attorney general over Republican Dave Yost. Crossman said he would refuse to defend Ohio’s law, which bans doctors from performing abortions after cardiac activity is detected, in court. As a state lawmaker, he voted against the six-week abortion ban, but it passed the GOP-controlled Legislature anyway. Gov. Mike DeWine signed the bill in 2019. But Hamilton County Common Pleas Court Judge Christian Jenkins recently blocked that law indefinitely. Yost filed an appeal Wednesday with the Ohio 1st District Court of Appeals in Cincinnati. Crossman said he would drop that appeal. “I intend to end this crusade against women and protect their constitutional rights,” Crossman said. “I will end the appeal immediately and I will honor the court’s decision.” Yost campaign spokeswoman Amy Natoce slammed Crossman for not defending Ohio’s law. “He literally just promised to cancel democracy because he doesn’t like a law passed by the General Assembly. Doesn’t that bother you?” she asked. “The attorney general has a sworn duty to defend laws passed by the people’s elected legislators regardless of his personal opinions – something Jeff Crossman is too inexperienced and morally bankrupt to understand.” Practically speaking, that might not end the appeal. In 2014, then-Kentucky Attorney General Jack Conway, a Democrat, refused to defend the state’s ban on same-sex marriage, so outside attorneys handled the case instead.\n\nOklahoma\n\nOkmulgee: Authorities are trying to determine if four bodies found in an Oklahoma river are those of four men who were reported missing several days ago after leaving a home together. Police in Okmulgee, about 40 miles south of Tulsa, said Friday that the bodies of four males had been found in the Deep Fork River. They have been sent for autopsies. Police said they’ve been searching for four friends – Mark Chastain, 32, Billy Chastain, 30, Mike Sparks, 32, and Alex Stevens, 29 – who were believed to have left a house in Okmulgee on bicycles on the evening of Oct. 9. Mark Chastain’s wife reported that he, Billy Chastain and Mike Sparks were missing, police said Tuesday. A few hours later, Alex Stevens’ mother reported him missing, police said. The bodies were discovered after a passerby saw something suspicious in the river near a bridge, police Chief Joe Prentice said. The bicycles have not been found, Prentice said. Police did not immediately respond to a message left Sunday. The men were all from Okmulgee, which has a population of around 11,000.\n\nOregon\n\nEugene: Twenty-five Oregon mayors joined together for the common goal of creating a strategy to address the statewide homeless crisis using funding and construction investments, submitting the plan to state officials Friday. A subcommittee on the Oregon Mayors Association put together the request calling for a partnership between the cities and the state to fund a response to local homelessness and preventative programs – totaling about $123 million annually. In addition to the annual funding for those programs, the plan also calls for construction investments for shelters and transitional housing projects. The letter to legislators highlighted the crisis, stating the municipal leaders “cannot be left to solve this statewide crisis” on their own. “The No. 1 issue throughout Oregon – in both rural and urban communities, large and small – is homelessness. We know this humanitarian crisis is impacting both the individuals directly experiencing homelessness as well as communities at large,” stated the OMA letter. Although many cities have individual or regional programs to address local issues, the statewide crisis has exceeded their “individual capacity.”\n\nPennsylvania\n\nHarrisburg: The state and national Republican parties are suing anew in the state in an effort to block some mail-in ballots – those lacking the voter’s handwritten date on the outside envelope – from being counted in November, when voters will elect a new governor and U.S. senator. The GOP’s filing late Sunday went straight to the state Supreme Court, with barely three weeks left before Election Day. The court does not have to take up the lawsuit. “The time for the Court to act is now,” lawyers for the Republican Party told the justices in the lawsuit. The effort by Republicans to ensure that improperly dated or undated ballot envelopes are thrown out could help their candidates in tight contests around the state. As of Friday, nearly 1.2 million voters had applied for a main-in ballot, with applications from registered Democrats outnumbering Republicans by an almost 4-to-1 ratio. Throwing out undated ballots would theoretically ensure that more Democratic ballots are tossed out, helping Republican candidates. Democratic Gov. Tom Wolf’s administration last week told counties that they are expected to include ballots with undated or improperly dated envelopes in their official returns for the Nov. 8 election.\n\nRhode Island\n\nProvidence: A jury has convicted a former corrections officer at the Adult Correctional Institutions of having sexual relations with two female inmates over the course of a year. Collins Umoh, 44, of Warwick, on Thursday was found guilty of three counts of criminal sexual conduct with an inmate under his direct custodial supervision between 2017 and 2018 after a five-day trial before Superior Court Judge Joseph A. Montalbano, according to an announcement by Attorney General Peter F. Neronha’s office. The state was unable to proceed with four additional counts that were subsequently dismissed, said Brian Hodge, spokesman for the office. He declined further comment. Umoh had been a corrections officer for 11 years at the time of his arrest in May 2019. Authorities at the time accused him of having sex with three women housed in the Gloria McDonald Correctional Facility between July 2017 and August 2018. “This agency has no higher priority than running safe, secure and constitutional facilities, and the protection of ACI inmates from sexual misconduct is something we take particularly seriously,” Patricia A. Coyne-Fague, director of the state Department of Corrections, said in an email at the time of his arrest. “Anyone involved in sexual misconduct will face significant consequences.” Assistant Attorney General Daniel Carr Guglielmo prosecuted the case, with State Police Detective Herb Tilson leading the investigation with the assistance of the Department of Corrections Office of Inspections. Umoh is scheduled to be sentenced Dec. 15. The charges are punishable by up to five years in prison and/or a fine of $10,000. Umoh’s lawyer, Stefanie Murphy, could not be reached immediately for comment.\n\nSouth Carolina\n\nSpartanburg: Hundreds of incorrect absentee ballots were mailed to Spartanburg County voters due to an error by the vendor who prints them, county officials said Wednesday. “This is an unfortunate situation, but thankfully there is time to correct it,” Elections Director Adam Hammons said in a statement. “My office is working hard to ensure every affected voter receives the correct ballot as soon as possible, giving the voters ample time to return them before 7 p.m. on Election Day.” Hammons said after sending to the vendor the file of voters’ names to be sent a ballot, his office identified one voter that had applied for an absentee ballot but later moved out of the county. He said his office asked the vendor to remove the voter from the file prior to printing and mailing the ballots. “During that process, the data shifted, unbeknownst to the vendor, causing the error,” Hammons stated. County spokeswoman Scottie Kay Blackwell said the county elections office is immediately mailing a new, correct ballot to all 699 voters who received the incorrect ballot. The office is also reaching out to voters directly, telling them the correct ballots will arrive in an envelope with a yellow stripe, she said. “The issuing and return of the new, correct ballots will be tracked by the elections office, ensuring that only one ballot is counted for each voter,” Blackwell stated. She said voters who are unsure if they’ve been impacted by the error can visit scvotes.gov and click on “Get My Sample Ballot.” If the sample ballot matches the one they received in the mail, they will know they received the correct ballot.\n\nSouth Dakota\n\nYankton: Authorities say an inmate who tried to escape from a hospital where he was receiving treatment was caught within 10 minutes. The 26-year-old man who was housed at the Yankton County Jail had been taken to Avera Sacred Heart Hospital for a medical issue Thursday evening when he ran away from a correctional officer, the Yankton Press and Dakotan reported. The suspect was apprehended less than two blocks away, according to the Yankton County Sheriff’s Office. He was charged with first-degree escape, which carries a maximum charge of two years in prison.\n\nTennessee\n\nGatlinburg: A campground at Great Smoky Mountains National Park that has been closed for nine years has been reopened, park officials said. Look Rock Campground is a 68-site facility that provides camping along one of the park’s most scenic drive, according to Superintendent Cassius Cash. The campground opened Saturday and remains available through Nov. 13. “We are grateful for the voices who supported us in our efforts to secure the needed funding for repairs, including the Friends of the Smokies and their donors,” Cash said in a news release. Look Rock Campground and Picnic Area were closed in 2013 after the water utility systems failed. The picnic area reopened with limited services after the park received funds in 2019 to install an accessible vault toilet. The water system has now been completely replaced, with access to flush toilets and potable water. Campground sites were rehabilitated. Ten sites were renovated to accommodate larger recreational vehicles and offer the first electric and water hookups in a park campground, the park said. The park received $4.7 million for the work from campground fees, donations and federal funds. Campground reservations must be made through Recreation.Gov.\n\nTexas\n\nFort Worth: A Fort Worth police said an officer fatally shot a 29-year-old man who pointed a handgun at him after police responded to a call from the man’s mother, who said he was damaging her home with a hammer. The Tarrant County medical examiner’s office has identified the man killed early Sunday as Taylor Grimes. Fort Worth police said that during the mother’s 911 call late Saturday, the man could be heard saying he would hurt his mother if any officers responded. Police said that when officers arrived, Grimes came to the door holding a handgun, closed the door and then refused to leave the house. The SWAT unit and hostage negotiators then arrived and tried to convince Grimes to surrender and to allow his mother to leave the house, police said. When his mother eventually left the house, Grimes was seen standing in the doorway, pointing a handgun at an officer, police said. Police said that the officer fired his weapon, striking the man. The medical examiner’s office said Grimes died in the living room of the home.\n\nUtah\n\nProvo: Provo has a new acting chief of police after the sudden resignation of police chief Fred Ross, The Salt Lake Tribune reports. Ross didn’t cite specific reasons for his resignation, other than saying that the job had “been determined to not be sustainable.” He was appointed to the role in November 2021. “After discussing this with my family,” Ross continued in a statement, “I’ve determined it is in my best interest personally and professionally to resign my position as chief of police, effective immediately. I thank you sincerely for the honor of serving you, the department, and the people of Provo.” Mayor Michelle Kaufusi appointed Capt. Troy Beebe, a 24-year veteran of the Provo Police Department, as the acting chief in an early Monday announcement, according to the news outlet.\n\nVermont\n\nBurlington: Students will be taking a different standardized test this spring. Students will no longer take the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium (SBAC) and the Vermont Science Assessment (VTSA) tests that they have since 2015. The new test, Cognia, encompasses the subjects of English language arts, math and science and will first be administered in the spring of 2023. The Agency of Education chose Cognia after the former testing provider’s contract was up, noting Cognia’s focus on equity. “Cognia’s approach to diversity, equity and inclusion in the development and implementation of assessments aligns with Vermont’s values, and the accessibility and user experience of their testing resources will make working with the assessments easier for students, families and educators,” said Dan French, Vermont’s secretary of education.\n\nVirginia\n\nHarrisonburg: A man has been charged in a shooting at an outdoor gathering over the weekend that sent eight people to hospitals, police said. Harrisonburg police arrested Tyreaf Isaiah Fleming, 20, of Harrisonburg, on Sunday afternoon, the department said in a statement. Fleming is charged with attempted murder, aggravated malicious wounding and firearms offenses, police said. Online court records do not list an attorney who could speak on Fleming’s behalf. Witnesses said shots were fired into the crowd at an outdoor gathering on Devon Lane in Harrisonburg around 2:20 a.m. Sunday, police said in a statement. Statements from witnesses and security camera video helped investigators identify Fleming as a suspect. Eight people ranging in age from 18 to 27 were taken to hospitals with injuries that were not considered life-threatening, police said. Police said they are investigating whether anyone else was involved in this incident.\n\nWashington\n\nKitsap: The Navy has scrapped a plan to lease local base space to a developer to build a power plant that could feed Kitsap’s electricity grid when outages occur. “The project was determined to not be financially feasible,” said James “Ken” Johnson, a Navy spokesman. The Navy had offered up to 95 acres at Naval Base Kitsap-Bangor of mostly forested lands and up to 10 acres of what are mostly surface parking lots at Naval Base Kitsap-Bremerton for lease. Johnson said the Navy had entertained multiple proposals that led to a potential leasee, but that leasee decided to drop out of contention earlier this year. Running power plants and facilities is nothing new for the Navy in Kitsap, a place where 13 nuclear-powered submarines are homeported along with two aircraft carriers powered by twin nuclear reactors. Naval Base Kitsap-Bremerton is also home to a steam plant that generates heat for buildings at the base and the Puget Sound Naval Shipyard using natural gas. But coinciding with the Navy’s initial proposal in 2020, Puget Sound Energy – owners of most of Kitsap County’s electricity grid – had made its own request for proposals to help make the grid more resilient. Among them is a plan to build a biodiesel-fueled power plant at a former rock quarry at Ueland Tree Farm, and several proposals for battery-fed energy storage in both the West Hills of Bremerton and in Suquamish. The Navy would not comment on any of those specific proposals. But Johnson said Navy officials are “focused on meeting the Navy’s goals for energy efficiency, reliability, and resiliency.”\n\nWest Virginia\n\nCharleston: The deadline has arrived to register to vote in the Nov. 8 General Election. A voter registration form must be in the county clerk’s possession by Tuesday for people who register in person, Secretary of State Mac Warner’s office said. Registration may also be completed by mail, and that must be received or postmarked by Tuesday. Voters may also register online by the close of business of their county clerk’s office. Voters can download a mail-in form, register online or find the county clerk’s contact information at GoVoteWV.com. Warner says anyone who has moved, changed their name since the last election or wants to change party affiliation may update their registration by Tuesday. Warner’s office and county clerks around the state held more than 100 voter registration drives during the month of September. A total of 5,326 people in the state registered last month, Warner said. Absentee voting began Sept. 23. Early in-person voting starts Oct. 26 and continues through Nov. 5.\n\nWisconsin\n\nGreen Bay: A nationwide study ranked Wisconsin No. 1 in mental health. Despite a shortage of therapists and wait times for mental health providers that can stretch up to and beyond six months, the study, conducted by Mental Health America, found the Badger State still had enough high points to top other states when it comes to tackling its residents’ mental health needs. Compared to other states, fewer Wisconsin adults are reporting that their mental health needs are going unmet, more adults are seeking treatment and fewer students are being reported for emotional disturbances with their individual education program. Another possible reason for its elevated status is the fact Wisconsin has invested in the mental health needs of its residents, industry professionals say. The report, published Thursday, covers a range of measures, including adults with any mental illness, youth with major depressive disorder, and those struggling with mental health conditions who couldn’t receive treatment due to workforce shortages or a lack of insurance coverage.\n\nWyoming\n\nJackson: Teton County Emergency Management will be testing its alarms Tuesday, Jackson Hole Daily reports. The county is testing its outdoor warning sirens to ensure they work for emergencies, such as inclement weather, incidents with hazardous materials and wildfire evacuations. “Most people associate outdoor warning sirens with tornadoes,” said Rich Ochs, coordinator for Teton County Emergency Management, in a press release. “Hearing a three-minute siren wail means that you should tune into local radio, All-Hazards Weather Radio, trusted online local media, or your phone for an alert.” According to the news outlet, the test will sound like a few short siren bursts and will go for no longer than one minute at a time, at siren locations in Teton Village, Teton Pines, downtown Jackson, Gregory Lane, Adams Canyon and Hoback Junction. Residents indoors will likely not be able to hear much, as the sirens are not designed to sound inside of buildings.\n\nFrom USA TODAY Network and wire reports", "authors": [], "publish_date": "2022/10/17"}, {"url": "https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/50-states/2020/11/27/winery-testing-gretch-grinch-disinfectant-cubes-news-around-states/115051084/", "title": "Winery testing, 'Gretch the Grinch': News from around our 50 states", "text": "From USA TODAY Network and wire reports\n\nAlabama\n\nBirmingham: Part of the holiday season will be missing in some cities this year as officials cancel Christmas parades because of the coronavirus pandemic. The cities of Birmingham and Anniston called off their parades in recent days as caseloads and hospitalizations increase across the state. The cities of Bessemer, Gadsden and Madison were among those that previously called off their Christmas parades, citing safety concerns related to the virus. Some places are still planning events like tree lightings that residents can watch online, and other places are creating alternative events. Hartselle plans a contest in which residents can compete for prizes by decorating their homes. Tuscaloosa announced a “reverse” parade in which people can stay in their cars and drive past decorated floats in a park, but organizers canceled it, citing low participation.\n\nAlaska\n\nAnchorage: Bars and restaurants in the city will be closed for indoor service, employers must allow people to work from home if possible, and many businesses will be limited to 25% capacity for the month of December as the state’s largest city tries to stem the increase in coronavirus cases, Acting Mayor Austin Quinn-Davidson said Wednesday. The new rules go into effect Tuesday and don’t end until Jan. 1, she said during a teleconference. “Today, we find ourselves in a situation that nobody wants to be in. There are no easy answers, but we must act because continuing on this path is the worst of all bad options,” she said. The director of the Anchorage Health Department, Heather Harris, said the agency “has been waving red flags for weeks as we have experienced record-breaking case counts.”\n\nArizona\n\nPhoenix: With their annual Thanksgiving meal for disadvantaged students canceled because of the coronavirus outbreak, alumni from one local community college held a drive-thru food distribution Tuesday so people could cook their own holiday dinner. The vehicles of 100 students who signed up beforehand lined up in the Phoenix College parking lot. Masked staff and volunteers placed a bag with turkey, mashed potatoes, pie and other fixings in the back of each vehicle. It’s an example of how traditional meals for the disadvantaged have had to be reimagined this year to prevent spread of the virus even as the ranks of the needy have grown. “A lot of the students are focused on trying to figure out what they are going to eat” for Thanksgiving, said Monique Briones, a nursing student helping distribute food. She also signed up for her own family to receive food for a holiday meal donated by the Phoenix College Alumni Association. Briones is living with her boyfriend, their five children and his parents during the pandemic.\n\nArkansas\n\nLittle Rock: The number of people hospitalized with COVID-19 in the state hit another record high Wednesday, crossing the 1,000 mark for the first time since the pandemic began. The state saw an increase of 40 virus hospitalizations to bring the current number to 1,028, Gov. Asa Hutchinson said. That tops Tuesday’s record high of 988 hospitalizations. Arkansas reported 1,965 new cases and 20 more deaths. One in every 243 people in Arkansas tested positive in the past week, according to researchers at Johns Hopkins University. “While we express our thanks across the state in smaller groups than normal years, I am more grateful than ever for the dedication of our health care workers,” Hutchinson said in a statement. “The new hospitalizations today adds to the burden, and let’s all go the extra mile to protect each other.” On Tuesday, the state’s largest school district said it would temporarily switch to virtual learning after the Thanksgiving break because so many teachers were quarantined because of the virus. The 22,000-student Springdale School District said classes will be remote until Dec. 7 because of a shortage of available substitute teachers.\n\nCalifornia\n\nLos Angeles: The state reported a record number of coronavirus cases Wednesday as Los Angeles restaurants prepared to close for three weeks and as firefighters in Silicon Valley were being enlisted to enforce public health rules to try to halt the spread of infections. Cases of COVID-19 have been climbing at an alarming rate for weeks and hit a new high of 18,350 recorded Tuesday, surpassing a previous record of more than 15,000 cases announced Saturday, state officials said. The seven-day average of positive tests has gone from 5.3% to 6.5% in the past week. “We are really, really concerned,” said Dr. Marty Fenstersheib, COVID-19 testing officer for Santa Clara County. “All of the metrics that we have been following, that have done well in previous months, are now going up very steeply. Our positivity rate in our county is rising and especially in our most affected communities.” Nearly all of the state is now under a 10 p.m.-to-5 a.m. curfew and subject to the strictest regulations for businesses to operate, including a ban on indoor dining and limited capacity in stores. But Los Angeles has gone even further. As cases spiked in the past week, it ordered restaurants to stop serving meals after Wednesday night and has been mulling another stay-home order.\n\nColorado\n\nDenver: Gov. Jared Polis warned Tuesday that some restaurant owners who defy or ignore strict state health orders to stem spread of the coronavirus could lose their licenses to operate. Colorado’s restaurant sector has been hit hard during the pandemic, with many forced to close and thousands of workers laid off. In recent days, restaurants in counties designated “red” by the state in a color-coded scheme that gauges increasing COVID-19 infection cases have been forced to halt indoor dining. “Every business in the state of Colorado needs to follow our laws and, whether you agree with it or not, in red counties, not having indoor dining is the law of Colorado,” Polis said. “Any type of business that violates a health order, whether it’s hepatitis, salmonella or COVID … could lose their license to operate.” The Democratic governor’s comments came after several Loveland businesses in Larimer County signed a letter stating that they will continue operating at full indoor capacity even though the county was placed in the “red” restriction category Tuesday. Polis said government financial aid for the restaurant sector is coming – possibly in the form of sales tax breaks – when the Legislature convenes in a special session next week.\n\nConnecticut\n\nHartford: A small number of flagrant violations and concerns about the holiday shopping season prompted Gov. Ned Lamont to impose a steep, new $10,000 fine on businesses that break the state’s coronavirus rules. The new fine was to replace the current $500 maximum penalty beginning at 12:01 a.m. Thursday, the Democratic governor announced Tuesday evening. A small number of restaurants have been cited for essentially operating as bars, which have been ordered closed during the pandemic. The governor said the harsher fine was the result of concerns by municipal leaders, public health officials and people in the business community. He also cited concerns about keeping workers and customers safe during Black Friday and the rest of the holiday shopping season. The state has an array of rules on businesses during the pandemic. Restaurants, for example, are limited to 50% capacity, with a maximum of eight people per table, and must stop inside dining service at 9:30 p.m. Local health directors or other municipal officials can issue the fines with the support of police.\n\nDelaware\n\nDover: State officials are inviting residents to get outside Friday as an alternative to going shopping, especially amid rising coronavirus case numbers. Officials are waiving state park and Brandywine Zoo entry fees on Black Friday as part of the nationwide #OptOutside movement. State parks will open at 8 a.m., with the exception of Fort Delaware State Park, which is closed for the season. The Brandywine Zoo and its new Madagascar Exhibit featuring rare lemurs and radiated tortoises will be open from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. Reservations are required by calling, and members can reserve time at the zoo online. Visitors who are kindergarten age or older must bring face coverings with them to enter a park and wear them when they cannot maintain social distancing from other visitors.\n\nDistrict of Columbia\n\nWashington: As a second wave of the pandemic meets a second blood shortage nationwide, the Red Cross in the D.C. region reported a “grave” scarcity of convalescent plasma, WUSA-TV reports. The critical liquid part of the blood in COVID-19 survivors can be harnessed and used to treat coronavirus patients in intensive care. Blood plasma from coronavirus survivors contains antibodies, which may help trigger immune responses in people severely stricken by the virus. The Red Cross is now testing all blood, platelet and plasma donations for coronavirus antibodies, so if donors didn’t know they once had the virus, their plasma can help patients in dire need of treatment. “The need for convalescent plasma supersedes all the needs that we have right now,” Red Cross spokesperson Regina Boothe Bratton said. The Red Cross is imploring people looking for ways to help over the holidays to visit the organization's blood donation website and schedule an appointment. The organization said it generally experiences a blood shortage between Thanksgiving and New Year’s Day, but COVID-19 has compounded the problem.\n\nFlorida\n\nTampa: A popular waterfront festival has been postponed amid a surge in confirmed coronavirus cases and hospitalizations in the state. The annual parade Gasparilla Pirate Fest that attracts about 200,000 people to Tampa’s downtown waterfront is typically held every January but is now planned for mid-April amid continuing health care concerns. Organizers said they consulted with city leaders and health care providers and decided to postpone the festival until next spring to restrict events that attract large crowds. Meanwhile, the Miami Herald said Miami Beach hotels were experiencing last-minute bookings for the Thanksgiving holiday week that may get them near full occupancy for the first time since they were forced to shut down to curb the spread of coronavirus in March. Other events in the state that attract large crowds in the winter such as Art Basel have already been scrapped. The prestigious December art fair draws collectors, socialites and celebrities from around the world.\n\nGeorgia\n\nAtlanta: As the ravages of the coronavirus forced millions of people out of work, shuttered businesses and shrank the value of retirement accounts, the Dow Jones Industrial Average plunged to a three-year low. But for Sen. David Perdue, R-Ga., the crisis last March signaled something else: a stock buying opportunity. And for the second time in less than two months, Perdue’s timing was impeccable. He avoided a sharp loss and reaped a stunning gain by selling and then buying the same stock: Cardlytics, an Atlanta-based financial technology company on whose board of directors he once served. On Jan. 23, as word spread through Congress that the coronavirus posed a major economic and public health threat, Perdue sold off $1 million to $5 million in Cardlytics stock at $86 a share before it plunged, according to congressional disclosures. Weeks later, in March, after the company’s stock plunged further following an unexpected leadership shake-up and lower-than-forecast earnings, Perdue bought the stock back for $30 a share, investing between $200,000 and $500,000. Those shares have now quadrupled in value, closing at $121 a share Tuesday.\n\nHawaii\n\nLihue: The first coronavirus death on the island of Kauai has been reported. Mayor Derek Kawakami announced in a statement Monday that an elderly resident with no travel history died. COVID-19 has killed 232 others in Hawaii. “It is heartbreaking to report this news especially as the Thanksgiving holiday approaches this week,” Kawakami said. “As a community, we share in this painful loss together and we extend our sincere prayers, love and aloha to the family and loved ones of this individual.” Another Kauai resident died in Arizona earlier this year, The Garden Island reports. Kawakami said Tuesday that he wants to reinstate a requirement that all travelers arriving in his jurisdiction quarantine for 14 days, regardless of whether they have obtained a negative coronavirus test. Kauai had no cases of community spread of the coronavirus for several months starting in July. But it’s had six cases of community spread since Oct. 15, when the state began allowing travelers to bypass the two-week quarantine if they tested negative for the disease 72 hours before arriving. Kawakami asked Gov. David Ige for permission to temporarily opt out of the pre-travel testing program.\n\nIdaho\n\nBoise: Lt. Gov. Janice McGeachin has proposed using millions of dollars in coronavirus relief aid to have additional safety technology including “walk-through disinfectant cubes” installed at the state Capitol in Boise. McGeachin, a Republican, promoted the “very high-tech equipment” manufactured by Xtreme Manufacturing in Las Vegas to reporters Tuesday while criticizing Republican Gov. Brad Little’s coronavirus response, the Idaho Press reports. “A person can walk through a cube and be disinfected from head to toe, including on the bottom of their feet,” she said. But the technology has been widely disputed. The National Institutes of Health published a study in June that found “walk-through sanitation gates” were ineffective and potentially dangerous, noting that the practice violates World Health Organization standards. “Fumigation is meant for inanimate objects and surfaces, and it should never be used on people,” the study said. The proposal calls for spending about $17 million, including $80,000 for two walk-through disinfectant cubes, three mobile units for emergency overflow and staffing for the units.\n\nIllinois\n\nLaSalle: State officials are investigating a coronavirus outbreak at a veterans nursing home in rural Illinois that has infected nearly 200 residents and staff and killed 27 veterans. Gov. J.B. Pritzker’s office and the state’s Department of Veterans Affairs are attempting to determine what caused the outbreak at the state-run LaSalle Veterans Home in LaSalle, about 90 miles southwest of Chicago. The department on Tuesday requested an independent probe into the facility, which was the focus of a state Senate committee virtual hearing on the outbreak. “The tragedy of what has unfolded at the veterans’ home cannot be understated,” said state Sen. Sue Rezin, who represents the district where the home is located. The current outbreak was identified in late October when a staff member and a resident tested positive for the virus. Since the beginning of November, two-thirds of residents and employees have tested positive, according to the Illinois Department of Veterans Affairs. State officials have increased staff testing at the facility, and the governor said an infection control team was sent to the home.\n\nIndiana\n\nWest Lafayette: Purdue University plans to reward its faculty and staff with a $750 bonus for their “heroic work” keeping the West Lafayette campus open amid the coronavirus pandemic, school officials announced Wednesday. The university said more than 15,000 faculty, staff and graduate student staff hired before Sept. 1 will get the money in their checks in December. Part-time staff will get a prorated amount. Purdue President Mitch Daniels said staff in executive-level positions will not get the $750 bonus. Daniels congratulated faculty and staff in a campuswide letter sent Wednesday morning for getting through the in-person portion of the fall semester. He called the bonus an “appreciation award” for their work that kept the campus open during the pandemic. “I admit I was far from certain that even a collection of can-do problem-solvers like ours could pull off that achievement,” Daniels wrote in the letter. “Well, we’re here, and only because of the collective effort we could only imagine in August.”\n\nIowa\n\nDes Moines: The state reported its highest single-day increase in COVID-19 deaths Wednesday, topping the mark set one week prior. The Iowa of Department of Public Health reported another 47 deaths due to COVID-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus. In total, 2,271 people with COVID-19 have died in Iowa, according to the state’s Coronavirus.Iowa.gov website. Another 3,365 coronavirus cases were added to the state’s tally Wednesday. The increases come as Iowa hospitals struggle with the coronavirus surge. On Tuesday, Dr. Tammy Chance, the chairperson of the Iowa Hospital Association, warned that the Iowa hospital region that includes the state’s most populous area has at times in the last week been down to two or three intensive care unit beds as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. The lack of beds and staffing shortages have forced some Iowa hospitals to transfer patients to other facilities, said Kirk Morris, the president of the association. Other doctors said their regions were experiencing similar shortages.\n\nKansas\n\nGreat Bend: Resistance to masks appears to be weakening as the coronavirus surges, straining the capacity of the state’s hospitals. Gov. Laura Kelly’s latest effort to require face coverings took effect Wednesday, although Kansas law still allows the state’s 105 counties to opt out. Most counties did so the first time Kelly tried to require masks in July. But with the average new case numbers more than nine times higher now than then, there appears to be less pushback. The governor told reporters Tuesday that adoption of mask orders by counties had so far been “pretty good,” The Wichita Eagle reports. “I think it’s because people are so much more aware of how serious this is, how widespread it is,” Kelly said. “And it is no longer an urban issue. I mean, it’s clearly from border to border.” In Barton County, commissioners voted Tuesday to unanimously adopt a countywide mask mandate that went into effect immediately. The commission had rejected mandates twice before, instead appealing to the public to do the right thing. Enforcement is an oft-cited concern. “I don’t want to be on the wrong side of history when it goes down and says we did nothing,” Barton County Commissioner Jennifer Schartz said.\n\nKentucky\n\nLouisville: Payments that are part of a federal program to aid those unemployed because of the ongoing pandemic will end this weekend under federal rules, affecting roughly 4,700 Kentuckians, the Kentucky Labor Cabinet said Tuesday. On Monday, the U.S. Department of Labor notified the state agency that the number of people receiving extended benefit unemployment insurance as a percentage of the labor force had fallen below the qualifying threshold for the state to continue dispersing funds under the program. As a result, the state will be barred from such payments for a minimum of 13 weeks. Kentucky’s seasonally adjusted preliminary October unemployment rate was 7.4%, the Kentucky Education and Workforce Development Cabinet announced last week. The preliminary October jobless rate was up nearly 2 percentage points from September. Gov. Andy Beshear said there was no recourse to reverse the federal agency’s decision and acknowledged that Kentucky families are hurting financially because of the pandemic. After Saturday, no new applications will be accepted, and claimants who have yet to exhaust all benefits will not receive the balance of their funds.\n\nLouisiana\n\nShreveport: Caddo Parish is weighing whether to pay $500 to families who have been affected by the coronavirus pandemic. Legislation was introduced Nov. 19 by Caddo Parish Commissioner Stormy Gage-Watts at a parish council meeting that would pay $500 to 500 eligible families. Families would have to apply and meet income requirements, give proof of income, and provide a statement of how the pandemic has affected their family’s finances. The money, which would be available on a first-come basis, would come from money already set aside for emergency disaster assistance. “Just a couple of years ago, we were able to be able to provide allocations for tornado victims, so we did that through a special fund, which is an emergency ordinance, and this is the same thing. It’s no different,” Gage-Watts told KTBS. The station said there will be a public hearing on the issue Dec. 3.\n\nMaine\n\nGuilford: A local medical supplies manufacturer has been awarded more than $11 million from the federal government to produce millions of additional testing swabs. Puritan Medical Products of Guilford received the money through the federal Paycheck Protection Program and Health Care Enhancement Act, Republican U.S. Sen. Susan Collins said Monday. The company will increase its production of swabs by 3 million per month, Collins said. Puritan has played a major role in the nation’s efforts to conduct enough testing to help corral the coronavirus pandemic. The White House announced in June that the federal government was providing more than $75 million for Puritan to double its production to 40 million swabs per month. The company’s total production of flock tip swabs and foam swabs is at least 90 million per month now, Collins said.\n\nMaryland\n\nAnnapolis: “Answer the call” and “download the COVID Alert app” have joined the growing list of pandemic precautions as the Maryland Health Department battles a pandemic surge this holiday season. Dr. Katherine Feldman, director of the Maryland Department of Health’s contact tracing unit, told Capital News Service it was important for Marylanders to enable the MD COVID Alert exposure notification app, answer calls from contact tracers, wear a mask, socially distance and continue to take other protective measures to “reduce transmission and have all of us stay safe and healthy.” MD COVID Alert is a passive system that users enable on their iPhone or download to their Android phone in order to receive notifications when they have come in close proximity to another user who may have tested positive for the coronavirus. The state Department of Health launched the system Nov. 10 and reported over 1 million Marylanders, about 17% of the state’s population, downloaded the app within the first week. Gov. Larry Hogan said at a press conference last week that while the number of state contact tracers has been “ramped up,” there are other challenges to address. “Our problem is that so many people refuse to give the information,” he said.\n\nMassachusetts\n\nBoston: The Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority is doing its part to control the spread of COVID-19 by handing out free face coverings at several subway stations and trolley stops. The service that launched Monday is backed by athletic footwear company New Balance, which donated 100,000 masks to the MBTA. MBTA commuters have been required to wear face coverings since early May. Transit police can fine people not wearing a mask up to $300. “Wearing a face covering is one of the most effective ways to combat the virus,” MBTA General Manager Steve Poftak said in a statement. “We ask that riders do their part by wearing face coverings while within the MBTA system and distancing while on public transit.” The masks will be offered during peak morning and evening commute times at the Charles/MGH, Downtown Crossing, Forest Hills, Hynes Convention Center, Maverick, Orient Heights, Park Street and Quincy Center stations.\n\nMichigan\n\nTrenton: Restaurant owner Jeremy Syrocki hit frustration overload with the latest restaurant restrictions shutting down indoor dining for the second time this year, and he’s using an inflatable Grinch to show how he feels. New rules from the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services came in an announcement Nov. 15 by Gov. Gretchen Whitmer and took effect last Wednesday. Syrocki decided to take a stand and do something about it. While shopping for portable patio heaters, he spotted an inflatable of the main character in the Dr. Seuss classic “How the Grinch Stole Christmas.” The Grinch reminded Syrocki of Whitmer, he said. The 10-foot-high creature now stands on Truago’s patio in downtown Trenton – one of Syrocki’s three downriver restaurants. The inflatable has a sign hanging from its neck that reads “Gretch the Grinch.” Syrocki also added red lipstick to the Grinch. In a Facebook post the morning after the Grinch went up, Syrocki wrote that the stunt is about getting the attention of the governor. He said he voted for Whitmer but now believes he shouldn’t have.\n\nMinnesota\n\nMinneapolis: A surge in COVID-19 cases has led to critical staffing shortages at some nursing homes and assisted living facilities, forcing the state to send the National Guard to help out and ask all state employees to consider volunteering in facilities. New data from the Minnesota Department of Health shows 90% of the state’s nursing homes and 58% of assisted living facilities have active virus outbreaks. The data includes more than 70 senior care homes that didn’t have any coronavirus-infected residents one month ago, the Star Tribune reports. Minnesota Health Commissioner Jan Malcolm said Tuesday that 47 long-term care facilities are in “a crisis staffing situation” and are receiving active support from the state, including help from federal health nurses. Gov. Tim Walz’s administration has taken the unusual step of emailing all state employees and asking them to consider volunteering for two-week stints in long-term care facilities, particularly in greater Minnesota. The email, which was sent to the heads of all state agencies, says no prior experience is required, and the state would cover travel and temporary housing costs.\n\nMississippi\n\nJackson: Gov. Tate Reeves announced Tuesday that he is expanding his mask mandate to cover half of the state’s 82 counties. Reeves had previously placed under the mandate 22 counties with the highest number of new cases of coronavirus. “It’s clear we are in the middle of our second surge,” Reeves said during a briefing at which he announced he was adding 19 counties to that list. Dr. LouAnn Woodward, vice chancellor and dean of the University of Mississippi Medical Center’s School of Medicine, had called on the governor Monday to reinstitute a statewide mask mandate. She said last week that no intensive care unit beds were available at the hospital, Mississippi’s only level-one trauma center. “I think we have reasonable evidence to believe that the county-by-county approach is not working,” she said Monday. Meanwhile, Mississippi’s top health official said this week that he is exhausted trying to convince people in the state to take the coronavirus seriously and follow public health guidelines. “It’s just going nowhere,” Dr. Thomas Dobbs, Mississippi’s state health officer, said Monday during a meeting with members of the state Senate. “We have chosen, very clearly, to prioritize social events over disease transmission.”\n\nMissouri\n\nKansas City: The state’s two largest metropolitan areas are cracking down on restaurants that violate rules designed to stem the spread of the coronavirus. Kansas City’s liquor control authorities found two dozen bars and restaurants in violation of the city’s new COVID-19 restrictions after a weekend sweep of 185 establishments. The city’s Department of Regulated Industries, which governs liquor licenses, used to rely primarily on complaints to enforce restrictions. But as the latest set of rules issued by Mayor Quinton Lucas took effect Friday – limiting bars and restaurants to 50% capacity and a closing time of 10 p.m. – the city became more proactive. Meanwhile, the St. Louis County Department of Public Health sent certified letters to three dozen bars and businesses ordering them to cease indoor service or face lawsuits or criminal charges. Eleven of those establishments had already received a second notice from the county, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reports. Many of the restaurants were among the same establishments that are suing the county seeking to block its suspension of indoor dining.\n\nMontana\n\nHelena: Schools will receive nearly $13 million in additional coronavirus relief funds before Dec. 30, Gov. Steve Bullock announced Wednesday. Public and private schools were allowed to request additional funding in October after Bullock directed $75 million in July from the state’s coronavirus relief funds to K-12 schools. More than 180 schools were approved for additional funding. The new funding includes about $5.7 million in unspent funding from the original $75 million allocated to schools and about $7.2 million in newly allocated funds. Federal coronavirus relief funds must be spent by the end of December, and Bullock called on Congress to pass additional school financing relief for 2021. “While this additional funding will serve our schools with continued needs through the end of this year, our schools head into the new year empty handed,” Bullock, a Democrat, said in a statement.\n\nNebraska\n\nOmaha: A meatpacking plant has been accused in a lawsuit of failing to take adequate precautions to protect workers from the coronavirus. The American Civil Liberties Union filed the federal lawsuit Monday against Noah’s Ark Processors in Hastings, Nebraska. The suit said the plant has made no effort to spread workers out to limit the spread of the virus, and it fails to promptly replace workers’ masks when they become soiled with blood and sweat. The plaintiffs include several former workers at the plant. “Noah’s Ark has shown a shocking indifference to its employees and the community by failing to take common-sense steps to protect them from the spread of COVID-19,” ACLU attorney Spencer Amdur said. Company officials declined to comment on the lawsuit Monday. The meatpacking industry has been hit hard by the coronavirus pandemic because workers stand shoulder-to-shoulder as they toil inside the plants and often crowd together in locker rooms and on breaks. The ACLU lawsuit said managers at Noah’s ark pressured people to continue working even when they were sick and showing symptoms of COVID-19.\n\nNevada\n\nReno: The coronavirus is spreading so fast in the state that one person is diagnosed with it every minute, and someone is dying from it every two hours, state health officials said Wednesday. Nearly half of the state’s 142,239 total cases since the start of the pandemic in March have occurred since September – fully one-fourth of those in the month of November and 10% in just the past seven days, according to the Nevada Department of Health and Human Services. “We have COVID-19 exploding in our community. It is spreading rapidly,” Washoe County Health District Officer Kevin Dick told reporters in Reno. “We have exponential growth going on.” While the majority of the state’s cases and 2,071 total deaths have been reported in Clark County – the most populous county that includes Las Vegas – the Reno-Sparks area in Washoe County has been hit the hardest in recent weeks.\n\nNew Hampshire\n\nConcord: State legislators are working on a bill to offer price protections for adult vaccines, such as those pending for COVID-19. Rep. Jerry Knirk, a Democrat from Freedom, told WMUR-TV that by expanding a New Hampshire nonprofit association that pools insurance company money to buy vaccine doses in bulk, the savings to the state and patients could be immense. The process is already done in New Hampshire for pediatric vaccines, he said. The bill would expand the New Hampshire Vaccine Association, which purchases vaccines for children under 19, to all adults. “In the pediatric program, we purchase about $38 million worth of vaccines for about $28 million,” Knirk said. “The savings is roughly about 26%. For the adults, it is estimated it should be very similar in terms of the degree of savings.” The federal government is expected to pay for a COVID-19 vaccination, but the bill could come in handy if gaps in funding arise next year or if suddenly states find themselves in the position of trying to obtain more vaccine.\n\nNew Jersey\n\nTrenton: With COVID-19 cases rising at an “alarming rate,” Gov. Phil Murphy on Wednesday abandoned the formula to determine which out-of-state travelers should quarantine once they reach New Jersey. Instead, Murphy said anyone coming into the Garden State from beyond the four-state region of Connecticut, Delaware, New York and Pennsylvania should isolate for 14 days. “Given the increased risk of spreading COVID-19 for both residents who travel outside the state and for visitors into the state, New Jersey continues to strongly discourage all non-essential interstate travel at this time,” Murphy said in a statement. His announcement came on one of the busiest traveling days of the year. About 50 million people were expected to travel in the United States for Thanksgiving, according to AAA. That would be a decline from past years, but federal and state officials, including Murphy, have urged people to stay home this year and keep their celebrations to immediate family members and fewer than 10 people to avoid spreading the virus.\n\nNew Mexico\n\nSanta Fe: State lawmakers on Tuesday passed a bipartisan coronavirus relief bill that will deliver a one-time $1,200 check to all types of unemployed workers and up to $50,000 for certain businesses. The bill also provides smaller stimulus checks to immigrants without legal status in the country and dependents, as well as additional funds for food banks, virus testing and contact tracing efforts. Republican lawmakers were unsuccessful in their efforts to provide aid for low-income essential workers. Democrats said federal guidelines would prevent such spending, and they promised to find ways during the regular session in January to address the issue. Most of the proposed spending will be made possible by federal relief funding previously assigned to New Mexico, including about $319 million in unspent funds that were expected to expire soon. An additional $10 million in state general funds was allocated for the testing and tracing efforts.\n\nNew York\n\nNew York: City Winery, an upscale chain, is trying a novel approach to indoor dining during a pandemic: Two nights a week, all patrons and staffers at its Manhattan location have to take a rapid virus test on-site and get an all-clear before coming in. Other nights unfold without testing but with precautions including temperature checks and spaced-out tables. Costing diners $50 per person on top of their tabs, it’s an elite experiment – complete with a free glass of sparkling wine – and health experts caution that a test isn’t a failsafe. So does City Winery CEO Michael Dorf, but he thinks the idea is worth trying as restaurants try to get through a year of shutdowns and social distancing. With winter looming over New York eateries’ outdoor-dining lifeline, “how do we get people to dine inside, feel comfortable, feel as safe as possible so that they can spend money in our restaurant, and our staff can feel comfortable?” asked Dorf, who said City Winery’s business is down 85% compared to 2019. A hotel with a rooftop lounge and restaurant in Queens’ hip Long Island City neighborhood briefly tried a similar testing program this summer. But it’s not clear how many other restaurants might follow suit.\n\nNorth Carolina\n\nRaleigh: Some of the state’s colleges plan to require students to show a negative coronavirus test in order to return to campus after their winter break. At the University of North Carolina System Board of Governors meeting last week, President Peter Hans said schools will do reentry testing or require students to show a negative test before they can return for the spring semester. None of the universities in the UNC System required students or employees to be tested for the virus before coming to campus in the fall. While many offered ongoing surveillance testing throughout the semester, it was mostly voluntary. UNC-Chapel Hill, N.C. State University and East Carolina University each had to send students home, close dorms and move classes online because of spikes in coronavirus cases in August. Now, each is requiring students to get tested for the coronavirus at the start of the spring semester.\n\nNorth Dakota\n\nFargo: The head of the largest hospital in the city is pleading for people to wear masks, warning that not following COVID-19 safety measures could have other consequences aside from spreading the coronavirus during the holiday season. Sanford Fargo President and CEO Bryan Nermoe said the failure of people to follow COVID-19 protocols could force some patients who need treatment for ailments other than the virus to be put on waiting lists or sent to facilities hundreds of miles away. In Fargo alone, the city’s three hospitals were down to four staffed intensive care unit beds and 19 staffed inpatient beds, according to state data compiled Tuesday. That included no ICU beds and 17 regular beds at Sanford, which recently opened 14 new patient rooms at its main facility in southwest Fargo. Nermoe is asking people to keep front-line caregivers in mind when deciding whether to wear masks, wash hands, maintain social distancing and avoid large gatherings. “On behalf of them, mask up,” Nermoe said. “Do it for them because they are really going above and beyond, 24/7, 365, of really trying to meet the needs of people in our region.”\n\nOhio\n\nColumbus: Seven of the state’s biggest counties on Wednesday urged residents to stay home and follow guidelines on social gatherings and wearing masks. The counties said in a joint statement that they want people only to leave home for work, school, medical appointments or buying essential items such as groceries. “Cases and hospital admissions are at the highest levels we have seen during this pandemic, by far. These county health advisories reflect the urgent need for all of us to protect ourselves and our families to stop the spread of this virus,” said Denise Driehaus, president of the Hamilton County Board of Commissioners. The counties are Franklin, Cuyahoga, Hamilton, Summit, Montgomery, Lucas and Mahoning. Cases in Ohio continue to spike. The state’s seven-day rolling average of daily new cases has risen over the past two weeks from 5,049 new cases per day Nov. 10 to 8,495 new cases per day Tuesday, according to an Associated Press analysis of data provided by the COVID Tracking Project.\n\nOklahoma\n\nOklahoma City: The Oklahoma State Department of Health announced Wednesday that public schools will be allowed to offer in-school quarantines for students exposed to the coronavirus. Schools in Mustang became the first in the state to adopt the policy, the department said. “In the past, if a student had tested positive for COVID-19, any students who interacted with the case – up to the entire class – would have been required to move to distance learning for 14 days,” said Dr. Jared Taylor, Interim State Epidemiologist. “An in-school quarantine option is the best way to keep our kids in school and prevent them from falling behind.” Mustang Superintendent Charles Bradley said in a statement that the policy allows the suburban Oklahoma City district to avoid moving entirely to online teaching. Students who are quarantined will be allowed to go to school to take part in virtual classes but kept out of individual classrooms in buildings such as gyms or an auditorium, where they would be socially distanced and must wear masks. The policy will be in effect from Nov. 30 through Dec. 23.\n\nOregon\n\nSalem: Bars and restaurants can reopen for limited outdoor service next week, but many restrictions will remain in place until a vaccine against the coronavirus is widely available, Gov. Kate Brown said on Wednesday. She pleaded with Oregonians to stay safe during the holidays and protect others by not ignoring safety protocols, like wearing masks and limiting personal contacts. Meanwhile, the rate of infections continue to skyrocket. A total of 8,687 new daily cases occurred last week, a 34% increase over the previous record-high week. Weekly hospitalizations rose to a record 366, a 26% increase. The revamped restrictions take effect when the current two-week “freeze” expires Dec. 3. Currently, only takeout restaurant service is allowed. The restaurant industry pushed hard against the restrictions, as several eateries closed for good, and others were at risk of doing so. Asked if at a virtual news conference if she was bending to industry pressure, Brown said: “I’m in the business, frankly, of saving lives and also preserving livelihoods.”\n\nPennsylvania\n\nHarrisburg: Cellphones across the state received an alert Wednesday afternoon notifying them of a growing COVID-19 emergency. The alert was shared on the day Pennsylvania surpassed 10,000 coronavirus deaths. More than 6,700 new cases were announced Wednesday, and 3,897 hospitalizations were reported. Of those people hospitalized, 895 were in intensive care units. “In PA, COVID-19 rates are rising & hospitals could soon be at capacity. Stay home if possible,” the phone alert said. “If you must go out, maintain social distance, wear a mask, wash your hands for 20 seconds. Stay up to date on the spread of COVID in your community so you can protect your loved ones with the COVID Alert PA app.” The alert was sent by the Pennsylvania Emergency Management Agency through the national Wireless Emergency Alert system. Wednesday was the first time Pennsylvania used that system to share a message about COVID-19, and it reached phones about a half-hour before bars and restaurants were required to stop serving alcohol on what is typically the biggest drinking night of the year.\n\nRhode Island\n\nProvidence: The state will provide an additional $100 million in relief to businesses and residents expected to suffer during a two-week period of new restrictions starting Monday meant to control the current spread of the coronavirus, Gov. Gina Raimondo said Wednesday. Half of the federal stimulus money will be available for businesses that must close or will be severely limited during that period, the Democratic governor said at a news conference. Raimondo said she wants businesses to use the money to continue to pay employees during the two-week pause. “The program that we have developed is meant to ensure that companies who are being put out of business or severely limited by the pause can get a check in their bank account quickly to help make up for the lost revenue of these two weeks,” she said. The other $50 million will go to provide an additional $400 to Rhode Islanders already collecting unemployment insurance benefits. She also reminded state residents who are in the U.S. illegally that they can apply for $400 debit cards through Dorcas International, a nonprofit that provides services to immigrants and refugees.\n\nSouth Carolina\n\nColumbia: University of South Carolina President Bob Caslen said Wednesday that he has tested positive for the coronavirus. Caslen said he tested positive Tuesday evening and is isolating at home, according to a news release, which added that he is asymptomatic. The test was administered through the university, which offers saliva-based and nasal swab testing to students, faculty and staff. “My diagnosis reinforces the need for everyone to get COVID tested regularly to protect yourself and your loved ones,” Caslen said in a statement. He had announced earlier this week that the university would institute monthly mandatory testing for students, faculty and staff who work on campus or are enrolled in at least one face-to-face or hybrid class. Those living, learning or working on the Columbia campus will also have to show proof of testing before returning to school in the spring. After reports of large crowds of students at Columbia bars, Caslen visited some establishments on Halloween night to see the conditions himself, WACH-TV reports. He also stopped by a neighborhood where thousands of students had gathered at an outdoor party earlier in the fall.\n\nSouth Dakota\n\nSioux Falls: The head of one of the largest regional health systems in the Midwest was replaced Tuesday, less than a week after telling employees he had recovered from COVID-19 and was not wearing a mask around the office. Sanford Health said in a release that it has “mutually agreed to part ways” with longtime CEO Kelby Krabbenhoft, who took over in 1996 and helped expand the organization from a community hospital into what is billed as the nation’s largest rural nonprofit health system. Krabbenhoft left the executive position after telling employees in an email that he believes he’s now immune to COVID-19 for “at least seven months and perhaps years to come” and isn’t a threat to transmit it to anyone. He said wearing a mask would be merely for show. Other Sanford executives tried to distance themselves from the comments. Sanford Health, based in Sioux Falls, has 46 hospitals and more than 200 clinics concentrated in South Dakota, North Dakota, Minnesota and Iowa. It employs about 50,000 people. The Dakotas have for weeks had the country’s worst spread rates of the coronavirus, according to the COVID Tracking Project.\n\nTennessee\n\nNashville: Gov. Bill Lee said Tuesday that COVID-19 vaccines will be optional in the state’s K-12 public schools, once they become available. The Republican said at a news conference that vaccines will be very important for Tennessee to “ultimately really be able to handle” the virus. But he said he doesn’t foresee COVID-19 mandates for school districts in Tennessee. “Vaccines are a choice, and people have the choice and will have the choice in this state as to whether or not they should take that vaccine,” Lee said. “That will be our strategy, and that is what we think will happen all across the state.” The comment comes as the state and the country look toward initial, limited doses of vaccine that could arrive in the next few weeks, amid a surge in the coronavirus that is increasingly straining hospital systems. In Tennessee, the first doses, likely through Pfizer, could arrive around Dec. 15, with the initial Moderna vaccines expected a week later, said state Health Commissioner Lisa Piercey.\n\nTexas\n\nHouston: The value of oil fields in West Texas has plummeted due to the coronavirus pandemic, which has caused the demand for crude to go down. Eli Huffman, a land broker and attorney at Houston-based Lone Star Production Co., said he has seen land prices fall below $1,000 an acre for property that used to be worth more than $10,000 an acre. “When (oil) prices are too low, no one is buying land,” Huffman said. “Everybody is risk-averse at the moment.” The average price of U.S. shale acreage has fallen by more than 70% in two years – from $17,000 per acre in 2018 to $5,000 per acre in 2020, according to Norwegian energy research firm Rystad. Despite that, the prices of some shale plays has held up, the Houston Chronicle reports. The Permian-Delaware basin is still valued at $30,000 per acre, and the Midland basin is valued at $17,000 an acre, Rystad said. But prices for devalued oil and gas lands will not be able to bounce back as quickly if the pandemic worsens and lockdowns keep pressure on demand for petroleum.\n\nUtah\n\nSt. George: Dixie State University said testing will be encouraged but not mandatory despite state health orders mandating college students get tested weekly for the coronavirus. “The truth is we don’t have enough tests to even test everyone,” said Jordon Sharp, vice president of marketing and communication at Dixie State. “Now, if that changes, then then we’ll see what happens.” Republican Gov. Gary Herbert issued health orders earlier this month requiring that college students get weekly COVID-19 tests starting no later than Jan. 1, KUER-FM reports. Sharp said the university received 2,000 kits, which it hoped to administer to students before Thanksgiving break, but that it is unlikely to happen because there are not enough tests to give to its 12,000 students. “There’s just really no process in place because we don’t have enough tests,” Sharp said. “So we’ll begin testing any student that would like (one).” Herbert said the goal is to screen 250,000 students a week at all the colleges and universities in the state, but the institutions are waiting for more equipment from the federal government.\n\nVermont\n\nMontpelier: A school district in Orange County is concerned about families not complying with quarantine rules after a cluster of coronavirus cases turned up in the district that serves Randolph, Braintree and Brookfield. The Orange Southwest School District has moved to remote learning but is encountering apathy from some people contacted during contact tracing, WCAX-TV reports. Superintendent Layne Millington estimates about a third of the families that were called discounted concerns about possible exposure or exposing others to the virus that causes COVID-19. “ ‘Didn’t care’ is probably a good expression for a lot of them,” Millington told WCAX-TV. “And then we had at least one family that had positive cases that said they were going to be noncompliant with the quarantine.” Gov. Phil Scott has said the state can impose penalties for people unwilling to comply with contact tracing requirements, but he’s reluctant to do that. “We don’t want to use our limited resources in public safety to go after people,” he said. “We’re asking people to tell the truth to protect others. I don’t think it’s tattling on anyone.”\n\nVirginia\n\nVerona: Recent accounts from inmates at Middle River Regional Jail have shed light on the growing threat of COVID-19, as inmates now find themselves bunking with the pandemic. Four nurses, 25 officers and 15 inmates had tested positive for the coronavirus as of Tuesday. A number of people are still quarantining at home, waiting for their test results, according to a press release from MRRJ. While officers and nurses have the option to avoid the crowd, the inmates don’t get that luxury. MRRJ conducted a spot test only on two housing units and people who showed symptoms. Kandi Harner, 32, tested positive and was told of the results Tuesday. She had been working a laundry job in the jail and said she was sent back to her pod after she suffered from nausea, a sore chest and an excruciating headache. Her pod consists of 35 women, 10 of whom tested positive. Harner said none of the 10 women were removed from the pod. “They still haven’t done anything for us or changed anything, short of giving us a mask,” Harner said by phone from the jail Tuesday. “This morning they tried to send me to work again, but I refused to go because I’m feeling so bad.”\n\nWashington\n\nSeattle: A new report shows people infected with the coronavirus in the state’s most populous county in recent weeks have been mostly exposed in homes, during social activities and gatherings, and in workplaces. Instead of a few “hot spots,” the report shows the risk of exposure is now widespread throughout King County as cases have increased in the past two months. Public Health – Seattle & King County released the report on outbreaks and exposure settings Wednesday showing where people most frequently reported being exposed. Cases related to social activities and out-of-state travel have increased over the course of the pandemic, while cases associated with long-term care and other health care facilities have decreased in the county, according to the report. It also noted differences in potential sources of exposure by race and ethnicity, geography and age. In many communities of color, for example, particularly in south King County, workplaces are more frequently reported as possible exposure sites, the report said, whereas in the north Seattle and suburban Shoreline area, the most common exposure settings are social gatherings.\n\nWest Virginia\n\nCharleston: Gov. Jim Justice blasted critics of his mask mandate Wednesday, saying he would not follow the lead of other Republican governors rejecting the advice of public health experts. “I don’t want to be South Dakota,” Justice said at a news conference. He then played a news clip from the state, where Gov. Kristi Noem has refused to issue a mask mandate, reporting that South Dakota has the most deaths per capita linked to COVID-19 in the world. There are 13 states currently without a statewide mask mandate in effect, all led by Republican governors. “I know that we are a strong-willed people in West Virginia, and we have our rights, and no one is trying to infringe on your rights in any way,” Justice said, a reference to some conservatives in the state who criticize his pandemic executive orders. Justice has vocally defended mask-wearing and recently tightened a mandate to wear one indoors when in public at all times, as cases have skyrocketed in rural enclaves. He has resisted more stringent lockdown measures and championed for schools to stay open where outbreaks are less severe.\n\nWisconsin\n\nMadison: The number of confirmed COVID-19 infections in the state continued to tick downward Wednesday, a rare bit of good news for health officials as they struggle to contain the deadly disease. The state Department of Health Services reported 5,469 confirmed coronavirus cases Wednesday. The number of confirmed cases has now declined for five days, an encouraging sign after the state saw a record-high 7,989 cases Nov. 18. What’s more, the seven-day average of positive tests was 28.3% as of Tuesday, continuing a downward trend from a record-high 36.6% on Nov. 11. But the disease is still running rampant across the state. According to DHS, the total number of confirmed infections stood at 369,442 as of Wednesday. The disease was a factor in 63 more deaths, bringing the death toll to 3,178, according to the department. Wisconsin remains sixth in the nation in per-capita infections, according to Johns Hopkins University. And any progress against the disease appears fleeting. Health officials are bracing for another surge in infections and deaths stemming from Thanksgiving gatherings.\n\nWyoming\n\nCasper: Officials in northern Wyoming have voted to remove Dr. Ed Zimmerman from his position as Washakie County health officer, a decision Zimmerman believes is in response to his implementing a mask mandate. Washakie County Commission Chair Fred Frandson said Tuesday that Zimmerman’s departure was not a result of the local mask mandate but said he could not discuss why he was removed because the county does not publicly discuss personnel matters, The Casper Star-Tribune reports. Zimmerman said there were several health officials who were worried they could lose their jobs by implementing mask mandates. “It had to do with the health order in some way,” Zimmerman said of losing his job. Zimmerman said he met with the county’s three commissioners Nov. 17 to discuss the forthcoming mandate and said the commissioners “were really, really not happy with me” about the decision. Zimmerman said he then received a call on Monday from Frandson informing him that his contract was terminated and that all his duties would end immediately.\n\nFrom USA TODAY Network and wire reports", "authors": [], "publish_date": "2020/11/27"}, {"url": "https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/local/2019/10/29/haunted-places-kentucky-and-indiana-see-map-ghost-story-sites/2496300001/", "title": "300+ haunted places in Kentucky, Indiana: Waverly Hills, Seelbach", "text": "Eastern Cemetery is haunted by some of its dead who are angry the cemetery is in such bad shape.\n\nHot Rod Hill hosts the ghosts of a tragic prom couple\n\nWaverly Sanitorium: You can check out, but you can never leave\n\nLOUISVILLE, Ky. — Halloween is the perfect time to visit haunted houses, spooky theme parks and ghostly attractions.\n\nSure, a trip to the Baxter Avenue Morgue or The Haunted Hotel can be scary fun, but what about those really haunted places — cemeteries with legends of ghost visits, abandoned hospitals with stories of tragic deaths.\n\nThe Courier Journal assembled a map of hundreds of places in Kentucky and Southern Indiana with reports of paranormal activity, as collected by the Shadowlands Haunted Places Index.\n\nWe also gathered up some history and a few legends surrounding some of Louisville's eeriest locations, you know, just in case.\n\nSo, if you want to find out if these ghost stories are real, check them out for yourself.\n\nWe dare you.\n\nEastern Cemetery's angry spirits\n\nEastern Cemetery on Baxter Avenue is said to be haunted by some of its dead who are angry the cemetery is in such bad shape. It has endured severe overcrowding ⁠— cemetery ownership even began to reuse graves at one point ⁠— and general neglect over the years.\n\nGravestones date back to the 1700s, and there could be any number of people buried at Eastern Cemetery with reason for vengeance, including whoever is under one crumbling gravestone covered in dead grass and leaves, or the people near a rotting pumpkin strewn across the sidewalk.\n\nAccording to Louisville Ghost Hunters Society, Eastern Cemetery Corp. opened the first crematorium in Louisville in the early 1930s in what is now an apartment building. There is supposedly a ghost of a woman that takes care of the graveyard's babies, who have a special section in the back.\n\nYou may like:This Louisville store has serving up Halloween scares for 99 years\n\nMitchell Hill Road's tragic prom couple\n\nAt the top of Mitchell Hill Road is a cemetery, and legend says buried there is a girl who died at the bottom of the hill in a car crash in the 1940s when she and her boyfriend were on their way to prom.\n\nApparently, some people have reported seeing the girl on top of the hill wearing her prom dress, wandering through the cemetery or walking along the road.\n\nThe stretch of the road where the accident supposedly happened is known as \"Hot Rod Haven\" because it was a popular, dangerous place for teenagers to race their cars in the mid-20th century.\n\nAccording to Keith Age, director of the Louisville Ghost Hunters Society, county records show an accident similar to the one described in the legend did occur on Sept. 23, 1946, when Roy Clarke and Sarah Mitchell were on their way to a school dance.\n\nHowever, a search of an online archive of the graves at Mitchell Hill Cemetery did not yield any gravestones with the name Roy Clarke. Two women named Sarah Mitchell have gravestones at the cemetery, but neither died at an unusually early age.\n\nMore:Your guide to 50+ best things to do in Louisville and Kentucky\n\nSeelbach Hotel's disembodied spooks\n\nThe Seelbach Hotel was built in the early 20th century, opening in 1905. According to the hotel's website, it began as the dream of Bavarian brothers Otto and Louis Seelbach, who came to Louisville in 1869 to learn the hotel business.\n\nDuring its 100-plus years downtown, the Seelbach has had many guests report strange sounds and activity during their stays.\n\nThere have been reports of televisions turning on at a loud volume at around 4 a.m., as well as the sound of running footsteps on wooden floors, even though the halls are now carpeted.\n\nSome guests have said they heard disembodied voices or felt cold patches throughout the hotel.\n\nThe ghostly Waverly Hills Sanatorium\n\nA list of haunted places in Louisville wouldn't be complete without mention of Waverly Hills Sanatorium.\n\nWaverly Hills in southwestern Louisville opened in 1910 as a two-story hospital to accommodate Louisville patients struck by a tuberculosis outbreak, according to Waverly Hills Historical Society. It eventually expanded to a new five-story building, which could hold more patients and opened in 1926.\n\nBefore the discovery of an antibiotic that treated and cured tuberculosis, a diagnosis of the disease was more or less a death sentence. The hospital was its own community set apart from the rest of Louisville to avoid contaminating the healthy population — it had its own post office and water treatment facility, and it grew and raised its own food.\n\n\"Once you went to Waverly Hills, you became a permanent resident,\" the historical society states on its website.\n\nThe tuberculosis hospital closed in 1961 and reopened in 1962 as WoodHaven Medical Services, a geriatric facility the state closed down in 1981.\n\nAfter it closed, Waverly Hills quickly gained a reputation for being haunted. It was purchased in 2001 by paranormal enthusiasts Charles and Tina Mattingly, and many volunteers working on the building's restoration have reported hearing ghostly sounds and slamming doors, seeing apparitions in doorways and being struck by invisible hands.\n\nToday, Waverly Hills attracts tourists from around the country with its paranormal and historical guided tours. It also allows private paranormal groups to host investigations of the facility, many of whom claim to have experienced inexplicable paranormal activity during their visits.\n\nMore:Explore Louisville's secret underground tunnels and the creepy stories they tell\n\n300+ haunted places in Kentucky and Indiana\n\nWant more? Here are all the ghost stories submitted to Shadowlands Haunted Places Index for Kentucky and Southern Indiana.\n\nRead it at your own risk.\n\nAlexandria, Ky. Witch Hill\n\nThere is a tree in the middle of the road in Wilder where 3 witches were supposedly hung, and there is a curse on the tree to whomever tries to cut it down or spits on it. I have been to this place many times, and taken pictures, and many times even though it was a clear night, the pictures have come back covered in white blotches. You will find many out of the ordinary happenings on the way out to the tree. - September 2004 update /correction: It has recently been cut down and moved to the church parking lot at the top of the road. The three humps were also left off the story. There are three evenly spaced humps right before the bend the tree was on. These are the graves of the witches. The stories of distorted pictures are true though.\n\nAnnville, Ky. Hwy 577\n\nOff Hwy 30 on Hwy 577 in Annville in Jackson county at night during a full moon you can see a glowing grave late at night. You can only see it from the road. When you go to the graveyard it disappears.\n\nAshland, Ky. Paramount Art Center\n\nIt is said that during some early renovation work on the Paramount Theatre, a death occurred there, and the man's ghost has forever since haunted the Paramount. In the early 1940s, four construction workers from Boyd Theater Company in Cincinnati, Ohio were working on a project inside the auditorium. It is reported that all of them had gone to lunch except for one man, a guy named Joe. When the other three returned, they found Joe hanging from the curtain rigging, dead. And since then, sounds have been heard, things have gone missing, cold drafts have been felt, and some folks even claim to have seen the image of a man appear on occasion. However, he is, by all means, a \"good ghost\" - one who seems to look out for the benefit of the theatre and its occupants. When Billy Ray Cyrus was here filming his video for \"Achy Breaky Heart,\" he was told about the legend of Paramount Joe. Between breaks, Billy Ray would talk to Joe, laughing and joking with him, sometimes even asking for his help. It is customary to get 8 x 10 photographs signed by each performer that appears at the Paramount and then hang the photo on the 'Wall of Fame' in the box office. Billy Ray personally autographed large color posters to each of the female employees working here at the time - and one with a personal inscription to Paramount Joe, whom he now had a fondness for. Each lady put her poster near her desk and Joe's was hung in the box office, near all the other performers. As time passed and the walls in the box office became too full of 8x10’s signed by other performers, the executive director felt that some of the pictures and posters needed to come down. Since there were so many of Billy Ray, she asked the women to remove their posters since they were all so similar. Nobody wanted to take their personally autographed picture of Billy Ray down, so they took down the one he had signed to Paramount Joe. The next day, when the ladies came to work, every single 8x10 and poster that had been hanging neatly on the walls the night before were now lined strewn on the floor, many of their glass frames shattered! It was as if someone had wiped each one off the wall. To this day, Paramount Joe’s poster still hangs in the Paramount, in a very special part of The Marquee Room, which is now the site of Paramount Joe's Rising Star Cafe.\n\nAshland, Ky. Small Blvd\n\nThere is a picture of a young Irish woman that hangs in the 5th house on the left. If you look at the picture the eyes will glow non-stop! If you look at the picture at night and walk across the room at the same time you will see the eyes follow you across the room. This lady had 5 kids, the picture has been passed down through the generations.\n\nBarbourville, Ky. Union College\n\nFinancial Aid office - Many people in the Financial Aid office have witnessed doors opening, closing, locking, and unlocking. Some have said that they have seen a woman. The office was once a house. The woman died in that house of mysterious causes.\n\nBarbourville, Ky. Union College\n\nPfeiffer Hall room 245 - there is said to be a ghost of a student that attended Union College in the 1960s. His name was James Garner and he was a football and basketball player at Union. James was about 6'4 or so and weighed about 250. Records say that he fell from his 2nd-floor window while trying to close it on a cool night. The date of his death was have said to be on October 30, 1963. Sources say that if you go to the room around midnight and open the window, James ghost will shut it. Many sightings have been reported. - March 2008 additional information: doors opening & lights turning on when no one else is present.\n\nBarbourville, Ky. Warfield Cemetery\n\nSomething follows you. Its footsteps move as you do, and stop when you do, yet this unseen thing moves very fast. You can feel its sense of urgency, and the steps crunch over the ground, as if it's agitated. When it starts this, you are standing there cringing, just certain something is going to knock you down from behind, but the steps just stop abruptly and don't start back up until you begin walking again. When you step outside of the gate, the sounds of the footsteps stop.\n\nBardstown, Ky. Old Kentucky Home Middle School\n\nDuring the Civil War the school was used as a hospital. The Morgue was in the basement. The floors and the ceilings have been said to bleed. The school’s art room (which is also located in the basement.) smells of rotting flesh. It has been said that this room was used for holding of decomposing bodies. They painted the basement walls white and blood-red spots bled back through.\n\nBardstown, Ky. Jailers Inn\n\nmany reports of this place being haunted. It was formerly the jail and now is a bed and breakfast. Former employees reported hearing footsteps and people crying.\n\nBardstown, Ky. Old Smith Mansion\n\nAcross from Heaven Hill distillery, is the old Smith Mansion on Loretto Rd. On clear nights during the summer, a German shepherd can be seen stomping the yard around the old house.\n\nBardstown, Ky. The Old Talbott Inn\n\nHaunted by numerous spirits that were killed there.\n\nBell County, Ky. Hutch\n\nthere is a small area off the main highway called Hutch. In this small community, there is a local swimming hole called \"Devil's Garden\". Before it earned this name, a small group of partying teenagers was swimming one summer night. After partying too much, one of the kids slipped and hit his head on a rock in the shallows. Not thinking straight, the other kids decided to hide the body under water, tied to a rock. The next day, the kids went to see if the night before had really happened. They arrived to find that the local authorities had already arrived and discovered the body. To their surprise, their friend had drowned and not died of the fall. They lived with their secret for over 15 years until they each started disappearing mysteriously, and the remaining two confessed and were sentenced to ten years in prison. Now every full moon, the moon's reflection casts a skull-like image on the water's surface.\n\nBellefonte, Ky. Bellefonte Hospital\n\nBellefonte is an Old Catholic hospital and it is said that the ghost of an old nun named Fannie haunts the hospital. There have been reports of things mysteriously falling off shelves and things making loud crashing noises, but when you go to look, nothing is there. Fannie is said to be seen most often in and around the emergency room.\n\nBerea, Ky. Berea College\n\nBoone Tavern Hotel - Once a part of the underground rail road. The basement had several rooms that were used to hide runaway slaves and for other purposes. Voices can sometimes be heard, and on more than one occasion a photograph of a young African American boy was taken. He appeared to be frightened and about 12 years of age. - March 2007 Correction: Construction on the Boone Tavern Hotel began in 1908, long after the Civil War and Railroad. Berea, Ky. as a city wasn't even established until after the Civil War, and during the war Berea College (which owns Boone Tavern) was only a normal school with two buildings. Also, Boone Tavern has no basement, only a sub-basement that houses an office and laundry. The sub-basement was dug out under the building in the 1940s.\n\nBloomfield, Ky. Maple Grove Cemetery\n\nAnna Beauchamp, of the famous 1825 Romantic Tragedy can be seen walking along the road and throughout the cemetery at times.\n\nBooneville, Ky. Owsley County High\n\nIn the gymnasium boy's sower room two students were punched so hard they were sent flying back and hitting the wall. Pairs of glowing red eyes were seen along with someone's finger poking through the door. Cold drafts have been felt and voices were heard.\n\nBowling Green, Ky. Greenwood Mall\n\nBack in '96, a man was found dead in his pickup truck in the rear parking lot. The cause of death was never determined, and the vehicle was stolen. No one ever figured out who he was, or what he died of. These days when people park in the spot where his truck was and leave their vehicle overnight, you can walk up to it and see a man in the passenger seat who looks to be dead or sleeping. It’s always the same guy. When any of the guards on duty call a police officer over to remove the guy, they find the car empty. Every single time. The parking spot has an oil stain that looks like a face and has never washed off or changed over the years. The police have nicknamed him \"the sleeper\". It’s so common; when they call PD dispatch they just say, \"We have a sleeper\".\n\nBowling Green, Ky. off the bridge\n\nThere is an old metal bridge with a wooden road ... a girl once jumped off the bridge and drown. The theory is if you go to the end of the bridge and turn your car off and put it in neutral the ghost of the girl will pull you across the bridge.\n\nBowling Green, Ky. Western Kentucky University\n\nAcademic Complex - The Academic Complex used to be an old hospital and now houses several classrooms, medical facilities, and the campuses TV and Radio stations. There have been DJs working for the Radio station that have heard things in the night, seen people out of the corner of their eyes. One night two DJs were talking about haunted places in the area and their CD player started to move about, opening and closing and rattling. It has been rumored that in the old hospital days, people had died in some of the classrooms and in a radio station studio. - February 2004 Update: It is said this is a rumor started by upper classmen to scare newcomers.\n\nBowling Green, Ky. Western Kentucky University\n\nBarnes-Campbell Hall - showers have been reported turning on and off by themselves, and chairs crashing against walls. A young man fell to his death down the dorm’s elevator shaft.\n\nBowling Green, Ky. Western Kentucky University\n\nHelm Library - is known to be haunted by a student who fell to his death from the ninth floor when trying to open a window.\n\nBowling Green, Ky. Western Kentucky University\n\nThe Kentucky Museum - Located on campus is haunted by an unknown male.\n\nBowling Green, Ky. Western Kentucky University\n\nMcClean Hall - McClean Hall on campus is supposed to be haunted by Mattie McClean the woman it’s named for. Supposedly if you stare at a picture of her long enough in the lobby she will smile back at you. Pearce Ford Tower (Dorm Hall) is supposed to be haunted by a construction worker crushed by an elevator.\n\nBowling Green, Ky. Western Kentucky University\n\nPotter Hall - In 1977 a girl hung herself in the basement. Change has been heard dropped in soda machines, but no one is there, scratching sounds of the basement floor. - February 2004 Update: is now just used for the office of the register, housing has been moved down to South West Hall. Which did once have a creepy incident involving an Ouija board where a wall began to crack open. Also, for Potter, it was in room 8 on the bottom floor that the girl hung herself -- though that is debated some believe she was murdered. - January 2006 Correction/ Update: A student that attended school with the girl has cleared a few things up on this haunting. She was a very quiet but very nice girl. Though she didn’t leave a note, she had taken her own life. They report her name was Teresa nicknamed Tye-Dye. Many on campus believe it to be Penny because of several of the office workers in that area of the building said they often find pennies rolling down the hall and find them on the floor. So, if anyone happens to notice pennies rolling down the hall or hears change clanging in the vending machines, don't be afraid. Potter Hall is Tye-Dye's old stomping ground where one day back in 1978, she made the decision to exert the only control she had over her own life.\n\nBowling Green, Ky. Western Kentucky University\n\nSchneider Hall - Objects disappear and then reappear. Knocks and strange noises during the day and night. Sudden temperature changes in certain rooms. Feelings of being watched. - February 2004 Update: It is no longer used as a dorm, it is being renovated to be a math building. Also, a student claims that - White Stone Hall and White Hall are the same building as Florence Schneider hall.\n\nBowling Green, Ky. Western Kentucky University\n\nRhodes Harlin Hall - is haunted by a girl who jumped to her death. People hear scratching on their windows and doors.\n\nBowling Green, Ky. Western Kentucky University\n\nVan Meter - Auditorium - The auditorium is reportedly haunted by a man that fell to his death there while working on one of the catwalks. Students, workers and performers have seen him. Also rumored, he fell onto the stage and his blood, of course, soaked into the wood. In the 1950s and again in 1968 this stage was re-floored, and the stain again returned.\n\nBoyle, Ky. Perryville\n\nPerryville Battlefield - Sightings of a soldier walking the battlefield at night. Reported to be seen by local police.\n\nBradfordsville, Ky. North Rolling Fork River\n\nDuring the summer of 1965, several of the children of Bradfordsville heard a mysterious sound coming from the North Rolling Fork River which flows parallel to the streets of the town. The sound was very similar to a whip being cast. If you got close to the river looking for the source of the sound--the sound got quieter. If you got farther away from the river the sound became louder. It went on and on. Many adults were called out by the children to find out what was causing the strange \"whip\" like cracking sound. No one ever was able to explain what caused the strange sounds.\n\nBrandenburg, Ky. Meade County High School\n\nAfter those horrible tornadoes on May 4 used the old high school gym as a morgue for all those who passed on. Sometimes you can hear voices in the hallways.\n\nBrandenburg, Ky. Meade County High School\n\nBand room - There are cold spots in the room, voices can be heard, there have been sightings of a boy with a tuba standing in the window when the school is empty. Also, there were rumors that our vice principal had photos of a concrete worker bent over inspecting something on the floor. The story goes that this person died when he fell while the school was being built.\n\nBrandenburg, Ky. Meade County High School\n\nbehind the football - field of the school is a graveyard, and people have their own opinions as to why the school is haunted. Also, on April 7, 1974, the gym was used for a funeral.\n\nBreathitt County, Ky. Salyersville\n\nFrozen - Old Vancleave Bible Institute - Located near Frozen Creek, this was once a bible school which housed both male and female students. Due to the difficult terrain, students lived on campus. In the flood of 1939, many students and staff perished while holing up in the boiler room. (They were warned of a tornado, not flood). Little remains of the school after the flood. Buildings include a dorm, a gym and a stone chapel. It has been reported that sounds of children laughing and crying can be heard. It is also reported that heat can be felt coming from the \"punishment rooms\". You can go there and feel like you are being watched, the laughter of little kids and in the third building you can feel heat as you go up the stairs to the punishment rooms. Some have even seen red glowing eyes in the upstairs. There is also what seems to be a small chapel that has an aboveground basement that sits out in a field. The basement is filled with black mud like substance. If viewed from above it has a whirlpool design to it. Several people say that they have heard cries of young children and have even seen them. It has been said that you will see and hear terrifying things. - December 2006 Update — has been torn down.\n\nCalloway, Ky. Dexter\n\nHill - There is a hill that is almost perfectly dome-shaped, like someone took a bowl of dirt and turned it over. Witnesses report they had seen it light up at night, heard strange sounds, and that it was haunted.\n\nCampbellsville, Ky. Campbellsville University\n\nFine Arts Building - The Fine Arts building was originally a Catholic Hospital. Some say they have heard babies crying where the nursery was, footsteps heard in the hall when no one was there, and art students have witnessed pottery wheels beginning to spin by independently. There are also numerous cold spots throughout the building.\n\nCampbellsville, Ky. Hiestand House\n\nThis house is haunted by the Hiestand family.\n\nCampbellsville, Ky. Taylor County\n\nM&R estates - In the civil war days the confederate soldiers took the war prisoners to this house for execution. They were murdered and hung in the barn behind the house. As the legend goes there are extreme temperature changes in the house, also the screams can be heard at night by people that walk down the road. On some occasions, people have been known to see blood dripping from the rafters of the old barn. The entire property is haunted and not many people dare to cross its boundaries if you do there is no telling what could happen. It appears people that go across its lines have been tortured in the future as in their dreams and everyday life. it will be a life-changing experience.\n\nClermont, Ky. Jim Beam Distillery\n\nSeveral years ago, there was an old man worked as a guard at the whiskey distillery in Clermont, KY. The guard was old and possibly out of his mind. One of his favorite things to do was to holler at the moon when it was full on his work shift. Some of the guards say that on a night with full moon, they can sometimes hear him screaming when they are on their patrol rounds.\n\nClinton, Ky. The Old Hickman County Elementary School\n\nBefore the old elementary school had burned down in 1998 it was believed to be haunted by the people who were once buried there. The tombstones were said to be removed but the bodies remained under the school. Numerous of students were said to be locked in the bathroom, heard and seen doors shut by themselves, and could also hear noises.\n\nClosplint, Ky. the child's creek bridge\n\nit is said that on a late night when you are all alone, there is a woman that appears and in a split second as she holds your attention you wreck ... it is said that the woman died after being run off the road at the curb and keeps coming back to get her revenge.\n\nColumbia, Ky. Lindsey Wilson College\n\nHorton Hall - Horton Hall is one of the many old buildings on the college campus. It is located between the Soccer Field and the Gym. Most of the horrific sightings have been spotted in the dorm rooms on the 2nd Floor. There have been many encounters late at night and mostly on the weekends of Dark Figures pulling up and shaking the ceiling tiles. Others have reported that if you lay really still without any movement at all that the Dark figures will slowly Creep down into your room. If you do let things get this far do not startle the shadow looking spirits. Once reported that loud screams would come from the spirits if they see any type of human life in the room. These spirits have no history to the area but just seem to appear random time during the course of the year.\n\nCombs, Ky. old combs school\n\nthe old combs school was used for many years. Closed in the early 1970s.for the new school that is still used today. The old abandoned school is on a hill above the new school. It has been told you can hear kids talking, teachers still give kids the lessons. Walking can be heard in the old halls. lights are seen, and sights of someone in windows. The school was kindergarten to the 8th grade. it is thought principal Spicer, who died in the late 60s or early 70s.still is on the job today. The building is in poor shape, and not too safe anymore. after all, that’s why it was abandoned that long ago.\n\nCorbin, Ky. old Corbin hospital\n\nEven though the old hospital has been closed for many years and has no electric. Strange noises and lights were always seen.\n\nCorbin, Ky. Cumberland Falls State Park\n\nBack in the 1950's, a Bride and Groom came to Cumberland Falls State Park for their Honeymoon. The couple decided to take in some of sites at the falls area before going back to their room at the lodge. Before leaving the falls, they wanted to have their photos the with the falls in the background. The couple found an overlook just a few hundred feet from the falls that would work great for the photo. As the Bride stood on the Pillars at the edge of the 75 to 80-foot cliff, the Bride lost her balance and fell to her death. This place is now called \"Lovers Leap\". There have been reports of people driving around the last curve and hitting a woman that seems to be wearing a wedding dress and when they go to look for her, she is nowhere to be found.\n\nCorbin, Ky. Florence Road\n\nLocated near Early Addition St. There is a certain place in the road where people passing by will experience a strong sense of fear and the feeling that they are being watched. These feelings disappear quickly after they leave this one certain spot in the road. There have been no known reports of anything terrible having happened in the past to account for this haunting. - February 2004 update/correction: The zone of fear is mainly experienced by pedestrians. It is a road with a lot of hills and curves and while the speed limit is posted as 15 mph, many people drive as fast as they can through this area just for fun. The submitter believes there have been a few accidents in the area, but they don't have the facts with them. Could be more of an urban myth than anything else. A variation they’ve heard is that the area of fear lies off the road along the railroad tracks.\n\nCovington, Ky. Old Theater\n\nThe old theatre (and church) on Maine Strasse in Covington is frequented with glimpses of spectral figures in the corner of the eyes or in reflections, footsteps, light switches turn themselves on, and occasionally a loud noise as of something heavy being dropped to the ground and dragged across the floor on the ground level.\n\nCrittenden, Ky. Juvenile Detention Facility\n\nThere have been numerous occurrences there: hearing voices in the hallway, feeling something touching or grabbing your arm, seeing lights, a young woman twice and she almost instantly disappears.\n\nCumberland, Ky. Benham Inn\n\nSounds of children running in the hallways, and the sounds of a child's laughter in the distance, slamming doors and lights turning off and on by themselves.\n\nCumberland, Ky. Lynch Mountain\n\nReports of an apparition of \"Headless Annie\" laying on the hood of a car when it stalls out, when she is gone, it starts back up.\n\nCumberland, Ky. Power Street\n\nIt is believed that a little girl haunts this neighborhood. The people that live there tell at night they hear noises like someone trying to get into doors and windows. If you look out they say you can see where her mother hit her in the head with an ax. It is believed she is hunting the people who did not come to her rescue when her mother was doing this to her.\n\nCumberland Falls Sawyer, Ky. Cumberland bridge\n\na while back a couple was getting married, but their parents would not let them so they both jump off the bridge and you can see the woman’s ghost at night crying.\n\nCynthiana, Ky. WCYN radio station building\n\nIt is the oldest building in Cynthiana. It used to be a house. The old occupants still haunt the building because they don't like that their house has been turned into a business and abused. There are voices, sightings, and objects mysteriously moving.\n\nDawson Springs, Ky. Lick Creek Cemetery\n\nNumerous incidents have been reported over the years at this small cemetery just outside Dawson Springs. Glowing eyes, ghosts of the dead, things appearing and disappearing.\n\nDawson Springs, Ky. Olney Road\n\nMcNeeley graveyard - about 3 miles down Olney Road. A road to the right Walter Calvert road. Up the road about 1 mile a graveyard on right named McNeeley. You will hear a baby crying at night. - Always get permission or tell the proper authorities before exploring this site after hours.\n\nDawson Springs, Ky. West Hopkins accelerated school\n\nThere are rumors that the school is haunted. slamming doors, doors not opening, and hearing things.\n\nDiamond, Ky. Wynn Cemetery\n\nRumors are there are 2 bodies of people who were believed to witches, buried in this cemetery. They both have an above-ground body coffin (they were thrown in the ground and cement was poured over them). The cemetery also used to have 3 trees on which the witches were hanged. Every anniversary of the night they were killed you will hear and see things. There is also a change in the climate in which after you walk into the gates that surround the cemetery.\n\nDunmor, Ky. Peach Orchard Rd.\n\nsounds of the man who was killed and rolled off the hill on peach orchard rd. can still be heard\n\nEddyville, Ky. Kentucky State Penitentiary\n\nMany inmates, the correctional office says that numerous ghosts haunt this former castle.\n\nEddyville, Ky. Lyon county elem. gymnasium girl’s bathroom\n\nA 9-year-old girl named Lisa is said to haunt this bathroom. she was stabbed, and her ghost now haunts the restroom. you can hear her knocking on the door, screaming, shadows on the walls, water coming on, and misplaced items. it is also said that she has torn down the doors to the stalls.\n\nElizabethtown, Ky. Bethlehem Academy\n\nNow a restaurant, this old house used to be a convent later a hotel. It is said that several nuns were murdered here along with others. Cold spots are present and during restaurant hours chairs are moved and things are misplaced. Drive by at any hour after midnight and you will see windows open and close along with lights being turned on and off. If you're brave enough walk up on the porch and feel the bad feelings that seem to radiate from the building.\n\nElizabethtown, Ky. Gates of Hell cemetery\n\nThe \"Gates of Hell\" is the nickname of a cemetery at the end of St. John Road. In Elizabethtown, the cemetery at the end of Saint Johns road, known as Gates of Hell, is said to be haunted. The interesting thing about this haunted place is that when traveling to the cemetery one of the last buildings you see is Elizabethtown’s other haunted place, Bethlehem Academy. No more than a couple of miles to the end of the road where surrounded by trees and overgrowth the cemetery contains the graves of unknown people from the 1700s and 1800s. The place right outside the remains of the iron and stone gate is where people go to party away from town. Many years ago, while parked there at night witnesses report they watched an enormous green orb suddenly suspended right above them. After a couple of long minutes, the orb shot straight up so fast that it was out of sight in a second. Others have claimed other phenomena while hanging out at the cemetery such as hearing screams, seeing shadow people, having electrical problems with their cars, and becoming so scared that many of them never returned.\n\nEolia, Ky. Arlie Boggs Elementary\n\nThere used to be downstairs bathrooms in the school back in the late 1900's but after many reports on a baby crying down there and due to the need for new bathrooms more where built upstairs and the bottom one sealed off. Now at night, you can hear a baby crying and the sound of an older woman, thought to be the mother, saying, \"LET ME OUT\", and beating on the floorboards.\n\nErlanger, Ky. Narrow's Road\n\nNarrow's Road is a winding back road. In the 1950s a police officer was hit and killed pulling someone over. Local legend says that if you drive this road at midnight, an officer will pull you over in a 1950's style cruiser talk to you, then go back to his car and disappear.\n\nEvarts, Ky. Black Mountain Elementary school\n\nIn the Black Mountain elementary school, they have been things seen in the girl’s locker home in the gym they have been names hollowed out. People have often heard kids laughing and shoes tapping on the floor.\n\nEvarts, Ky. Coxton\n\nOn rainy or foggy nights, a woman can be seen either on the side of the road or in the back of the car. It is said that one night her and her husband got into a fight and he beat her and threw her out of the car and left her to die, now she will take rides to try to get back home.\n\nEvarts, Ky. Eastbrook\n\nMany residents of the apartment complex have told that they have heard cries for help in the middle of the night and have seen random faces appearing in their home many have had exorcism done on the homes.\n\nEvarts, Ky. Evarts High School\n\nThe band room is told to be haunted. Many students have heard strange noises and seen ghostly figures in the band room. It is also said to be haunted by a janitor that died in the basement. He was found covered with coal and nobody ever found out what exactly happened.\n\nEvarts, Ky. Hwy 38\n\nIf you stop on the side of on the second curve a head- less woman will get in and ride so far. She was claimed to have been killed in the old sawmill off in the woods. She was reported to have been raped and murdered, but there have been many other versions of this story reported over the years.\n\nFeds Creek, Ky. Feds Creek High School\n\nwater faucets coming on and off. Televisions in classrooms blinking on and off with no intentions. Bats and crows (blackbirds) coming in and out of the windows or sitting on the windowsills. It is a place that is dark and damp anyways, but the strange Phenomena that goes on is still horrifying\n\nFisherville, Ky. The Trestles\n\nThere was supposed to have been a little boy who lived in the house next to the creek under the trestles. He went out one day to watch a train go by from the top of the hill and fell onto the tracks, he was then run over. If you drive under the trestles right at dusk, you can see his blue shirt blowing in the wind stuck in the middle of the tracks, and him waving to you from the tracks.\n\nFlemingsburg, Ky. Simons Middle School\n\nAuditorium - there have been reports of footsteps being heard coming down the large aisle and echoing in the room. They are that of a man wearing what sounds like hard-soled dress shoes.\n\nFlorence, Ky. Bone Lick Park\n\nYou can drive down the road in which it is located and experience phenomenal things. Things such as whispers, undeclared figures, and unknown noises. This supposedly happens to a numerous amount of people. Like the spirit is looking for help. THE BONE LICK PARK is a place in which is Indian related. There are buffalo and such in the park. Many believe that the noises have to do with cries of many children who wander off into the woods surrounding the area and never return because of an evil spirit who takes lives because his was taken. Some people also say that this person was murdered there and is just in search of the killer (in look for help). This is a tourist attraction around Kentucky and fewer cases have happened because of this. So, on some night drive down that road and get out of your car and walk on the outskirts of the woods and you may be able to hear the cries.\n\nFlorence, Ky. Yealey Elementary\n\nWhen they were redoing the cafeteria, a worker got decapitated by a falling light fixture. He's seen after hours by the cleaning staff juggling his head and laughing.\n\nFloyd, Ky. Prestonsburg\n\nCliffside Apartments - The apartments are said to be built on an Indian barrel ground. Strange things happen there. Unoccupied apartments with lights on, the sound of footsteps walking up and down the stairs. A ghostly figure of a man appearing in closets of children. TV's turning on by themselves. The dials of radio's turning by themselves. It is definitely a very haunted place.\n\nFloyd, Ky. Wayland\n\nMillcreek - in 1956 there was a coal mines collapse that killed 26workers at night you can walk down the road the miners will follow you and you can see the miners go into the mines wearing their hardhats with light.\n\nFort Thomas, Ky. Carmel Manor Nursing Home\n\nA young woman in the late 1800s was murdered and decapitated at this location--the killer took her head and threw in a well located at Bobby Mackey's bar in Wilder, Ky (another haunted place seen on Unsolved mysteries) --The spirit of the headless woman is said to roam the grounds. Unexplained noises come from the 3rd floor of the assisted living wing of the nursing home--Some staff and residents have claimed to have seen the ghost of \"pearl\"-The nursing home is run by the Carmelite Sisters--do not go uninvited as this is a nursing home and respect the residents that reside there - WARNING - the area is highly patrolled by Ft. Thomas police in addition to Carmel Manor Security.\n\nFort Thomas, Ky. Highlands High School\n\nHighlands High School is haunted by a former student named David Cecil. He was a football player and suffered a fatal accident during a home football game. What was the locker room at the time was turned into the music/band room and is constantly full of paranormal activity. Chimes will swing, symbols will slide down the split-level floor, his \"spot\" gets icy cold when it's disturbed, trophies will fall from the shelves, and a door with no knob or lock will shake uncontrollably as if someone were locked inside that closet (you hear and see this as it happens), and the TV goes on and off \"by itself\". And sometimes, during home games if you look into the band room from the stands of David Cecil Memorial Stadium, you can see a figure of a teenage boy peering through the window even though no one is allowed access after school hours but the band members\n\nFoster, Ky. Foster Dam\n\nMany people have been killed, died accidental and committed suicide at this location. If you go you can always feel the presence of somebody who has died there.\n\nFrankfort, Ky. Liberty Hall\n\nLady Grey haunts this building along with a ghostly Indian and soldier. There is also a young woman in the back yard that was murdered. And another woman inside the house. So, altogether there are five ghosts there\n\nFrankfort, Ky. Old State Office Building\n\nDuring renovation of the office building, several workers have stated that they have felt like they were grabbed by something in stair tower #2. This building is located on the old State Penitentiary grounds.\n\nFranklin, Ky. Octagon House\n\nSpirits of civil war soldiers are said to still haunt the house. no one really knows why they are there but there are many visitors to experience this spine chilling oddly shaped house.\n\nFrenchburg, Ky. Carrington Rock\n\nImages of Confederate Soldiers have been seen on and around this very high sandstone rock formation, it has been said, this was once a lookout post during the civil war. Also, there have been several sightings of a woman who paces around on top and for a few minutes and then plunges herself over the edge. Her screams, as she falls, can be heard up to a mile away. The forest and surrounding hollows in this area have produced sounds of orders coming from soldiers on the battlefield, moans, cries of agonizing pain, and sightings of both confederate and union soldiers. Carrington Greens Golf Course has had reports from several of their customers about weird noises and seeing soldiers on the course, which is located on most of the battlefield.\n\nFrenchburg, Ky. Tar Ridge\n\nLocals call this area of roadway the \"devil’s backbone\". Sightings include solders riding house back late into the night. As well as a woman running down the road with blood coming from her mouth where her tongue was removed. An old man walking along holding a lighted lantern and many more. The ghosts also have been said to haunt several of the homes along the roadway.\n\nGlasgow, Ky. Coral Hill Road\n\nReports from a man walking home one night of an apparition of a white transparent headless horseman. Later, members of his family report it followed him home and it had been seen outside the home when they awoke to see him in the yard and the doors open.\n\nGrayson, Ky. Big Clifty\n\nA Woman having just left her husband, was on her way to her mother's house when her car hydroplaned off a small bridge. If you pass the bridge around the same time of the accident you can hear the baby cry from the trapped car. Ten years later the same bridge takes two more lives on a rainy night. Two 18-year-old boys a week shy of their high school graduation drowned after hydroplaning off the bridge. Both accidents happened at the same exact time.\n\nGreensburg, Ky. Courthouse\n\nGreensburg has the oldest courthouse in Kentucky. The courthouse was in use until 1931. Sounds of courtroom activity, talking and footsteps have been reported. Whether you are stopping in or passing through the small town, the courthouse will draw your attention with its historical presence outside and from within.\n\nGreensburg, Ky. Old Greensburg Elementary\n\nThe school is about to be torn down however years ago a lady was said to have jumped out of one of the upper-level windows and killed herself on the ground below. Also, if you walk next to the large windows on the side of the building you are supposed to be able to see a little girl in a white nightgown hanging in the window. Many people go there at night and claim to see and hear strange things.\n\nHardburly, Ky. an old graveyard\n\nA graveyard around the mountain in Hardburly is haunted. fog like thing moves around a headstone.\n\nHardburly, Ky. Coal Spring\n\nHardburly is an old mining camp in Kentucky. It has legends of hauntings. One is Coal Spring, a stretch of road that lines Jake Branch Stream. It’s here they say you can hear a child scream, with no one there. The story is a boy drown in flood waters there. He still screams. In the 1970s a guy was chased by an unseen thing. Faster he ran it ran, just behind him. He stopped to catch his breath it was heard gasping for air also. After he got up a bank he did not hear it any more.\n\nHardy, Ky. Mudlick Road\n\nIn the early 1980's it has been told that exactly 1/4 a mile up Mudlick Road a white house has been haunted. Usually at 1:20 a.m. you will hear a little girl named Abby whispering, \"Get me out!!\" They have also been residences say you can hear the doors cracking and footsteps on the front porch.\n\nHarlan, Ky. Bardo Hollow\n\nUp in Catrons Creek in a hollow named Bardo Hollow every spring, there is a mysterious light that appears at the end of the hollow. It usually stays up there and eventually disappears but there have been times that the light will start floating down to the bottom of the hollow. It has been seen for many years.\n\nHarlan, Ky. Cardinal Financial Services\n\nThere have been numerous encounters of a female ghost named Cheyenne. There are keys rattling and doors slamming. It has been reported that you can feel Cheyenne walk up behind you and breathe down your neck. When you turn around, she's gone.\n\nHarlan, Ky. Closplint\n\nChildscreek - it is said that on a cold, rainy night that you can see a headless man by the name of Doc walking up and down the hollow trying to find his head and the people that cut it off.\n\nHarlan, Ky. Hall Elementary\n\nFootsteps heard, apparitions seen. The story is a male janitor died from falling into the furnace.\n\nHarlan, Ky. Pine Mountain\n\nat the top of the mountain some nights you can see a ghostly figure of a lady on a dark night.\n\nHarlan, Ky. Wallins creek\n\nWatts creek - there are several hauntings in the small community one that most people in this community has experienced is an old coal miner who died in an explosion he still walks the old path from his mines to his home and is seen quite often.\n\nHarlan County, Ky. East Brook\n\nResidents of the Eastbrook apartments have heard little girls in their bathrooms talking about putting on makeup. And heard voices calling for help and constant banging on doors and a cry for help.\n\nHarrodsburg, Ky. Pepsi-cola warehouse\n\nTelevision changes channels, Lights, ceiling fans turn on/off by themselves. Doors close, unlock and open by themselves. Cold spots reported at times. Employees feel as if being watched at times.\n\nHarrodsburg, Ky. Shaker Village\n\nUnwanted children were once reportedly thrown into a pond by the Shakers. This was verified generations later when the pond was drained, revealing scores of baby skeletons. It is said that sometimes at night, one can hear the babies crying.\n\nHarrodsburg, Ky. Young's Park\n\nYoung's Park was the site of a ball in the late 1800s. A young woman is said to have danced herself to death. Her grave is still there and marked UNKNOWN. People have reported seeing her dancing there late at night.\n\nHatfield, Ky. big creek\n\nA woman has been seen walking along the railroad tracks, that had got married the same day she was struck by a train in the 1940's. Also, the coal mines, workers have seen a man on his knees working that had been killed several years before, also they have seen men coming out with their mining lights on. There have been several hauntings on big creek too many to be told on here, there are also several houses as well.\n\nHebron, Ky. Country Place\n\nMany people who have once lived here have reported a weird occurrence. You will sometimes hear beads fall down your steps and your dogs may sometimes stair up the stairs and have an uncontrollable bark. This site is believed to be built on an Indian burial ground. You may sometimes see scratch marks on the trees, because this was how Indians cut their fingernails.\n\nHi Hat, Ky. Cemetery On a hill overlooking the Hi Hat post office\n\nIt’s a spot through the years that a lot have people have visited over the years, so it is telling what has happened there. Anyway, if you visit this cemetery late at night like 1 or 2 something will sound like it is running beside the old church banging very hard on the walls. Sometimes this unseen force that will rock your whole vehicle will slam your whole vehicle. It has a weird feeling like your being watched, and you can see things that can’t be there. It’s really a creepy place.\n\nHickman, Ky. Wilson Hill\n\nMany years ago, a little girl was murdered and decapitated there. Her body was thrown off the hill. At night if you park your car there and flash your headlights three times the little girl will come walking up the hill with her head in her arms.\n\nHighland Heights, Ky. NKU\n\nAlumni House - This house once belonged to a farming family who owned the land where Northern Kentucky University now sits. The house is now used as the Alumni House for gatherings and functions. At times locked doors are unable to be unlocked. Mysterious footsteps on the second floor where the bedrooms are and the toilet on the second-floor flushing by itself. In the second-floor window, a person can be seen standing at the window with the curtain held back at times seen from outside. The longer you stand there looking at the window the person disappears, and the curtain will fall back into place.\n\nHindman, Ky. Motel 80\n\nYears ago, a man is said to have found his wife, and another guy together. He shot and killed the other man. Today it’s said the ghost of the man killed is haunting the motel. lights go on and off. sounds of walking can be heard, and no one is found.\n\nHodgenville, Ky. Creekfront Tunnel\n\nSounds of a loud stomping as if someone was jumping up and down as hard as they could.\n\nHopkinsville, Ky. Riverside Cemetery\n\nThis is the burial site of Edgar Cayce, A civil war General Killed in Hopkinsville by a Union sympathizer and One of the Bell Kids. (yes, associated with the Bell Witch and Adams Tennessee) There have been reports of screams in the cemetery, People staring out of the front gate and strong smells of Lilac even in the winter when snow is on the ground.\n\nHoney Bee, Ky. Cumberland Falls State Park\n\nBack in the early 1950s a bride & Groom came to Cumberland Falls State Park for their honey moon but, their honeymoon turned fatal soon after. They were at the falls area when they decided to tour the park. As they hiked down through the park trails, they came to one of the overlooks, facing back toward the falls were the view of the falls was a perfect place for a photo shoot. After standing and waiting for that perfect last view, the Bride then stood atop one of the pillars to have her picture taken. As the Groom started to take the picture, she screamed his name for the last time as she fell 73 feet to her death. This overlook is now what they call \"Lovers Leap \". An apparition of a floating woman motioning you to come to here has been reported. A Ranger was patrolling around the park we he was heading to the Falls Area when women dressed in a wedding gown walked right out in front of him and hitting her. When he realized he hit this woman he stopped his vehicle and began to check on the women but to his surprise, there was known one to be found. To this day he fills this was the bride who died on that fatal summer night.\n\nHyden, Ky. Hendover\n\nTugs point - you hear horses and wagons coming down the river. hooves and guns.\n\nJackson, Ky. Combs cemetery\n\nMany sightings and noises within the graveyard.\n\nJackson, Ky. Frozen Creek\n\nJuly 5, 1939, Frozen Creek was suddenly flooded killing hundreds. One of the most tragic events in Eastern Kentucky History. Supposedly you can hear children's cries at this site which was once a school/church before the flood.\n\nJackson, Ky. Jackson Independent School\n\nHaunted by a young girl who met her death after falling down a flight of stairs during a fire alarm. - October 2004 correction/additional information: It was a young girl who suffered from seizures. She had one on the stairs one night during a PTA meeting. It was in the 20s or 30s. There have been lockers opened during the night, books scattered up and down the halls. The face of a little girl in the window at night; janitors have chased the apparition down the hall, thinking it was a real child, doors open and close in the old high school building, etc. Her name was \"Maxine”. She is not a malicious ghost.\n\nJackson, Ky. Jefferson Hotel\n\nMany can hear the sounds of the man who was gunned down on the entrance steps.\n\nJessamine, Ky. Nicholasville\n\nWest Jessamine High School - There is an old family cemetery on the grounds. It is enclosed by an old rock wall. The football field was also used as a mass grave during a cholera epidemic. It is also said that three women were hung on a tree in the old family cemetery. They had been accused of witchcraft. Teachers have told of hearing a woman humming while walking the halls. Also, the smell of rose perfume will suddenly overtake a room. If you visit the school after dark you may see shadow figures in the old cemetery. If you leave your car and go down to the cemetery your car will start by itself and the lights will go on and off. Custodians have also told of seeing three ladies, all dressed in red walking side by side in the halls at night.\n\nKnott County, Ky. Caney\n\nLate at night at about 10 o'clock you can walk along the side of the hill, an unseen force in the hills follow you as you walk down the path.\n\nKnox, Ky. Barbourville\n\nUnion College - Pfeiffer Hall - In room 212 there is said to be a ghost that haunts the dorm. You can hear her run through the halls and slam doors. No one knows why she is here, they think that maybe she died here.\n\nLatonia, Ky. Value City Department Store\n\nThe store is haunted by a man who died in the store in December of 2006. He had worked there for 30 years and he can be seen wandering in the back of the store by where the house wares and toy department is. He has also been seen walking around on the back dock in the early morning.\n\nLawrence, Ky. Webbville\n\nDiamond Ridge - Irish Creek - For years many of the local people have reported a noise in the woods. If you walk down a particular stretch of the road you can hear something walking with you. A very religious lady, not from the area, said it is the devil himself. She says he walks the ridge. This area has an unusual amount of murders and suicides reported in and near it.\n\nLebanon, Ky. The Caldwell House\n\nThings fly off the walls out of the blue during the night, They're Christmas photos showed up with blotches of \"fog\", and at night they turn the heat up VERY high because it gets extremely cold!\n\nLebanon, Ky. St. Ivos Cemetery\n\npeople have experienced when they went there to investigate the haunting of this place they left a video camera on one of the graves and as they were seen walking away in their video when they played it back the camera zoomed in on them and followed them wherever they walked then the camera fell off the grave and went foggy. Reports of voices and other strange noises heard.\n\nLecher, Ky. Doty creek\n\non every Halloween night (at 12:00) there is suspected to be a ghost dog coming back to haunt the person that lives in his master home. His master died by a robber who shot the dog and his master four times each. the ghost dog comes every other year, the dog is suspected to be seen the thirty-first of October 2001. we do not know for a fact that he will come this year, but we do know he has come every other year since the happening in October 31, 1911.\n\nLeslie County, Ky. Wotton\n\nW.B. Muncy school - Ghost from the graveyard above the school. and, a ghost from the hills behind the school. a man working in the log woods lost his head and he walks the grounds of the school in the fall trying to find it.\n\nLexington, Ky. Campbell House Inn\n\nThis haunted hotel is very spooky, not to mention very old. Two women have been said to have been murdered here, one on the steps where one woman was stabbed to death. You can still see bloodstains in the carpet on the stairs. Another was shot in one of the third story rooms. Strange happenings have occurred such as doors slamming and seeing things that really aren’t there.\n\nLexington, Ky. Hunt-Morgan House\n\nThe previous residents have stayed here to haunt it.\n\nLexington, Ky. Leestown Division VA Hospital\n\nMade up of many different buildings and a huge, wooded grounds area, the Leestown Division of the VA Hospital in Lexington has been the site of several strange and frightening occurrences. Haunting images of several ghosts have been seen, as well as screams and moans, doors slamming, footsteps, disembodied voices talking and equipment and appliances turning on and off by themselves.\n\nLexington, Ky. Lexington Cemetery\n\nThe tomb has the feel of anger and often a large black blob can be seen in the back of the mausoleum.\n\nLexington, Ky. Loudoun House\n\nLoudoun house is an 1852 Gothic Villa that was once home to the families of Francis Key Hunt and William Cassius Goodloe that is home to the Lexington Art League. A partial list of activities includes a Victorian woman who haunts the western half of the house, an apparition of a black cat, the apparition of another Victorian woman seen in the former dining room. The aroma of an antique floral perfume in one of the upstairs rooms now used as a studio, voices and distant strains of ballroom music are sometimes heard.\n\nLexington, Ky. The Mansion-Griffin Gate\n\nThis historic building was once used as a house. A teenager named Gretta lived in it. It is now a restaurant, but employees always warn people about the blue room. It was Gretta's when she lived there. One night she hung herself in her room because a guy had stood her up or turned her down for a date. Visitors claim in the blue room (her room) and every so often the lights and candles would flicker, and you'd feel a cold breeze go across your legs, even though there were no vents. A few other people also noticed it too. Then if someone made her mad, Gretta would slam the shutters on the windows and sway the chandeliers a bit\n\nLexington, Ky. Transylvania University\n\nThere is said to have been a suicide here and at night in a certain dorm you can wake up and see a male student standing in front of your bed with a pair of gym shorts on.\n\nLexington, Ky. Transylvania University\n\nFounder's Cabin - There is a myth that the founder put a curse on it when he died.\n\nLexington, Ky. University of Kentucky\n\nGuignol Theatre - Witnesses report feeling as if being watched.... strange banging noises at night. Some claim to have a seen a ghostly man wandering the catwalk or the lighting booth.\n\nLiberty, Ky. Wilson Ridge Hill\n\nA woman in a flowing white bridal gown has been seen wandering and peeking from behind the trees many times over the years. She never makes a sound, but some have come close to her and it's said that she wears a veil to cover her face. No one knows who she may be, however, there is a grave yard and a church at the bottom of the hill ... most certainly her final resting place. She is simply called, \"The Bride\".\n\nLondon, Ky. East Bernstadt\n\nNo. 8 Tunnel in the old tunnel - It has been said that a man named old Caleb or Caleb red eyes that walks the old tunnel at midnight. The reason his name was Caleb red eyes is that he was always drunk, and his eyes were bloodshot. It's been said that if you turn your vehicle off and lights you can hear him singing and the sound of him will get closer and closer and if you wait long enough you will see a figure that looks just like a person.\n\nLondon, Ky. McWhorter\n\nRubin Ridge - There is a tale of a young man riding his four-wheeler when he comes upon a truck parked under a tree which is up on a coal bank. Upon further inspection he finds a man hanging from the tree inches from the tailgate. They say if you ride down to the bottom of the coal bank and shut off your four-wheeler and turn off your lights you can hear the sound of a rope rubbing against the tree. Just as soon as you turn your lights on the sound will stop.\n\nLondon, Ky. Sue Bennett College\n\nthey say the dorms and the theater are haunted and that Bell Bennett roams the halls all night playing the piano’s turning off and on lights and watching people sleep that still stay there if you go in your sure to find something\n\nLouisville, Ky. Cave Hill\n\nWitnesses have seen green lights moving around in cave hill in Louisville. They have also heard noises and graves falling down. If you wait by the back gate it can be heard miles away.\n\nLouisville, Ky. Central State\n\nA phantom man on a tall black horse has been sighted.\n\nLouisville, Ky. Cherokee Cemetery\n\nWitnesses report flashing lights, the scream of a man, and was chased by an unseen force.\n\nLouisville, Ky. Eastern Cemetery\n\nHis cemetery has graves dating back to the eighteenth century. It is now in horrible condition. It is said that some of the dead haunt it, angry that the cemetery is in such bad shape. There is supposedly a ghost of a woman that takes care of the babies, who have their own section in the back.\n\nLouisville, Ky. Formerly Hoffman Lighting\n\nLater River City Lighting - Owned by two men one of which killed the other in the showroom. The accused killer was found not guilty. A manager at the showroom from 1979-81 would come in before anyone else to do some work. Very distinct footsteps could be heard in the warehouse above my office. Many people heard this ghost at different times.\n\nLouisville, Ky. Harvey Browne Church\n\nThere are variety of things that happen at the church each night. Around 5:00 pm a strange presence can be felt in the largest chapel in the church. This wing during this is time should be pretty much unpopulated. There is even more though. Around 7:00 pm- 9:30pm about things start to get a lot stranger, you can hear footsteps, foot scuffing, and sometimes knocks. there are at least three spirits that haunt the chapel, a male presence was felt. Reports of what sounded like a little girl and mother or older woman laughing.\n\nLouisville, Ky. Hebron Lane Cemetery\n\non moon lit nights you can see the ghost of Hebron Lane. It is an old woman walking through the cemetery among the headstones carrying a lantern. She is dressed in a long dress with a long apron, and she has a covering over her head. She holds the lantern up high looking in the trees, (some trees are no longer there), the story goes that she is trying to find her cat in the trees. She appears mostly around Halloween. However, she can be seen at other times as well.\n\nLouisville, Ky. Louisville Theater\n\nIn the theatre lighting booth an old light tech had a heart attack and died. Since, employees have heard strange noises and have found his name written in the dust in the catacombs that run throughout the theatre.\n\nLouisville, Ky. Meyzeek Middle School\n\nback in the 1930's a young boy was shot in the lobby of the school. To this day he haunts there. At this school there is a lock-in for the graduating 8th graders. Each year they have had a lock-in, something has happened. One witness reports someone's belongings went missing, someone broke a finger, and another sprained her ankle while running down the stairs. She claimed that something had pushed her. In years past people had reported missing items, strange noises, and so-called accidents.\n\nLouisville, Ky. Middletown\n\nWoodland Hills - While driving on one of the roads in Woodland Hills, a lady in her 90's with white hair and black eyes, runs after your car and takes a picture. It is to be known that her husband died in a hit and run, and the lady runs out of nowhere and takes the pictures of the vehicle. The woman’s basement is filled with pictures on her walls, of cars, and teenagers. However, when you take a picture of her, it doesn't come out, but in the film’s negatives, you see a white mark. The lady goes by the name of \"The Watcher on Davidson\", and to her neighbors, she died twenty years ago.\n\nLouisville, Ky. Phoenix Hill Tavern\n\nFootsteps coming down the stairs and across the Saloon. White-colored flashes in mirrors. The taproom area is extremely old and has cold spots in air when otherwise warm. Objects get moved, disappear for a while, then show back up in the same place. All this happens when no one else is around to have caused it.\n\nLouisville, Ky. Portland Family Health Center\n\nOld Army Hospital - In the back of the property is the original two-story hospital, which was built before the civil war. It was built near the banks of the Ohio river, for easier access to the river. It was used to treat army soldiers. Also used in the Civil War. They stopped using the building because of the said hauntings. People have seen soldiers walking around and have heard strange noises. Windows and doors have been seen to open and close on their own. Lights have been seen on at night when not a person is there.\n\nLouisville, Ky. Rose Bowl Lanes\n\nEmployees and customers have witnessed TV sets and pin machines turning on and off only to have found them un-plugged, accompanied by the apparition of a woman.\n\nLouisville, Ky. The Deaf Community Center, Inc.\n\nFormerly known as the Hampton House. It was habited by the Hampton Family in the 1800's. The house had many parties and balls there. Mrs. Hampton always burned a lamp in the second-floor window when Mr. Hampton was not home. The lamp still burns at night when no one is they're watching for Mr. Hampton to come home. The elevator, which was installed after their deaths, goes up and down the 3-story building and opens at every floor as if someone is looking for someone. The spirit of Mrs. Hampton can be seen at times walking the halls of the house.\n\nLouisville, Ky. The Jefferson Mall\n\nThe screams of a small boy can be heard coming from the mall's main restrooms.\n\nLouisville, Ky. The Speed Museum\n\nA female ghost is said to appear in the basement and other poltergeist activities occur in the basement of the establishment.\n\nLouisville, Ky. Sleepy Hollow\n\nthere have also been reports by locals of hearing a woman crying while parked close to the old dam.\n\nLouisville, Ky. Spring Street Bar and Grill\n\nA ghost of an old man walks the 2nd floor of this restaurant at night when the employees are closing the bar. There is no information currently who he is (was). All the employees and owners who go to this storage area on the second floor report their hair standing on end when they are upstairs in this space. This building is at least 80 years old.\n\nLouisville, Ky. Tucker Station swimming area\n\nThe Tucker Station swimming area used to be a large lake that was open to the public during the 1980's. So many young children drowned because of the height of the diving platforms. The diving platforms are three stories high and many inexperienced children would jump off without adult supervision. Stories say that you can still here the children playing in the lake.\n\nLouisville, Ky. Sleepy Hollow\n\nSleepy Hollow off US42, Brownsboro Road - Reports of phantom cars, a three-legged dog and a deserted house boat where lights have been seen.\n\nLouisville, Ky. The Seelbach Hotel\n\nReports of running footsteps in the hallway on wooden floors (the floor is carpeted. TV's will come on during the 4AM hour blaring, then after 15 minutes just stop.\n\nLouisville, Ky. Waverly Manor/Waverly Hills\n\nOld T.B. and Mental hospital. Includes crematory and body slide. Several cold spots and a young girl has been spotted on several floors but mostly in the basement and on the third floor. Sighting of a young boy with dark hair in old fashioned clothing and hat, by main entrance (golf course) but watch out if you see him he will come up to you wanting to go home with you. Local rumors are that he was a victim of a doctor who performed illegal experiments on his patients. There is also a body chute that is said to be haunted. The chute was used to transport the dead bodies of TB patients who had died so that the other patients wouldn't see them carting all the dead bodies out of the hospital. Many strange figures and noises can still be heard. The overall feeling of dread in the entire building. - January 2007 Additional information. A visitor has 12 photos out of about 50 that they personally took, and they have orbs in them (one photo has over 20 orbs, and it hadn't rained in days, and there was nothing for light to reflect off).\n\nWilliamsburg, Ky. Route 92E\n\nthere is rumored to be a black panther that roams the forests at night and then disappear. Locals call it the Mulberry Black Thing.\n\nLyon County, Ky. Lyon County Elementary\n\nIt has been said that in the girl’s bathroom in the gym that a little 9-year-old named Lisa died there. She has haunted the bathroom since her death. People have seen shadows, heard screaming, seen things moving, and seen water come on by itself. Even if you knock on the closet door you will hear her knocking back. It's also been said that she has gotten so angry that she tore the doors off the stalls.\n\nMadisonville, Ky. Grapevine Cemetery\n\nThere is a statue of an Angel in the Grapevine Cemetery and it is said that her eyes turn red and bleed and she cries for all the dead babies. There are two different versions of the story to the angel of the grapevine cemetery. One is that at midnight on a full moon she will look up at you and her eyes will leak blood. My friends mother said she saw that about twenty years ago, the story of my generation goes as all my friends grew up within minutes of the cemetery, that her head has been broken off and sits atop her body and her right-wing is broken off and laying in the ground. It is said that if you knock off her head that she will curse you with bad luck and you might die, however, if you place her wing on her then she will give you one wish. There is another story of a grave there, I don't know which one but that you pull up in front of it and roll down all your windows open your trunk and doors and turn a love song up loud, because some guy committed suicide after his girlfriend left him, the ghost of a young teenager will scream a death roar and you have to get the trunk closed along with the doors and roll up the windows before he gets to your car or you will die.\n\nMarion, Ky. Baker Hollow Road Cemetery\n\nMany different things occur at this cemetery. It is located off Baker Church Road going toward Morganfield. You turn to the left off Baker Church Road on to Baker Hollow Road. There is one cemetery behind the church on the left. After you pass this church there is a fork in the road, follow it to the left and this is where everything begins. However, on a good night, it begins when you first turn on the road. You must go after dark but the best time to go is around or after midnight. This cemetery disappears and then reappears in different locations. However, it will not show itself when you drive down the road. You must drive down to the end of the road and turn around and come back to see the cemetery. You will know when you are close to the cemetery because you will have an overwhelming feeling of sadness and will begin to cry for no apparent reason. You will see and hear various things. Sometimes you can hear music playing, laughter, screams and hear things trying to get in your vehicle. There have also been fingerprints and dents in vehicles visitors have taken but there as well as scratches that came from the outside but went all the way through the glass. If you are lucky enough to find the cemetery and drive up into it, you will not be able to drive out. It is so spiritually active that it drains the battery of your car leaving you stranded until the morning or until you get brave enough to push your car out. There have been images of Soldiers killing each other and those around them. There have been sightings of the dense woods opening where you can see more than you should. The fork in the road rolls and a dense mist appears and disappears as you drive the road. There is also a guardian dog. This dog closely resembles the \"Hounds of Hell\" as described in the Bible. This dog has dead yellow eyes and casts the shadow of a demon when it gets ready to disappear in the triangle at the fork in the road. The dog appears to be injured when it first appears on the side of the road, thus making you want to stop and pick it up, which in turn gives an open invitation to any spirit that is around. When you fail to pick up the dog things begin to change. The dog will walk a few steps and then turn to see if you are still following it. However, if you speed up the dog will speed up, if you slow down it will slow down, if you go to the left it will go to the left, if you go to the right it will go to the right and it is impossible to run over this dog. There have also been sightings of wrecked vehicles with people screaming for help. Due to the period when this cemetery was beginning you will see images of men who were hung from the trees out this road before and after you pass the cemetery. You will also see images of dead family members calling to you. You will also experience a change in the weather when you turn out this road. For instance, it will be raining before you turn on the road, but when you turn on to this road the rain mysteriously stops, and the mist begins until you exit this road where the rain will start again. There are many other things that occur out this road, but you must be very alert and very open to the spirit world and you cannot show fear, or it can take your soul, according to the legend. There are many trapped souls at this location that will mess with you. Make sure you do not have an open invitation of any kind. This means windows rolled up and doors locked. These spirits can also communicate with you through your dreams if you will let them. So, go if you dare just don't show fear! Everyone sees something different when they go to this location so be prepared to be scared.\n\nMarion, Ky. Pilot's Knob\n\nWitches Grave - This cemetery is located off Ford's Ferry Road in Marion. The legend behind this cemetery is about a five-year-old girl who was burned at the stake, along with her mother, in the late 1800s to the early 1900s for witchcraft. It is not known what happened to the body of the mother, however, the little girl, Mary Evelyn, is buried in a steel lined grave that is covered with rock and not dirt. She has a white picket fence surrounding her grave. The base of this fence is a series of crosses that connect end to end. However, she is not tall enough to climb over the fence, unlike a normal 5-year-old. Her tombstone looks brand new even though it is close to 100 years old, as does the fence. She paces inside this fence when someone comes to visit her making faces at them and reaching out to them. She sleeps during the day but is very evident at night. The legend also says that she cannot rest because she is searching for her mother but cannot escape the confines of the fence. Many unexplainable things occur at this cemetery. For one the \"Watcher\" makes himself very know and tries to follow you out of the cemetery. The \"Watcher\" was murdered at the swinging bridge but haunts the witch’s grave. He is trying to get to the little witch but because of the crosses that surround her he is unable to because he is evil. Crosses appear in the trees both upright and upside down, directly over her grave, though they face different directions. She presents herself as a normal 5-year-old little girl in a white dress, though her dress is scorched at the bottom as is her blonde hair. If you lay on her grave she will hold you down refusing to let go until someone from outside of the fence pulls you free. However, never lay on the grave when you are alone because chances are you will be pulled into her grave to be with her thus giving her more power. As with every haunted cemetery people that are open to the spirit world see something different.\n\nMartin, Ky. Arkansas Creek\n\na man in old army clothing is supost to be seen in the kitchen and roaming the hallways the land was an old cemetery.\n\nMartin, Ky. Crum Branch\n\na lady has been seen walking around in a white dress with no head and asking the people she sees for their head.\n\nMayfield, Ky. Maplewood Cemetery\n\nsupposedly the angel tombstone located in the center of the cemetery will drop rocks on your head at the stroke of midnight if you're sitting on the bench beneath her feet...\n\nMaysville, Ky. Hayswood hospital\n\nLocated at the north end of 4th street, Abandoned since the early '80s. People who live near it have said they have often seen strange lights in the windows and heard infant’s cries. Also, some have claimed to see a figure standing in the last window on the third floor both day and night. Others who have been inside since its closing have noticed an old stretcher that seems to move on its own, others have said to have been followed by shadows accompanied by voices and the feeling of being watched. Others have claimed to see doctors in the halls and heard the cries of past patients. Red glowing eyes and what seems to be some sort of dog that seems to be chasing something have been seen, also cold spots and children playing in the waiting rooms. In the basement and all over the building are strange markings as if they are warnings of some kind, anyone who goes in walks past, or drives by have said they felt sick and a threatening hostility. It is believed to haunt the entire town.\n\nMaysville, Ky. Washington Opera house\n\nA young girl named Maras performing on stage until she fell through a trap door and broke her neck. People that have performed at the Opera house Have seen a blue light where she fell to her death. There is also a reddish stain on the basements carpet.\n\nMcCracken, Ky. Paducah\n\nCC Cohen Restaurant - Haunted History - CC Cohen Restaurant - Known to most Paducah residents as the Cohen building, this important structure was built around 1865, probably for M. Livingston & Company. Afterward, it became a clothing store, a dry goods store and in 1914, a Paducah City Directory identified the occupants as the R.L. Peacher Liquor Dealers and the Rehkopf Distilling Company\n\nMcCreary County, Ky. Granny's Old House\n\nBuilt on an ancient Indian burial ground. In the middle of the night, you see balls of light flying at you. You can also hear footsteps, people talking, and doors slamming.\n\nMidland, Ky. Jones cemetery\n\nvery large dark figures have been spotted several times in the past. For unknown reasons any visitor at night will encounter these large inhumanly figures and will be chased after by them.\n\nMiddlesboro, Ky. Middlesboro Park, near Greenwood Rd.\n\nThere was a little boy murdered there by the swings. They claim that she was out playing at night by herself and got raped and killed. If you walk down the park late at night around 12:00p.m., you can see visions on her swinging on the swings.\n\nMorehead, Ky. Clack Mountain\n\nIn recent decades there has been occult activity. Satanic symbols have been sandblasted from the mountainsides but soon reappear. People report getting a \"bad feeling\" as they come into the vicinity of the long-abandoned sacrificial rock.\n\nMorehead, Ky. Fleming Avenue\n\nCabin - Footsteps heard, apparitions are seen & items seem to move on their own right in front of the residents’ eyes.\n\nMorehead, Ky. Morehead State University\n\nButler Hall - has had strange noises in the middle of the night and footsteps in empty rooms. And TV's and computers turn on by themselves. It is said to be haunted by three resident that have lived then died in the building previous years\n\nMorehead, Ky. Morehead State University\n\nButtin Auditorium - in the 1980's a janitor was cleaning a large clock hanging off the balcony and apparently, he fell off the balcony and a chair broke his back and sometimes if you're sitting in the area he fell on you get a crushing sensation and a very odd smell.\n\nMorehead, Ky. Morehead State University\n\nNunn Hall - A ghost of a former student named Penelope, is said to haunt Nunn Hall. Penelope is said to be seen late at night and in the early morning hours. She plays with lights and televisions, turning them on and off. The story of Penelope is that she was dating someone her parents did not approve of and she became pregnant by him. Unable to tell her parents about the pregnancy, she jumped from the ninth floor, falling to a tragic death.\n\nMorehead, Ky. Morehead State University\n\nWaterfield Hall - On the Third floor in room 358 you can hear screams, the TV goes and off and the door to the room and stairs open by themselves.\n\nMorehead, Ky. Mr. Gatti's\n\nA man named Carl is rumored to haunt this business. Years ago, this Mr. Gatti's was a saloon and Carl was shot in the head by a jealous man in the old apartment (now abandoned) above the store. Employees have reported seeing strange figures moving around the store, mostly during closing hours. Also, voices and noises have been heard in the office area. The strangest of all is employees finding evidence that a game back in the game room has just recently been played when there has not been a customer for hours.\n\nMorgan County, Ky. Wrigley Hill\n\nJust off 519 lays route 7 which flows across Wrigley Hill. Late at night people driving across Wrigley Hill have seen a woman hitch-hiking or the have seen her in their car.\n\nMorganfield, Ky. Earl C. Clements Job Corps Center\n\nthere have been reports from students that men with old green army suits have been standing over them. Others say that they were strangled by a ghost while they were trying to sleep. You also feel like someone is watching you, doors close and open on their own. Sometimes you can feel something touching your shoulder and nothing is there. Some people say that General Breckinridge himself walks the hallways of the dormitories\n\nMorgantown, Ky. Woodbury\n\nYears ago, a little girl was left, or her parents/family had all died when she was only 2 or 4 years old. People have heard her crying and going up the stairs. People have blocked the house off, so people can't go in it. People have tried to tear it down, but the girl makes sounds and scares the workers away.\n\nMount Sterling, Ky. Old Windsor Nursing Home\n\nThe old Windsor nursing home is the old nursing home that is abandoned now. The story is that if you go up there late at night, you can peek in the windows and see the old wheelchairs rolling around. You can hear moaning and screaming. This nursing home was shut down in the 80's because they had many patients dying and found out it was abuse. So, their lost souls roam the halls.\n\nMount Sterling, Ky. Stepstone Church\n\nIn an abandoned church on Stepstone. The church still stands but the inside of the church was gutted by a fire long ago. A few men hung 4 teenage girls on a cross in the loft and set fire to the church. If you go at night, it is said you can hear them laugh, cry and see the shadows of them flying around. It is also known that if you do something to upset the girls, you will find hear them scream in rage.\n\nMuhlenburg, Ky. Rosewood\n\nSkipworth Cemetery - It is said that this cemetery, established in the 1800's, is patrolled at night by a Civil war soldier whose body is buried there. If you see a round, white light on a moonlight night in the spring of the year and are not family or friend you must exit the cemetery at once or your entire family will be cursed.\n\nMunfordville, Ky. Hart County High School\n\nA man fell down a manhole in the student parking lot. There are always strange things happening here, but it gets more active around the end of basketball season. You'll find locked doors open, lights turned on after they have been turned off, and in rm. 46 the air conditioners will be on in the mornings during the middle of winter.\n\nMunfordville, Ky. Raider Holler\n\na little boy was drowned in this well known to be Jacob, this is his well and if you park your car by his well and turn off your vehicle and get out and holler for Jacob and say, \"Jacob your mommy is here to get you, can you hear me.\" He'll be known to say help me mommy! DANGER!! this will happen!!!\n\nMurray, Ky. Asbury Cemetery\n\nReports of an apparition that chases people. Sounds of a baby crying have also been reported.\n\nMurray, Ky. Coles Campground Cemetery\n\nGraves shift sometimes, strange noises can be heard in the surrounding woods, and this is just during the daytime. At night there is an odd feeling, a feeling of true urgency that is indescribable. Although it is too dark to see anything properly. The farther back you go in the graveyard the older the tombstones get. One is just a crudely carved stone slab that becomes illegible after a few lines.\n\nMurray, Ky. Murray State University\n\nFine Arts Building - An apparition has been accompanied with very cold air. The Fine Arts elevators always seem to hang on the fourth floor; the significance of this is unknown. Anywhen you ride them there is a weird sense of impending doom.\n\nMurray, Ky. Murray State University\n\nFine Arts Building -The elevator - they have completely gutted the elevator shaft several times to no avail the young female student who fell to her death in the shaft after the door opened and there was no elevator there. She takes out her revenge upon the riders of the elevator; the elevator shakes and rattles as it travels up and down the shaft. It stops constantly between floors; the doors constantly refuse to close.\n\nMurray, Ky. Murray State University\n\nHester Hall - In 1998 there was a fire in Hester hall at Murray state university. A young man was purposely trapped in his room and perished in the fire. The room was room 402. The dorm reopened the following and only incoming freshmen were placed on the floor. Former resident claims Room 402 always had a scary presence about it and standing outside the door one felt watched. The room was kept empty and like all empty rooms it was supposed to be locked yet often if you walked up to the door it would be unlocked and even slightly opened on several occasions they with entered the room and closed the door it would open on its own. In room 406 you could on some nights hear a scratching sound on the door and if you opened it nothing would be there. The story is that the young man had escaped his room and was found dead of smoke inhalation outside of the hallway to elevator 406 was across from this hallway.\n\nMurray, Ky. Murry State University\n\nSigEp House - An old lady by the name of \"Ma\" Crawford rented rooms out to the brothers of Sigma Phi Epsilon at Murray State University when their house burned down in the 1970s. When she died, the brothers inherited the house and still live in it today. She is still heard walking up and down the stairs, the light in what used to be her bedroom still turns off and on from time to time with no one touching it, and you hear people talking downstairs in the living room when no one is down there. Also, the most recent experience happened when one of the brothers was sleeping and his door opened from the shut position (doorknob turned, and the door opened completely) and no one was there. She is believed to just be checking on the brothers and making sure they are alright.\n\nNicholas Co. -Robertson, Ky. Blue Licks Park\n\nThe lodge is haunted by a friendly woman. you can hear her talking.\n\nNicholasville, Ky. West Jessamine High School\n\nJanitors report being hit by thrown trash cans in the middle of the night. Lockers seen opening and closing on their own. Football field lights go off and on by themselves at strange hours of the night.\n\nOlive Hill, Ky. Bethel Hill\n\nTwo things are rumored to happen there. One legend is never pass the old church on a Saturday night when it is drizzling. They say a woman is walking on the side of the road and if you pick her up she will disappear after a few miles. If you don't pick her up she will welcome herself into your backseat. The other one is to go to the church on Friday the 13th and look into the windows the locals say you will see the scariest thing in your life. Although no one has yet to describe what is in there nobody will go out to the church on Friday the 13th.\n\nOlive Hill, Ky. Clark Hill Trail\n\nIn the early 1900s, a young woman named Stella Kinney went to live with her aunt and uncle who lived out of town. According to legend, her uncle got her pregnant. Well on the way back he murdered her. He took her placed her on a huge rock and cut her head off with a hand ax. For years after the rock was called by the locals \"Bloody Rock\" and every time it rained it would bleed. But now it has been buried into the ground because they made the road bigger.\n\nOwensboro, Ky. Ben Hawes State Park\n\nA girl who was accused of witchcraft in the 18th century was burned at the stake in the woods. If you up there at night you can see her ghost walking and the light of the torches of the people who came to burn her.\n\nOwensboro, Ky. Davies County Middle School\n\nin the middle of the day you can hear screams of a woman in the girls’ bathroom of the 3rd floor. You can look around and see that there is no one there\n\nOwensboro, Ky. Davies County Public library\n\nan apparition of a boy with high red knee socks, a red vest, very old-style shoes, high shorts, and one of those hats you see on many men back in the '20s and '30s.\n\nOwensboro, Ky. Fordsville\n\nDeanefield - During the Civil War, Confederate soldiers hiding from the Yankees used a small cliff cave to hideout. It is said that the Yankees ambushed the southern soldiers, killing them all. On summer nights of the full moon, shots can be heard as well as sounds of laughter, a fire crackling, and horses galloping. The cliffs can be found off highway 1414 in Ohio Co, Ky.\n\nOwensboro, Ky. Hospital\n\nOn the first floor near the old morgue, you can hear screams coming from empty hallways. Also, you can see shadows on the wall as if someone is walking beside you.\n\nOwensboro, Ky. Wilson House\n\nThis house was one of the first built in the area. It was once owned by a large family back in the early 1800s. The family was an outcast family and very odd. The story goes that a son named John killed them all, then killed himself. You can hear screams and laughter late at night at this deserted house.\n\nOwensboro, Ky. Owensboro Catholic Middle School\n\nAt night, neighbors have reported screams and wicked laughter. They have seen doors flying open and shut as if possessed. There are dark reddish stains that have never come out of the floors in certain rooms.\n\nOwensboro, Ky. Owensboro High School\n\nWhen Owensboro High's elevator was first put in the seven-year-old son Johnny of the builder of the elevator was playing with his ABC blocks the elevator wasn’t all finished and there had been no doors to the elevator yet and the boy fell to his death, to this day if you go to the school real late at night right in front of the elevator and say Johnny are you playing with your blocks, you are to hear the sound of the blocks clinging together as if he were playing with them.\n\nOwensboro, Ky. River Park Center\n\nAt night on the catwalk you can see a woman in white, dripping water as she continues to walk over the edge to the river below.\n\nOwensboro, Ky. The Old Theater Workshop\n\nIn 1809 this theater was a Baptist church. A young priest lived there with his family. His daughter was dating a young man who her father disapproved of. Late one night the daughter came to her father with dreadful news. She told her father she was pregnant. He was so disappointed in her, he told her he never wanted to see her again and sent her away. So, the story goes that night she was out of her mind, she ran up to the bell tower and hung herself. Her father was so sad he killed himself in the basement. With what nobody knows. To this day, lights are said to go on and off constantly, the bell rings when there isn't a bell anymore, coldness out of nowhere surrounds you, and if you’re not careful while standing in front of the basement you just might get pushes as many have before.\n\nOwensboro, Ky. Whitesville\n\nold Whitesville school - If you go to the old Whitesville Public School you can hear doors and windows opening and shut and the lights will flicker on and off. There are reports of people finding an old electric chair in the basement.\n\nOwenton, Ky. Perry Park\n\nHere there is a pre-Civil War plantation that burnt down and killed 2 kids and their nanny. It was rebuilt and later turned into a private country club in 1967. The house was made into the restaurant and the rooms upstairs were rented out (to live in) then redone into a bed and breakfast (just for members guests). If you listen hard you can always hear little kids screaming and running footsteps all around. Doors won’t unlock and open or sometimes they won’t open even if unlocked. The nanny keeps quiet but every once in awhile, someone will get the privilege to see her full body in big windows that start at your nose. Since then the country club has been turned into a resort where they have built a hotel and made the golf course public. The ghosts do not like this, the fire alarms go off in the middle of the night for no reason and even after being reset will go off again. Curtains shut themselves and in the kitchen pots and pans will bang together and the doors will shut and lock themselves. The lights have dimmers and at night employees have said after turning off the switch and the lights on high they will come in the next morning and the lights will be switched on and on low dim. This doesn’t just happen at a certain time it happens ALL the time.\n\nOwsley County, Ky. Booneville\n\nOwsley County High School - A man roams the halls and writes disturbing words and phrases on the walls and chalkboards. The student was supposedly hung by a janitor in 1973 in the shower room in the boy's locker room. Exactly one year later the janitor was found hanging in the same spot as the student and was hanging by an old rusty chain. To this day no one really knows what happens!\n\nPaducah, Ky. Emma Morgan Elementary\n\nIn the little-kids playground, through the gates, you will be talking and back around the corner you can hear a bike being slammed up against the gates, but when you walk back there, it stops. There are also voices and footsteps in the halls, especially in the hallway that has the names of the past principals listed. Also, for two miles around it, almost all the houses have had paranormal activity. No one knows the identity of the school's ghosts, but most of the ghosts in the community are either past owners or past owners' pets. Also, the place used to be a gravel pit. According to myth, many people died on construction of the town, and, to keep people from knowing that some people had died unexplained deaths, there buried them under the town. Of course, that's just a myth...\n\nPaducah, Ky. Lone Oak\n\nGerman Cemetery - This is an old Catholic cemetery located directly across the road from St John’s Catholic Church. There have been many sightings here of unexplained supernatural phenomenon. Such events include but are not limited to sightings of a \"werewolf\" type creature that charges up the hill at you, a female apparition that is not fond of males, and a strange light that seems to hover over one of the graves in the lower portion of the cemetery. Late at night during certain events, even the crickets are silenced.\n\nPaducah, Ky. Oak Grove Cemetery\n\nThe spirit of a young woman named Della Barnes walks through this cemetery on certain nights. Documents claim she was accidentally poisoned by the doctor who was treating her for an illness. Legend has a different story though. Some people believe that her fiancé murdered her in a fit of rage. He even went as far as to cut off her left ring finger to retrieve the expensive engagement ring he had given her. There is also an iron-rod statue of an angel that is said to turn and face a different direction in the cemetery.\n\nPaducah, Ky. Paducah Middle School\n\nThere have been reports of 4 gangsters roaming the halls and firing blanks at students. at night the janitors have reported smoke and the smell of marijuana coming out of the boy’s locker room.\n\nPaducah, Ky. Reidland Middle and High School\n\nDuring the day you could hear someone walking down the hallway and there would be no one there. Then some of the doors would open and close real fast and there would be nothing there some of them would not open it would be like it is stuck. Then the lights would go on and off and would not come on but when the teachers or students would go over there it would stop. Nobody knows what it is.\n\nPaducah, Ky. Whitehaven\n\nA restored mansion, now a rest area, and open to the public. A female apparition has occasionally been sighted on the balcony attached to the second-floor bedroom, believed to be the owner's wife. Legend has it she bled to death during an appendectomy. The feeling in that room is very pleasant, however, due to how much she loved that room---her husband had the room and balcony added on especially for her. She has been known to turn off the lights in that room, and the sounds of long skirts swishing as well as the scent of her perfume have been noted. Also, even though the old kitchen is now the employees' break room, there have been times the smells of someone cooking a huge feast have greeted startled visitors. It has been known to happen during the holidays, mainly Thanksgiving and Christmas. It is a beautiful place to visit, even if you don't get to meet the happy spirits inhabiting this great house.\n\nPaintsville, Ky. the City\n\nbuilt over partially or very near an Indian war and burial ground. This city is named for its numerous amounts of Indian paintings found here, and there are several Indian burial grounds here that businesses had been built on, that have had sightings.\n\nPaintsville, Ky. Local Gas Station\n\nthere have been reports, of 'fully dressed' in battle clothing- headdresses and all, Indians, walking through a local gas station and disappearing again and dishes in the eatery of the place falling and being thrown around as well, many employees have quit.\n\nPaintsville, Ky. Mayo Church\n\nMr. Mayo who was the richest man in a town built a church mostly for his wife. Some said that they have seen Mrs. Mayo praying or just sitting in the chapel late at night. Others say that you can hear whispering or humming coming from the chapel late at night.\n\nPaintsville, Ky. Mayo Mansion\n\nMr. Mayo has been seen in his era clothing and hat on the sidewalk watching people drive by. a tunnel leading from the house underground to the church has long been filled however you get an eerie feeling standing near the site of the tunnel.\n\nPaintsville, Ky. Old Town Cemetery\n\nThere have been reports of an old lady who wanders around the cemetery that overlooks the town of Paintsville in eastern Ky.\n\nPaintsville, Ky. Paintsville Elementary School\n\nNumerous reports of unexplained happenings from within the building including unexplained moaning, a sighting of a woman in one of the classrooms crying out to her husband and a child on the other side of the room, and many of the janitors working there claim there is in fact a ghost within the school.\n\nPaintsville, Ky. Ramada Inn\n\nThe RAMADA INN was built on haunted grounds. The once place called BRISTLE BUCK. At the RAMADA, employees have had first hand experience at hauntings. In the kitchen, pans will come flying from off the wall at whoever! Late at night in the atrium, there have been the footsteps of a woman in high heels heard, this is every night. You don't want to go into one of the banquet rooms alone, you will feel as if someone is behind you.\n\nParis, Ky. The Covered Bridge\n\nLocated on Colville Road. Haunted by a young girl who was killed in a wreck with her boyfriend. They were coming home from prom and were going to stop at the bridge. You can set in the middle of the bridge and watch headlights come up behind you, but no car and then you see lights under the bridge as if a car has fallen in the water.\n\nParis, Ky. Old Hospital\n\nA", "authors": [], "publish_date": "2019/10/29"}, {"url": "https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/50-states/2019/12/03/liberty-state-park-christmas-tree-lane-time-capsule-news-around-states/40746993/", "title": "Liberty State Park, Christmas Tree Lane: News from around our 50 ...", "text": "From USA TODAY Network and wire reports\n\nAlabama\n\nMontgomery: Officials in the capital city are preparing to open a time capsule that contains letters from residents and city officials to their successors and descendants. The capsule was sealed 50 years ago, during Montgomery’s 150th anniversary in 1969. It included instructions to keep the capsule closed until the city’s 200th anniversary, which is this week. The City of Montgomery, the Alabama Department of Archives and History and the Montgomery County Historical Society will commemorate the bicentennial Tuesday with the opening of the capsule. In addition to letters, it contains magazines, newspapers, brochures and other materials. The capsule also holds letters from then-Gov. Albert Brewer, former Mayor Earl James and other city officials to their successors 50 years in the future.\n\nAlaska\n\nJuneau: A new study of environmental threats to Alaska Native communities has found the greatest challenges include erosion, flooding and thawing permafrost. Alaska’s Energy Desk reports that the study results issued last month found the environmental hazards continue to worsen due to climate change. The Army Corps of Engineers and researchers at the University of Alaska Fairbanks conducted the study for the Denali Commission’s Village Infrastructure Protection Program. Officials say the three-year, $700,000 study examined 187 communities, primarily in Western Alaska areas located on or near the coast or a river. The study provides a rating system that ranks the existing danger levels from flooding, erosion and permafrost degradation. A Denali Commission official says the report may help residents determine the biggest threats facing their communities.\n\nArizona\n\nPhoenix: The administration of Gov. Doug Ducey has developed a pattern of delaying or withholding public records requests. The Republican governor’s administration takes months or even years to release documents requested under the state’s public records law – if they exist at all. Dan Barr, an attorney specializing in First Amendment issues, says that the government should be communicating policy and decisions in writing and that not doing so “strains credulity.” But the governor’s office says it always follows the law and doesn’t document every decision in writing. Reporters have waited months for requests for comprehensive records such as government contracts or salary information for staff, which are public records. They’ve often been rebuffed when requesting documentation that might show the administration came to a certain policy decision.\n\nArkansas\n\nFayetteville: State records indicate a youth mental health treatment center broke federal rules by using chemical injections to restrain young people held in seclusion. Inspection records obtained by the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette say the Piney Ridge Treatment Center was cited for at least 13 violations of Medicaid rules prohibiting simultaneous restraint and seclusion in 30 days. The Fayetteville facility, which treats patients 7 to 17 years old, was inspected in October after a watchdog group said staff were using physical and chemical restraints excessively. In November, Piney Ridge sent the state a corrective action plan that included revisions to its policies, additional training for nurses and two months of monitoring. Piney Ridge did not provide comment to the Democrat-Gazette.\n\nCalifornia\n\nFresno: Residents are trying to save a struggling deodar cedar tree that lies at the heart of an annual California Christmas tradition. The Fresno Bee reports homeowners Greg and Dana Pratt have hired an arborist to tend to the first tree of what today is known as Christmas Tree Lane. The tree was first decorated in 1920 by William and Mae Winning in memory of their teenage son who died from a fall. Neighbors decorated trees in front of their homes in solidarity with the grieving parents. Today, the tree is one of hundreds decorated by residents along a 2-mile stretch of Van Ness Boulevard each December. Dana Pratt says she believes the tradition embodies the spirit of Christmas.\n\nColorado\n\nDenver: Ten grizzly bears from a zoo in Argentina are adjusting to their new home at Colorado’s Wild Animal Sanctuary. The bruins were flown from Argentina to Dallas, then driven to Keenesburg, north of Denver, in late November. After an adjustment period, sanctuary officials plan to move the bears to a 50-acre habitat near Springfield. Wild Animal Sanctuary director Pat Craig tells Colorado Public Radio the sanctuary is the next best thing to living in the wild. The bears come from the Mendoza Zoological Park in the Mendoza Province near the Chilean border. The zoo was the subject of protests for housing a polar bear that died in 2016. Craig says the grizzlies mostly lived in cages and concrete surfaces. He says one was kept in a concrete pit for almost 19 years because he once escaped.\n\nConnecticut\n\nHartford: U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal is pushing legislation aimed at what he describes as “cyber Grinches.” The Connecticut Democrat says the goal of the bill, which he unveiled last week, is to try to block the use of so-called bot technology that he says allows individuals to bypass security measures to scoop up large batches of the hottest toys of the season and then resell them at inflated prices. Blumenthal says the practice is unfair and may contribute in part to the scarcity of some of the toys. Blumenthal compares the practice to ticket scalping. In 2016 Blumenthal pushed legislation to crack down on those who used the same technology to unfairly scoop up tickets.\n\nDelaware\n\nWilmington: City officials have moved to repeal laws that restrict the times, places and ways people can ask for money in public, in the wake of federal court decisions ruling those regulations unconstitutional. The restrictions make illegal a wide range of panhandling methods, some of which raise eyebrows over their specific nature and whether it is possible to enforce them. The city code states, for example, that it is illegal to ask for money by “stating that the donation is needed to meet a specific need, when the solicitor already has sufficient funds to meet that need and does not disclose that fact.” Panhandlers are also prohibited from lying about being homeless or being from out of town and stranded. They also must receive a police permit to panhandle more than five days out of the year. The laws appear to have been enacted at least 25 years ago, and city officials say they haven’t been enforced “for at least a year or so.”\n\nDistrict of Columbia\n\nWashington: A D.C. councilman accused of violating board ethics is fighting an attempt to have him recalled from office. News outlets report Jack Evans on Friday filed a challenge to a petition calling for his recall, alleging more than a third of the collected signatures are invalid. Elections officials have less than three weeks to decide whether to validate the signatures or block the recall. Evans’ challenge filed with the district Board of Elections includes declarations from two people whose names appear on the petition but say they didn’t sign it. Evans, first elected in 1991, is up for reelection next year but hasn’t yet filed paperwork to run. A third-party investigation recently found he used his office to benefit private clients. Similar allegations are under federal investigation.\n\nFlorida\n\nOrlando: White Castle has announced plans to open its first fast food restaurant in the Sunshine State since closing its Miami burger joint decades ago. The company announced last week that its new restaurant in Orlando will be among the national chain’s biggest. But so-called Cravers will have to wait about 18 months before the store is built and open for business. White Castle is best known for its sliders and became even more of a household brand more than a decade ago with the release of the film “Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle.” A White Castle restaurant operated in Miami in the 1960s. The chain now operates 375 restaurants in 13 states.\n\nGeorgia\n\nCairo: Litigants are instructed to “All rise” when court begins, but in one south Georgia courthouse, they won’t be rising by elevator. Grady County officials tell the Thomasville Times-Enterprise the courthouse’s elevator needs major repairs after three people got stuck in it last month. Firefighters pried open the door and rescued the group, but officials determined the 30-foot elevator shaft must be replaced. That’s a problem because a term of court is set to open on the second floor in December. County Administrator Buddy Johnson says the county has one bid of $32,400 for repairs but is seeking a second, cheaper bid. The shaft must be cut out in sections and replaced one piece at a time. For now, judges are making special accommodations for disabled people.\n\nHawaii\n\nHonolulu: The governor plans to announce support for pay increases to help recruit and retain teachers in special education, rural schools and Hawaiian language immersion. Hawaii Public Radio reports Democratic Gov. David Ige has scheduled a public announcement Tuesday to express his support for pay differentials for the specific teacher categories. Ige’s office says he is working with the Hawaii Department of Education and state Board of Education to implement strategies to address teacher shortages. The Board of Education is scheduled to meet Thursday to review proposed pay increases. The education department is seeking an annual $10,000 increase for qualified teachers. The estimated cost for 1,691 special education teachers in fiscal year 2020 is $8.4 million, with the estimate rising to $16.9 million for fiscal year 2021.\n\nIdaho\n\nCoeur d’Alene: Gov. Brad Little is calling for a third-party review of Lake Coeur d’Alene water quality, as the Coeur d’Alene Tribe has expressed frustration with management plans. The Coeur d’Alene Press reports for the past two decades, the state and tribe have worked to track toxins and compile plans to reduce pollutants. Phil Cernera, who directs the tribe’s lake management department, cited inaction and a seeming unwillingness by the state to act to clean up the lake as reasons for the tribe leaving the process. Agriculture, leaking septic systems and municipal sewer plants add phosphorus into the water. Heavy metals on the lake bottom are from mining. The toxins become part of the water column when oxygen is low. Little says a third-party assessment would help inform the state’s response.\n\nIllinois\n\nChicago: A screening of WTTW’s yearlong initiative on gun violence and a discussion on the topic are scheduled for Wednesday. WTTW and Leadership Greater Chicago will co-host the event on the lasting impact of gun violence. WTTW’s “Firsthand: Gun Violence” follows the lives of five Chicago residents affected by violence with firearms. It’s a 15-part digital series reported in partnership with The Trace, a national news organization covering gun violence. Brandis Friedman of “Chicago Tonight” will moderate the discussion, to feature two initiative participants. Reality Allah is an ex-offender now working with READI Chicago. Police Sgt. Jermaine Harris from the Austin neighborhood’s 15th District advocates social justice. There are admission fees to the 6 p.m. event at Venue SIX10.\n\nIndiana\n\nIndianapolis: Construction is moving ahead on a permanent stage at the White River State Park amphitheater downtown. Work going on now for the nearly $16 million project is scheduled for completion in June. It’s being built at the same site of the temporary stage that has been built and torn down each year since the park started hosting concerts in 2004. The current work includes adding two new LED video screens, a concrete pad for 3,000 permanent seats and more restrooms. A future $13 million phase would add an artistic canopy over the permanent seating area and part of the stage. Tom Mendenhall of concert promoter Live Nation tells the Indianapolis Business Journal that the amphitheater’s summer concert season could grow to 30 shows a year with the improvements.\n\nIowa\n\nSioux City: After 11 years of temporary lanes and closed exit ramps, work is finally nearly complete on an Interstate 29 expansion project through the city. The Sioux City Journal reports the Iowa Department of Transportation hopes to finish work on the project by Christmas. Final construction includes pouring concrete bridge approaches, installing guardrails and painting pavement. It was 2008 when crews began the $400 million project to widen the freeway to three lanes in each direction from Sergeant Bluff through Sioux City and to the South Dakota border. Although major construction will be over, workers still will need to make unexpected repairs to a bridge damaged by fire this fall. State transportation planner Dakin Schultz acknowledged that “there are times when it seemed it would never end.”\n\nKansas\n\nKansas City: Discussions following vandalism at a historic site linked to abolition and the Underground Railroad may help generate support for preservation efforts there. KCUR reports the vandalism was discovered last month at a statue honoring abolitionist John Brown in Kansas City. Part of his hand and a scroll he’d been holding were missing. The statue marks the entry point to the historic Quindaro Ruins, stone foundations and caves with archaeological artifacts linked to the activity of abolitionists and the Underground Railroad. Media reports about the latest vandalism and community outrage over it are focusing attention on the site. Energy company Phillips 66 has gas lines in the area. A spokesman says the company wants to see what it can do to support preservation of the site.\n\nKentucky\n\nFrankfort: Gov.-elect Andy Beshear’s administration has announced plans for his inauguration celebration and swearing-in. Beshear and Lt. Gov.-elect Jacqueline Coleman will be sworn in at the state Capitol on Dec. 10. The events include an inaugural breakfast reception at the Thomas D. Clark Center for Kentucky History followed by a worship service at First Christian Church. The inaugural parade at the Capitol will begin at 10 a.m. EST, and Beshear will be sworn in at 2 p.m. A grand march presenting the new governor and lieutenant governor will begin at 8 p.m., and two inaugural balls will run from 9 p.m. to midnight. A release from Beshear’s transition team says all inaugural events including the balls will be free and open to the public.\n\nLouisiana\n\nBaton Rouge: The state’s coastal protection agency says a coastal restoration project in southwestern Louisiana has been completed. The Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority said in a news release last week that the marsh creation project on the eastern shore of Calcasieu Lake in Cameron Parish created or nourished 700 acres of degraded marsh. The agency, along with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the Louisiana Department of Natural Resources, paid for the $12 million project. Most of the money came through a federal and state partnership designed to restore wetlands. The coastal agency says two other projects have already been completed in southwestern Louisiana this year. The agency’s director, Bren Haase, says more projects are under construction or being planned in the region.\n\nMaine\n\nBangor: The organizers of a popular folk music festival have decided to discontinue the event for financial reasons. The American Folk Festival took place for the 18th time this year. Organizers say it was the final edition of the yearly three-day event in Bangor, supported by public donations. Organizers said it “celebrated the roots, the richness and the variety of American culture through music, dance, traditional crafts, storytelling and food.” The festival board of directors chair Nicole Gogan says the decision to discontinue the folk festival was “a financial decision” because the board saw “no clear path forward that could be responsibly taken.” She said the decision to end it was “incredibly difficult.” The event began in 2002 as the National Folk Festival.\n\nMaryland\n\nBaltimore County: Anglers will soon get new warnings about fishing in polluted waterways. The Baltimore Sun reports that the Maryland Department of the Environment is providing signs to Baltimore County that indicate fish in certain waterways could have mercury, PCBs and pesticides. The signs, in English and Spanish, will advise anglers to avoid or limit the amount of fish they eat. The county has identified 20 locations for the new signs and is looking at other possible sites. The Maryland Department of the Environment recently provided similar signs to Prince George’s County to put near the Anacostia River.\n\nMassachusetts\n\nBoston: State lawmakers are returning from Thanksgiving with one big leftover on their plate – what to do with a $1.1 billion surplus in tax revenue from the last fiscal year. Passing such spending bills is usually a routine matter on Beacon Hill. Legislative leaders had hoped to button down the bill before Thanksgiving but failed to meet that goal. The debate now carries on into December, when lawmakers are typically taking a break from heavy legislative lifting before returning in earnest in January. The beginning of the year also marks the start of budget negotiations on the next fiscal year’s budget – in this case the 2021 fiscal year. That budget is supposed to be passed by lawmakers and signed by Republican Gov. Charlie Baker by the end of June.\n\nMichigan\n\nAnn Arbor: Nearly two hours before the first sales of recreational marijuana began Sunday, the line at Arbor Wellness snaked around a city block. And Nick St. Onge was the first in line, arriving from his Clinton Township home shortly before 7 a.m. “It’s a historic moment. I wanted to be one of the first ones to buy legal marijuana,” he said. “To not have to worry about it anymore. I can just walk in and buy it instead of going to somebody on the street to find it. It’s tested, and that’s comforting.” The actual first sale happened at 9:50 a.m. to legendary cannabis activist John Sinclair, a Detroit resident who racked up three marijuana-related arrests in the 1960s and landed a 10-year prison sentence for giving an undercover cop two joints. His plight attracted the attention of John Lennon and Yoko Ono, who headlined a concert in Ann Arbor in 1971 to bring attention to Sinclair’s arrest.\n\nMinnesota\n\nDuluth: The Diocese of Duluth says Bishop Paul Sirba has died after suffering a heart attack. He was 59. The diocese says Sirba collapsed at St. Rose Church in Proctor on Sunday morning and was rushed to a Duluth hospital, where he died about 9 a.m. Sirba has led the Catholic Diocese of Duluth for a decade. His vicar general, Rev. James Bissonnette, said in a statement that “words do not adequately express our sorrow at this sudden loss of our Shepherd.” After Sirba was ordained in 1986, he served at the Church of St. Olaf in Minneapolis, the Church of St. John the Baptist in Savage, at St. John Vianney Seminary and the Church of the Maternity of the Blessed Virgin, both in St. Paul, and at the St. Paul Seminary. Funeral arrangements are pending.\n\nMississippi\n\nGulfport: A new oceanographic research ship will be named for a physician who filed one of the Deep South’s first school desegregation lawsuits and led wade-ins at a federally funded public beach. The lawsuit that Gilbert R. Mason Sr. filed for his son made Biloxi’s public schools the first in the state to integrate. An official at the University of Southern Mississippi’s School of Ocean Science and Engineering says Mason’s name was among more than 160 submitted. The ship is expected to begin studies in the Gulf of Mexico in 2023. It will be operated by a consortium led by USM and the Louisiana Universities Marine Consortium. Universities in every Gulf state, as well as Georgia, Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands and Mexico, also are part of the group.\n\nMissouri\n\nClayton: An alarming string of deaths inside St. Louis County’s jail led to a slew of changes, and county leaders believe the changes are paying off. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch reports it’s been nearly six months since 31-year-old Daniel Stout died from peritonitis, the last of four 2019 deaths at the St. Louis County Justice Center. County leaders cite personnel moves, disciplinary actions, and reforms designed to improve professionalism, accountability and collaboration. Other changes sought to identify and address acute health problems more quickly. Alcohol poisoning killed 51-year-old Larry Reavis in January. A month later, 29-year-old John M. Shy died from internal bleeding after screaming in pain for hours. Twenty-year-old Lamar Catchings died of a treatable form of leukemia in March after no one sought to diagnose his condition.\n\nMontana\n\nLibby: Gayla Benefield is dying from lung disease caused by inhaling asbestos fibers, just as her dad, mom and husband did and four of her five children are. But when she first raised concerns that the W. R. Grace and Co. vermiculite mine responsible for much of this northwestern Montana town’s livelihood was killing its residents, her concern was met with anger and denial. Benefield uncovered a 1969 memo that showed 92% of long-term mine workers suffered pulmonary diseases. The company hadn’t told its workers. After the news got out in November 1999, and Libby was declared a Superfund site, Benefield told the Daily Inter Lake she was probably the least-liked person in town. Two decades later, Benefield says some people have thanked her quietly.\n\nNebraska\n\nLincoln: A new course at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln will focus on the world’s religions and ask students to use their newfound knowledge to propose a common worship space on campus. The Lincoln Journal Star reports the course called “When the World’s Religions Came to Lincoln” will start in spring 2020. Max Mueller, an assistant professor of classics and religious studies, says only 4% of Nebraska residents identify as non-Christians, but more immigrants and refugees in Lincoln have created greater religious diversity. Mueller says despite that increase, other religious communities don’t have a space on or near campus to worship, leaving them to pray together in libraries or even hallways. As students learn about religions, they will research and propose a space to university stakeholders that could serve various religions.\n\nNevada\n\nLas Vegas: Cigarette and cigar smokers can be common in the state, where no law prohibits a gambler from lighting up. But some longtime card dealers, bar employees, health advisers and researchers say secondhand smoke can be dangerous. Teresa Price tells the Las Vegas Sun she was a table-games dealer for 35 years and is now on medical leave. She says she thinks secondhand smoke made her sick. Much of Nevada went smoke-free in 2006, after voters approved the Nevada Clean Indoor Air Act. But exceptions were made for bars, strip club, brothels and casinos. Some officials say smoking and gambling go together, and longtime state and local lawmaker Tick Segerblom calls smoking part of the Las Vegas culture. He says Nevada lets people do things they can’t do in other states.\n\nNew Hampshire\n\nConcord: Mayors in the state’s two cities that take in the most refugees say they continue to support such resettlements. Under an executive order issued by President Donald Trump, state and local governments both must consent to receive refugees. Republican Gov. Chris Sununu gave the state-level consent Friday, and communities have until Dec. 20 to opt in. Concord and Manchester have taken the bulk of the state’s refugees. Concord Mayor Jim Bouley told the Concord Monitor he expects to get approval from the City Council on Dec. 9. Manchester Mayor Joyce Craig says she supports accepting refugees, but her office is seeking clarity on whether she needs sign-off from the full City Council. Between July 2010 and July 2018, Concord took in 1,292 refugees. Manchester took in 1,242.\n\nNew Jersey\n\nJersey City: The billionaire owner of a golf club for millionaires has his sights set on expanding his course onto a waterfront portion of Liberty State Park used mostly by children to learn about the ecology of New York Harbor. The renewed push by Paul Fireman, owner of Liberty National Golf Club, to build three holes on undeveloped Caven Point comes at a time when state lawmakers may ban such projects from New Jersey’s most visited park. The Legislature is considering a bill that would prohibit large developments at the park after 40 years of attempts by developers to build everything from a hotel to an amusement park on land coveted for its panoramic views of Manhattan. But a lobbyist for the golf course who has ties to Gov. Phil Murphy asked lawmakers at a recent Senate committee hearing to consider amending the bill to take out language protecting Caven Point.\n\nNew Mexico\n\nAlbuquerque: A beloved snowman made of tumbleweeds is returning to the city. The snowman goes up along Interstate 40 the Tuesday after Thanksgiving, called Tumbleweed Tuesday. The Albuquerque Metropolitan Arroyo Flood Control Authority says the tradition goes back to 1995. The agency builds the snowman with tumbleweeds collected from arroyos in the metro area and with recycled material. Field engineer Nolan Bennett says the tumbleweeds used are bigger than the usual tumbleweeds most people have on their property. The snowman typically dons a scarf and blue cap. Last year’s snowman was 8 feet tall and 12 feet wide.\n\nNew York\n\nNew Rochelle: The Freemasons will purchase a former college for $32million after placing the winning bid approved in a bankruptcy auction. The bid by the Trustees of the Masonic Hall and Asylum Fund for the 15.6-acre College of New Rochelle campus was approved last week. The 115-year-old school declared bankruptcy in September. The college’s interim chief restructuring officer, Mark Podgainy, says he’s confident the Masons will use the campus in a manner that preserves the college’s legacy and “offers value to the local community.” The Mason trustees operate a senior health care campus and campground in Oneida among other New York properties. The fraternal organization of Freemasons started in Europe and spread to the American colonies. George Washington and 13 other presidents were Masons.\n\nNorth Carolina\n\nRaleigh: Significant changes to the state’s justice system for young offenders and sex-related offenses began over the weekend. No longer will 16- and 17-year-olds be automatically tried in adult court for most nonviolent or less serious felonies as the “Raise the Age” initiative takes effect. North Carolina’s designation as the only state where women can’t revoke sexual consent is getting eliminated. A new law also essentially cancels a 2008 court decision that said sexual assault laws don’t apply to people incapacitated because they decided to take drugs or drink alcohol. The age limit in which child sexual abuse victims can sue for civil damages also is going up from 21 to 28. These are among about 30 state laws passed or amended this year that are being enforced with the new month.\n\nNorth Dakota\n\nBismarck: Sanford Health has implemented visitor restrictions in the neonatal intensive care unit at its Bismarck hospital because of influenza and respiratory illnesses. The health care provider says only immediate family members of a baby in the unit are allowed to visit. And they must have no symptoms of respiratory illness. Immediate family members include parents and guardians, grandparents and siblings over 12 years old.\n\nOhio\n\nCelina: Immigrants from the Marshall Islands who’ve settled over the years in this rural area are sharing their culture and history with their neighbors. The Marshallese Culture Club plans to meet once a week in Celina, where an estimated 1,500 people from the chain of south Pacific Ocean islands now live. The leader of the club tells The Daily Standard in Celina that those taking part will learn the language, customs and traditions of the Marshallese. Carmichael Capelle says he wants to teach the history of the Marshall Islands to the longtime residents of western Ohio and to the Marshallese community in Mercer County, including the children who don’t know their history or language. He says that someday he’d like to have a Marshallese class taught in area schools.\n\nOklahoma\n\nOklahoma City: When students at Positive Tomorrows were asked what they’d want at their dream school, answers included a tree house, a library, an alarm for intruders and an area for gymnastics. Positive Tomorrows is the state’s only school exclusively serving children and families experiencing homelessness, and because of high demand and inadequate space, nearly 100 children a year are turned away. But after several years of fundraising and construction, the organization has moved into a new $15 million school building. Eventually, the school will expand to serve 210 children, more than doubling current capacity, says Susan Agel, president and principal. This week marks the first time students are attending class inside the 42,000-square-foot facility, which ultimately included many of the kids’ design ideas, says Gary Armbruster, principal architect and partner at MA+ Architecture.\n\nOregon\n\nKlamath Falls: Authorities at Crater Lake National Park say someone driving off road damaged plants and other resources, and they’re asking for the public’s help in finding who is responsible. The Herald and News reports park rangers believe the incident happened late Nov. 23 or early Nov. 24. According to a park Facebook post, driving off roadways and damaging resources is a federal crime punishable by up to $5,000 and/or six months’ imprisonment for each offense. The park says there is a short window during summer months in which plants in the park get sunlight to grow. The rest of the year they can be buried in deep snow. The park says the staff spends time each year fixing areas damaged by visitors not staying on roads or trails.\n\nPennsylvania\n\nHarrisburg: The Pennsylvania Game Commission says it is investigating a video circulated on social media showing two males apparently beating an injured deer. In a Facebook post Sunday, the commission called the conduct portrayed in the video “reprehensible and potentially a violation of the law.” The two appear to kick the animal in the face repeatedly and rip off one of its antlers. Game wardens are investigating and ask anyone with information to call the Operation Game Thief hotline or the northwest region dispatch office. The commission told KDKA-TV that although the two individuals are reportedly from Brookville in Jefferson County, that doesn’t mean the incident occurred there. Brookville police told WJAC-TV the events occurred outside their jurisdiction, and “proper authorities were notified.”\n\nRhode Island\n\nProvidence: The Rhode Island State House Christmas tree will be artificial this year. The governor’s office said in a statement that the 18-foot California baby redwood replica will be more manageable than a real tree. Democratic Gov. Gina Raimondo says it’s challenging to keep a real tree alive and thriving through the holiday season. There have been several mishaps with State House trees. In 2005 the tree turned brown and shed all its needles. In 2016 the tree was replaced for being too small, and in 2017 the tree died 10 days before Christmas. Former Gov. Lincoln Chafee caused an uproar in 2011 when he called the tree a “holiday tree.” The new tree will be lit during a ceremony Wednesday.\n\nSouth Carolina\n\nColumbia: Winter weather preparedness week is kicking off in the Palmetto State, with officials asking residents to check supplies now. The state Emergency Management Division says even though winters are usually mild in South Carolina, the state can get big snows or ice storms. The agency says residents need to check fuel supplies to make it through long power outages and make sure their pipes are insulated so they don’t freeze. Other winter survival tips include making sure chimneys are clean of debris and carbon monoxide detectors are working. Winter weather preparedness week started Sunday and runs through Saturday.\n\nSouth Dakota\n\nRapid City: The city canceled its Festival of Lights Parade because of poor road conditions and high winds. The decision came after festival staff and the Rapid City Police Department discussed road and weather conditions Saturday morning. The parade was planned for Saturday evening, and much of the parade route had not been plowed yet. KELO-TV reports parade organizers will instead hold a “static parade” next Sunday at the Rushmore Mall. The television station reports that means when the mall closes at 6 p.m., the overhead lights will be shut off so people can drive a loop around the mall to see the floats lined up outside the edge of the parking lot.\n\nTennessee\n\nNashville: The state has the fifth-largest number of rural students in the country, but it’s the seventh-lowest in terms of funding for instruction, according to a recent report on the country’s rural schools by the nonpartisan Rural School and Community Trust. In Tennessee, almost 300,000 students attend a rural school – or 1 in 3 kids. The report points out that Tennessee is showing promise despite its level of funding. It highlights areas of strength, but also problem areas, for states in teaching students with rural backgrounds. For example, the report says that “22 states have decreased their state contributions for every local dollar invested in rural schools. Tennessee has seen the greatest drop ($1.68, down from $2.11 per local dollar).” This comes as more Tennessee school districts are classified as rural, the report says. And the state’s rural students are more likely to face extreme poverty than their rural counterparts in other states.\n\nTexas\n\nEl Paso: Father Harold Joseph Rahm, a Jesuit priest who graces a mural in the Segundo Barrio neighborhood for his positive influence, died Saturday, according to the El Paso Catholic Diocese. He was 100 years old. Rahm came to El Paso in 1952 and was an assistant pastor at Sacred Heart Church for 12 years. At the time, the area was riddled with gangs, and Rahm took it upon himself to talk to them and try to make an impact in their lives. He was known for cruising the streets of the Segundo Barrio on his bicycle, stopping to talk to people in the neighborhood and to reach out to gang members. He was sometimes called “the bicycle priest.” In May 2015, he came all the way from his home in Brazil to El Paso at the age of 96 to be honored with the 2015 Segundo Barrio Person of the Year Award.\n\nUtah\n\nSalt Lake City: Parents say a substitute teacher berated their fifth grader after he said he was thankful that he’s finally going to be adopted by his two dads. The boy’s classmates say the teacher said that “that’s nothing to be thankful for” and lectured the 30 kids in the class about her views on homosexuality. She said that “two men living together is a sin,” and “homosexuality is wrong.” Parent Louis van Amstel tells the Salt Lake Tribune he’s grateful for three girls who asked the teacher to stop and eventually walked out of the room to get the principal. The substitute was escorted from the building. A spokesman for Alpine School District south of Salt Lake City says that “appropriate action has been taken.”\n\nVermont\n\nDummerston: A nonprofit has proposed a nature preserve that would protect more than 1,100 acres. The Brattleboro Reformer reports the Green Mountain Conservancy has proposed a nature preserve that would run through Dummerston, Brookline and Newfane, making it the first parcel owned by the nonprofit. The conservancy plans for the trails on the new preserve to connect to trails at the Putney Mountain Unit of Conte National Wildlife Refuge and the Black Mountain. The proposed preserve started as the Deer Run Farm, a 300-acre parcel and farmhouse, in 1985. The nonprofit received $350,000 from the Vermont Housing and Conservation Board to purchase the land, as well as assistance from the Vermont Land Trust. The organization plans to host an information meeting about the Deer Run Nature Preserve on Dec. 4.\n\nVirginia\n\nCharlottesville: The University of Virginia and William & Mary are the latest schools to announce plans to become carbon neutral. The schools announced their goals Monday in a statement that said they hope to produce zero net greenhouse gas emissions. UVA and William & Mary said they will share information and collaborate. William & Mary said it’s exploring an agreement that could bring as much as 60% of its electricity from solar farms. Another challenge is the use of natural gas for heating and steam production. William & Mary said it will hire a consultant to provide advice. The goals go further than power consumption. UVA hopes to expand plant-based meal offerings and switch to sustainably raised meats. UVA is in Charlottesville. William & Mary is in Williamsburg.\n\nWashington\n\nMount Vernon: Wildlife rehabilitation facilities are seeing an increase in owls being hit by vehicles north of Seattle. The Skagit Valley Herald reports Sarvey in Arlington and Wolf Hollow Wildlife Rehabilitation Center on San Juan Island see an increase each fall. Wolf Hollow Education Coordinator Shona Aitken says 14 of 17 owls treated at the center this fall were hit along Highway 20 and Memorial Highway, as well as in the Big Lake, Bow, Mount Vernon and Sedro-Woolley areas. While there’s always an uptick in injured owls this time of year, she said seeing 17 since Sept. 15 is unusually high. Some of the owls have died, some were released into the wild, and some are still undergoing treatment. At Sarvey, six owls hit by vehicles in Skagit County have been received since Oct. 1. Aitken says drivers can help by being aware that owls typically hunt between dawn and dusk and aren’t just found in forested areas.\n\nWest Virginia\n\nCharleston: Hunting and fishing licenses for next year have gone on sale in the state. The Division of Natural Resources says in a news release that the sale started Sunday, earlier than normal, to allow for holiday gift purchases and early renewals. Gov. Jim Justice says anyone buying a sportsman or junior sportsman license before Jan. 1 will automatically be entered to win a free lifetime license or a vacation to a West Virginia state park. Winners will be announced in mid-January.\n\nWisconsin\n\nMadison: The Wisconsin Elections Commission wants the Legislature to get involved with a dispute that could result in 234,000 people being made unable to vote. The commission voted 5-1 Monday to ask that the Republican-controlled Legislature provide guidance for when voters who may have moved should be deactivated from voter rolls. The conservative Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty filed a lawsuit last month alleging that the commission is not removing the potential movers as quickly as it should. The lawsuit alleges they must be deactivated after 30 days after receiving notice from the state. The commission currently plans not to remove anyone until after the April 2021 election because of problems that occurred in 2017 with people deactivated even though they had not moved.\n\nWyoming\n\nCasper: The state collected more than $1 billion in sales and use taxes in fiscal year 2019. According to an annual tax revenue report compiled by the state’s Economic Analysis Division, that was nearly 12% more than the state collected the previous fiscal year. The report credits oil exploration and more active drilling rigs in eastern Wyoming for some of the growth. The Casper Star-Tribune reports that construction stemming from the energy sector delivered high returns for the state. Still, the 2019 fiscal year didn’t set any tax records. Chief economist Wenlin Liu says the amount of total sales and use taxes for fiscal year 2019 was about 5% lower than that of fiscal year 2015, before the economic downturn in the state.\n\nFrom USA TODAY Network and wire reports", "authors": [], "publish_date": "2019/12/03"}, {"url": "https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/columnists/david-plazas/2020/06/05/tennessee-voices-african-american-writers-racism-conversations/3137351001/", "title": "Tennessee black writers share essays on racism and next steps", "text": "The editors of the USA TODAY Network Tennessee\n\nDavid Plazas is the director of opinion and engagement for the USA TODAY Network Tennessee.\n\nIn 2017, Tennessee State University student Leona Dunn wrote a guest column for the USA TODAY Network Tennessee titled \"Can you not understand why black people are angry?\"\n\nHer column took on a new life as people started reading and sharing it again last weekend during the statewide protests against police brutality.\n\nThree years later, the answer to Dunn's question appears to be \"no\" or at least \"not yet.\" Brutal killings of African Americans still happen in 2020. Think George Floyd in Minneapolis, Ahmaud Arbery in Glynn County, Georgia and Breonna Taylor in Louisville.\n\nThere is something deeply wrong when people's humanity and lives are so unjustly stripped away.\n\nPerhaps the question now should be: \"Why aren't we listening — truly listening — to black people?\"\n\nThat is why the USA TODAY Network Tennessee is dedicating this special presentation to guest columns about racism with reflections from black writers.\n\nThe essays sometimes veer into the deeply personal sting of bigotry. Others focus on policy and solutions. Every writer brings a unique approach.\n\nI invite you to get to know them and to help continue this important conversation about how we finally fulfill America's promise of equality and justice for all.\n\nDavid Plazas is the director of opinion and engagement for the USA TODAY Network newsrooms in Tennessee. wrote this note behalf of network editorial board members Regional Editor Michael A. Anastasi, The Tennessean Executive Editor Maria De Varenne, The Commercial Appeal Executive Editor Mark Russell, Knoxville News Sentinel Executive Editor Joel Christopher, Middle Tennessee Editor Chris Smith and Plazas. He hosts the Tennessee Voices videocast. Call him at (615) 259-8063, email him at dplazas@tennessean.com or tweet to him at @davidplazas.\n\nHear more Tennessee Voices:Get the weekly opinion newsletter for insightful and thought provoking columns.\n\nClick on the link to each column or scroll down and read them by chapter.\n\nDevin DeLaughter:Engaged vs Enraged: how we move forward from racial injustices will define our society\n\nRick Ewing:Racism and bigotry today shouldn't surprise you, but you need to listen and act justly\n\nTerri Lee Freeman:After George Floyd's death, outrage is not enough\n\nJay Gilmore:My white friends are asking me how I feel about the riots. It’s a complex conundrum we find ourselves in\n\nJames Hildreth:Nashville: Fight back against hatred and COVID-19\n\nLeBron Hill:Stop telling black people they are overthinking racism\n\nDrake Hills:The traumatic effect of lifelong exclusion for black Americans in society\n\nAmy Hopson:Why decades of racial slurs and discrimination take a toll on Black Americans\n\nDwight Lewis:John Seigenthaler's never-before-published reflection on the 'color line' in America today\n\nMetro Council Minority Caucus:Five ways Nashville can move forward to become a city of peace\n\nLynn Norment:Racist police killings: The other virus consuming America\n\nMealand Ragland:Each time another black person is killed by police, all I can say is: 'Again?'\n\nTheotis Robinson Jr.:I can’t breathe. America, can you hear me?\n\nDeWayne Stallworth:Running while Black: Why we are not all in this together\n\nTonyaa Weathersbee:Should black violence spawn more outrage than police killings? One feeds the other\n\nFallon Wilson:We riot because you choose not to hear: A digital equity lesson for Nashville\n\nIn 2011, Tanya McDowell found herself handcuffed and awaiting arraignment in a Connecticut courthouse. Her charges were first-degree larceny and conspiracy, to which she plead guilty. Ms. McDowell, who was homeless at the time, was sentenced to five years in prison for enrolling her son in a school district in which he did not reside.\n\nThat’s right, this homeless mother of a five-year-old got five years for “stealing an education, valued at $15,000.” Before you jump to her defense, you should know that she was also charged with possession of illegal drugs and intent to sell to an undercover officer.\n\nDoes that make you less outraged?\n\nIt shouldn’t. It’s been 152 years since the passage of the Equal Protection Act, but the sad reality is that few people in the black community feel anything close to equality or protected. Instead, we feel isolated and ignored, ignited by injustice and angry in the form of riots and righteous protest.\n\nIn his seminal book, “Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community,” Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. laid out a step-by-step plan to bridge the racial divide that persists in our country.\n\nTwo key components of his plan were empathy and education – which brings us back to Ms. McDowell and her son.\n\nHear more Tennessee Voices:Get the weekly opinion newsletter for insightful and thought provoking columns.\n\nEight years after she was imprisoned for “stealing\" an education for her child, young black men are being terrorized and killed by police officers who demonstrate little empathy or cultural education — even while being filmed.\n\nBy enacting the Equal Protection Act, the United States forever established that \"all lives matter.\" The problem is, many black people still live with the social philosophy that we must be twice as good to receive our just due.\n\nAnd worse, too few white Americans are willing to prioritize real progress over self-interest.\n\nLiving this way takes a toll\n\nEven though she will never win parent-of-the-year, Tanya McDowell had an abiding belief that a quality education would position her son for a better life, and that his presence in a mostly-white school would influence his classmates towards greater empathy and understanding.\n\nBut instead, the opposite happened. Imprisoned by poverty, her son found no favor, and his mother found no forgiveness.\n\nBlack lives must matter.\n\nI’m a 40-year-old black man and I’m afraid because of the microaggressions I personally experience every single day. I’m afraid because I see myself in Mike Brown, Amadou Diallo, Eric Garner, Trayvon Martin, Ahmaud Arbery and George Floyd.\n\nI’m afraid because I feel the need to justify my humanity to many of my white brothers and sisters. I’m afraid because I can’t think of a solution. And, because I’m afraid, today my fear manifests as rage.\n\nIf America continues to show such gross incompetence in protecting black lives, it will force each of us to choose, metaphorically, between the ballot or the bullet.\n\nThe ballot represents real change – the collective courage to confront ignorance, reject racism and embrace the truth that “injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”\n\nThe bullet, on the other hand, represents extreme nationalism and destructive division.\n\nThe bullet approach is primal and swift, but never satisfying. Engaged community or enraging chaos?\n\nLike Dr. King, I pray we all choose the former.\n\nDevin DeLaughter, Ed.D., is the Head Of School at New Hope Academy.\n\nMy wife came to me the other day, eyes still streaming in tears. It didn’t take long to figure out that her sadness came from the recent news events where our country suffered another racial wound. But apart from her progressive political anger was a deep fear for the life and safety of myself and other members of my family.\n\nMy wife is white and I’m African-American. She watched the video of Christian Cooper, a birder enjoying Central Park being threatened to be pursued by law enforcement for the simple slight of asking a white woman to leash her dog under city laws.\n\nI have much in common with Mr. Cooper. We’re both middle-aged African-American men, educated in elite schools (him: Harvard, myself: Yale, Trinity and Vanderbilt). We enjoy white collar careers. We have hobbies that aren’t associated with black folk.\n\nAnd like him, I’ve also been profiled in a negative way due to race, many times.\n\nRacism overrides status in America\n\nThis should not surprise you. It’s been a fact of life for African-Americans for generations, and sadly, racism often overrides wealth, class and life standing. A Yale classmate was once frisked by police looking for a suspect, despite the only commonality between the two was being a black male (size, height, facial hair were all wrong).\n\nAnd he was dressed in an expensive suit and leather briefcase waiting for the morning train in a wealthy neighborhood with many others. His father was a famous business executive and the apology came swift once it made the national news. But the incident still stung. Yes, it can happen to that guy. So Christian Cooper’s altercation was not a surprise.\n\nMany people who aren’t black shrug incidents like this off. Maybe it didn’t happen the way it was presented. Maybe it was someone just trying to make a scene. Maybe ... well, there’s always a maybe.\n\nBut our families have “talks” with our teenage kids for a reason and they aren’t the same talks you give your kids. We have to make sure that their encounters with law enforcement or strangers don’t end badly or tragically.\n\nMy uncle gave me one of my 'talks'\n\nI was fortunate that one of my “talks” at age 16 was given by my uncle who was a Memphis cop. He understood how police think. Those rules he gave me saved me less than a year later when I was staked out by Nashville Metro Police for two hours thinking I was a thief.\n\nWhen four cops surround you suddenly, the fear lodged in your throat is for your life. And I went back to “the rules.\"\n\nWhen I watched the death of George Floyd under the knee of a cop in Minneapolis, my mind went back to the night I was suspected of a crime, until a fifth cop showed up and realized they had the wrong guy.\n\nI was lucky. But I shouldn’t have had to be lucky. I’ve used those rules my uncle gave me ever since.\n\nDo not be passive about bigotry\n\nWe African-Americans are frightened. We are angry. But we are also weary. After decades of progress, we still face things you do not. Our ask of you is to view these events as a daily call to action. Being passive about ending bigotry does nothing but perpetuate it.\n\nThis transcends whatever political shield you carry. Acknowledgement of the pain and suffering of others does not make you weaker. We need each and every one of you to be active in the fight, especially with the next generation. Because if you do not, there will be many more Christian Coopers and even worse, more George Floyds.\n\nNashville is in pain today. Tornadoes and COVID-19 damaged us, but the aftermath of the “I Will Breathe” protest is a self-inflicted wound on our city. In recent years during strife, we hold a rally or march, city leaders and ordinary people speak, we listen to each other, and then we go home.\n\nThat did not happen this time and it stained the good intentions of Nashvillians who attended willing to listen to others.\n\nThe city that learned from protests 60 years ago can still lead the conversation for positive change. But it won’t happen if we don’t take the risk of reaching past our outrage.\n\nRick Ewing is a native Nashvillian and healthcare technology executive. He adapted this op-ed from a version of his essay that first appeared on Jennifer Puryear’s “Bacon on the Bookshelf”blog.\n\nI have always looked at the glass as half full as opposed to half empty. But, even so, I consider myself more of a pragmatist than an optimist.\n\nAs an African American woman, I’ve experienced how ugly the world can be. I’ve experienced both blatant and more insidious racism. I’ve been called a nigger. I’ve been assumed to be the assistant to my white CFO when, in fact, I was the CEO. I’ve watched white men who held my same position, with less academic and practical experience, be given double the salary. This reality is not just mine. Many African American women and men can speak to the micro- and macro-aggressions they experience daily. But this week has been another particularly bad week for African Americans and a week when all Americans should hang their heads in shame.\n\nJust as we were moving toward hopeful justice for Ahmaud Arbery, killed by three white vigilantes, we literally watched the murder of George Floyd by an overzealous police officerwho placed his knee on a handcuffed Mr. Floyd’s neck. To do what, further restrain him or kill him? We are haunted by George Floyd’s words on the video, as we have heard them before from Eric Garner, also murdered at the hand of the police. “I can’t breathe, I can’t breathe, I can’t breathe.” Onlookers urged the police to ease up and reiterated that Mr. Floyd could not breathe, but to no avail.\n\nCriminals should be punished, but surely the alleged crime of forgery did not merit a death sentence. Nor did the crime of selling single cigarettes, or being a passenger in a car even with a permit to carry a firearm (the Second Amendment applies to us too, right?), or being a boy playing with a toy gun in a park, or walking in your neighborhood with a bag of Skittles and an Arizona Iced Tea in your pocket. All crimes apparently punishable by death if you are a black man in America.\n\nAnd if that wasn’t bad enough, along comes Amy Cooper who blatantly, and quite dramatically, lied to the police that her life was being threatened by Christian Cooper, an African American man birdwatching in Central Park. She was the one breaking the law. Thankfully, her lie backfired. But for far too many African American men, their murder has been precipitated by a false accusation from a white woman. In 1955, Emmett Till’s 14-year old brutalized body was pulled from the Tallahatchie River after a white woman in Money, Mississippi, accused him of whistling at her in a neighborhood store. She lied.\n\nThese are the very real issues black men face daily. When will this madness end? When will we be afforded true justice? When will we stop being seen as threats to whiteness? Or is it hate, not fear, that motivates white people to endanger our lives? I am no more a threat to your whiteness than you are to my blackness!\n\nWhen will America get a grip and extend the constitutional freedoms of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness to us? If you consider yourself an accomplice in the fight for justice and against discrimination, we need you now more than ever! We can no longer simply be outraged when these incidents occur. If you say nothing in the face of these constant wrongs, you become complicit in oppression.\n\nI have the honor of working in a place that stands as a monument to the many African Americans and other allies who died for our rights and freedoms. We cannot allow their sacrifice, or the sacrifice of Ahmaud Arbery, George Floyd and so many others to be in vain. We must call this behavior what it is: criminal.\n\nTerri Lee Freeman is president of the National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis.\n\nThis is heavy.\n\nI can feel the chains of inequity on my shoulders as I sit at the computer.\n\nThese past few days have felt like a lifetime. It’s been a lifetime of being made to feel less than human for our African American population.\n\nOnce again, it’s rearing its ugly face\n\nAs it comes to a fever pitch and people are choosing sides, I’m siding with my beliefs. There are those who are pissed off with protests and rioting. I’m pissed too, however; I firmly believe that people can’t tell others how to process pain they themselves have never experienced.\n\nI’ve watched my wife carry three children. I’ve seen her go through the thought process of, “epidural or no epidural.” I will never know her burden. I can have a little empathy, but I’ll never understand. And therefore, I can never tell her she shouldn’t take an epidural.\n\nI’ve lived in different cities and joined several churches. I’ve watched three different pastors lose children. One pastor lost a son to murder, another lost a son to suicide, and another to drugs.\n\nThese are three different families in three different cities. I don’t know what they’re going through, and I don’t know their pain. All I can do is listen. If I lose one of my two sons to the same fate, then I can join the conversation. Regardless, it’ll still be from a different vantage point.\n\nThe best thing to do is listen and learn\n\nSo how can an outsider speak on what a disenfranchised community “should and should not do?”\n\nSome are bringing up the days of Martin Luther King, Jr. There are quotes and memes circulating social media. However, MLK was shot and killed for his beliefs. That’s an important fact.\n\nIf protests and riots are not the American way, if violence isn’t the answer, then why does our country recognize and celebrate national holidays that say otherwise?\n\nI vividly remember the hated fervor Colin Kaepernick was met with when he tried to take a knee. Recently as this weekend, a Facebook friend of mine responded to a picture of Kaep kneeling and said, “they should go back to Africa if they can’t stand.” We’re no longer Facebook friends.\n\nWhen is the right time to protest?\n\nWe tried to take a knee; we were told to stand. We tried to speak out; we were told to shut up and dribble. We started a hashtag that said Black Lives Matter. That was met with All Lives Matter. But the thing is, saying black lives matter doesn’t take away from white lives.\n\nSaying I like bacon doesn’t mean I hate sausage. Saying I love apples has no bearing on how I feel about oranges. And if our fire department were dispatched to put out a fire on a residential street, they wouldn’t be met with resistance to spray down non-burning homes.\n\nResponding to our non-violent cries with resistance is the definition of white privilege. So then, what other options are left to affect change? The problem isn’t our method, it is clearly our message. We’re asking to be viewed as equal within humanity.\n\nWe want equality.\n\nWhat’s the answer? I believe it starts with admitting there is an issue.\n\nUntil then, silence is complicity.\n\nJay Gilmore is a University of Memphis assistant professor of journalism and strategic media.\n\nNashville, we are fighting against two enemies right now that are equally formidable. The first is hatred. The second is disease. We cannot afford to let either of these foes win.\n\nI’d like to offer a battle plan of sorts, informed by two perspectives – that of a black man in America who spent my childhood with Jim Crow’s knee on my neck, and that of an infectious disease expert who has devoted my career to caring for people of every race and ethnicity.\n\nOn the subject of hate, I speak to all Nashvillians who are aghast at the specter of seething anger in our streets and the torching of our symbols of justice, events that threaten our sense of who we are as a city. For generations, Nashvillians have prided themselves on meeting our challenges with civility as we have sought common ground.\n\nBut, as we watch a new generation cry out for justice by the thousands, we must avoid the trap of sugar-coating Nashville’s legacy of peaceful protest – and chastising them for supposedly tarnishing that legacy. The Nashville sit-ins and marches of the 1960s, also led by young people, were not peaceful. They were violent and hateful. The protesters scrupulously practiced non-violent resistance because they risked being killed otherwise – and they almost were. They endured regular beatings and wrongful imprisonment.\n\nBlack protesters are fed up and so are their white allies\n\nThis is important to remember as the John Lewises and Diane Nashes of today take to our streets. They are angry over the senseless killing by police, not only of one black man named George Floyd, but of hundreds whose lives have been ended by hatred.\n\nThey represent all races and genders. The black protesters are fed up with being targeted by the criminal justice system due to the color of their skin. Their non-black allies are fed up with listening to their non-black elders pay lip service to racial equality.\n\nWe must appreciate that they have a right to outrage, and that they are making progress. Monday, we witnessed their cry for Tennessee National Guard members fronting them outside the Capitol to lay down their shields. The guard members complied, to resounding applause and thanks from these young leaders. It was the very best of Nashville, and we will have more such moments if we follow the example set by both sides.\n\nBut as we in Nashville and nationally grapple with the cultural crucible of our time, we also are grappling with the most pervasive health crisis of our time: COVID-19. It is still lurking in our midst and threatening to resurge, which could drive us all back into hiding and kill many in the process.\n\nMore:Tennessee Voices, Episode 19: James Hildreth, president of Meharry Medical College\n\nRespect those on the frontlines of health care too\n\nI applaud those who protest injustice, and who have come out in force to demand change. I have experienced too much racism in my lifetime and pray this will be the generation that finally pulls it out of our nation’s soil by the roots.\n\nBut I ask those of you on the front lines of the war against hate to remember and respect those on the frontlines of the war against disease. Think of the consequences of another surge to our brave healthcare workers. Think of your vulnerable family members and friends.\n\nMarch forward wearing a mask. Decontaminate before going back into your homes or the homes of those you love. Keep your distance so as not to become a vector for deadly disease, creating a scenario in which public gatherings are again declared a public health hazard.\n\nTo paraphrase the lyrics of that old gospel song, you’ve come too far to be turned back now.\n\nDr. James Hildreth is the President/CEO of Meharry Medical College, located in Nashville and the largest historically black academic health sciences center in the US. An infectious disease expert, he is a leading national voice on COVID-19 and its outsized impact on people of color.\n\nOn Tuesday, after a long stretch of days witnessing protests, both in person and remotely, I finally took the time to think and reflect on police brutality and racial injustice.\n\nI went to Instagram to see what everyone on my feed was thinking. And to my astonishment, I saw many of my white friends posting black squares in solidarity for #blackouttuesday. I sent along red hearts to every post, reveling in the humanity that I felt having the support from my white friends.\n\nIt sent me back to when I was a kid growing up in Tullahoma, Tennessee, a mostly white community.\n\nI never spoke about racial injustices that happened to me and in the world around me because I never felt supported by the white community there. When I would speak about a police shooting of an unarmed black man or any other instance, I would be met most times with “racism doesn’t exist” or “you’re thinking too much in it.”\n\nOne story that sank my heart was when I was an 18-year-old working at Walmart as a customer associate — in other words, a glorified cart pusher.\n\nWhen the carts weren’t scattered across the parking lot, I would walk around the lot and see if shoppers needed help with their bags.\n\nOne night, as I always did, I went around asking if I could help put bags in cars. I went to an older white women and asked her the question I’d asked many times before, “Can I help you with your bags, ma’am?” She responded, “I’ve been going to Walmart for 25 years and no one has ever asked me that.” Thinking it was a compliment, I said, “It’s all in a day’s work.” She seemed to smirk, then told me, “No, thank you.”\n\nAfter she left Walmart, two workers came outside and asked me if I seen someone come up to any customer and asked to help them with their groceries. A lady had called the store and said someone tried to mug her.\n\nI felt enraged because I knew whom they were referring to and quickly told them what happened.\n\nThe two workers went inside and later a white man, who I imagine was a manager, came to me and said, “The lady on the phone didn’t have a racist tone in her voice. You’re overthinking.”\n\nWhat saddened me the most wasn’t the lady who accused me of trying to mug her but the white man in leadership who let that go.\n\nIt doesn’t matter what skin color you have, you can have a voice in fighting racism and injustices.\n\nWe’re all we’ve got.\n\nLeBron Hill is an opinion columnist for the USA TODAY Network in Tennessee. Feel free to contact him at LHill@gannett.com or 615-829-2384.\n\nMy ninth grade English teacher once stopped me on a September day during lunch in front of the majority-white student body to tell my black, 14-year-old self I didn't belong at the school. And I believed it.\n\nAmid concerns pertaining to my lack of progress in the class, I was alienated by this teacher and lost the sense of belonging on those Catholic school grounds, before I could even grasp it.\n\nThat was 2010 in San Diego, where I initially leaned on an innate basketball talent. I also leaned on my first name — Drake, as a Canadian rapper with the same name recently released his debut album.\n\nI was able to wiggle into new social circles, dripping of affluence and racial tone deafness, lacking the black peer presence I was accustomed to, reigniting a lifelong trauma of walking through doors hardly touched by black hands.\n\nFor years, I've struggled to prove to myself, and to others, that I belong. As a black man in American society, the reality is the battle lasts a lifetime and includes inequity, bigotry, prejudice and poor allyship. In the midst of that unrighteous truth, I continue to fight for that sense of belonging.\n\nMoving to Nashville in October 2019 wasn't my first time in the South. I remember sitting in my kindergarten class at Monte Sano Elementary in Augusta, Georgia, as my grandmother taught her first grade class next door. I had black and white friends.\n\nA cross-country pit stop during the move to California in 2002, however, opened my eyes.\n\nI was 6 years old and vividly remember a humid summer night at an Exxon Mobil gas station in the Dallas area, where my mom had walked me to the bathroom. We crossed paths with a white woman standing among two others outside of the women's bathroom. In a disorderly state, she said: “Now, you know you don't belong over here.”\n\nI moved back to Georgia during the 11th grade. Just before I sat down at my desk before my English literature class, I overheard a white classmate telling his friend — who was white — about the rigorous challenge in keeping up with reading deadlines.\n\n\"I got the same problem bro,\" I said.\n\n\"So what, you're black,\" he replied. His friend chuckled. I sulked in that same alienated feeling I once had in the ninth grade.\n\nBut I know I belong at any school I choose to attend. I belong in any classroom I enter, media scrum I report in and press box I cover sports from.\n\nI believe Ahmaud Arbery belonged on any street he chose to sprint on and that Breonna Taylor belonged in her own home — safe — and George Floyd belonged in any community he chose to preach the Gospel of Jesus Christ.\n\nTo this day, 24 years later, it hurts that American society doesn't see it that way.\n\nDrake Hills is the Nashville SC and Major League Soccer reporter for The Tennessean, contact Drake at DHills@gannett.com and follow him on Twitter at @LiveLifeDrake.\n\nI was 5 years old the first time I heard the n-word. I had no idea what it meant, but I remember that everyone “ooh’ed” and “um’ed” as I sat confused.\n\nEven with the reactions, I did not know that it was something that should offend me. This was just the beginning of the memories.\n\nAnother memory was in fourth grade when a friend was having a slumber party and advised that she could not invite me because I was black. Unlike my first experiences of racism, fourth-grade me knew this was messed up and that only certain people were affected.\n\nSince born and raised in the South, our parents educated us on racism and discrimination. Since both my sister and I went to college and on to have decent careers, the adversity seemed to have the opposite of the intended impact. Please don’t worry if this doesn’t resonate. It only affects certain people.\n\nI was 18 years old the first time I heard the n-word as an adult. Yes, in 2001 I was openly referred to as this and “colored” during a casual conversation. It was at my orientation. I will never forget that rage. It was frustrating because I thought adulthood would be different, but I was still affected.\n\nSlavery did not end racism\n\nI am 37 years old and I still experience similar situations on a regular basis. They are now just more subtle and/or passive aggressive. Are you surprised? Are you clutching your pearls or shaking your head in disbelief? Like I said, it only affects certain people.\n\nEvery single day there are more examples of the racism that Black Americans have been dealing with since slavery. The scariest part is the illusion of progress and equality.\n\nHip-hop is thriving. We see designers and influencers selling and promoting different parts of Black American culture. However, we die at a higher rate from a number of diseases and illnesses including COVID-19 and people are silent. We are dragged by vehicles, murdered in broad daylight, and our issues minimized. Yet ... crickets. How can you love a culture and hate the creator?\n\nAs you watch the news, see protests, and hear the messages from all people of color around the hate and injustice they experience, be open and be active. Support systematic change with your voice and your vote, but do not stop there.\n\nLearn, listen and understand\n\nBe a real partner. If you can speak on Lil Yachty, you can speak on the Little Rock Nine. Know the history. The hatred you see now is the same hatred behind slavery and Jim Crow. Same ol’ song, just remixed.\n\nWhile I do not condone violence or the destroying of communities, I know and feel the rage and sadness which got us here. It’s being harassed and threatened. It’s being wrongfully accused and persecuted. It’s not having a safe space to live or just exist.\n\nMore importantly, it’s being disrespected, minimized, and treated as less than just because your beautiful melanin skin is a perceived threat to a small minority within the majority that has the platform to spin narratives and push agendas.\n\nIt is not okay to minimize, abuse, or oppress any human being. As we all now see, the consequences of doing so affects more than just certain people.\n\nI am one of the certain people\n\nAmy Hopson was born and raised in Tennessee. She is a data analyst who resides in Franklin, Tennessee.\n\nThere’s an old saying that the more things change, the more things stay the same, or in far too many instances get worse.\n\nThe late John Seigenthaler, who worked as a reporter and later served as a progressive editor, publisher and CEO of The Tennessean, wrote these words in 2006 as part of an introduction for a book of yet to be published essays that I was working on at the time.\n\nThis is the first time these words of his are being published.\n\n“More than a century ago, W.E.B. DuBois predicted that ‘the problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line – the relations of the darker to the lighter races … in Asia, Africa, America and the islands of the sea.\n\n“Sixty-five years later, ‘the color line’ remained America’s problem of the century. The National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, the so-called Kerner Commission, reported in 1968: ‘Our nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white … separate and unequal.’\n\n“And were DuBois alive today, he would warn, with the same certitude that the problem of the twenty-first century will continue to be the color line. A new Kerner Commission would report today that ‘our nation is moving toward three societies – one black, one brown, one white … separate and unequal.’\n\n“Both would acknowledge some progress in the decades that have ensued. But they would not dodge reality: the problem lives; too many who are African-American and too many others who are Hispanic still live in an America that is separate and unequal.\n\n“Too few voices still chronicle the message that so long as issues of race and poverty and discrimination intersect, the problem of the twentieth century will persist – and the debilitating, destabilizing, decaying movement toward separate but unequal societies, will continue, further corrupting the culture of the country.’’\n\n“There are voices still raised to remind our tone deaf society that DuBois’ alarm resonates: the problem of the color line drags on, ’’ added Seigenthaler, who died in 2014. “Voices still echo the Kerner Commission’s powerful, poignant warning.\n\n“The movement toward a racially-ailenated underclass has gained momentum and complexity, as Hispanic immigrants have swelled the numbers of the nation’s poor and powerless.\n\n“…A vital segment of the Kerner Commission findings, after it explored the cause and effect of the inner city violence that rocked the nation in the 1960s, was to point out that the news media did little to mirror the racial diversity of the nation – and provided little news coverage that truly reflected the racial divide. Newspaper editors and television news directors took the admonition to heart, and there followed, for a time, an affirmative action push, well-intentioned but, as it turned out, too short-lived and inadequate.\n\n“It took a hurricane that ripped away the roof from an arena in New Orleans to expose the large and lingering dirty secret: The problem of the color line remained. The story the news media had missed over two decades was the depth of the problems of the underclass. We still were a separate and unequal society.’’\n\n'We’ve got to get to the place where we all respect one another'\n\nUnfortunately, the problem of the color line is still with us today – from Los Angeles to Washington, D.C., to Detroit to Nashville to Dallas to Seattle and beyond – as thousands of protesters have been seen battling law enforcement officers since George Floyd, a 46-year-old black man died at the hands of Minneapolis police on Monday evening, May 25.\n\nBut it’s not just problems with law enforcement or our judicial system that’s causing disturbances to take place in America today as they did during the 1960s riots. There are issues with our educational system that we need to deal with now, issues with healthcare and housing.\n\nEverything ties together. And, the powers to be have to be willing to change in order for America to truly become a nation that is not divided – one where all Americans matter.\n\nAs former U.S. Civil Rights Commission chairwoman Dr. Mary Frances Berry told me recently, “We’ve got to get rid of the racism and white supremacy that exists in America. We’ve got to get to the place where we all respect one another, and especially to the place where black people and other people of color are respected and looked at as human beings.’’\n\nI am ready to help move America forward, and I hope you are, too. And, no, I don’t condone the violence that has taken place over the past two weeks.\n\nDwight Lewis served in a variety of roles at The Tennessean, including reporter and columnist, from 1971 to 2011.\n\nThe events of the past week have been heavy, emotional, and a reflection of the damage to our community that has been building for years and years.\n\nThey have also shown us that there are some people that are trying to change the subject. From the extremists to the well-meaning, it’s clear they’d rather talk about vandalism than the countless police murders.\n\nWe will not let the subject be changed, because changes must be born from the most recent killings of innocent, lawful African Americans.\n\nWe are demanding justice. There is no peace without justice.\n\nWe have laid out five areas that need immediate action to start us on a path towards becoming a city of peace. But if we ask for peace without implementing the following five actions, we will find our city in this place time and again.\n\nSupport of the Community Oversight Board and the accountability of MNPD. Ensure that a fair share of the federal funds for COVID-19 go directly into the black community. We know that this pandemic is disproportionally affecting the black community, and more has to be done. Designate funding for the purchase and full implementation of body cameras. Ensure that the recommendations from the Equal Business Opportunity legislation are implemented and more economic equity is seen in Metro contracts for black businesses. Hire a Chief Diversity Officer. The Minority Caucus has expressed the importance of hiring a Chief Diversity Officer in the past. To date, this position has not been filled.\n\nOf all of the thousands of people who have protested around the country, we have hardly any instances of protesters hurting or killing anyone. Anyone that wants to change the subject to protesting and property damage, away from the murder of George Floyd, should know that we are not going to let them change the subject.\n\nThe point of all this is mending the relationship between the overall community and the African American community, speaking up and taking action against police violence, and shining a light on what it means to be an African American in America today. We are not going to let you change the subject.\n\nNo matter what happens, we will maintain a laser like focus on the solutions we’ve outlined above.\n\nPlease demand that the first group the mayor should meet with is your elected Minority Caucus.\n\nThe Metro Council Minority Caucus of Metropolitan Government of Nashville and Davidson County:\n\nCouncilmember At-Large Sharon Hurt, chair\n\nCouncilwoman Tanaka Vercher (District 28)\n\nCouncilwoman At-Large Zulfat Suara\n\nCouncilwoman Delishia Porterfield (District 29)\n\nCouncilwoman Joy Styles (District 32)\n\nCouncilwoman Sandra Sepulveda (District 30)\n\nCouncilwoman Jennifer Gamble (District 3)\n\nCouncilman Jonathan Hall (District 1)\n\nCouncilwoman Kyonzte Toombs, Ex-Officio (District 2)\n\nCouncilman Brandon Taylor (District 21)\n\nCouncilwoman Antoinette Lee (District 33)\n\nAs we grapple with the devastating COVID-19 pandemic, we also struggle with a series of racist killings and acts that are keeping black America on edge. Racism is not a new virus, but it is one that is virulent and for which there appears to be no cure.\n\nThe fact that America has exploded in violent protests because another black man or woman has been killed by law enforcement is not surprising. It was bound to happen. Just as the coronavirus was bound to erupt in the U.S. In both cases, nothing was done to mitigate the circumstances, so the worst case scenario played out.\n\nI’m deeply disturbed by what happened in Minneapolis on Memorial Day, May 25. It was painful to watch as that white policeman, Derek Chauvin, knelt on the neck of George Floyd, a 46-year-old unarmed black man. When Chauvin arrived on the scene, Floyd was already handcuffed and in a squad car. Chavin pulled Floyd out of the car, threw him to the pavement and knelt on his neck, as bystanders videotaped the senseless brutality.\n\nImages of that killing, that execution, haunt me. I can’t get out of my head the smug look of self-righteousness of the perpetrator as he pressed his knee into the victim’s neck as Floyd pleaded, “I can’t breathe. Please …”\n\nHorrified bystanders also pleaded with the officer, but he continued\n\nChauvin held his knee on the victim’s neck for nearly nine minutes, three after Floyd was non-responsive. Another policeman checked Floyd’s pulse. There was none. Yet, Chauvin kept his knee in place, even after paramedics arrived.\n\nIt harkened back to when black men and women were lynched and burned for no reason other than being black. It was the same racist virus at play. It is a disease that has infected America for way too long.\n\nChauvin and three other officers were immediately fired. Days later, Chauvin was charged with third-degree murder and second-degree manslaughter. U.S. Sen. Amy Klobuchar said Wednesday that Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison would increase the charges to second-degree murder, and that the other three officers would also face charges.\n\nChauvin is not the first policeman to blatantly kill a black person. He is not even the first to kill in Minneapolis, a city that for decades has tolerated a police force that at times seems out of control. In 2010, a mentally ill black man, David C. Smith, died after two Minneapolis policemen held him prone for nearly four minutes. They were never disciplined.\n\nChauvin himself has more than 17 complaints of misconduct, and he has been named in a brutality lawsuit. Yet, he only has two letters of reprimand.\n\nAn infectious disease\n\nIt is indicative of a systemic problem when one police killing closely reflects another. This one does. In 2014, white police officer Daniel Pantaleo killed Eric Garner with a chokehold on Staten Island. Unarmed, Garner also cried out, “I can’t breathe.” Pantaleo was fired but never charged in Garner’s death.\n\nThat blatant absence of justice is remembered. That’s why tens of thousands of people — black, white and brown – have been protesting in more than 100 cities across the country. That’s why people are so frustrated. It’s that virus.\n\nThere also is anger because in March 2020, Breonna Taylor, a 26-year-old black medical worker in Louisville, was killed in her bed when police with a no-knock warrant burst into her home after midnight and shot her eight times. Those three policemen are on “administrative reassignment” but not charged with her death.\n\nLike Pantaleo in New York and the officers in Louisville, most police officers who commit blatant racist brutality are not arrested or charged. If there is a trial, they usually are not convicted.\n\nFormer Chicago police officer Jason Van Dyke didn’t expect to land in prison when in 2014 he fired 16 shots into 17-year-old Laquan McDonald. Van Dyke claimed McDonald threatened him with a knife, but video footage showed the teen walking away from the officer when he was shot. Van Dyke was convicted of second-degree murder and 16 counts of aggravated battery.\n\nWhite police officer Roy D. Oliver II in Balch Springs, Texas, in 2017 shot and killed 15-year-old Jordan Edwards with a high-powered rifle as the black teen drove away from a house party. Oliver was convicted of murder and sentenced to 15 years in prison.\n\nIn 2014, Ferguson, Missouri, white police officer Darren Wilson fired 12 times and killed unarmed Michael Brown, a black 17-year-old, but jurors did not even indict him.\n\nAlso in 2014, immediately upon arriving at a recreational center in Cleveland, patrolman Timothy Loehmann shot and killed Tamir Rice, a 12-year-old black child with a toy gun. He was fired but never charged with the killing.\n\nIn Tulsa in 2016, police officer Betty Jo Shelby was quickly charged with manslaughter after she shot and killed Terence Crutcher, an unarmed black man. Jurors acquitted her.\n\nAnd in 2015, Freddie Gray of Baltimore died of a spinal cord injury while in police custody. Six officers were charged in connection with Gray’s death, but none was convicted.\n\nWhen will it stop?\n\nPeople are fed up with outlaw police officers who feel it is their right to brutalize and kill black people just because they can. In most of these cases, there were protests against police brutality and killings across the country. Yet, the slaughter continues. That is why so many are marching and protesting now. People are fed up.\n\nWhile the police can be menacing enough, there are the racist white men with no badges who feel they can grab their guns and kill black boys and men as well.\n\nIn Florida, 17-year-old Trayvon Martin, was shot and killed by George Zimmerman back in 2012 when Martin was walking back home at night. Zimmerman was charged with murder but acquitted at trial.\n\nAnd just recently, unarmed Ahmaud Arbery was killed in Georgia as he jogged. A former policeman and his son decided the 25-year-old black man was a robber. They chased him in a pickup truck and the son shot unarmed Arbery three times. The two vigilantes have been charged with murder, as has a third man who followed and videotaped the disturbing incident.\n\nThese and numerous other deaths of black people at the hands of brutal law enforcement officers, or their proxies, is why people are protesting across the country. Like me, they are fed up with black people being killed by those who are supposed to protect us.\n\nThe malignant racist attitudes, ineffective policies and inefficient training of police officers must be corrected.\n\nAs former President Barack Obama said: “This shouldn’t be ‘normal’ in 2020 America. It falls on all of us, regardless of our race or station, to work together to create a ‘new normal’ in which the legacy of bigotry and unequal treatment no longer infects our institutions and our hearts.”\n\nLet’s find a cure for this deadly virus before it destroys us all.\n\nLynn Norment is a Memphis journalist who previously was an editor and senior writer for Ebony magazine. She can be reached at normentmedia@gmail.com.\n\nOne lesson I’ve tried to teach my children, ages 10 and 14, is to never allow someone to make them feel guilty about what they’re feeling or to discount the feelings of others.\n\nBut what do you do when you don’t know how you feel? Or your feelings are so overwhelming that you don’t know how to process them?\n\nIt’s difficult to put into words how I’m feeling about the ongoing deaths of black people at the hand of law enforcement officers, or those that are extremely suspicious on their face and seemingly covered up or ignored.\n\nNumb. Each time a new case emerges, all I can say is: “Again?”\n\nAngry. Why does this keep happening? When will it stop?\n\nSad. A life filled with potential and promise is cut short. A family is mourning. A community is outraged and in many cases, no one is listening.\n\nConfused. Just confused.\n\nWhen videos of these deaths surface, I refuse to watch them. Death is a normal part of life, but to see someone taken in such personal manner is just too much for me. Darnella Frazier, the 17-year-old girl who filmed Floyd’s death, will carry that scene with her for the rest of her life. Can you imagine how traumatic that must be?\n\nSo this past Tuesday morning — days after Floyd’s death, weeks after Breonna Taylor was killed, months after Ahmaud Arbery and years after Sean Bell – I woke up and sat in my bed with a heavy heart and eyes filled with tears that wouldn’t stop.\n\nI was numb, angry, sad and confused. And I didn’t know what to do with my feelings. After each instance occurs, I move toward healing. Until the next one. It’s like a new wound all over again and the more it’s irritated, the likelihood of it healing properly lessens.\n\nThe only thing I know to do is to pray that God sends the answer. That includes someone with the boldness to lead the charge to change our communities and change the world.\n\nThe lives of future engineers, entrepreneurs, nurses, congressmen, teachers, artists and preachers depends on it.\n\nMealand Ragland-Hudgins is editor of The Daily News Journal in Murfreesboro.\n\nThere is mourning in America. It is real and it is painful. Ignited by the horrific murder of George Floyd at the hands and knees of four Minneapolis cops, his “lynching” has become symbolic of countless other killings of black people throughout centuries in our country.\n\nTens of thousands of Americans of all races and backgrounds have responded in protest, demanding change in America, whose original sin was the enslavement of Africans stolen from their native lands.\n\nSome protests have morphed into riots. But as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said, “A riot is the language of the unheard.” We cannot be dissuaded by white nationalists - posing as Antifa trying to hijack the protests - to ignore what led us here.\n\nHow many times have people cried out for changes in the cultures of police departments in inner-city communities? How many times have the crimes of men in blue perpetuated against African-American men and women gone unpunished? I am tired of hearing about “a few bad apples.”\n\nHow many more Philando Castiles, Sandra Blands, Eric Garners, Tamir Rices, Ahmaud Auberys and Breonna Taylors must we bury for America to hear our cries of anguish before we are heard? Black lives have never mattered in this land.\n\nWe all want peace. But peace cannot exist in the absence of justice. Frederick Douglass pronounced, “Power yields nothing without a struggle.”\n\nTrump doesn't know how to lead\n\nDonald Trump is the head of our government. But this pathetic, self-serving creature who sits behind the Resolute desk is incapable of leading our nation in this moment of crisis. Some say he refuses to lead, but that's not the problem. Trump doesn’t know how to lead.\n\nStanding in the Rose Garden, Trump - the most lawless president since Richard Nixon - declared himself “your president of law and order” while demanding that local officials “dominate the streets” of our nation. He would bring “order” under the heel of the state. He also proclaimed that he was defending the Second Amendment, while trampling on the First.\n\nmarting from accusations that he was hiding in a basement bunker in the White House, Trump felt the need to prove that he was not hiding, that he was tough. Every weak man has a desire to prove that he is strong. So Trump's attorney general, William Barr, ordered police using pepper balls and smoke canisters to clear out a crowd of peaceful protesters in our nation’s Capital so the president could stroll across Lafayette Square for a photo-op in front of St. John’s Episcopal Church and hold aloft a book foreign to him — a Bible.\n\nMaking a mockery of the Bible\n\nUsing “the church of presidents” as a backdrop while clutching the Bible as a prop, Trump made a mockery of both. He neither asked for permission nor informed church leadership of his brazen political act. The White House later released footage of this outrage set to triumphant music. Surely white evangelicals can see through this stunt by a man who knows nothing of Jesus.\n\nThe next day, Trump took his act to the Saint John Paul II National Shrine. Washington Archbishop Wilton D. Gregory slammed the presidential visit in a statement shortly before the arrival of Trump and his wife, Melania. “I find it baffling and reprehensible that any Catholic facility would allow itself to be so egregiously misused and manipulated in a fashion that violates our religious principles, which call us to defend the rights of all people even those with whom we might disagree,” Gregory said in a statement.\n\nFather James Martin responded on Twitter by saying, “This is revolting. The Bible is not a prop. A church is not a photo op. Religion is not a political tool. God is not your plaything.”\n\nContrast Trump’s words and behavior with those of Joe Biden, Trump’s apparent opponent come November: “The country is crying out for leadership … leadership that can recognize pain and deep grief of communities that have had a knee on their necks for a long time. … The moment has come for our nation to deal with systemic racism.”\n\nPeople whose ancestors were undeterred and fearless in the face of Bull Connor and his dogs and fire hoses in Birmingham will not be curtailed by Trump’s bellicose threats. And people whose forebears bravely marched across the Edmund Pettus Bridge, risking death in the path of baton-wielding cops in Selma, will not be halted by a man who envisions himself their emperor.\n\nA conversation is ensuing about racism in our country. Trump has disinvited himself from the discussion. Ours is, as Benjamin Franklin said, “a Republic, if (we) can keep it.”\n\nDr. Theotis Robinson Jr. is a freelance writer, former Knoxville City Council member and retired vice president of equity and diversity at the University of Tennessee. He may be reached at thewriteone7@comcast.net.\n\nhe world has forever changed. For the first time in over one hundred years, every person on this planet can relate to one another in a shared experience of struggle (i.e., global pandemic).\n\nWhite, Black, Asian, Hispanic, rich, poor, educated, and uneducated alike all have to grapple with adapting to strategies and techniques which aid in combating a virus that has focused attention on human annihilation.\n\nWe would like to think the slogan \"we are all in this together\" represents a reality of social sincerity; however, it does not. One must remember that life as we know it changed rather quickly, but this existential shift did not influence change simultaneously within the human conscience.\n\nFor African Americans, this new social reality translates into targeted death, while also experiencing struggles associated with a global pandemic.\n\nAhmaud Arbery was killed because racism is a virus\n\nIt was difficult to watch the video that captured the killing of Ahmaud Arbery. I am an avid hunter, and the video shows clearly the hunting tactics employed by several white men.\n\nThe practice of group stalking is undoubtedly similar to methods associated with hunting rabbit, duck, and wild boar. The hunting objective for these animals is for one hunter to force the prey into a compromised position, while the other hunter goes in for the kill — this is what happened to Ahmaud Arbery.\n\nAs I understand it, white men are responsible for this calculated tragedy. This unfortunate situation could have been avoided, so we are left to grapple with why it happened. It happened because racism is a virus, and the killing of Ahmaud Arbery was simply a symptom of the disease.\n\nFailure to morally reconstruct America after the end of the Civil War led to a systematic understanding of black people — they are not worthy of life in dominated white space.\n\nIn light of this racist assertion, some white Americans made themselves gods and began to delete black life in this country. While phrases such as \"know your place\" invariably meant racial parameters had been compromised, to maintain the security of white space, blacks were taught a lesson via targeted lynching and assassinations.\n\nThe killing of Ahmaud Arbery, due to the virus of racism, is an indication that black people in this country are part of a vulnerable population (running while black).\n\nI fear I won't come home when I go for a run\n\nAs an educated black man who enjoys taking contemplative runs in my neighborhood, I must confess that I leave my home with the thought that I may not return (and this is before Arbery's killing). I think about my attire — would this shirt cause someone to think I am a burglar.\n\nIf I see a white woman walking or running alone, I attempt to avoid contact as much as possible. For several years now, I have been licensed to carry a firearm, which I rarely leave at home when taking a much-needed run (this is absurd).\n\nNevertheless, this is my reality as a black man attempting to embrace life in a dominated white space (this is the reality for every black person in America, rich or poor).\n\nUnfortunately, this was also the reality for which Ahmaud Arbery came to understand American racism as a sickness unto death.\n\nDeWayne R. Stallworth is professor of religious studies at American Baptist College.\n\nSo, let’s talk about outrage.\n\nSome of my readers, as well as numerous keyboard warriors, have been questioning whether the activists who’ve been protesting Derek Chauvin’s slaying of George Floyd on camera are as outraged over the violence plaguing African-American communities.\n\nThey are.\n\nWe know this because in February, there was a Ride of Tears, as well as numerous other demonstrations of anguish and anger, over three black children in Memphis who were killedin drive-by-shootings.\n\nBut here’s what’s really outrageous.\n\nWhat’s really outrageous is that those who are posing that question tend to be people who don't care about black people's pain if the institutions they trust are inflicting it.\n\nOr that African Americans shouldn't react after seeing a white police officer plant his knee on the neck of a black man to snuff out a life that he didn’t believe was worth serving or protecting.\n\nOr that black people, who are disproportionately poor, disproportionately sick and disproportionately grappling with historic injustices and daily indignities, must be perfect before protesting police who kill them.\n\nPolice who, unlike other murderers, tend to get away with it, along with a salary and pension that black people pay taxes to support.\n\nBlack youth internalize violence\n\nAlso outrageous is how some can't see how, when white police officers kill unarmed African Americans with impunity, it reinforces the idea that black lives are collateral, not consequential.\n\nThat their lives don’t matter.\n\nAnd when black people, especially black youths, believe their lives don’t matter, they don’t think the black lives around them matter much either.\n\nWhich is why the Society for Adolescent Health and Medicine issued a statement decrying Floyd's slaying at the hands of police - as well as the slaying of Ahmaud Arbery at the hands of vigilantes in Brunswick, Georgia, and Breonna Taylor at the hands of police executing a no-knock warrant in Louisville, Kentucky.\n\n\"Experiences of discrimination lead to internalized negative stereotypes that preclude the development of a positive identity and may lead to depression, anxiety and suicide,\" the statement reads.\n\n\"Violence perpetuated against people of color, especially Black men and transgender women, leads to mental health disorders and deaths...\"\n\nDr. Altha Stewart, associate professor of psychiatry and director of the Center for Health in Justice Involved Youth at the University of Tennessee Health Science Center in Memphis, agrees.\n\n\"The trauma of witnessing someone die at the hands of the police in your neighborhood, and having that replayed on your TV, or on your smartphone, or wherever you go all the time, it changes your brain,\" Stewart said.\n\nShe said when youths see police brutality and violence, it piles on to what's known as adverse childhood experiences.\n\n\"You've got kids who started school last year who have only known how police brutality leads to death,\" she said. \"So for them, this is not new. But the [high-profile brutality] incidents that we know about may not reflect what they see all the time...\n\n\"There are tons of these stories out here. And these kids are definitely impacted by them.\"\n\nSo, here's where the outrage should lie.\n\nIt should lie with the fact that police officers like Chauvin, officers who are supposed to be examples of how to respect laws and life, are, by killing and brutalizing African Americans, fueling children's feelings of worthlessness.\n\nIt should lie with how so many people don't believe police who kill and brutalize African Americans are actually part of the problem that feeds black violence; that feed the devaluation of black lives.\n\nSo as activists fill the streets of Memphis, Nashville, and other cities to demand police reforms in the wake of Floyd's death, people would be wise to remember that their outrage isn't misplaced.\n\nIt's right where it should be.\n\nBlack people, and black youths especially, must be shown that their lives, and the lives of those around them, are too valuable to be lost to violence.\n\nThat can't happen if the police are piling onto that violence.\n\nAnd getting away with it.\n\nYou can reach Tonyaa Weathersbee at 901-568-3281, tonyaa.weathersbee@commercialappeal.com or follow her on Twitter: @tonyaajw.\n\nThe iconic cultural theorist and writer Toni Morrison wrote, \"What struck me most about those who rioted was how long they waited. The restraint they showed. Not the spontaneity, the restraint. They waited and waited for justice. And it didn't come. No one talks about that.\"\n\nHer words speak to the pot of distrust that brews in Minnesota where another unarmed and non-violent Black father, George Floyd, was killed as if he were a stray mutt in the city's littered alley. A police officer placed his knee on the neck of an innocent Black son and crushed his ability to breathe. His whispers for release, air, and his Mother broke our collective heart and set a primordial racial discontent ablaze in our cities. And, so the people rioted.\n\nThese types of riots don't just appear overnight. They are not like the drunken rabble of white fans at college and professional sporting events, incited when their teams lose (or win) to decide they want to spend the night flipping cars. They are not like the militarized, white-led, anti-shelter-in-place protesters with AK47s who spit virulent defenses of their First Amendment rights directly into the faces of \"peacekeeping\" police officers who, like guards at Buckingham Palace, don't even blink.\n\nThe riots of Minneapolis-St. Paul are responses to centuries of Black bodies being discarded, still-open wounds that are daily salted by micro-aggressive uses of white privilege to ensure that people who look like me never forget that no matter how hard we work within \"the system,\" the system will remind us that we don't belong. The system will remind us that our concerns for justice and equity don't matter.\n\nThe voice of the majority drowns out Black and Brown voices\n\nThe rioting doesn't start overnight. It begins with the continuous silencing of Black leaders who seek to make the system better for communities of color who have systematically been discriminated against. It begins with excluding voices of color from the conversation. I will share a present-day example of what seeds a riot.\n\nNashville, like other cities, is struggling to address the digital divide. I have spent the last eight weeks trying to align all conversations about digital inclusion, tech racial disparities and how to help make sure that all Nashville students have equitable access to digital learning.\n\nDaily, I have alternated between phone calls and video conferences trying to persuade Nashville leaders to collaborate on a plan to address both Metro Nashville Public Schools needs and the larger racial issues that allow so many students and families to lack access to this new world of technology.\n\nHowever, over the last eight weeks, I have grown more weary and angry with Nashville leaders' blatant disregard for Black and Brown lives, in a city that is led by non-people-of-color who want quick fixes that are cultivated by nepotism and wealth.\n\nThey value “urgency” to spend available dollars over strategic courage. The “voice of the majority” drowns out the voices of Black and Brown leaders.\n\nThe seeds of the riot are in not being seen as 'good enough'\n\nThough I founded an organization to support Black technologists, Black in Tech Nashville, co-chaired Nashville's Smart City plan, hosted the first ever citywide conference on tech inclusion, and sit on the Federal Communication Commission’s Diversity in Tech Working Group, non-people-of-color who are not experts or colleagues of mine in digital equity work are invited onto the Mayor's COVID Funding Advisory committee to give recommendations on how to address racial tech inequities in Nashville.\n\nThis is troubling and seeds racial discontent. One can be driven to riot when, no matter how much you develop authoritative knowledge (I have a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago), how much you reach across racial boundaries (I have often been the only face of color and only voice for change in a room full of people who don’t understand principles of equity), how much you “code switch” or how much of an expert you are in this field of tech inclusion, you are still not good enough, let alone white enough, to be seen as a leader in this space. These are the seeds of a riot.\n\nA device alone will not solve inequities\n\nI am tired of worrying about our children: Black, Latinx, Nepalese, Kurdish, Sudanese, Vietnamese and Somali children lacking access to technology because we choose to focus solely on amassing devices while overlooking the need to co-create a plan that not only includes students’ access to devices, but strategically addresses the larger structural issues that allowed 80,000 MNPS students and families to lack consistent and quality internet and devices.\n\nThere is a pernicious train of thought in our city, especially among those who enjoy the benefits of racial, ethnic and socioeconomic privilege, to assume that a device alone will solve the vast inequalities that affect people of color. This is yet another example of how a city can seed a riot by valuing urgency over collaboration and planning.\n\nTherefore, given the current racial unrest and understanding that the reasons for this unrest stretch far beyond recent events, we need a diverse group of leaders to create a plan that prioritizes leaders of color, design thinking experts, and industry-specific supply chain thinkers to plan how to effectively ensure all Nashvillians have equitable access to personal devices and quality internet.\n\nA plan that focuses on execution and accountability. A plan that understands that if you create the pathway to deliver and connect devices and internet in 80,000 MNPS homes, you can use the same pathways to deliver food services to food-insecure homes.\n\nYou can use the same pathways to deliver COVID-19 contact tracing methods. A plan that will outline how multiple devices and quality internet can affect the entire family and help parents manage home-learning while retooling their skill sets to eventually apply for the tech-related jobs that are numerous in Nashville.\n\nA plan that considers the current lived realities of racial and ethnic minorities in this city, where many are struggling disproportionately with COVID-19 infections and deaths. Ultimately, a plan that recognizes the humanity of this digital divide.\n\nBut, to do what I just described requires you not to be driven by urgency alone, but by a profound sense of courage to right the inequities of the past and present. You have to believe communities of color are valuable enough for such an intentional, measurable, and courageous response. And you have to include leaders of color in crafting the response.\n\nWhy we have given people of color no other choice but to protest\n\nSome are watching Minneapolis-St. Paul in utter disbelief of how people can riot over a death. How could they burn businesses in their communities? How could they?\n\nIt starts with a handful of seeds.\n\nA seed of continuously ignoring Black and Brown leaders asking to build an equitable Nashville.\n\nA seed of white leaders taking ideas developed by people of color on how to address issues of equity and passing them off as their own.\n\nA seed of creating a community oversight board only for them to have to fight the police to be transparent.\n\nA seed of creating a Chief Diversity and Inclusion Officer, only to cancel the role the following year because of funding. A seed of claiming to have valuable Black and Brown leadership, but not have this reflected in Nashville C-Suites.\n\nUltimately, it’s decades of being denied the basic human right of being heard. Not just allowed to speak, but truly heard. We have been casting these seeds of discontent and disenfranchisement for a long time. It is no surprise that we have left people of color no other choice than to protest during a pandemic for our voices to be heard.\n\n“A riot is the language of the unheard.” -Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.\n\nFallon Wilson is the CEO of Black in Tech Nashville. She’s on twitter @SistahWilson.", "authors": [], "publish_date": "2020/06/05"}]}
{"question_id": "20230120_22", "search_time": "2023/01/20/16:38", "search_result": [{"url": "https://www.cnn.com/2022/12/08/health/face-mask-recommendations-rsv-flu-covid/index.html", "title": "Face masks come back to forefront amid triple threat of Covid-19, flu ...", "text": "CNN —\n\nMonths after most mask requirements have come to an end and many people have stopped wearing them, some of the nation’s leading health experts are encouraging people to put their face masks back on – but this time, it’s not just because of Covid-19.\n\nAs a triple threat of respiratory illnesses – flu, RSV and Covid-19 – sweeps the nation this holiday season, health officials are urging people to take precautions to protect themselves: get vaccinated, wash hands frequently and even mask up in certain circumstances.\n\n“There’s been a lot of attention directed to patients at higher risk of the complications of all of these illnesses – older persons, people who have any underlying illness, anyone who has immune compromise – I think, during this surge of this tridemic, if you will, there’s been a lot of ‘dust off your mask. Put your mask back on,’ ” said Dr. William Schaffner, a professor in the Division of Infectious Diseases at Vanderbilt University Medical Center and medical director of the National Foundation for Infectious Diseases.\n\nAt this phase in the Covid-19 pandemic, even with other types of respiratory viruses circulating, masking recommendations based on an individual’s risk have been at the center of public health discussions, “rather than saying everyone in a community has got to put their masks back on,” Schaffner said.\n\n“I don’t want to go to mandates because I think over much of the United States, you will get a lot of pushback, and people will ignore it. Public health recommendations have to be acceptable,” he added.\n\n“The notion that during these kinds of viral surges, that people at risk should be wearing masks and being more cautious seems entirely reasonable – and I add to that, particularly in this part of the country, that we should be accepting, tolerant and indeed supporting people who do that, because they have a reason,” said Schaffner, who is based in Nashville.\n\n“Don’t look at this as a political statement or a social statement. This is a purely health-related statement.”\n\nSome communities across the country are considering bringing back certain masking recommendations as the wave of respiratory illnesses worsens.\n\nLocal officials mulling over masks\n\nThe US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention offers specific guidance on when masking is recommended based on its Covid-19 community levels.\n\nThe agency says that people may choose to wear masks at any time but that a “high-quality mask or respirator” is recommended for everyone when a county has a “high” Covid-19 community level.\n\nAs of Thursday, about 5.66% of US counties have high community levels, including some places in Arizona, Wyoming, Oregon and the Dakotas.\n\nLos Angeles County is at a high Covid-19 community level, but it hasn’t hit all three indicators that would trigger a mask mandate, Public Health Director Barbara Ferrer said Thursday.\n\nThe county has 258 new Covid-19 cases per 100,000 people and 14.8 hospitalizations per 100,000 people but continues to stay below the “high” level of staffed Covid patient beds, at 6.9%, she said.\n\nOfficials will consider masks again if that level goes over 10%, Ferrer said, but she’s hopeful that metrics might improve before then.\n\nEven without a mandate, she emphasized community efforts like wearing masks inside when possible and getting Covid-19 vaccines or boosters.\n\n“We haven’t reached that super dangerous threshold where CDC has said ‘you really need to start worrying about your hospital system,’ but we’ve reached a threshold, and all of the data shows this, where there is too much transmission, and it’s creating a lot of risk. And the time to mitigate the risk is actually now,” Ferrer said.\n\nThroughout the Covid-19 pandemic, Los Angeles County has been at the forefront of implementing mitigation measures. In this case, officials would be following CDC guidance about masking and community levels.\n\n“What L.A. County is doing is, they’re looking at their uptick in cases, hospitalizations and deaths, and they’re seeing a trending upwards toward that high community transmission level, and they’re preparing to reimplement the guidance that goes along with high community transmission, and that is to reimplement universal masking,” said Lori Tremmel Freeman, chief executive officer of the National Association of County and City Health Officials.\n\nEvery community has been looking at the same guidance, considering whether they are approaching high levels and might have to consider universal masking again, Freeman said.\n\n“Now, I say all that based on the pure facts of the guidance, but I do think that has the possibility again of turning into a political divide in community by community where elected officials and others may or may not wish to see universal masking reimplemented. But we will have to see if that legal divide enters the picture again,” she said. “There’s not a lot of appetite for some of these original mitigation efforts to be reimplemented.”\n\nIn New York, state officials have encouraged schools and communities to take precautions such as indoor public masking as RSV, Covid-19 and the flu circulate, according to a letter from Health Commissioner Dr. Mary Bassett and Education Commissioner Betty Rosa.\n\nThe letter, issued Monday, warned of the multiple respiratory viruses that are straining the state’s health-care facilities.\n\nOver the past three weeks, New York’s flu hospitalizations have more than doubled, and lab-confirmed flu cases have nearly tripled, according to the letter.\n\n“In response, we are urging a community-wide approach, inclusive of schools, to again take precautions this holiday season and winter that can prevent the spread of respiratory viruses and protect young children, older individuals, and those with underlying health conditions,” the commissioners wrote.\n\nThe letter said schools and communities should encourage indoor public masking, vaccination and frequent hand-washing, among other measures.\n\n“We encourage schools to utilize their local departments of health as a partner and resource in this work,” the commissioners said. “Together, we will ensure that all students in our state have a healthy and safe holiday season.”\n\n‘We do encourage people to mask’\n\nThe CDC’s Covid-19 community level metrics for US counties are based on three things: new Covid-19 hospitalizations, hospital capacity and new Covid-19 cases. But the agency is looking into revisiting these community levels, possibly to include data on other respiratory viruses such as flu and RSV, Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky said Monday.\n\n“It’s something that we are actively looking into at CDC. In the meantime, what I do want to say is, one need not to wait for CDC action in order to put a mask on,” she said.\n\n“We do know that 5% of the population is living in places with a high Covid-19 community level. We do encourage people to mask,” she said, adding that people should stay home when sick, practice good hygiene like washing hands frequently and improve air ventilation in indoor spaces.\n\nCovid-19 hospitalizations are starting to tick up after Thanksgiving: More than 34,000 people were admitted to the hospital with Covid-19 in the past week, up 20% from the week prior, according to the CDC. Ensemble forecasts from the CDC predict continued increase over the next month or so.\n\nAbout 1,800 Covid-19 deaths were reported to the CDC in the last week of November, and ensemble forecasts that predict Covid deaths will remain steady for the next month or so.\n\nGet CNN Health's weekly newsletter Sign up here to get The Results Are In with Dr. Sanjay Gupta every Tuesday from the CNN Health team.\n\nDr. Anthony Fauci, who is stepping down this month as director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said he is not afraid to recommend a return to masking in some circumstances as the nation faces a triple threat of Covid-19, flu and RSV.\n\n“I’m not talking about mandating anything,” Fauci said Wednesday on “NBC Nightly News.” “I’m talking about just common sense of saying, ‘You know, I really don’t want to take the risk of myself getting infected and, even moreso, spreading it to someone who’s a vulnerable member of my family.’ “", "authors": ["Jacqueline Howard"], "publish_date": "2022/12/08"}, {"url": "https://www.cnn.com/2022/10/24/tech/eu-law-charging-standard/index.html", "title": "EU formally adopts law requiring Apple to support USB-C chargers ...", "text": "Washington CNN Business —\n\nA landmark law requiring Apple and other electronics makers to adopt USB-C as a universal charging standard in the European Union has cleared its final procedural hurdle, after EU member states voted to approve the legislation on Monday.\n\nThe new law, which is targeted at smartphones, tablets, digital cameras, portable speakers and a wide array of other small devices, is the first of its kind anywhere in the world. It aims to streamline the number of chargers and cables consumers must contend with when they purchase a new device, and to allow users to mix and match devices and chargers, even if they were produced by different manufacturers.\n\nApple could be among the most affected by the legislation. The iPhone maker has historically required users to charge its mobile devices using a proprietary charging connector known as Lightning; under the new rules, Apple would be forced to migrate away from Lightning in its devices sold in the EU. That change, which Apple is reportedly testing for iPhones, could potentially extend to devices Apple sells in other markets as well.\n\nThe EU law must still be signed by the presidents of the EU parliament and European Council, according to a release, but those are considered formalities. Earlier this month, the legislation received final approval from EU lawmakers.\n\nIn addition to covering new, small electronics going on the market at the end of 2024, the rules will also extend to larger electronics such as laptops beginning in 2026. It will also commit European officials to streamlining standards for wireless charging, a technology that is only just becoming more widespread.", "authors": ["Brian Fung"], "publish_date": "2022/10/24"}, {"url": "https://www.cnn.com/2022/06/09/politics/gallery/january-6-hearings/index.html", "title": "Photos: The January 6 hearings | CNN Politics", "text": "The House select committee investigating the January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol held its last public meeting on Monday, laying out its findings, approving its final report and outlining criminal referrals for former President Donald Trump and other officials.\n\n\"Evidence has led to an overriding and straight-forward conclusion: the central cause of January 6th was one man, former President Donald Trump, who many others followed,\" the committee wrote in a summary of its final report. \"None of the events of January 6th would have happened without him.\"\n\nThe committee voted to refer Trump to the Justice Department on multiple criminal charges, including obstructing an official proceeding, defrauding the United States, making false statements and giving aid or comfort to an insurrection. While the referrals are largely symbolic in nature — as the panel lacks prosecutorial powers and the Department of Justice is already conducting its own investigation — committee members have stressed the move serves as a way to document their views for the record. Attorney General Merrick Garland will make the ultimate call on charging decisions.\n\nThe committee's final report will be released to the public on Wednesday, marking the end of an expansive investigation that has spanned more than 17 months, encompassed more than 1,000 interviews and culminated in accusations that Trump and his closest allies sought to overthrow the 2020 presidential election and stop the peaceful transfer of power.\n\nThe committee held a series of public hearings this year regarding the Capitol attack. Throughout the hearings, there was live testimony from more than a dozen witnesses and recorded depositions of more than 40 others. Much of the recorded testimony was from members of Trump's inner circle, including former Attorney General William Barr and Trump's daughter, Ivanka Trump.", "authors": [], "publish_date": "2022/06/09"}, {"url": "https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/50-states/2019/07/22/titanic-auction-legos-mighty-mississippi-news-around-states/39794949/", "title": "50 states", "text": "From USA TODAY Network and wire reports\n\nAlabama\n\nBirmingham: The state’s busiest airport is partnering with a company that can identify passengers through eye scans and fingerprints. Al.com reports that Birmingham-Shuttlesworth International Airport recently added kiosks offering the technology for a fee. CLEAR offers a $15 per month membership, paid annually, with various discounts for family members. After the biometric identification, passengers move to the front of physical security screening. The company says its technology is available at more than 60 airports, stadiums and other locations.\n\nCorrections & clarifications: In a previous version of this story, it erroneously stated what CLEAR members do in the security line. CLEAR is not involved with physical security. The article also incorrectly stated the number and types of locations where CLEAR is available. The program is available at more than 60 airports, stadiums and other locations.\n\nAlaska\n\nKodiak: Alaska has become the only state without an arts council following a loss of funding through state budget cuts. The Kodiak Daily Mirror reports that the closure of the Alaska State Council on the Arts last week means a $2.8 million loss of arts funding in the state. Although only $700,000 is state funding, another $2.1 million consists of federal funds through matching grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and private foundation support. Officials say those funds will no longer be available without the state council as a connecting vehicle. Officials say Alaska residents’ federal taxes will still help pay for the arts in other states through the NEA, but those funds will not contribute to the arts in their own communities.\n\nArizona\n\nTucson: A program that prioritizes drug treatment over jail time is credited with keeping people out of jail and saving taxpayers some money. The Arizona Daily Star reports more than 500 people struggling with opioid addiction were sent to a grant-funded Pima County “deflection” program in the past year. Based on jail booking costs, taxpayers saved $178,000 in the fiscal year that ended June 30. The effort began a year ago as a six-month pilot program in two divisions of the Tucson Police Department. Officers could recommend a suspect caught with 2 grams of opioids or less for treatment instead of arrest. Authorities say the program proved successful with nearly 120 people getting “deflected.” The county has since received $1.4 million in federal funds to expand the program.\n\nArkansas\n\nFayetteville: Northwest Arkansas cities are figuring out how to handle the arrival of electric scooters, and the process will be evolving, officials say. A state law set to take effect Wednesday authorizes electric scooters vendors to set up shop in any Arkansas city. The scooters are battery-powered, have two wheels and a T-shaped handlebar and a floorboard. Riders pay to unlock them through a mobile app. The law says riders must be at least 16, and scooters have a maximum speed of 15 mph. The law allows municipalities to establish reasonable regulations for the safe operation and presence of the scooters on public property, but not ban them from the public right of way. Fayetteville’s City Council first took up a draft of an ordinance to regulate the devices July 2. Scooter companies will have to apply for a permit, the Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette reported.\n\nCalifornia\n\nSanta Rosa: The Sonoma County Fair has eliminated the pig scramble from Farmers Day because of rising public concern and protests over animal welfare. In the long-running event at the fair, youngsters chased and tried to capture piglets weighing 40 to 60 pounds. Officials say this year’s event Aug. 4 will instead include elementary school children carrying watermelons slicked with vegetable oil around an obstacle course in a timed race. The board president says the decision reflects a “heightened awareness” toward calls for humane treatment of farm animals at the fair 55 miles north of San Francisco.\n\nColorado\n\nLoveland: State wildlife officials are telling people near the Rocky Mountain foothills to keep an eye on their children and pets after a series of mountain lion sightings. Donna Kendrick says she and a neighbor saw a mountain lion recently in their backyards in west Loveland. Kendrick told the Loveland Reporter-Herald on Friday the big cat saw her and “vanished like a ninja.” Kendrick called the Colorado Parks and Wildlife department, where spokesman Jason Clay says wildlife managers are aware of the sighting. Clay says Loveland-area residents reported mountain lions twice previously this year. People have reported mountain lions six times this year in nearby Masonville.\n\nConnecticut\n\nHartford: State Insurance Commissioner Andrew N. Mais is urging homeowners to review their insurance policies before the upcoming tropical storm season. Peak hurricane season in Connecticut begins in mid-August and runs through late October. Mais says policyholders should discuss with an agent or insurance company if they have appropriate and adequate coverage. Although homeowners, condo and renters insurance cover many types of storm damage, he notes that damage from flooding is excluded. Separate policies can be purchased from the federal National Flood Insurance Program or a private insurer. He says now is the time to buy those policies, considering there’s a 30-day waiting period before the policy takes effect.\n\nDelaware\n\nWilmington:From 2006 through 2012, nearly 300million painkillers were shipped into Delaware according to a Drug Enforcement Administration database published this week by The Washington Post. If those 276,177,276 pills were distributed equally, that would be 286 for every Delawarean. The data set, known as ARCOS, tracks the journey of every prescription painkiller in the United States, starting with the manufacturer that produced it all the way to the pharmacy that purchased it. In 2006, 29 million prescription painkillers landed in Delaware communities. In 2011, the year with the highest volume, that number was nearly 48 million — a 68% increase. In 2012, the most recent year of data available, the number was 41 million. More than half of the pills — nearly 150 million — arrived in New Castle County. Sussex County had the highest per capita rate in the state at 361 pills per person. Kent County saw the greatest increase in pills delivered between 2006 and 2012, going from 4.5 million to 7.1 million respectively — a 57% increase.\n\nDistrict of Columbia\n\nWashington: Developer Adrian Washington, CEO and founder of Neighborhood Development Company, has apologized for padlocking Little Jewels Daycare and Nooks Barbershop citing environmental concerns last week, WUSA-TV reports. To make amends, Washington has offered the barbershop and daycare spots in a new building paying the same rent. “We did the right thing (where) there was a clear health emergency, but we did it in the wrong way. We didn’t communicate well, we came in suddenly and people rightly felt disrespected,” Washington says. He adds it served as a valuable learning lesson even for a developer who has been in the business for more than two decades.\n\nFlorida\n\nSt. Augustine: An alligator that eluded capture for days in a Chicago lagoon is settling in its new home. The St. Augustine Alligator Farm Zoological Park said in a Facebook post Friday that it welcomed the reptile known as Chance the Snapper with a banner, pizza and the band Chicago’s greatest hits. The park that now houses Chance recommended the Florida trapper Chicago officials flew in to capture the gator. The 4-foot, 18-pound American alligator became an instant sensation from the day he was spotted in the Humboldt Park lagoon and photos popped up online. Investigators don’t know why the animal was in the lagoon, but experts say it wouldn’t have survived the winter. Park director John Brueggen says Chance will stay alone for 90 days to make sure he is illness-free, and then join other gators.\n\nGeorgia\n\nAtlanta: Georgia Power intends to rely more on solar power than in past years to deliver energy to homes and businesses. It will also close a coal-fired power plant in the northwest part of the state. WABE-FM reports that it’s part of the company’s long-range energy plan, which was recently approved by the Georgia Public Service Commission. Under the plan, Georgia Power will close its coal-fired power plant near Rome. Also part of the plan: the company says it will add more wood burning to its energy mix. Georgia Power has proposed an increase in rates by about 7 %. Hearings on that matter are scheduled to begin later this year.\n\nHawaii\n\nWailuki: The governing authority for Maui’s water utility plans to study the feasibility of buying and maintaining an irrigation system that diverts stream water from east Maui and delivers it other parts of the island. The county Board of Water Supply voted Thursday to establish a subcommittee to study the issue, The Maui News reported. Alexander & Baldwin developed the East Maui Irrigation system a century ago to supply water to its sugar cane fields in central Maui. The company last year sold the cane fields to Mahi Pono, which is growing a variety of crops on the land. The system, which is today owned by A&B and Mahi Pono, has also supplied 35,000 residents in Upcountry with water. These water users have been in limbo after a bill that would have authorized the state to extend A&B’s water permits failed at the state Legislature in May. A&B’s diversion permit expires in December. The bill’s failure raises questions about the permit’s renewal and the delivery of water to end users after that date.\n\nIdaho\n\nBoise: In February, Idaho Fish and Game drastically cut the number of moose tags because of population declines across the state. In 2019-2020, there will be only 634 moose tags available each year, a 22% decrease from 2017-2018, which also saw an 8% reduction compared to 2015-2016. The Panhandle region of Idaho saw a 45% reduction in moose tags, the largest in the state, and the elimination of antlerless tags. Wildlife biologists do not have clear answers for the drop in moose population, but the likely suspect is a combination of habitat loss, ticks and predators. Idaho Fish and Game does not know exact moose population numbers but estimates there are 10,000 to 12,000 in the state. To estimate populations, Idaho Fish and Game relies on harvest information.\n\nIllinois\n\nSpringfield: Thousands of people have visited the governor’s mansion since it reopened last year after renovations that cost $15 million. The State Journal-Register reports that the governor’s office says more than 29,000 people have toured the mansion. Former Gov. Bruce Rauner spearheaded the renovations because maintenance had been neglected. Recent former governors rarely used the mansion before the renovations. But Rauner lived there and now Gov. J.B. Pritzker has moved in. The mansion offers exhibits highlighting the 1893 World Columbian Exposition in Chicago and life during the Civil War. An “Art of Illinois” project also showcases 80 pieces of fine and decorative art. The mansion has hosted free weekly concerts this summer. The mansion is open daily from 1 p.m. to 4 p.m. for guided tours.\n\nIndiana\n\nBurns Harbor: The Navy is planning to commission its new USS Indianapolis combat vessel at a northwestern Indiana port this fall. The ceremony marking the ship’s entry into the Navy’s active fleet is set for Oct. 26 at Burns Harbor along Lake Michigan. It is the fourth military vessel carrying the Indianapolis name. The second USS Indianapolis was sunk by a Japanese submarine in July 1945 while returning from a Pacific island where it delivered key components for the Hiroshima atomic bomb. Only 317 of its nearly 1,200 crewmen survived the sinking and days in shark-infested waters. The ship was built at a Marinette, Wisconsin, shipyard and will be based near Jacksonville, Florida. It is a Freedom-class littoral ship designed to be highly maneuverable for missions such as mine-clearing and anti-submarine warfare.\n\nIowa\n\nCoralville: Iowa State University is dropping claims of wrongdoing against a former employee and paying her $225,000 to resolve a legal dispute over its popular outdoor sculptures made from Legos. As part of the settlement, Iowa State has also taken several steps to restore the reputation of Teresa McLaughlin. Iowa State President Wendy Wintersteen has written her a glowing letter of recommendation calling her an honest, innovative employee. The school also will dedicate a bench for McLaughlin in Reiman Gardens, the campus landmark that McLaughlin spent most of her career building as its director. Those steps will resolve a contentious three-year legal dispute that derailed Nature Connects, the traveling Lego art program conceived by McLaughlin. McLaughlin had accused the university of failing to pay her commissions. The university accused her of working to market competing exhibits.\n\nKansas\n\nGarden City: A local zoo says two of four red panda cubs born last week have died. Officials with the Lee Richardson Zoo say one of the male cubs died of injuries “of an unknown origin” shortly after he was born. Another female cub died while being cared for by her mother. The cubs were among quadruplets born last Wednesday to Ember, a 9-year-old red panda. The zoo says only 1% of red panda litters are quadruplets. Ember and the cubs are expected to be on public display in late September or early October. Until then, footage of mom and cubs will be available on the zoo’s social media accounts.\n\nKentucky\n\nNewport:The city’s plans to install a SkyWheel at the Newport on the Levee can move forward, the city announced Monday. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has approved the permit for construction of SkyWheel, the observation wheel planned for the riverfront, according to the city. Construction on the 230-foot tall SkyWheel will start as soon as possible. It will feature 30 climate-controlled gondolas and will be built at Newport on the Levee, right next to the Newport Aquarium, by Koch Development of St. Louis.\n\nLouisiana\n\nNew Orleans: The Mississippi River is finally low enough again to let the Army Corps of Engineers begin closing a huge spillway after a record-breaking run diverting water into Lake Ponchartrain. The corps says Monday in a news release that about 10 of the 168 open bays in the Bonnet Carré spillway would be closed by day’s end. Spokesman Matt Roe says full closing is expected to take about a week, with daily checks to make sure the river remains low enough to avoid stressing the city’s levees. The spillway was created to limit the river’s rush past New Orleans, keeping it below 1.25 million cubic feet per second – an amount that would fill the Empire State Building in 30 seconds. The spillway was opened May 10 for the second time this year.\n\nMaine\n\nStonington: A group of Maine lobstermen that has the backing of the state’s Congressional delegation is pushing back at a plan to protect endangered whales with new fishing regulations. A federal team has called for the removal of half the vertical trap lines from the Gulf of Maine to reduce risk to North Atlantic right whales. Lobstermen from the Maine coast gathered with three members of the delegation and Democratic Gov. Janet Mills in Stonington on Sunday to make the case the new rules would put an unfair burden on a key state industry. Democratic Rep. Chellie Pingree, who attended the rally, says right whales need help, but the government’s “one-size-fits-all risk reduction” approach might not be the best way. The whales number about 400 and have experienced high mortality recently.\n\nMaryland\n\nBaltimore: Several hundred people gathered outside Johns Hopkins Hospital to protest the hospital’s practice of suing patients over unpaid medical bills. The Baltimore Sun reports the Saturday demonstration also promoted the efforts of Hopkins nurses to join the National Nurses United union. The Sun reported in May that Hopkins has filed thousands of lawsuits since 2009 against patients with outstanding bills. It reported a large portion of those lawsuits targeted residents of low-income areas. Hopkins emailed a statement to employees Saturday saying it supports its nurses right to unionize, but the union released false information about Hopkins’ debt collection practices. Spokeswoman Kim Hoppe says the court is only called on when patients stop responding and all points of contact are exhausted. She says patients can apply for medical or financial hardship.\n\nMassachusetts\n\nBoston: Lawmakers are weighing a ban on the practice of declawing cats. Supporters of the measure say declawing is cruel and painful. They say cats rely on their paws and claws to groom themselves and to help protect and defend their bodies. The practice involves amputating a cat’s toes to the first knuckle. A bill that would prohibit declawing is scheduled for a public hearing at the Statehouse on Monday before the Committee on Consumer Protection and Professional Licensure. Lawmakers in New York last month voted to approve a bill banning the declawing of cats. The bill was sent to Democratic Gov. Andrew Cuomo. Declawing a cat is already illegal in much of Europe and in several Canadian provinces, as well as in Los Angeles, San Francisco and Denver.\n\nMichigan\n\nArcadia:An exclusive golf course no longer encourages players to hit balls into Lake Michigan after a diver found hundreds in the water. A description on the Arcadia Bluffs website of the 12th hole overlooking the lake had said, “Go ahead and do it, everyone does,” in reference to hitting a ball into the water before striking a tee shot. The Detroit Free Press says Arcadia Bluffs removed that reference last week after inquiries from the newspaper. Golf course president William Shriver says he doesn’t want to encourage the practice. Experts say golf balls are made of plastic and rubber and aren’t good for the Great Lakes. A beverage cart employee says she was fired for discouraging players from hitting balls into the lake. Arcadia Bluffs declined to comment.\n\nMinnesota\n\nSt. Cloud:About 400 butterflies filled the sky on Sunday afternoon to celebrate lost loved ones at the eighth annual butterfly release event organized by Quiet Oaks Hospice. More than a thousand people were in attendance to listen to music, send off a butterfly, sip on root beer floats and enjoy a summer breeze by the river. In previous years, the event organizer would read off the names of those who were being celebrated during the butterfly release. But this year, attendees were invited to speak the name of the person they were celebrating and take a moment of silence to reflect.\n\nMississippi\n\nColumbus: A group petitioning to legalize medical marijuana in the state says it needs about 28,700 more signatures to put the initiative on the November 2020 ballot. Jamie Grantham is communications director for Medical Marijuana 2020. She says organizers have gathered more than 86,000 signatures. That’s about two-thirds of what’s needed. The Commercial Dispatch reports Grantham spoke to a civic club Tuesday in Columbus. She says the state Department of Health would regulate every facet of the program, including overseeing treatment centers where products would be sold. She says only Mississippi licensed physicians could prescribe marijuana products to people with “debilitating medical conditions.” State Public Safety Commissioner Marshall Fisher says he opposes easing marijuana laws because of concerns the drug could be abused. He was a longtime narcotics agent.\n\nMissouri\n\nKansas City: Lobbyist spending in Missouri has dropped by 94% since voters approved a $5 cap on lawmaker gifts last year. A KCUR analysis of state data concludes that lobbyists spent less than $17,000 on lawmakers in this year’s legislative session compared with last year’s spending of about $300,000. Peverill Squire, a University of Missouri political science professor, says financial gifts don’t buy votes, but they can buy lawmakers’ effort and time. Squire says most of the spending is on larger events that all lawmakers can attend, which adheres to the cap rule. Kelly Gillespie, a lobbyist who heads Missouri Biotech Association, says the new rules limit educational possibilities. Gillespie’s group funded a program last year to teach lawmakers about drug discovery and health care affordability. That is no longer an option.\n\nMontana\n\nMissoula: Glacier National Park officials are teed off over a report that tourists were hitting golf balls off Going-to-the-Sun Road during a traffic delay. NBC Montana posted a video Thursday taken by a tourist during a road construction delay that shows two men teeing off with golf clubs on the side of the steep mountain road. On Friday, Glacier spokeswoman Lauren Alley told the Missoulian the incident is under investigation. She says throwing or hurling things over Going-to-the-Sun Road has the potential to hurt or kill people or wildlife. She says anyone who spots such activity should try to record the person’s license plate number or remember their face if it can be done safely. Alley says law enforcement calls at Glacier are up 40% over last year.\n\nNebraska\n\nOmaha: Two king penguin chicks that hatched in March are now on display at Omaha’s Henry Doorly Zoo and Aquarium. The first chick hatched March 14 and now weighs 26 pounds. The second hatched March 16 and weighs 32 pounds. Their genders are not yet known. The chicks will remain in a segregated “chick pen” in the Antarctic penguin habitat until they molt their nonwaterproof down feathers. It also allows the chicks to get acclimated to the habitat and the other penguins. The chicks were raised by adult males – not typical for this species. Generally, an adult female shares that responsibility. The Zoo’s Aquarium Birds staff only intervened during select feeding times to get the chicks used to accepting food by hand. The zoo has 24 king penguins: 13 males, nine females and the chicks.\n\nNevada\n\nFernley: The second-largest commercial land sale in state history is expected to bring thousands of new jobs to a northern Nevada industrial park covering nearly 7 square miles about 30 miles east of Reno. A California-based real estate firm, Mark IV Capital, outlined details of the $45 million purchase along Interstate 80. The Economic Development Authority of Western Nevada estimates more than 10,000 direct and indirect jobs will be created as a result of the potential development at what will be called the Victory Logistics District. Mark IV Capital cited location and infrastructure as reasons for its decision to acquire the property. In addition to easy railway access, it sits at a crossroad near I-80 and U.S. Highways 50 and 395.\n\nNew Hampshire\n\nLoudon: The state Department of Transportation will be implementing a traffic control plan for fans attending Sunday’s Monster Energy NASCAR Cup Series Foxwoods Resort Casino 301 Race in Loudon. The race starts at 3 p.m., with maximum traffic congestion occurring in the late afternoon and early evening. There will be ramp closures and other changes affecting Route 106, Interstate 93 and Interstate 393. In some areas, extra temporary lanes will be created.\n\nNew Jersey\n\nNewark: Passengers traveling between New Jersey and New York have experienced rail delays of five hours or more about 17 times per year in recent years. That’s the conclusion of a review conducted on behalf of New Jersey Transit and Amtrak. The study’s findings were released Monday by the overseers of a multibillion-dollar project to build a second Hudson River rail tunnel and a new rail bridge over New Jersey’s Hackensack River. The study covered 2014 through 2018 and says the delays cost commuters almost 2,000 hours in extra transit time. They were mostly caused by mechanical problems and an aging infrastructure. The $13.7 billion tunnel project has been stalled by disputes between New York and New Jersey and the federal government over how the cost will be divided up.\n\nNew Mexico\n\nAlbuquerque: In what’s expected to be a long, contentious process, a few dozen people gathered recently for the first public meeting hosted by Public Service Co. of New Mexico on the planned shutdown of its coal-fired power plant. The utility says it wants feedback on four proposed options for replacing the power that will be lost when the San Juan Generating Station closes in 2022. The proposals are outlined in a filing made earlier this month with the Public Regulation Commission. Regulators will review the options in public hearings over the next nine to 15 months. The Albuquerque Journal reports PNM also will hold meetings in August with organizations that want to test potential changes in the different scenarios using modeling tools to determine costs and feasibility.\n\nNew York\n\nAlexandria Bay: The St. Lawrence River has been named the best bass fishery in the nation. It’s a first for the river, which borders Canada to the north and was ranked in the top 10 twice in the past four years by Bassmaster Magazine. The average weight of the entire 149-team field during a June tournament was 20.3 pounds, topped by the winning team from Sam Houston State University, which averaged 24.4 pounds a day. The Big Bass Award for that event was a 6-pound, 7-ouncer. Bassmaster Magazine editor James Hall says in some years there was internal debate over No. 1, but not this year. New York’s Lake Erie out of Buffalo was 10th.\n\nNorth Carolina\n\nAsheville: Housing prices in Buncombe County have never been higher, outpacing even that of prices in Asheville city limits for the first time in nearly six years, data compiled by area real estate agencies show. The county's median sale price for the year's second quarter was $319,500, up more than 10% from the same time in 2018 and its highest figure on record, according to Mosiac Community Lifestyle Realty. The rise is being driven by more homes selling for more than $300,000 and fewer selling below $300,000 compared to the same time in 2018, Mosaic said. Buncombe had 732 home sales during the quarter, a roughly 8% boost from the previous year's totals. The same time period yielded 453 home sales in Asheville, also a record number for a quarter, says Mosiac.\n\nNorth Dakota\n\nBismarck: The state Game and Fish Department says its workers have just completed one of the largest fish stocking efforts in the history of the agency. Crews have stocked 140 lakes across the state with more than 11 million walleye fingerlings from the Garrison Dam National Fish Hatchery. Fisheries production leader Jerry Wiegel says the Garrison Dam hatchery had to step up this year because of fish production that couldn’t be used at the Valley City National Fish Hatchery. Its source of water is Lake Ashtabula, where zebra mussels were recently discovered. Walleye already produced at Valley City here used only to stock Lake Ashtabula. Some were also sent to other states for use in lakes where zebra mussels exist.\n\nOhio\n\nRossford: Amazon says it will open two new distribution centers in Ohio. The company announced Monday that the two sites in Akron and near Toledo will bring a combined 2,500 full-time jobs. The new facility in Akron will be built on the site of a former shopping mall. The one in Rossford near Toledo is going up at the intersection of Interstate 75 and the Ohio Turnpike. Each of the two distribution centers will cover more than 700,000 square feet. Both centers will employ workers to pack and ship small items. Amazon has five other distribution centers in the state. They employ a total of roughly 8,500 workers.\n\nOklahoma\n\nChickasha: One of the last remaining Democrats from a rural district in the state Legislature says he won’t seek re-election in 2020. Rep. David Perryman announced Monday that he won’t seek a fifth-consecutive term for House District 56. The southwest Oklahoma district includes the towns of Anadarko, Chickasha, Fort Cobb, Minco and Pocasset. A minority floor leader, Perryman says it’s a “frustrating time” to be a Democrat from rural Oklahoma and that he’s disappointed with the lack of bipartisanship in the Legislature. Republicans have a 77-24 advantage over Democrats in the House. Perryman says that when he completes his term in November 2020, he plans to resume his full-time law practice in Chickasha.\n\nOregon\n\nSalem:The state’s iconic Douglas firs are declining as the state’s summers have grown hotter and drier. Drought also is killing grand fir and might be contributing to declines in Western red cedar and bigleaf maple. Oregon has experienced drought each summer since 2012, peaking in 2015. Although rainfall and snowpack have been close to average the past two years, temperatures in many areas still were above normal. Climate change is expected to increase drought in Oregon. Oregon Department of Forestry scientists conduct statewide aerial and ground tree surveys across 30 million acres each year, recording the number of dead and dying trees from all causes, including drought, storms, disease and insect damage. In 2018, about 680,000 acres contained damaged or dead trees attributed to all causes. That’s fewer than at the peak of the drought but still higher than historic levels.\n\nPennsylvania\n\nWilkinsburg: Pogopalooza, known as the World Championships of Pogo, bounced into the city last weekend. Extreme pogo stick athletes from around the world came to town to show off their huge tricks and flips to compete for world titles in such categories as High Jump and Best Trick. The events on Saturday and Sunday weren’t just for the grown-ups. Pogo users under the age of 15 entered a “bounce off” competition and those who bounced the longest got a free pogo stick. Visitors tried their hand at pogo-sticking in a free jump area that had pogo sticks of all sizes. In addition to the main competitions, the pogo athletes attempted to break three Guinness World Records over the weekend.\n\nRhode Island\n\nNewport: A Titanic survivor’s walking stick with an electric light she used to signal for help from a lifeboat has sold for $62,500 at an auction of maritime items. Guernsey’s auction house held the auction in Newport on Friday and Saturday. Guernsey’s President Arlan Ettinger says the top bid on Ella White’s cane was $50,000, plus the surcharge added by the auction house. The preauction estimate had been $300,000 to $500,000. The walking stick was consigned to Guernsey’s by the Williams family in Milford, Connecticut. Ettinger says some family members contested the sale. The issue was resolved before the auction, but the dispute might have made potential bidders nervous. Ettinger says the winning bidder said he was there on behalf of a friend in the United Kingdom.\n\nSouth Carolina\n\nOrangeburg: A family owned plant in Orangeburg County that makes machines for textile mills is closing after nearly 50 years. Mayer Industries Inc. CEO George Fischer says the company is consolidating its work making braiding machines at plants in Germany. Fischer told The Times and Democrat of Orangeburg that its 59 employees were told of the closing two years ago and the company has been working to help anyone find a new job. Fischer says Mayer Industries did a similar consolidation of its knitting machine business nearly 20 years ago. Mayer Industries built the Orangeburg plant in 1970 and created a course at the nearby technical college to teach workers metric measurements they would need to make machines for the European market.\n\nSouth Dakota\n\nRapid City: A National Guard unit has been welcomed home after a nearly year-long deployment to the Middle East. A ceremony was held Sunday afternoon for the 26 members of the 935th Aviation Support Battalion at the Army Aviation Support Facility in Rapid City. KOTA-TV says community members showed their appreciation with prayer and applause. Gov. Krisit Noem told the guard members their dedication did not go unnoticed because of their exemplary work. The Rapid City-based unit provided aviation maintenance and repair support for the Army.\n\nTennessee\n\nMemphis: The Shelby County Sheriff’s Office says six corrections officer have resigned after an internal investigation into accusations of inappropriate conduct. The Commercial Appeal reports that the identities of the deputies were not provided. A social media post from the sheriff’s office says the investigations focused on inappropriate relationships with inmates at the Shelby County Jail. The deputies were suspended with pay in mid-June while an investigation was conducted. One of the deputies resigned in June after being charged with a personal conduct violation and consorting with persons of bad or criminal reputation, which are administrative charges. Sheriff’s Office Captain Anthony Buckner says in a video release that the investigation was halted because the deputies left the department and the office’s General Investigation Bureau did not find sufficient evidence to bring criminal charges.\n\nTexas\n\nDeer Park: The cleanup of millions of gallons of waste and polluted water is far from over four months after a large fire burned for days at a Houston-area petrochemical storage site. The Houston Chronicle reports that Intercontinental Terminals Company, the facility’s owner, must abide by a 31-page management plan that underscores how waste is sampled and identified, stored and discarded. The March 17 fire at the company’s Deer Park site, located southeast of Houston, triggered air quality warnings. More than 21 million gallons of potentially hazardous waste and contaminated water have since been collected from the tank farm and Houston Ship Channel. The Harris County District Attorney’s Office filed water pollution charges in April against Intercontinental Terminals Company, alleging the fire caused chemicals to flow into a nearby waterway.\n\nUtah\n\nAlpine: Police in northern Utah were surprised to learn the suspect in a reported burglary was a wild turkey. Dave Ventrano with Lone Peak police says they received a call on Saturday from a resident who heard a window break in the house next door. The family that lives there was out of town. Officers searched the house and found a dead turkey lying in a pile of broken glass underneath a window on the first floor of the home. Ventrano said the turkey died after flying through the window. He said there are a lot of wild turkeys in Alpine. Police gave the turkey carcass to a resident who owns a local barbecue restaurant.\n\nVermont\n\nStowe:The once-endangered common loon is making a comeback in Vermont, but not without the help of humans across the state who build islands for the birds. Eric Hanson, a loon biologist with the state Center for Ecostudies has been leading the group's efforts to manage loon populations in the state. On July 15, Hanson, volunteers from the conservation group Friends of Waterbury Reservoir and Park Ranger Chad Ummel met at the northern part of Waterbury Reservoir to grab some canoes and kayaks and paddled out to build a nesting raft for the two loons that call the artificial lake home. The raft the crew put together on the reservoir was made from a base of cedar logs. Hanson sawed notches on the logs so they fit together like Lincoln Logs.\n\nVirginia\n\nRichmond:The state Department of Health has issued a warning to residents that there has been an increase in respiratory illnesses across the state. The health department received increased reports of respiratory, or breathing, illnesses across the Commonwealth greater than observed in previous summers. Most of the reports have occurred among older adults and those with chronic medical conditions in assisted living and long-term care facilities, the VDH said. The reports involve different regions of the state and different diseases, including pertussis (whooping cough), influenza, haemophilus influenzae infection, Legionnaire’s disease and pneumonia caused by rhinovirus or human metapneumovirus.\n\nWashington\n\nBremerton:The Kitsap Pride in the Park 2019 event emphasized unity: among law enforcement, churches, elected officials and community members. The Bremerton Police Department, City Council members and Mayor Greg Wheeler were among the hundreds of community members in attendance at Evergreen Park on Saturday. The Police Department took to the main stage following Wheeler's address to announce its “Safe Place” program. The program, operated by Officer and LGBTQ liaison Mitchell Chapman, will allow the department to offer a safe haven at the station for victims of hate crimes while police resolve the issue. Chapman says he will be working closely with local businesses and social services to train them on the protocols to serve as safe spaces.\n\nWest Virginia\n\nVivian: Crews have begun clearing the scene of a train derailment, where up to 20 cars went off the rails, some of which had carried hazardous materials at one point. No one was injured. The Bluefield Daily Telegraph reports Kimball Fire Chief Jimmy Gianato says the hazardous material train cars were empty during the Saturday crash, but will still be continually monitored becauese of possibility of a leak. After the Norfolk Southern train cars derailed near Vivian, some toppled onto their side. Others fell into the neighboring creek. The newspaper reports one was labeled “Carbon Dioxide Refrigerated Liquid.” Crews with Norfolk Southern, Emergency Railroad Services and Cranemasters worked to clear the scene Sunday.\n\nWisconsin\n\nAppleton:In the midst of a sweltering heatwave that scorched more than half of the U.S., there was some good news for Appleton residents: It apparently has been worse. A Seattle news station reported Friday that Appleton is home to the hottest \"feels like\" day in U.S. history, when the temperature hit a high point of 101 degrees with a dew point of 90 degrees on July 13, 1995. That combination produced a heat index — or made it feel like — 148 degrees that day, KOMO News reported. Friday wasn't quite that hot — Appleton saw a high temperature of 90 degrees and dew points ranged from the low-to-mid 70s, says Scott Berschback, a meteorologist out of the National Weather Service office in Green Bay. Berschback couldn't confirm Friday's peak heat index, nor could he confirm the purported record.\n\nWyoming\n\nRock Springs: Two residents are trying to end the use of a gas chamber for euthanasia at an animal shelter. The Humane Society of the U.S. says Wyoming is one of just four states where shelters still use gas chambers rather than lethal injection to euthanize animals; the others are Missouri, Ohio and Utah. Animal welfare advocates say gas chambers are cruel because death often doesn’t happen quickly. The Rock Springs Rocket-Miner reports Madhu Anderson and Eve Waggoner have been protesting the use of gas at the Rock Springs animal shelter. Anderson says lethal injection is more humane and not difficult to implement. Rock Springs Police Chief Dwane Pacheco says the shelter only euthanizes feral cats and aggressive dogs and has one of Wyoming’s few free spay-and-neuter programs.", "authors": [], "publish_date": "2019/07/22"}, {"url": "https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/50-states/2019/07/09/ink-library-parking-barnacles-lunar-training-grounds-news-around-states/39666487/", "title": "News from around our 50 states", "text": "From USA TODAY Network and wire reports\n\nAlabama\n\nFlorence: The University of North Alabama is opening a new center to help students, including those from the LGBTQ community. The Mitchell/West Center for Social Inclusion will open this fall on the campus in Florence. An announcement from the university says the center will address multiple challenges including suicide prevention, food insecurity and LGBTQ issues. It will also serve as a link to The Point Foundation, which grants scholarships for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender students. The center is being funded with donations by Elliott Mitchell and Clark West, who also funded a scholarship for the first Point scholarship recipient to attend North Alabama. The school is the only Southern institution with a student who received a scholarship through the program this year.\n\nAlaska\n\nAnchorage: Residents of two northwest Alaska villages say large numbers of dead mussels and krill have washed up on their shores. The Anchorage Daily News reports the discoveries are contributing to fears of record-warm waters causing ecosystem changes, including unusual wildlife deaths. Scientists say they are working to pinpoint what has caused a string of unusual mortality events this season and whether the deaths are related. An official in the village of Teller estimates there were 2 million dead mussels in a channel on the Seward Peninsula in late June. A high school teacher says he found “millions” of dead krill stretching for several miles along beaches near Shishmaref. In addition to mussels and the shrimp-like krill, seabirds, seals and whales have also died along Alaska’s shores recently.\n\nArizona\n\nFlagstaff: Before Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin knew they’d be the first to walk on the moon, they took crash courses in geology in northern Arizona. They hiked the Grand Canyon and visited a nearby impact crater to learn about layers of rocks and taking samples. Astronauts on later Apollo missions studied volcanic cinder fields east of Flagstaff where hundreds of craters were blown from the landscape intentionally to replicate the lunar surface and tested rovers. Today, astronaut candidates still train in and around Flagstaff. The city is joining others nationwide in celebrating the 50th anniversary of the first moon landing July 20, 1969, with tours, exhibits, talks, and moon-themed food and art. Apollo 17 astronaut Charlie Duke will be the keynote speaker at a Flagstaff science festival in September.\n\nArkansas\n\nLittle Rock: The state Game and Fish Commission has launched a three-year study to track aquatic turtles in the Mississippi River Delta. Researchers have been trapping, marking and releasing nearly 100 turtles a day since May. They notch the turtles’ shells so they can be identified if caught again. Brett DeGregorio, who heads the Fish and Wildlife Cooperative Research unit of the U.S. Geological Survey, tells the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette that the count will provide the commission with data so it can determine if restrictions on turtle harvesting are needed in Arkansas. Commercial harvesting is allowed in the Delta. DeGregorio says regulation ensures the turtle population is in good condition. The study is funded by a $107,963 grant from the commission. The University of Arkansas is contributing $97,243 to the study.\n\nCalifornia\n\nChester: A fungus that causes a deadly disease in bats has been detected in the state for the first time. U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service wildlife refuge specialist Catherine Hibbard said Friday that samples collected this spring from bats on private land in this Northern California town tested positive for the fungus. The fungus causes white-nose syndrome, which can lead to dehydration or other conditions that kill bats. Hibbard says there is no sign the disease is currently affecting bat populations in California. She says the fungus was first detected in New York in 2006 and has spread incrementally. Bats that have contracted the disease have now been confirmed in 33 states and seven Canadian provinces. Another five states, including California, have bats that have tested positive for the fungus.\n\nColorado\n\nAspen: Avalanche debris in the state’s high country could provide fresh breeding grounds for the forest-destroying bark beetle, but a U.S. Forest Service supervisor says there’s little the agency can do to mitigate the threat. Heavy snowpack unleashed a series of avalanches during the winter that downed spruce and aspen trees in numerous areas – a collective event that White National Forest supervisor Scott Fitzwilliams says may occur once every 300 years. “I understand from entomologists that blown-down spruce trees are the perfect breeding ground for spruce beetles,” Fitzwilliams told The Aspen Times. “It’s definitely a concern, but there’s not much we can do about it.” Spruce trees and spruce beetles are the major concern in the White, Rio Grande and Gunnison national forests, he said. The beetle previously had caused large spruce losses in the latter forests.\n\nConnecticut\n\nHartford: Ambulance personnel across the state want to become a political force at the state Capitol by forming a new association. They’re upset that a new law providing post-traumatic stress disorder benefits to certain first responders does not include thousands of paramedics and emergency medical technicians. Robert Glaspy, a paramedic from Milford, says there are roughly 20,000 paid and volunteer emergency medical responders in Connecticut, and they need to be aware of what’s happening in Hartford, especially when bills like the PTSD legislation are debated. The new law extends up to 52 weeks of workers’ compensation benefits for PTSD only to police and firefighters for certain on-the-job events, such as witnessing the death of child. It stems from an agreement reached between the Connecticut Conference of Municipalities and police and firefighter unions.\n\nDelaware\n\nWilmington: The average amount of debt for students graduating from Delaware colleges has increased at a rate higher than any other state over the past decade. Between 2008 and 2016, the average college debt burden for graduates in the state has grown from $20,511 to $36,276, a 77% increase, according to data compiled by the Institute for College Access and Success. The average amount of debt held by Delaware graduates is $36,276, the fifth-highest in the country, according to the institute. Delaware also saw a large increase in the proportion of students with college debt over the same period, jumping from 44% to 62%. And the state has an above-average number of out-of-state students, according to the Institute for College Access and Success. These students pay higher tuition, resulting in more student debt. Compounding the issue, Delaware has the sixth-highest average out-of-state tuition, according to the College Board.\n\nDistrict of Columbia\n\nWashington: The International Ink Library at the U.S. Secret Service contains more than 15,000 samples dating back more than 85 years. The collection is the result of one man, Antonio Cantu, a renowned investigator and former chief chemist at the Secret Service who started picking up samples decades ago. Cantu died unexpectedly last year, and the Secret Service recently dedicated the lab in his honor. The lab is one of several under the Secret Service’s questioned documents branch, including handwriting analysis and document authentication and ID, and handles as many as 500 cases a year. Together, they work on Secret Service investigations and help law enforcement agencies around the nation and worldwide with their own investigations.\n\nFlorida\n\nOrlando: Walt Disney World is reviving an animation class that teaches people how to draw their favorite characters. The drawing class was shut down four years ago, but the Orlando Sentinel reports it will be coming back starting this week. The classes are called the Animation Experience at Conservation Station and will be held at Animal Kingdom to honor “The Lion King” reboot, released later this month. Eight animation artists will teach visitors how to draw characters from the movie, such as Simba and Pumbaa. The animation class was shut down in 2015 to make way for the Star Wars Launch Bay. Disney hasn’t told the artists how long this program is scheduled to last.\n\nGeorgia\n\nAtlanta: State records show the number of families in the state receiving welfare benefits has dropped by more than two-thirds in the past 14 years. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports that the numbers have decreased as Georgia has applied constant pressure to drive down the rolls. The number of households receiving aid from the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program has consistently dropped. It even happened during the Great Recession. State officials say the decreasing rolls are a sign that the program is working. The newspaper reports that the trend in Georgia mirrors what has happened nationally.\n\nHawaii\n\nLihue: A local group is counting vehicles approaching a state park with the intention of regulating visitor traffic. The Honolulu Star-Advertiser reports Kuhio Highway Regulation intends to monitor the number of rental cars on the highway. The Kauai residents formed the group due to frustration with state and county efforts to reduce harmful effects of visitor traffic around Haena State Park. The group says not enough tourists have been informed of the need for advance reservations to enter. Kuhio Highway reopened to the public in June, more than a year after devastating floods struck. The group says 400 rental cars headed to the park July 4, while only about 100 of those had park parking passes. Kauai Police Department officials were unavailable to comment Saturday.\n\nIdaho\n\nPost Falls: The former executive of a senior center who admitted to embezzling thousands of dollars has been sentenced to a month in jail. The Coeur d’Alene Press reports 49-year-old Alison McArthur pleaded guilty Friday to a misdemeanor charged over stolen funds that prosecutors said were used for a car repair, personal telephone bills and a trip to Disneyland. McArthur, who was executive director of the Post Falls Senior Center for six years before being fired in 2017, said she made a mistake and wanted to rebuild her life. First District Judge Cynthia K.C. Meyer ordered jail time and $3,500 for restitution. McArthur said the senior center’s board chairman allowed her to use the organization’s credit card, but it was not authorized by the entire board, as required.\n\nIllinois\n\nChicago: A new study that challenges stereotypes about homeless people estimates that in 2017, about 18,000 of Chicago’s homeless had graduated college, and more than 13,000 were employed. The report, released last week by the Chicago Coalition for the Homeless, examined census data from that year. The Chicago Tribune reports that data shows about 86,000 people experienced homelessness in Chicago at some point that year. Supporters say Chicago’s homeless population is considerably higher than the annual point-in-time tally the city conducts because the count doesn’t include people who are “doubled up,” or residing in other people’s homes. The latest point-in-time tally, from January 2018, revealed more than 5,000 people living in shelters or in places not suitable for human occupancy. The coalition indicates 4 out of 5 homeless people are “doubled up.”\n\nIndiana\n\nHope: Plans are moving forward on a new, permanent home for the Indiana Rural Letter Carriers Association Museum. The (Columbus) Republic reports the building slated to house the museum is in the town of Hope, about 40 miles southeast of Indianapolis. For several years, the museum was housed in a small, wood-frame building on the town square to commemorate Hope’s longest continuous rural mail delivery service in the state, which dates to October 1896. That building was demolished in 2015, and the Yellow Trail Museum became caretaker of its artifacts. The Yellow Trail Museum acquired the new building, a former photography studio, and efforts are underway to raise money for improvements.\n\nIowa\n\nDubuque: For more than 3,000 years, the tri-state area was dominated by oak savannas. The grand prairies of grasses, wildflowers, bushes and small flowering trees were dotted intermittently by great, sprawling oaks. European colonizers quickly molded that landscape into the mosaic of agricultural, prairie, urban and closed-canopied forest that dominates today. But the City of Dubuque has joined a regional movement toward the restoration of the historic oak savanna, hoping to glean the benefits the unique landscape provides. Dubuque has targeted swaths of Eagle Point Park and the Four Mounds site, which encompasses more than 220 acres, for these restorations. Both are in the design phase, the Telegraph Herald reports. The return to the historic landscape should better mitigate soil erosion and runoff than the manicured lawns and closed-canopy woods at both sites now.\n\nKansas\n\nLenexa: A suburban Kansas City man has accomplished his goal of completing marathons in all 50 states before the age of 50. The Kansas City Star reports that the final stop on Austin Braithwait’s quest was a June 22 race in Duluth, Minnesota. It almost didn’t happen. The Lenexa man was 26 when he ran his first marathon, during an ice storm. The experience was so miserable that he waited another eight years before running another. But eventually he was hooked, fitting in races around his work travel schedule at UMB Bank. On a couple of trips, he squeezed in back-to-back races, running in Mississippi on a Saturday and Alabama on a Sunday. On another trip he ran in Pennsylvania and New Jersey during a single weekend.\n\nKentucky\n\nCarrollton: The runoff that resulted from last week’s Jim Beam warehouse fire reached the Ohio River early Monday morning, but those living along the Kentucky River aren’t finished dealing with the aftermath. Dead fish continue to fill the Kentucky River, which flows into the Ohio River near Carrollton. The worst is nearly over. State officials said the runoff would affect some fish at the point where the two waterways meet once it reached the Ohio River but would likely dissipate quickly after it reaches the much larger body of water separating Kentucky and Indiana. The Kentucky Energy and Environment Cabinet said in a statement Sunday, though, that those along the Kentucky River would likely continue to see and smell dead fish as the plume of alcohol makes its way north through the region.\n\nLouisiana\n\nBaton Rouge: Rescue shelters in the state are facing new restrictions on how and when they can give animals to facilities that use them for research. A law recently signed by Gov. John Bel Edwards will ban shelters from taking in stray or unwanted animals solely to euthanize them for research facilities and will prohibit shelters from selling animals for research or experimentation. Any shelters that give living animals to research facilities will only be allowed to do so if they tried to find other placement for the animals first, if precautions are taken to minimize pain and only under limited research circumstances. The new law, sponsored by Houma Republican Rep. Jerome “Zee” Zeringue, takes effect Aug. 1. Violators can face fines up to $1,000 for each violation.\n\nMaine\n\nAuburn: Workers are going to be putting aluminum sulfate in Lake Auburn this week to fight algae. The Auburn Water District and Lewiston Water Division agreed to apply an algaecide to the lake last September. The aluminum sulfate will be applied to three-quarters of the lake starting Wednesday. The treatments follow an algae bloom last summer that was caused by phosphorus from stormwater runoff and higher-than-average temperatures. The public water supply remained safe to drink, but there were complaints about the taste and odor of the water. Auburn Water & Sewer Superintendent Sid Hazelton said the treatment will buy time to implement additional watershed protection efforts.\n\nMaryland\n\nSalisbury: State wildlife officials say they’ve euthanized nearly 400 geese in an effort to curb the excessive population. U.S. Department of Agriculture spokesman Kevin Sullivan says his team “humanely euthanized” the Canada geese last week at the request of city officials. Sullivan says the goose overpopulation has inundated the city, leaving messy droppings, over-grazing plants, damaging the habitat and polluting the water. He says the geese were captured, and a waterfowl processor humanely euthanized them with carbon dioxide gas before providing the meat to food shelters. Sullivan says he believes this is the first time the city has turned to killing the geese in almost 15 years of population monitoring. In the past, officials used a slower method of poking holes in eggs.\n\nMassachusetts\n\nBoston: The city is literally digging its Chinatown. Mayor Marty Walsh says city archaeologist Joe Bagley has launched the first historical excavations in the neighborhood. Bagley says he expects the dig to turn up artifacts that will shed new light on immigrants not only from China but also from Syria, Ireland and England who sought a new life in Boston from 1840 to 1980. Work began Monday at a vacant lot near the ornate gate to the colorful neighborhood. It’s expected to continue until early autumn. Walsh says the dig makes sense because Boston is a city of immigrants, “and this is an important piece of Boston’s history.” Over the years, Boston has unearthed hundreds of archaeological sites.\n\nMichigan\n\nLansing: A McLaren Greater Lansing executive says the hospital has rethought its requirement that patients reschedule medical procedures until they can pay a portion of estimated out-of-pocket costs. One patient was forced to postpone his cardiac catheterization two days before the scheduled procedure in May. It took Al Herring two weeks to raise the required $1,105, during which time he was at heightened risk of suffering a heart attack. Herring says the delay could have killed him. Chief financial officer Dale Thompson says the hospital has tweaked its point-of-sale policy since the Lansing State journal informed him of Herring’s plight. Thompson says patients may go ahead with their procedures after merely acknowledging anticipated costs, rather than having to wait longer while they raise 50% of the amount.\n\nMinnesota\n\nAvon: Several cities are seeking more time to reduce the amount of chloride, or salt, in their wastewater. About 100 Minnesota cities discharge too much chloride from their wastewater plants, and 15 plants need to reduce their chloride discharge levels in order to meet current state limits. But about six cities want more time. One of those cities is Avon. State regulators say Avon’s wastewater treatment plant is releasing too much chloride into nearby Spunk Creek, which empties into the Mississippi River. Minnesota Public Radio News reports that Avon is the first city to ask for a variance to chloride limits under the federal Clean Water Act. They city is seeking an additional 15 years to come up with a solution to the chloride pollution, which is likely caused by home water softeners.\n\nMississippi\n\nHattiesburg: Work is underway on a memorial to honor a voting rights activist killed when the Ku Klux Klan firebombed his home. WDAM-TV reports that a statue of Vernon Dahmer, who died in 1966, will be the centerpiece of a new plaza at the Forrest County Courthouse to honor him and other local civil rights leaders. The television station says the bronze Dahmer sculpture was recently cast. Landscaping work at the plaza and the construction of a base for the statue are to begin soon. Forrest County Board of Supervisors president David Hogan says a short wall that will double as a bench will feature a Dahmer quote: “If You Don’t Vote, You Don’t Count.” A total of $120,000 in public and private funds has been contributed for the project.\n\nMissouri\n\nKansas City: The American Civil Liberties Union is asking an appellate court panel to let it begin collecting signatures that would put a new state law banning abortions at eight weeks of pregnancy to a public vote. The Missouri branch’s acting executive director, Tony Rothert, told a three-judge panel of the state’s Court of Appeals on Monday that it had been premature for GOP Secretary of State Jay Ashcroft to reject petitions by it and prominent Republican donor David Humphreys to put the law on the 2020 ballot. Rothert wants to begin the process of collecting the more than 100,000 required signatures by July 18. He says the petition-gathering process needs to be completed before most of the new law, including the eight-week abortion ban, takes effect Aug. 28.\n\nMontana\n\nHelena: State officials say they confiscated more than 800 bottles and cans of alcohol in a raid just days after the Yellowstone Club signed a deal to settle charges of serving booze at unlicensed bars at the private ski resort for the ultra-rich. A Department of Revenue notice says officials took the alcohol June 25 from a terminal that serves Yellowstone Club members and others who fly into Bozeman Yellowstone International Airport on private jets. Agency spokesman Sanjay Talwani said Monday that state officials believe the alcohol belongs to a company owned by two club executives. The company was part of the $370,000 settlement agreement signed six days earlier that allowed Yellowstone Club bars to continue serving alcohol at the resort.\n\nNebraska\n\nOmaha: The city says it will use a new device called a “barnacle” to immobilize vehicles with unpaid parking tickets. The Omaha World-Herald reports the city was slated Monday to begin using the device, which is a panel that attaches to a vehicle’s windshield, blocking a driver’s view. The barnacles will be attached to vehicles with three or more past-due parking tickets or with more than $108 in parking fines. Motorists can release the device themselves with a code they’ll get by calling a number on the barnacle to pay the fines. Motorists must then take the barnacle to a drop-off location within 24 hours. Also starting Monday are new parking violation fees. Most parking violations bring a $16 fine. But blocking a fire hydrant will cost $32, and driving with expired license plates will cost $100.\n\nNevada\n\nReno: A new 3-mile-long bicycle and pedestrian trail hugging the northeast shore of Lake Tahoe is providing new access to hidden beaches and a bird’s-eye view of the cobalt waters never available before. The Tahoe East Shore Trail that opened Friday includes an 810-foot-long bridge overhanging the lakeshore between Incline Village and a state park at Sand Harbor. The $40.5 million highway project is designed to improve safety on a dangerous, congested stretch of State Highway 28 while providing hikers and bikers better access to the lake. It’s also designed to prevent runoff from the road that reduces lake clarity. The 10-foot-wide paved trail includes 17 designated vista points and 11 designated shoreline access points. It also has eight bear-proof trash stations, three dog waste bag stations, five bathrooms and more than 30 bike racks.\n\nNew Hampshire\n\nConcord: Groups representing municipalities and businesses are trying to put the brakes on the state’s efforts to impose some of the nation’s toughest drinking water standards for a class of toxic chemicals that have caused widespread contamination in the state. Last month, the Department of Environmental Services filed a proposal to set maximum levels for several compounds known as per- and polyfluoroalykyl substances, collectively called PFAS. New Hampshire is proposing a maximum of 12 parts per trillion for one of the contaminants called PFOA and 15 parts per trillion for another called PFOS. Opponents say they lack the resources to comply with the standards and argue they shouldn’t be held responsible for addressing the problem because they are not the source of the contaminants. A legislative committee is expected to take up the proposed standards this month.\n\nNew Jersey\n\nManasquan: After Superstorm Sandy whacked the state, most shore towns had to build or rebuild protective sand dunes. But three areas got a pass. That could change soon. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers says it will study whether dunes need to be built in places where they don’t exist now. Nearly seven years after Sandy, Manasquan and Belmar do not have dunes protecting their coast. And a privately owned part of Point Pleasant Beach, owned by Jenkinson’s Boardwalk, negotiated a deal with state and federal officials to build its own steel retaining wall under the sand in return for not having a dune. The Army Corps will begin a study in October, carrying out a request the state Department of Environmental Protection made in 2015.\n\nNew Mexico\n\nRoswell: Police are searching for whoever cut locks and fencing on zoo exhibits, allowing four animals, including a bobcat, to escape before they were quickly found nearby. Roswell police say they discovered the vandalism after a visitor noticed cut fencing at the red-tailed hawk exhibit Sunday. The zoo was evacuated as staff discovered that other vandalized enclosures had freed a raccoon, two raccoon-like coatimundis and a bobcat. Officials say the animals were all found within 20 minutes in non-public zookeeper areas. Spring River Park and Zoo staffers believe only the raccoon might have ventured into a visitor area. Authorities say they’re glad the animals stayed in their “comfort zones,” but the vandalism could have put people and animals in danger.\n\nNew York\n\nWalkill: Going a step beyond eating and buying locally, some Hudson Valley residents support local electricity. They purchase production credits produced by a hydro site along the Wallkill River. Green-minded customers support a local renewable resource, while operators have a way to keep their turbines spinning. Hydro proponents hope arrangements like these can help keep these older energy sites competitive in the 21st century. Natural Power Group sells power under New York’s “community-distributed generation” program. The policy allows electricity customers to collectively invest in renewable projects, mostly solar, in their utility service territory. The hydroelectricity still flows into the grid. But customers reserve a percentage of the power generated by a hydro project. Officials in nearby Woodstock say their hydro purchases help keep the town government meet its carbon-neutral goals.\n\nNorth Carolina\n\nConcord: A sheriff’s office says one of its K-9s that ran from its handler when some fireworks went off nearby has been found safe. The Cabarrus County Sheriff’s Office says Igor was outside with his handler and without a leash Thursday. Chief Deputy James Bailey said at the time that some fireworks went off near the handler’s home, and Igor ran away despite the handler’s verbal commands. The sheriff’s office said on its Facebook page that a person going to work in Concord found the dog Monday morning about a mile away from where he ran off. According to the sheriff’s office, Igor appeared to be in good shape and was being examined by a veterinarian.\n\nNorth Dakota\n\nBismarck: Hunters killed more pheasants in the state last fall than they did the previous year, although the numbers are tempered by the fact that drought and declining habitat continue to affect the odds of a successful outing. The Bismarck Tribune reports that about 58,200 hunters killed 327,000 roosters in 2018. That was up just 6% from the dismal 2017 hunt, when the harvest was the smallest in 16 years at just 309,400 pheasants. Recent numbers have also been lower than normal in neighboring South Dakota and Minnesota. Neither year approached the state Game and Fish Department’s benchmark for success, which is 500,000 pheasants. Wildlife officials attribute the numbers to less grassland due to farmers putting idled Conservation Reserve Program land back into crop production, along with drought conditions.\n\nOhio\n\nCleveland: A toy company known for its yo-yos is marking 90 years in operation and plans to celebrate with a yo-yoing contest and other events in the city next month. Cleveland.com reports Middlefield-based Duncan Toys also wants to try to break a Guinness world record for most players simultaneously yo-yoing. The company is inviting the public to join in the attempt Aug. 9 at Cleveland’s downtown Public Square, where attendees also will have a chance to meet impressive yo-yoers and Duncan employees. The four-day yo-yoing contest occurs that weekend, too. Expert yo-yo enthusiasts from around the world are expected to participate in the four-day competition, which begins Aug. 7 at a Cleveland hotel.\n\nOklahoma\n\nTulsa: Gov. Kevin Stitt and three Tulsa-area mayors want the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to expedite its study of the region’s levee system following severe flooding along the Arkansas River this spring. Stitt, Tulsa Mayor G.T. Bynum, Bixby Mayor Brian Guthrie and Jenks Mayor Robert Lee sent a letter to Corps officials Friday requesting a study of the 75-year-old Tulsa-West Tulsa Levee System be completed by the end of the year. The Corps is required to complete a study of the nation’s levees by September 2020, but the letter says Oklahomans can’t wait that long. While Tulsa-area levees held back water for weeks, the letter says a breach would have caused catastrophic flooding over a wide area. The letter says the Corps rated the region’s levees “unacceptable” in 2008.\n\nOregon\n\nSalem: The state Department of Transportation has expanded its road usage charge program, OReGO. The voluntary program charges motorists based on how many miles they cruise along Oregon’s roads and highways instead of through fuel taxes. It’s intended to equalize what participants pay the state based on their actual road usage, not through fuel consumption, which can vary based on the vehicle’s efficiency. Owners of any vehicle can enroll in OReGO if it gets 20 miles a gallon or better. That’s the “break-even point” where fuel taxes cost the same as OReGO. But the biggest changes are for any vehicle getting more than 40 miles per gallon and electric vehicles. Those drivers will have to choose between paying higher registration fees in 2020 or enrolling in OReGO.\n\nPennsylvania\n\nPittsburgh: The iconic Fallingwater home built over a western Pennsylvania waterfall by Frank Lloyd Wright has been designated a World Heritage Site by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization. UNESCO announced on its site that during a Sunday World Heritage Committee meeting in Baku, Azerbaijan, the organization added Fallingwater and seven other U.S. buildings designed by Wright in the first half of the 20th century to its World Heritage List. Wright designed Fallingwater in 1935 for Pittsburgh department store magnate Edgar Kaufmann Sr. and his family, placing the home on top of Bear Run, a mountain stream. It now receives about 180,000 visitors per year. The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reports Fallingwater director Justin Gunther called the designation “a tremendous honor, one reserved for the world’s most treasured places.”\n\nRhode Island\n\nProvidence: The governor has signed legislation to allow domestic violence protective orders to include pets. Democratic Gov. Gina Raimondo signed the legislation introduced by Senate President Dominick Ruggerio and Rep. William O’Brien, both North Providence Democrats. Ruggerio said in a statement that there’s a strong correlation between domestic abuse and animal abuse, and the new law, which takes effect immediately, ensures pets are protected. It expands the Family Court’s jurisdiction to allow it to enter protective orders to provide for the safety and welfare of household pets in domestic abuse situations. Many other states, including neighboring Massachusetts and Connecticut, already have laws that include pets in domestic violence protection orders.\n\nSouth Carolina\n\nFort Mill: An alumni group is helping pay students’ lunch debt. Fort Mill School District spokesman Joe Burke says as of June 18, the most recent information available, students had about $12,000 in combined student lunch debt. The Herald reports the Fort Mill Ol’ School Crowd is gathering donations to cover that balance. Each school has an Angel Fund, in which community members can donate to ease students’ negative lunch balances. Jean Deese, an alumna who helped start the debt relief effort, says people have been donating to that fund for about two years now. She says students with balances are given an alternative lunch that makes the kids feel different and can lead to bullying. Deese says they’ve raised more than $5,000 since starting the effort.\n\nSouth Dakota\n\nRapid City: The state’s Unified Judicial System is piloting a program that will eventually allow the public access to court records from any computer. The public can now view public court records on computers at state courthouses during work hours from Monday to Friday. This means that some people face long drives to access records. The new website, set to go live late 2019 or early 2020, will charge people 10 cents per page viewed from any computer. People will be able to look up cases by entering names, date of birth or county, and date range of the alleged offense. Complete criminal backgrounds cost $20. Greg Sattizahn, administrator of the Unified Judicial System, tells the Rapid City Journal the fees will help cover enhanced technology within the UJS.\n\nTennessee\n\nMemphis: Hattiloo Theatre, the only black repertory theater in the Mid-South, has won a grant to produce a new play about the removal of the city’s Confederate statues in 2017. The theater, which is adjacent to Overton Square in Midtown Memphis, was awarded a grant of $18,725 to develop “Take ’Em Down 901,” a one-act play about the grassroots movement that pushed for the uprooting of statues of Confederate Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest, President Jefferson Davis and Capt. J. Mathes from two downtown parks. The play is one of 42 original, live-performance projects selected to receive part of the $1.3 million in funding available this year from the New York-based MAP Fund.\n\nTexas\n\nDayton: A fence that for decades divided two historic Houston-area cemeteries into plots for white people on one side and black people on the other has been taken down. The Houston Chronicle reports that a white, 85-year-old maintenance volunteer, Henry Buxton, in April dismantled the chain-link fence that divided the Linney Cemetery from the Acie Cemetery in Dayton. The change comes after a new president took over the Linney Cemetery, where white people are buried. He saw the division as inappropriate and inefficient. Lynda Young, who ran Acie Cemetery where black people are buried before the merger, says seeing the fence come down feels like freedom. She says the community can now move forward.\n\nUtah\n\nSalt Lake City: Thousands of families in the state rely on free summer meal programs to feed their children once school food becomes unavailable. But despite high demand, there’s a shortage of the programs statewide. The Salt Lake Tribune recently reported that state data shows most counties have fewer than 10 summer meal sites, and the programs don’t exist in several counties with high child food-insecurity rates. The U.S. Department of Agriculture says nonprofits and government agencies can apply to open a site and get federal reimbursement for meals they serve. Some advocates say that approach can exclude cash-strapped school districts and other groups from operating programs. They cited Utah’s sparse population and transportation as other barriers to expanding meal programs but hope speaking out encourages school districts to better address food insecurity.\n\nVermont\n\nNorth Bennington: A small library has been recognized by a national group for overcoming adversity and creating lasting, innovative service programs. The Bennington Banner reports the John C. McCullough Free Library in North Bennington is one of five runners-up in a new national award from the American Library Association’s Penguin Random House Library Award for Innovation Through Adversity program. Library director Jennie Rozycki nominated the library for the inaugural program with an essay. In April, she learned the library won a runner-up award of $1,000 worth of materials. She says the McCullough library has made tremendous strides in increasing programs for all ages on a “shoestring” budget. She says the library would use the funds that come with the award to replace some of their classic editions, “which have been well-loved.”\n\nVirginia\n\nHarrisonburg: More than 100 employees at James Madison University have received a pay increase after the school adopted a minimum wage of $12 an hour. The school announced last week that it was adopting a living wage for all full-time employees and set the minimum wage at $12 an hour after determining that a living wage in Rockingham County is $11.38 an hour. In all, 109 employees who were earning less than $25,000 a year received the pay increase. The raises will cost the university about $75,000 a year. James Madison, like all public universities in Virginia, froze tuition rates for the upcoming school year in exchange for additional state funding.\n\nWashington\n\nSeattle: Researchers have confirmed a new calf born to a pod of endangered orcas in the Pacific Northwest is female. Scientists believe the whale was born in late May. They have designated her J56. She is the second calf born in the past five months to southern resident killer whales that frequent Puget Sound and other waters around Washington state and British Columbia. In January, researchers identified another orca calf in the L pod, L124 or Lucky. That calf was last seen back in March and appeared to be in good health. The births are welcome news for a southern resident population that dropped to more than a 30-year low last year. Declining prey, pollution and boat noise all threaten the whales.\n\nWest Virginia\n\nMorgantown: Researchers at West Virginia University are testing an idea to help save freshwater resources by combining wastewater from power plants with wastewater from fracking. The Dominion Post reports the power industry is the biggest water user in the state. Nationally, it is the second biggest, behind agriculture. Thermoelectric plants use water in heat exchangers. As it evaporates, natural salts concentrate to the point where they could foul the cooling system. Meanwhile, water from fracking contains other substances that could harm the cooling towers, like magnesium and strontium. But when the two are mixed together, the chemicals combine in a way to precipitate out of the water. This produces clean water to recirculate. The project, still in its early stages, is funded by a $400,000 Department of Energy grant.\n\nWisconsin\n\nMilwaukee: The era of electric scooters in the Badger State has arrived. During a ceremony Monday at the Milwaukee Public Market, Gov. Tony Evers touted the importance of different modes of transportation and stressed that local governments would have the power to regulate scooters. The legislation now bearing his signature allows local governments to regulate electric scooters. The law’s signing came days after Bird and the city finished hashing out the terms of a settlement agreement in a lawsuit filed last summer – and on the eve of a Milwaukee Common Council vote on a measure allowing dockless mobility systems, including scooters, only if companies participate in a city pilot study that sets rules for their use. The city stood ready to start accepting applications to the program as soon as the state law changed.\n\nWyoming\n\nCheyenne: The Capitol will reopen to the public Wednesday after a four-year, $300 million renovation project. The Wyoming Tribune Eagle reports the building suffered from crumbling concrete, disintegrating plumbing and aging electrical wiring hanging loose inside walls. The project included construction of a new utility plant for the Capitol complex, rebuilding parts of an adjacent office building, and renting temporary space for the Legislature and other officials. Renovation workers discovered historic features that had been covered up by earlier remodeling, included murals, dishes, bricked-up windows and opera posters on ceilings. Gov. Mark Gordon says the renovation was a good investment. He says it’s appropriate that the Capitol is reopening in 2019, the 150th anniversary of when Wyoming became the first state to recognize women’s right to vote.\n\nFrom USA TODAY Network and wire reports", "authors": [], "publish_date": "2019/07/09"}, {"url": "https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/50-states/2020/01/31/mammoth-cave-sharks-waterfall-chasing-valentines-divorce-news-around-states/41114873/", "title": "Mammoth Cave sharks, waterfall chasing: News from around our 50 ...", "text": "From USA TODAY Network and wire reports\n\nAlabama\n\nMontgomery: Gov. Kay Ivey fractured her shoulder after being tripped by the state’s “first dog,” her office said Wednesday. Ivey spokeswoman Gina Maiola said the governor is in an arm sling after being tripped by her mixed-breed dog named Missy. The rescue pooch unintentionally tripped the governor at home Tuesday night, Ivey’s office said. The 75-year-old Republican governor issued a statement about the injury, saying, “You’ll see me in a sling, but this won’t slow me down one bit.” “I’ll keep you posted on the recovery, but most importantly, Missy is also doing just fine.” Ivey is scheduled to deliver Alabama’s annual State of the State address Tuesday night to mark the opening of the legislative session. Last year, the governor announced she had been diagnosed with early-stage lung cancer and was being treated with radiation. Her office said in January that medical scans showed a good response to treatment and that her doctor considered her cured.\n\nAlaska\n\nAnchorage: State officials have forecast poor returns for Kenai River king salmon in the upcoming spring and summer fishing season. The Alaska Department of Fish and Game released the estimates Monday. This year’s forecast of salmon during the early run through June 30 is just 4,794 large fish, which would rank as the eighth-lowest return in the past 35 years but higher than last year’s run of 4,216 fish, state biologists said. The department classifies large fish as those greater than 34 inches in length. The average return over the past 35 years is more than 9,100 king salmon in the early run. The department predicts a similar result – 22,707 large king salmon – during the late run that lasts through August. The return would be about 60% larger than last year’s escapement of just 12,780 fish, which failed to meet the department’s sustainable escapement goal of 13,500 to 27,000 fish.\n\nArizona\n\nSupai: Reservations to hike to the idyllic green waters of Havasupai Falls don’t come easy. Those who hope to reserve a 2020 hiking permit and campground reservation when they go on sale at 8 a.m. Saturday can take some steps in advance to improve their odds of getting one of the 350 spots available each day. Hopeful hikers can make an account at havasupaireservations.com and pre-enter credit card information to save time when the permits go on sale. Phone reservations are not accepted. Available trip dates start March 1, and it’s best to have a first choice and a few backup dates in mind before sales begin. Last year, the reservations were mostly gone within five hours of going on sale. New this year, reservation-holders can list potential alternative trip leaders beforehand to make it possible to transfer a reservation to someone on that list free of charge.\n\nArkansas\n\nWest Memphis: A casino has debuted sports betting in its soft opening this week, officials said. Southland Casino Racing began accepting wagers Tuesday for the upcoming Super Bowl, as well as on NBA games, college basketball, NASCAR racing, PGA tournaments and more, the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette reports. Approved by voters in November 2018, Amendment 100 to the state Constitution authorized Southland Casino Racing to expand into a full-fledged casino. It is the third Arkansas casino to win the commission’s approval to begin sports wagering. “We have been working toward this for a while,” said Jeff Strang, Southland’s senior marketing director. International Game Technology announced Tuesday that it signed a multistate sports betting agreement with Southland’s parent company – Delaware North Cos. Gaming and Entertainment – to power retail sports betting in Arkansas and West Virginia.\n\nCalifornia\n\nCalexico: Strong winds gusting across Southern California blew down several panels of a new barrier being installed along the U.S.-Mexico border, a newspaper reports. The U.S. Border Patrol said the panels fell into Mexican territory Wednesday about 100 miles east of San Diego where the border runs between the U.S. city of Calexico and the Mexican city of Mexicali, the San Diego Union-Tribune reports. The 30-foot-tall panels had just been anchored in concrete that had not yet cured when the gusts hit, the newspaper says. The panels fell onto a road. “Luckily, Mexican authorities responded quickly and were able to divert traffic from the nearby street,” U.S. Border Patrol Agent Carlos Pitones said. U.S. Customs and Border Protection was working to retrieve the panels from Mexico, the Union-Tribune reports.\n\nColorado\n\nDenver: The state has launched two pilot programs focused on reducing carbon emissions and improving energy efficiency at cannabis cultivating businesses, officials said. The programs started Wednesday and support Democratic Gov. Jared Polis’ mission to cut greenhouse gases 50% by 2030, The Denver Post reports. The Carbon Dioxide Reuse Project partners Denver Beer Co. with the Clinic cannabis dispensary to recycle carbon emissions. Denver Beer Co. plans to use a a carbon-capturing machine to provide carbon dioxide produced during the brewing process to the clinic, which will use the gas to stimulate plant growth. The brewery expects to recycle more than 150,000 pounds of carbon dioxide – enough to meet all the clinic’s needs, Earthly Labs CEO Amy George says. The Colorado Cultivators Energy Management pilot will enable cannabis businesses to enlist the help of local electric cooperatives and utility companies to examine their energy use and ways to become more efficient.\n\nConnecticut\n\nHartford: A Rembrandt portrait that hasn’t been exhibited in the U.S. in more than half a century is coming to a local museum starting this weekend. “Titus in a Monk’s Habit” will be on exhibit at Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art in Hartford from Saturday through April 30, the museum said in a statement. The portrait depicts the Dutch artist’s teenage son in 1660. It’s on loan from the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. Rembrandt van Rijn created the artwork “at a crucial moment in his late career when he was revamping his business as a painter and recovering from bankruptcy,” the museum said. “It opens questions about the artist’s career, his use of traditional subjects and the bold technique that has won him enduring fame,” Oliver Tostmann, curator of European art, said in a statement. “With his son in the role of a poor monk, it is a heart-wrenching interpretation of the human condition and an echo of the family’s humbled economic state.”\n\nDelaware\n\nNewark: A University of Delaware program that starts this fall will allow high school students to get an early start on their college studies. The Early College Credit Program will be free and open to juniors and seniors in all 74 public, charter and private high schools throughout the state, the Delaware State News reports. The introductory courses – which will be in subjects such as astronomy, philosophy, art history and more – will be transmitted via video from UD’s Newark campus and streamed to the students’ high schools. The high school students will be enrolled alongside college students. “One of the things we are excited about with this new program is that high school students have the opportunity to interact with regular undergraduates on campus, virtually,” says Lynn Okagki, deputy provost for academic affairs at the university. Participation will allow students to earn both high school and college credits.\n\nDistrict of Columbia\n\nWashington: Attorney General William Barr on Thursday nominated Timothy Shea, one of his closest advisers, to be the next top prosecutor in the nation’s capital. Shea will lead the largest United States attorney’s office in the country, one that has been historically responsible for some of the most significant and politically sensitive cases the Justice Department brings in the U.S. He is a senior counselor to the attorney general and was Barr’s right-hand man helping institute reforms at the federal Bureau of Prisons after Jeffrey Epstein’s death at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in New York City. As the U.S. attorney in the District of Columbia, Shea would oversee some of the lingering cases from special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation, along with a number of politically charged investigations.\n\nFlorida\n\nTallahassee: Cities and counties wouldn’t be able to ban sunscreens containing ingredients that some researchers say harm coral reefs, under a bill passed by the state Senate on Wednesday. The Senate voted 25-14 in favor of the bill after no discussion or debate. If it becomes law, a Key West ordinance to ban the sale of sunscreens containing oxybenzone or octinoxate would be nullified. The Key West ban is set to go into effect next year. Research has shown the chemicals can cause coral bleaching, and the reefs around Key West attract divers, snorkelers and fishing enthusiasts. But Republican Sen. Rob Bradley has said previously that he sponsored the bill because protecting people is more important, and the research hasn’t proven the chemicals actually harm reefs. An identical House bill has been making its way through committees.\n\nGeorgia\n\nAtlanta: After trying last year to place restrictions on electric scooters all across Georgia, a state Senate committee now wants the state to keep its hands off. The Senate Transportation Committee on Tuesday unanimously approved a new version of Senate Bill 159, which would define electric scooters in state law. But it would do nothing else, leaving other regulations up to local governments. State Sen. Steve Gooch, a Dahlonega Republican, told committee members Tuesday that’s how the scooter companies and local governments both want it. “Local governments should be doing backflips and cartwheels,” Gooch said. “They’re getting everything they asked for.” The cities of Atlanta, Brookhaven and Decatur have authorized scooters, as has Georgia Southern University. But a Senate study committee report filed last year found 12 other cities had banned or placed temporary moratoriums on scooters.\n\nHawaii\n\nHilo: Thurston Lava Tube in Hawaii Volcanoes National Park could reopen within a month if a final repair project is successful, an official said. A park spokeswoman said the tube will be reopened to the public after a nearby restroom facility is restored to working order, The Hawaii Tribune-Herald reports. Thurston Lava Tube was one of several attractions at the park that were closed indefinitely after the Kilauea volcanic eruption, which began in May 2018 and destroyed more than 700 homes on the Big Island. Also called Nahuku, the lava tube remained closed after Hawaii Volcanoes National Park reopened in September 2018. Scientists and engineers wanted to confirm the tube was structurally sound after thousands of earthquakes rattled the park during the eruption. The park must repair and bury an electrical line, which could take two to four weeks, spokeswoman Jessica Ferracane said.\n\nIdaho\n\nBoise: The state’s prisons are overcrowded and dilapidated, the inmate population is rapidly growing, and taxpayers could save millions by building a prison, state auditors told a panel of lawmakers this week. The findings came from the Office of Performance Evaluations’ report on managing the state’s correctional capacity, which took a close look at staffing levels, inmate populations, the condition of the actual prison buildings themselves and how those factors will likely affect Idaho in years to come. “Idaho is at a critical juncture in planning how it will house inmates,” an office evaluator, Lance McCleve, told members of the Joint Legislative Oversight Committee. “Just since 2016, we’ve seen about an 18% increase of inmates incarcerated in prisons.” That dramatically outpaces the state’s population growth of about 6% in the same period, McCleve said.\n\nIllinois\n\nChicago: Elections officials disclosed fresh problems Wednesday with the state’s automatic voter registration program, including at least one eligible voter who said she registered to vote but ended up on an opt-out list. The program is already under fire for mistakenly registering more than 500 people who indicated they weren’t U.S. citizens, of whom 15 people voted in 2018 and 2019 elections. Election officials said at least eight of the people have long voting histories and were likely U.S. citizens, leaving seven voters in question. The individuals involved were applying for standard driver’s licenses at secretary of state’s offices. Details were scarce on the new issues, disclosed at a State Board of Elections meeting. Brenda Glahn, an attorney with the secretary of state, said registrations of eligible voters who appeared to decline to be registered were still sent to election officials.\n\nIndiana\n\nMuncie: Hundreds of Ball State University students gathered for a rally to demand the early retirement of a white professor who called police on a black student who refused to change seats last week during a class. A crowd of 200 to 300 students, some carrying protest signs, converged Tuesday outside the Whitinger Business Building. It’s where Sultan “Mufasa” Benson, a senior business-administration major, left marketing professor Shaheen Borna’s class after the tenured faculty member called police on him. Benson, who is from Chicago, recounted how he felt when Borna asked him to move to the front row from the back of the class. “Why am I being moved?” Benson said he asked the Iranian-born professor. “No answer. ‘You can move or we can call the police.’ ” Though Benson said he feels like “another statistic” that Ball State is using to advertise its black student enrollment, he thanked school President Geoffrey S. Mearns for attending the rally and listening to them.\n\nIowa\n\nDes Moines: A bill proposed by a group of Republican lawmakers that would have amended the Iowa Civil Rights Act by removing protections against discrimination for transgender people is dead, a powerful committee chairman said. Nine Republican House members sponsoring the bill introduced it Wednesday morning, but by evening Republican Rep. Steven Holt, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee to which the bill was assigned, said he wouldn’t allow it to move forward to a subcommittee hearing. “It’s dead,” Holt said. “It just would have had a lot of unintended consequences.” Iowa law currently prohibits discrimination based on gender identity, race, creed, color, sex, sexual orientation, national origin, religion, ancestry and disability. Gender identity was added in 2007 when Democrats regained control of the Legislature and held the governor’s office with the election of Gov. Chet Culver.\n\nKansas\n\nWichita: The Kansas Highway Patrol has a practice of unlawfully targeting motorists based on their out-of-state license plates or Colorado travel plans, due to that state’s legalization of marijuana, according to a federal court filing Thursday. Among the allegations contained in the new filing are statistics showing that drivers with out-of-state plates made up 93% of all the agency’s traffic stops in 2017. The case began as a hand-scrawled complaint filed last December by two irate drivers themselves in federal court. It got some significant legal firepower when the American Civil Liberties Union and Kansas City, Missouri, attorney Sam Diederich filed an amended complaint on their behalf. The revised complaint references a serious imbalance in people of color in targeted vehicles. It also challenges a law enforcement practice known as “the Kansas Two Step,” a maneuver used to detain drivers for canine drug searches after a traffic stop.\n\nKentucky\n\nMammoth Cave National Park: Paleontologists have found remarkably intact fossils from ancient sharks in Mammoth Cave. The discovery hundreds of millions of years in the making began when Mammoth Cave specialists Rick Olson and Rick Toomey came across fossils as they explored and mapped the cave system and sent photos to Vincent Santucci, senior paleontologist for the National Park Service in Washington, D.C., for help identifying them. Santucci then sent John-Paul Hodnett, a paleontologist and program coordinator at Dinosaur Park in Maryland, to help with what became the Mammoth Cave National Park Fossil Shark Research Project. The fossils were parts of a head that belonged to a Saivodus striatus shark, about the size of a great white. Thanks to the slow erosion of the limestone in the cave, the shark’s teeth are mostly intact and extremely detailed. More than 100 individual specimens have been discovered so far during the project.\n\nLouisiana\n\nBaton Rouge: The state’s new legislative leaders quickly signed off Thursday on plans to borrow up to $350 million to replenish the account that pays for state-financed construction work, the first major financial decision for the latest House and Senate term. The Bond Commission, a panel of state officials that oversees publicly financed construction spending, agreed to the March general obligation bond sale without objection. The proposal provoked no discussion from the House’s and Senate’s new budget and tax committee chairmen, sitting on the panel for the first time in their new roles. The borrowing will keep cash flowing to a long list of projects, including coastal restoration work, state park improvements, road and bridge projects, college building repairs and local projects favored by lawmakers.\n\nMaine\n\nAugusta: Maine lobsters need to arrive alive at their destinations, and a proposal before the Legislature is aimed at making it more certain that happens. Democratic Sen. Eloise Vitelli of Arrowsic has introduced a bill that would exempt truck drivers transporting live lobsters from some hours-of-service restrictions. Vitelli said the proposal would extend an exemption already granted to transporters of potatoes, broccoli and livestock. “Getting lobsters quickly to market in Boston is essential for Maine lobster dealers to maintain and grow this iconic industry,” Vitelli said. Vitelli introduced the bill Tuesday, and it will face votes in committee before moving on to the full state Senate and House of Representatives. Virginia Olsen, a lobster fisherman from Stonington and board member of the Maine Lobstering Union, said members of the industry are at “an economic disadvantage when trying to bring our live product to market under the current time restraints.”\n\nMaryland\n\nBaltimore: A rarely open U.S. House seat has drawn a crowded field of 24 Democrats and eight Republicans in a special primary for the office held by the late Rep. Elijah Cummings. Candidates in the majority-black district’s Tuesday primary include Cummings’ widow, Maya Rockeymoore Cummings; and Kweisi Mfume, a former NAACP head and one of three men who’ve held the seat in the past 49 years. Republicans on the ballot include Kimberly Klacik, an activist whose social media video of trash and run-down buildings in Baltimore caught President Donald Trump’s attention before he described the district in a tweet as a “rodent-infested mess.” Mfume, who stepped down in 1996 to lead the NAACP after serving five terms as a congressman, is telling voters in the heavily Democratic district his experience separates him from the crowd.\n\nMassachusetts\n\nBoston: The state is pushing ahead with efforts to amend the U.S. Constitution to restore limits on political spending by corporations. A commission charged with weighing potential constitutional amendments aimed at countering the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United decision released an interim report Wednesday updating its progress. Members of the Massachusetts Citizens Commission said the goal of the amendment would be to give Congress and states the power “to regulate contributions and expenditures in our federal, state, and local elections to secure the free speech and representation rights of all Americans, combat corruption and protect the integrity of elections.” A ballot question approved by Massachusetts voters in 2018 created the commission. The report pointed to a sharp rise in spending in elections, most concentrated in the hands of a small slice of the electorate, the commission said.\n\nMichigan\n\nDetroit: Marie Woo, who’s earned a reputation as “the potter’s potter” and as an educator, researcher and curator who’s played a major role in spreading awareness of Chinese folk pottery, was announced Thursday as the 2020 Kresge Eminent Artist. The lifetime achievement award, which comes with a $50,000 prize, is given annually to a metro Detroiter for distinguished contributions to the arts and the community. Known both for her mastery of clay and her continuing commitment to experimentation and innovation, Woo, 91, joins 11 other past winners. It’s a collection of Detroit luminaries that includes the late jazz trumpeter Marcus Belgrave, photographer and activist Leni Sinclair, painter and sculptor Charles McGee, and the late Michigan Opera Theatre’s artistic director David DiChiera. Woo is the first Kresge Eminent Artist to represent the art of ceramics.\n\nMinnesota\n\nLonsdale: A local Roman Catholic priest apologized Wednesday for saying in a sermon that Islam was “the greatest threat in the world” to the United States and Christianity. The Rev. Nick VanDenBroeke apologized in a statement issued by the St. Paul-Minnesota Catholic archdiocese. He had made the comments in a Jan. 5 sermon at the Lonsdale church where he serves as pastor. The Minnesota chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, a civil rights group, had called on the state’s Roman Catholic church leaders to repudiate the sermon after the newspaper City Pages published an article about the sermon. In the statement from the archdiocese, Archbishop Bernard Hebda said the church’s teaching is clear, and he quoted Pope Benedict XVI as saying the church looks with esteem to Muslims, who worship God through prayer, fasting and the giving of alms.\n\nMississippi\n\nJackson: A proposal to give most teachers at least a $1,000 pay raise is starting to move forward at the state Capitol. The plan won approval Thursday in the Senate Education Committee. It will go to the Senate Appropriations Committee another day, and it must pass there before it can go to the full Senate. Senate Bill 2001 would give $1,000 across-the-board raises to most teachers and teachers’ assistants. Teachers in the first two years of their careers would receive slightly larger raises of $1,100. That’s an effort to boost the beginning salaries. Mississippi has long had some of the lowest teacher salaries in the nation. Republican Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann and several other officials said during the 2019 campaign that increasing teacher pay would be a priority this year.\n\nMissouri\n\nJefferson City: Republican state senators put forth a new plan Wednesday that would scrap “partisan fairness” and “competitiveness” from the criteria used to draw state House and Senate districts – reversing a key part of a ballot initiative approved by voters just two years ago. Senators began debating the newly proposed constitutional amendment Wednesday. If approved by the Legislature, it would go to a public vote later this year. In addition to changing the redistricting criteria, it also would abolish a voter-approved state demographer position to draw districts and return the task to a bipartisan commission used in the past. Like the successful “Clean Missouri” initiative on the 2018 ballot, the new GOP proposal would package the redistricting changes with other potentially popular ethics reforms. “If you like Clean Missouri, you’re going to love Cleaner Missouri,” said Sen. Denny Hoskins, a Republican from Warrensburg.\n\nMontana\n\nGreat Falls: Little Shell Tribe of Chippewa Indians Chairman Gerald Gray will be Sen. Jon Tester’s guest of honor at the State of the Union address Tuesday. “I’ve worked with many leaders in the Little Shell Tribe over the past 20 years, and Chairman Gray is right up there at the top,” Tester, D-Mont., said Thursday in a news release. “He is a relentless advocate for his people who built strong coalitions but wasn’t shy about putting the screws to me and the rest of the delegation when he needed to.” Gray said that he was “grateful” to be invited and that Tester “was so instrumental in the restoration of my tribe’s federal recognition.” Each senator is allowed one guest. After more than 100 years of efforts by the tribe, federal recognition was signed into law Dec. 20 as a part of the National Defense Authorization Act. The Little Shell Tribe is based in Great Falls and has nearly 5,400 members.\n\nNebraska\n\nLincoln: Families in the state who want access to high-quality child care may be out of luck depending on where they live or how much they make, according to a report released Thursday. The Nebraska Early Childhood Workforce Commission’s report found access to child care varies widely, with 11 of the state’s 93 counties having no licensed child care facilities. The report also found a high turnover rate among early childhood care providers, driven in part by low pay. The median wage for early childhood professionals teaching in community-based child care centers was $18,706 in 2016, according to the report. That’s nearly $1,400 below the federal poverty line for a family of three. The commission is a part of the Buffett Early Childhood Institute at the University of Nebraska.\n\nNevada\n\nLas Vegas: McCarran International Airport says a jump in the number of travelers in December pushed it to a record 51.5 million passengers in 2019. An airport year-end report made public Wednesday came more than a month after officials held a ceremony marking the arrival of a record 50 millionth passenger in one year. The previous 12-month record was 49.7 million in 2018. The Clark County Department of Aviation counted nearly 4.25 million arriving and departing passengers in December, up 9% from the same month in 2018. Airport chief Rosemary Vassiliadis said domestic passenger volume grew 3.9% for the year, with big increases by low-cost carriers Sun Country, Frontier and Spirit airlines. Southwest Airlines is by far the busiest airline, accounting for more than 17 million passengers last year. But the airline was down 3.7% from its total of more than 18 million in 2018.\n\nNew Hampshire\n\nConcord: The state Senate on Thursday gave preliminary approval to a bill to establish and then gradually increase the minimum wage. The state currently defaults to the federal minimum wage of $7.25. Lawmakers last year approved the creation of a state minimum wage, but Republican Gov. Chris Sununu vetoed it. The vote Thursday in the Democrat-led Senate was 14-10 to raise the state minimum wage to $10 an hour in 2021 and $12 an hour in 2023. Supporters noted that New Hampshire continues to fall behind its New England neighbors. On Jan. 1, Vermont, Maine, and Massachusetts all raised their minimum wages. Opponents said the bill would push small businesses to reduce hours and increase automation of jobs.\n\nNew Jersey\n\nTrenton: Nine hospitals in areas with some of the state’s highest rates of shootings will share $20million in an intervention program designed to reduce violence, particularly related to guns. The distribution of federal money is a nationally unique approach to “disrupt the cycle of violence,” Attorney General Gurbir Grewal said. New Jersey is now making the biggest investment of federal Victims of Crime Act funding for such a program, he said. “This is not a garden variety, ‘Every state’s doing this,’ ” Gov. Phil Murphy said. “We’re the only state doing this.” The money will help establish “hospital-based violence intervention programs” to support victims but also try to prevent future incidents. The idea is to intervene at a crucial moment in an individual’s life – after being shot, for example – and provide services such as counseling, case management or even removing a tattoo that could be used to identify them for retaliation.\n\nNew Mexico\n\nSanta Fe: Legislators could receive state salaries for the first time as the result of a newly proposed constitutional amendment. A panel of legislators led by state Democratic Sen. Linda Lopez of Albuquerque endorsed the proposed constitutional amendment Wednesday that would give the recently founded State Ethics Commission authority to set salaries for lawmakers and other elected official including the governor. New Mexico runs the only unsalaried legislature in the nation, though members receive a $162 daily stipend during sessions and reimbursement for some travel expenses. Amendment sponsor Sen. Daniel Ivey-Soto, an Albuquerque Democrat, said that handing over salary decisions to the ethics commission would depoliticize the matter and avoid the taboo against lawmakers approving their own pay.\n\nNew York\n\nAlbany: The state has set some of the nation’s most ambitious goals on fighting climate change, but some activists say it isn’t moving fast enough. Lawmakers holding budget hearings this week faced protests from environmental and left-leaning groups who criticized the lack of new solar and wind projects breaking ground in the state. Protesters filled rows at a hearing to call for the state to do more to boost electric vehicles and energy efficiency and block construction of infrastructure for natural gas, which contributes to global warming. “Six months ago, Gov. Cuomo signed the nation’s most aggressive climate legislation, promising that New York would ‘lead the way forward’ and ‘set a new standard,’ ” said Conor Bambrick, director of climate policy for the environmental group Clean Water for Environmental Advocates of New York. But New York needs to do much more to match the “urgency of the climate crisis,” he said.\n\nNorth Carolina\n\nCharlotte: A car dealer is opening up his sales lot to homeless people whose cars are their only means of shelter. James Charles made the move after a member of his sales team went to repossess a woman’s car, WBTV reports. “The gentleman who was repossessing the car said, ‘We can’t take the car, there’s somebody living in the car,’ ” said Charles, manager at Kiplin Automotive Group in west Charlotte. Charles said he looked for a shelter for the woman, but all of them were full. So he put her up in a hotel for a few nights, until she had a more permanent solution. That, Charles said, was the sign he needed to launch his plan. His dealership now offers space for other families, with security cameras, bright lights and an open invitation. “You can come here,” Charles said. “We will allow you to stay on our property, and of course, we’re going to help you find a place if we can.”\n\nNorth Dakota\n\nBismarck: The state should reinvest half of the earnings from its voter-approved oil tax savings account to grow the fund’s principal by billions more dollars over the next decade, Gov. Doug Burgum said Wednesday in his State of the State speech. The state is “strong, growing and full of boundless opportunity,” but “there’s a lot more we can do,” the first-term Republican said during his nearly two-hour speech at the University of North Dakota in Grand Forks. Burgum’s speech was somewhat unscripted and largely fell short on policy specifics, including his plan to spend earnings from the state’s Legacy Fund, which voters enacted in 2010. How and when earnings from the fund should be spent has long been point of contention even among Republicans in the GOP-led Legislature.\n\nOhio\n\nColumbus: The nation’s oldest civil rights organization has endorsed a ballot initiative aimed at streamlining the state’s voting process. The NAACP’s Ohio Conference announced its backing for the Ohioans for Secure and Fair Elections measure Wednesday. In a statement, conference president Tom Roberts said the NAACP sees the campaign as “a necessary step” to modernizing Ohio elections. If voters approve the proposal, Ohioans would be automatically registered to vote when conducting business at state Bureau of Motor Vehicles offices, and early voting locations would have to be open on the two weekends prior to Election Day. That would allow eligible voters to register and vote on the same day. The requirement that voters be registered during BMV trips unless they opt out is also part of pending House and Senate legislation.\n\nOklahoma\n\nOklahoma City: The body of a woman found in central Oklahoma nearly 40 years ago and known only as “Lime Lady” has been identified as a missing Las Vegas woman, authorities said Thursday. DNA testing with the help of the DNA Doe Project identified Tamara Lee Tigard as the woman whose body was found April 18, 1980, on the banks of the North Canadian River in Jones on the outskirts of Oklahoma City. Tigard, who was shot to death, was found on what would have been her 21st birthday, Oklahoma County Sheriff’s Capt. Bob Green said. Tigard was known for decades only as “Lime Lady” because her body had been covered in lime in a possible attempt to destroy it, but instead the lime helped preserve her remains. It is not known how long she was in Oklahoma, according to Sheriff P.D. Taylor. Investigators have also determined she was in the U.S. military, serving in the Army, Green said.\n\nOregon\n\nSalem: Democrats in the Statehouse are seeking to have voters change its quorum rules so that walkouts by lawmakers can no longer stymie legislation. The joint resolution, filed this week before the Legislature starts its short 2020 session Monday, would ask voters to change quorum rules, allowing the Statehouse to convene with only a simple majority of lawmakers present instead of the current two-thirds requirement. Senate Democrats say all but three other states require a simple majority for a quorum. Senate Majority Leader Ginny Burdick, a Democrat from Portland, had been expected to introduce the proposed constitutional amendment. “Stopping the work of the people by denying a quorum is unconscionable and undemocratic,” Burdick said last year. If the Legislature approves the resolution, voters would then decide on the proposed change in the 2020 election.\n\nPennsylvania\n\nHarrisburg: A $45 million project to upgrade the state’s emergency radio communications system is on time and within the budget, but the purchasing process has encountered some glitches, the state auditor general said Thursday. A report released by Democratic Auditor General Eugene DePasquale identified errors in the bidding process but concluded they would not have changed the 2016 contract award. It also said there was inadequate documentation about the qualifications of people involved in awarding the contract. The statewide radio project, known as PA STARNet, began with a $179 million expenditure in 1996 that developed into a massive boondoggle, eventually costing the state more than $850 million. It produced a system that was badly flawed, with poor reception, software problems, short battery life and reliability shortcomings.\n\nRhode Island\n\nProvidence: The state Department of Correction is failing to comply with a court order limiting the time an inmate can be held in solitary confinement to 30 days, a federal judge ruled. U.S. District Court Chief Judge John McConnell faulted the department for not seeking court approval after an inmate serving life was held in disciplinary segregation for 60 days in 2014, the Providence Journal reports. McConnell ruled the department “unilaterally and substantively” changed the so-called Morris Rules in 2005, when it instituted a policy that prisoners could be held in disciplinary segregation for 31 days to a year on a single offense. The judge’s ruling received praise from the American Civil Liberties Union in Rhode Island, which agreed to represent the inmate and others who find themselves in similar situations in the future.\n\nSouth Carolina\n\nColumbia: A bill that would bar anyone using a cellphone while driving from holding the phone in their hands appears to be dead for the year. The Senate Transportation Committee decided Wednesday not to vote on the bill. It could still come up later in the session, but often that action sends a bill into a limbo from which it does not return. The bill would require anyone making a cellphone call to use a Bluetooth device or have the phone in a dock and use the speaker. It does not prohibit one swipe to get the function to work. Text by voice would also be legal if the phone isn’t held. Opponents of the bill said the state already has a distracted driving law. Supporters said that usually only kicks in after a crash, and the bill would prevent wrecks. The House has passed a similar bill, and sponsor Rep. Bill Taylor said he thinks if the Senate ever gets on board, it can become law.\n\nSouth Dakota\n\nPierre: Proponents of creating schools focused on Native American language and culture have two weeks to rework their proposal after Gov. Kristi Noem opposed the initiative. A state Senate committee on Thursday deferred a bill that would create Oceti Sakowin schools that teach Lakota, Dakota and Nakota language and culture. Several teachers are trying to open schools in Native American communities that would attempt to address educational achievement gaps among Native American students. “I see a system that isn’t working, and we’re looking for something that is working,” said Sage Fast Dog, an educator who is planning to open a school on the Rosebud Indian Reservation. Parents testified about how children had struggled with their identity after facing teachers and schoolmates who were insensitive to the culture of the Oceti Sakowin, which is commonly known as Sioux.\n\nTennessee\n\nMurfreesboro: An attorney is giving away free divorce representation to one client for Valentine’s Day. W. Scott Kimberly said in a news release that for many people Valentine’s Day is “another reminder that they remain trapped in a relationship that they cannot leave because of financial problems, because of a spouse who refuses to agree to a divorce, or for some other reason.” This is the third year the Murfreesboro divorce attorney will give away his services. Last year, Kimberly selected two winners, saying he had a hard time narrowing down the entries. Applicants are asked to share the story of why they want a divorce. Applications are accepted through Valentine’s Day, with a winner selected on Feb. 17. Although Kimberly won’t charge for his services, the winner will be responsible for court costs and filing fees. “This giveaway is a chance to help someone move on with their life,” Kimberly said.\n\nTexas\n\nAustin: A state historical review panel delayed a vote this week on whether to move the Alamo Cenotaph, a memorial to the 200 Alamo defenders killed by the Mexican army in an 1836 assault during the war for Texas independence. The Texas Historical Commission put off its vote for at least two months, saying commissioners want more information on where the monument might be moved and what restoration work it may need. It’s a key piece in a major renovation of the Alamo. The 58-foot-tall marble slab has been a focal feature of Alamo Plaza in downtown San Antonio since 1939. Planners of a $450 million Alamo renovation project have proposed moving the monument to a place about 500 feet to the south of its longtime home, a proposal that has drawn fierce opposition from descendants of the Alamo’s 1836 defenders.\n\nUtah\n\nSpringdale: Against the towering, red cliffs of Zion National Park, Provo native band The National Parks will be holding their first music festival April25. The indie-pop band says the Superbloom Music Festival will be held at the O.C. Tanner Amphitheater in Springdale. The National Parks will headline, and other local Utah and West-based bands will perform as well – Joshua James, The Strike, Tow’rs, The Federal Empire, Ellee Duke and Brother. The National Parks lead vocalist and guitarist Brady Parks said many of the bands and artists performing at the festival are people he’s been friends with and fans of for a long time. “Zion holds a special place in our heart,” Parks said. The festival will be an all-day “destination” event, he said. Local vendors and food trucks will be at the festival, and a VIP campfire concert will be held nearby the night before. Tickets are on sale now.\n\nVermont\n\nMontpelier: State legislators are reviewing a bill that would ensure rights for the homeless. The House bill would seek to establish “a homeless bill of rights and prohibiting discrimination against people without homes,” the Times Argus reports. Rep. Tom Stevens, a Democrat, has twice submitted the bill since 2017 to the House General, Housing and Military Affairs Committee, without it being approved. The bill’s intent is to ensure that no person would be subject to civil or criminal sanctions “for soliciting, sharing, accepting or offering food, water, money or other donations in public places.” Under the bill’s provisions, an aggrieved person would also have the right to petition in civil court for appropriate relief against damages suffered and costs incurred as a result of violations of their rights. The resolution notes that a count of the state’s homeless population last January found 1,089 lack secure housing, 23% of whom are children.\n\nVirginia\n\nRichmond: Democrats in the state House are advancing a package of gun-control measures they say are needed to improve public safety. The new Democratic majority in the House voted Wednesday to advance a package of gun measures over vocal opposition from Republicans, who said the measures infringe on law-abiding gun owners’ rights. The bills include limiting handgun purchases to once a month; universal background checks on gun purchases; allowing localities to ban guns in certain areas; and a red flag bill that would allow authorities to temporarily take guns away from anyone deemed to be dangerous to themselves or others. A final vote is expected Thursday to pass the measures and then send them to the Senate, which has already passed its own versions gun-control bills. So far neither chamber has approved a proposed assault weapon ban, a top priority for Gov. Ralph Northam and one that’s drawn fierce resistance from gun-rights advocates.\n\nWashington\n\nOlympia: Republican state legislators have introduced a bill – which includes a pilot hatchery project in Bellingham – that they believe will help increase the salmon population and help the orca whales. The Bellingham Herald reports the Salmon Repopulation Act, Senate Bill 6509 and House Bill 2741 were recently introduced and referred to committees. The bills would attempt to bring a public-partnership in state-approved hatcheries and potentially build a new hatchery on Bellingham’s waterfront. In a news conference in Olympia on Tuesday, several GOP legislators talked about the need for this public-private model to get more fish in local waters. “This is about acting now for the orca,” said Sen. Ann Rivers, R-La Center. “What the orca need more than anything else is food to eat, and we can’t wait on this.”\n\nWest Virginia\n\nCharleston: State officials are trying to find someone interested in preserving a historic bridge connecting West Virginia and Ohio. The Aetnaville Bridge, also known as the Georgia Street Bridge, was built in 1891. It lies over the back channel of the Ohio River from Wheeling Island, West Virginia, to Martins Ferry, Ohio. The bridge was originally part of the streetcar system in Wheeling and later converted to a toll road for automobile traffic. It became toll-free in 1953 and was part of U.S. 252 until it was closed in 1988 due to deterioration. Anyone interested in the bridge must submit a preservation and financial plan as well as information about the intended use of the bridge, the Division of Highways said in a news release. If no one is interested, the bridge will be demolished, the agency said. Requests to assume ownership of the bridge must be submitted by April 15.\n\nWisconsin\n\nMadison: Gov. Tony Evers signed an executive order Wednesday creating a task force on student debt, fulfilling a pledge he made during his State of the State address last week. The task force will consist of a number of state officials or their designee, including the governor, the state schools superintendent, and the presidents of the University of Wisconsin System and the Wisconsin Technical College System, according to the order. Two state senators and two state representatives from each party will also serve on the the panel. State Department of Financial Institutions Secretary Kathy Blumenfeld will serve as chairwoman. The order directs the task force to study student loan debt and its causes, evaluate current policies, and provide recommendations on how the state can best address the problem and improve families and students’ financial situations.\n\nWyoming\n\nCasper: Preliminary numbers show a sharp increase in traffic deaths in the state in 2019. The 147 people killed on roads in 2019 was up by 36 compared with 2018 and the most since 2015. The reason for the increase isn’t clear. The Wyoming Department of Transportation hasn’t yet analyzed its numbers for 2019. One reason could be more deaths per wreck, department spokesman Jeff Goetz told the Casper Star-Tribune. Generally most crashes are attributable to driver distraction, alcohol or drug use, or driving too fast for conditions, Goetz said. Wyoming road deaths have largely declined since the early 2000s, when close to 200 people died on Wyoming roads annually.\n\nFrom USA TODAY Network and wire reports", "authors": [], "publish_date": "2020/01/31"}, {"url": "https://www.cnn.com/2022/03/22/investing/india-paytm-tech-ipo-bust-hnk-intl/index.html", "title": "Paytm to Zomato, India's tech IPO boom has rapidly turned to bust ...", "text": "New Delhi CNN Business —\n\nIn November last year, one of India’s most prominent tech entrepreneurs stood at the Bombay Stock Exchange and cried with joy.\n\nI am “just overwhelmed,” said Vijay Shekhar Sharma, while wiping tears from his eyes. He was addressing an audience at the listing ceremony of One97 Communications, the parent company of digital payments giant Paytm.\n\nSharma founded the company nearly two decades ago. In the last five years, Paytm has become the darling of India’s booming fintech sector, and is backed by big-name global investors such as SoftBank (SFTBF) and Warren Buffett. In 2021, One97 raised $2.5 billion in the country’s biggest ever initial public offering (IPO).\n\nDuring November’s listing ceremony, Sharma called the company’s purpose of bringing millions of Indians into the mainstream economy “pious.”\n\nPaytm founder Vijay Shekhar Sharma breaks down while giving a speech during his company's IPO listing ceremony at the Bombay Stock Exchange in Mumbai on November 18, 2021. Punit Paranjpe/AFP/Getty Images\n\nInvestors, however, appear to disagree — Paytm’s stock crashed 27% on its first day of trading.\n\nFour months later, things have only gotten worse. The firm’s stock is now trading close to 560 rupees ($8), more than 70% below its offer price, according to data from Refinitiv.\n\nIt is not the only Indian internet company that has soured on the stock market this year. While Paytm has been a flop since day one, other Indian tech giants whose debuts were red-hot in comparison have also plunged in recent months.\n\nFood delivery company Zomato — the first Indian unicorn to go public — is down over 36% from its first day of trading last July.\n\nE-commerce site Nykaa, whose debut late last year made its founder India’s wealthiest self-made female billionaire, is also trading 36% below the highs it saw on listing day. Online insurance marketplace Policybazaar has fallen more than 40% since it began trading in November.\n\nWhile technology stocks are suffering globally, the plunge in India is particularly painful for investors and companies who were hoping for a coming-of-age period for one of Asia’s fastest-growing startup ecosystems.\n\nInstead, it has turned into a big, fat reality check for tech companies, with retail investors questioning their huge valuations. The steep plunge in those stocks has also likely thwarted IPO plans for other Indian companies — at least for the foreseeable future.\n\n“Last year, there was an IPO frenzy and people were willing to pay the aggressive valuations these companies demanded,” said Piyush Nagda, head of investment products at Mumbai-based brokerage Prabhudas Lilladher. “But those retail investors were looking for immediate listing day gains.”\n\n“Other investors who got on the bus after the IPO may be repenting now,” he added.\n\nPaytm’s flop\n\nIndia’s tech IPO party — which started with Zomato last year — came to a screeching halt with Paytm’s debut.\n\nWhile the stock has trended lower for most part since its listing, March has been particularly difficult for the payments company.\n\nEarlier this month, India’s central bank barred the company’s banking arm from signing up new customers. The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) also directed the bank to “appoint an IT audit firm to conduct a comprehensive System Audit of its IT system.”\n\nPaytm launched its Payments Bank in 2017 as a joint venture with Sharma. It can accept deposits and issue debit cards but cannot lend money to customers.\n\nThe RBI said it would allow Paytm’s Payments Bank to add new customers “after reviewing [the] report of the IT auditors.”\n\nPaytm stock plunged further after the RBI’s notice, even though the company tried to reassure existing customers by informing them that they can continue using that bank’s services “without interruption.”\n\nA Paytm logo can be seen in Kolkata, India, in November 2021. Indranil Aditya/NurPhoto/Getty Images\n\n“We believe RBI’s direction will not materially impact Paytm’s overall business,” a company spokesperson said in a statement.\n\nBut the damage had been done. To complicate matters further, China’s Ant Group and Alibaba (BABA) own more than 30% of Paytm, according to recent filings, and that investment has become problematic since border clashes in 2020 soured relations between India and China and led New Delhi to ban dozens of Chinese apps.\n\nIn a note last week, Macquarie analysts predicted a bleak future for the company.\n\nThe RBI ban and Paytm’s “Chinese ownership” make it “significantly” harder for the bank now to get a license from the regulators to upgrade and start lending, they wrote.\n\n“Given this, and competition from other fintechs in the payments space, we remain skeptical about Paytm’s longer-term ability to generate free cash flow,” they added, slashing Paytm’s target price to Rs 450 ($6).\n\nAll this bad news for Paytm comes on top of its lack of clear path to profitability, which has perturbed analysts since its IPO launch. Paytm reported a loss of $104 million for the December quarter.\n\nAnd it is not just Paytm that has failed to impress investors with latest earnings.\n\nZomato — which remains a loss-making company — had scored big with its IPO in July last year, but its stock has fizzled lately, declining over 40% alone since the start of this year.\n\nThe company said Tuesday that it will start a 10-minute food delivery service, but the stock remained near its all-time low even after that announcement.\n\nA Zomato food delivery partner is seen on a road in Kolkata, India, on July 14, 2021. Debarchan Chatterjee/NurPhoto/Getty Images\n\n“Venture capitalists have the stomach to digest these numbers,” said Nagda, while talking about lack of profits among Indian tech giants. “But retail investors react immediately once they see quarterly numbers.”\n\nZomato has also disappointed investors with its relative lack of transparency, as it holds only one earnings call a year. Most public companies do four calls a year, usually after every quarterly result.\n\nZomato did not respond to a request for comment.\n\nMihir Vora, senior director and chief investment officer at Max Life Insurance called this moment a “reality check” for India’s cash-guzzling tech firms, which need to participate in more “regular investor communications.”\n\n“The cash burn is too large,” he said. Markets want to know “where the next round of funding is coming from.”\n\nWhat’s next?\n\nPaytm’s nosedive, followed by the battering other tech stocks have received in India lately, may be forcing other companies to reconsider their IPO plans.\n\nIn October last year, Softbank-backed hotel chain OYO confirmed plans to raise nearly $1 billion through its debut. But, according to a recent Bloomberg report, the company is now considering “slashing its fundraising target by half or even shelving the debut.”\n\n“It’s considering also halving its expected valuation from the $12 billion originally targeted,” Bloomberg added, citing unnamed sources.\n\nAn OYO hotel is seen in Kolkata, India on June 8, 2021. Debarchan Chatterjee/NurPhoto/Getty Images\n\nIn an email to CNN Business, OYO “strongly” denied the assertions made in the report. “OYO continues to receive investor interest as we await approval from the regulator,” it added, but declined to disclose any specific details.\n\nPaytm’s smaller rival Mobikwik has said it would defer its IPO, originally planned for November last year, by a few months. The company told CNN Business last year it would “list at the right time,” without sharing any other details.\n\nDespite the current turmoil, most global investors say that India remains attractive for them, provided companies coming to market are more realistic about their valuations.\n\n“There is no emerging market that offers the growth opportunities that India does,” said Nuno Fernandes, portfolio manager of the emerging wealth strategy at GW&K Investment Management. But he also said that he found most valuations by Indian tech giants last year “completely unwarranted” and hopes other startups would be more cautious now.\n\n“My recommendation to the management is that it is better to be modest and be successful in the IPO, rather than have it falter.”", "authors": ["Diksha Madhok"], "publish_date": "2022/03/22"}, {"url": "https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2020/04/27/corrections-clarifications-2018/3031460001/", "title": "Corrections & Clarifications 2018", "text": "USA TODAY\n\nWe recognize that mistakes may happen – or that new information can emerge after a story is published – and we pledge to address all concerns quickly, fairly and transparently. If a correction or clarification is warranted, we will highlight that in the original file and explain to readers why the change was made. Any correction or clarification would also be published on our corrections log.\n\nTo report corrections & clarifications, contact:\n\nPhone , 1-800-872-7073\n\n, 1-800-872-7073 E-mail, accuracy@usatoday.com\n\nPlease indicate whether you're responding to content online or in the newspaper.\n\nThe following corrections & clarifications have been published on stories produced by USA TODAY's newsroom:\n\nDecember 2018\n\nNews: An earlier version of this story misstated the date most residents evacuated Paradise, California. https://www.usatoday.com/in-depth/news/2018/12/24/camp-fire-tracking-where-paradises-residents-have-gone/2406084002/\n\nMoney: A Dec. 30 story on Muslim science fiction writers was produced in association with Round Earth Media.\n\nMoney: An earlier version of this story misstated the amount of free storage Microsoft and Google offer. https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/columnist/2018/12/25/which-best-cloud-storage-when-you-use-android-ios-microsoft/2367889002/\n\nMoney: A story Dec. 18 about spousal benefits misstated who is eligible to file a restricted application for Social Security. An eligible individual can file once they’re reached full retirement age and if their spouse has filed. https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/columnist/2018/12/05/social-security-spousal-benefit-strategies-help-you-retirement/2134037002/\n\nMoney: An earlier version of this story gave an incorrect figure for holiday sales. ​ https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2018/12/26/holiday-sales-retailers-gifted-best-shopping-season-6-years/2406991002/\n\nNews: An earlier report from The Associated Press misidentified the name (and gender) of the child the president spoke to on Christmas. https://www.usatoday.com/videos/news/2018/12/25/trump-tells-boy-believing-santa-7-marginal/2411322002/\n\nNews: A previous version of this story incorrectly stated the growth in men's waist sizes. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/health/2018/12/20/all-americans-getting-fatter-men-getting-shorter-u-s-report/2363150002/​\n\nNews: A tweet from the USA TODAY account misspelled the name of the Merriam-Webster dictionary. It has since been deleted and reposted with a correction. https://twitter.com/USATODAY/status/1074716658915266560\n\nNews: An earlier version of this story misidentified where the aircraft was operating. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2018/12/17/methamphetamine-drug-drop-bicycle-calexico-mexicali/2345377002/\n\nSports: An earlier version of this story inaccurately described Kelly Krauskopf as the NBA's first female assistant general manager. https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/nba/pacers/2018/12/17/indiana-pacers-make-kelly-krauskopf-first-female-assistant-gm-nba/2334784002/​\n\nNews: A @USATODAY tweet with an incorrect URL was deleted. The tweet was posted again, with the correct URL, and that was noted in the follow-up tweet. https://twitter.com/USATODAY/status/1073254881778118656\n\nSports: A previous version of this story had an incorrect team in the New Mexico Bowl. https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/ncaaf/2018/12/14/college-football-2018-bowl-games-ranked-their-watchability/2269393002/\n\nSports: A Sportsline item in the Dec. 11 edition misstated the elected office of Nancy Pelosi. The Democrat from California is a U.S. representative.\n\nNews: We are removing a Humankind video because the subject of the story is a minor, and his family confirmed that he has been bullied at school as a result of the story, where the student uses his bike for therapy. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/humankind/2015/08/03/humankind-biking-entrepreneur/31069959/\n\nSports: A previous version of this story include incorrect references to the gender of an MMA fighter and a boxer. https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/boxing/2018/12/09/first-transgender-male-boxer-pro-debut/2256858002/\n\nSports: An item in the Dec. 7 Army-Navy section included an incorrect NCAA subdivision for Liberty. The Flames compete as an independent in the Football Bowl Subdivision.\n\nLife: An earlier version of this story mischaracterized the concentration camps located in Nazi-occupied Poland. https://www.usatoday.com/story/life/movies/2018/12/06/steven-spielberg-schindlers-list-more-relevant-today-than-1993/2225228002/\n\nSports: Two incorrect graphics were shared on the Twitter sports accounts and one to the Facebook sports account on assistant college football coaches compensation stories. All three have been corrected.\n\nhttps://twitter.com/usatodaysports/status/1070415840187744258\n\nhttps://twitter.com/usatodaysports/status/1070413964981473280\n\nhttps://www.facebook.com/usatodaysports/posts/2244906612208155\n\nSports: Alabama plays Oklahoma on Dec. 29 in the Orange Bowl. Alabama’s opponent was incorrectly identified in the Odds list in Dec. 4 editions.\n\nLife: Because of a production error, puzzle answers were omitted in some editions of the Dec. 2 Life section.\n\nNovember 2018\n\nMoney: An earlier version of this story incorrectly stated the year in which bitcoin hit its previous low. https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2018/11/25/bitcoins-and-other-cryptocurrencies-get-hammered-post-thanksgiving/2108033002/​\n\nMoney: A previous version of this article included incorrect and incomplete information on standard deductions for 2018. https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2018/11/29/money-moves-2018-before-year-end/2065915002/​\n\nTech: A previous version of this column incorrectly stated that only one size of solid state drives was available on iMac models. https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/columnist/2018/11/28/new-macbook-air-and-mac-mini-show-apple-tax-storage-lives/2056256002/?asdfa​\n\nSports: An earlier version of this story misidentified the victim. https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/olympics/2018/11/21/usa-volleyball-star-danielle-scott-seriously-injured-stabbing/2083897002/\n\nNews: A previous version of this story misstated the U.S. Postal Service’s holiday schedule. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2018/11/21/thanksgiving-day-2018-whats-open-and-closed-federal-holiday/2076648002/​\n\nSports: An incorrect graphic was shared on the Twitter and Instagram sports accounts for the NFL playoff picture. Both have been corrected. https://twitter.com/usatodaysports/status/1067073749407711232 https://www.instagram.com/p/BqpfhB_AzZV/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link\n\nSports: A previous version of this story incorrectly implied that Mike Ditka's 1985 Super Bowl title was the franchise's only championship. https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/nfl/2018/11/24/mike-ditka-hospitalized-after-suffering-heart-attack/2100512002/​\n\nLife: An earlier version of the story misstated where Oprah Winfrey is from. She was born in Mississippi. https://www.usatoday.com/story/life/people/2018/11/14/michelle-obama-becoming-moments-chicago-tour-stop-oprah/1997163002/​\n\nFacebook: An earlier version of this post had the wrong name in the caption. It has been updated. https://www.facebook.com/usatoday/posts/10156602682270667?business_id=10152397388295667&__tn__=-R\n\nLife: A previous version of this story mischaracterized Viggo Mortensen’s nationality. He is Danish-American. https://www.usatoday.com/story/life/movies/2018/11/14/viggo-mortensen-just-may-win-oscar-last-green-book/1993984002/​\n\nSports: West Virginia was No. 3 in the College Football Fox Fan Index best quarterback poll. A helmet icon was incorrect in the Nov. 16 edition.\n\nTravel: An earlier version of this story misstated the location of American Airlines’ headquarters. The company is based in Fort Worth, Texas. https://www.usatoday.com/story/travel/news/2018/11/11/american-airlines-sued-over-2016-flight-attendant-brawl/1971453002/\n\nNews: A previous version of this story incorrectly stated the last member of Congress to be indicted while in office. Sen. Robert Menendez, D-N.J., was indicted on corruption charges in April 2015. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2018/11/07/duncan-hunter-chriscollins-indicted-lawmakers-win/1918092002/​\n\nNews: An earlier version of this story misstated the spending by member countries. The U.S. spends the largest portion of its economy on defense and Luxembourg the least. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2018/11/12/donald-trump-nato-complaints/1974593002/\n\nNews: A prior graphic mischaracterized Michelle Lujan Grisham’s win. She will be New Mexico’s first Democratic Latina governor. The prior photo used of her was mislabeled by AP.\n\nNews: This story was originally published in February after the deadly high school shooting in Parkland, Florida. It was updated after the mass shooting at a bar in Thousand Oaks, California. It has since been corrected to reflect that Australia had a mass shooting in May. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation-now/2018/11/08/thousand-oaks-shooting-australia-no-mass-shootings-since-1996/1934798002/\n\nNews: A Page One story on Nov. 5 about the impact of the 2018 elections on gerrymandering misspelled the last name of Adam Kincaid, executive director of the National Republican Redistricting Trust.\n\nMoney: A previous version of this story incorrectly identified a brand as being owned by TJX Cos. https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2018/11/01/2018-holiday-shopping-retail-debt-results-season/1816910002/\n\nNews: The last name of Billy Michael Honor, organizing pastor at Pulse Church in Atlanta, was misspelled in a Page One story Nov. 2 about faith leaders using the pulpit to urge voting.\n\nTech: A previous version of the story misstated a measurement of Internet speed. https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/columnist/komando/2018/11/01/how-can-check-my-internet-speed-ways-measure-how-fast/1830188002/​\n\nOctober 2018\n\nSports: An earlier version of this live video used incorrect chatter language. https://www.facebook.com/usatodaysports/videos/256653691635241/\n\nSports: A photo on 1C of Oct. 31 editions of the U.S. gymnasts who won gold at the Gymnastics World Championships in Doha, Qatar, misidentified the athletes. They are from left, Ragan Smith, Simone Biles, Riley McCusker, Grace McCallum, Morgan Hurd and Kara Eaker.\n\nLife: An earlier version of this story misstated the line of succession to Japan's throne, leaving out Emperor Akihito's second son, Prince Fumihito. https://www.usatoday.com/story/life/people/2018/10/29/japans-princess-ayako-must-leave-royal-family-after-marrying-commoner/1804881002/​\n\nNews: A previous tweet wrongly identified a victim of the Kroger shooting. https://twitter.com/USATODAY/status/1057399616331751424\n\nThe City podcast: A Facebook post, tweet and previous version of Episode 6 of The City podcast misidentified the number of silver pieces Judas received for betraying Jesus. It was 30 pieces of silver. https://www.thecitypodcast.com/podcast_episode/operation-silver-shovel-episode-6/​\n\nSports: A previous version of this story misstated when the Texas Rangers first went to the Karolyi Ranch. https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/2018/10/18/former-usa-gymnastics-ceo-accused-removing-files-karolyi-ranch/1680089002/\n\nNews: A story and posts on Twitter and Facebook mentioned the wrong date for the Melania Trump plane incident. The incident occurred on Wednesday. https://www.usatoday.com/story/life/people/2018/10/17/melania-trump-plane-returns-airport-after-mechanical-issue/1668508002/\n\nMoney: An earlier version of this list incorrectly identified one Kmart location as a Sears. https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2018/10/15/sears-holdings-bankruptcy-store-closures/1645971002/\n\nNews: A graphic in some editions Oct. 11 misstated the year that Hurricane Andrew struck Florida. The hurricane occurred in 1992.\n\nMoney: A previous version of this timeline misstated the date Sears sold its credit portfolio to Citibank. https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/business/2018/10/10/sears-bankruptcy-2018-rumors-retailer-timeline/1591710002/​\n\nMoney: Because of a production error, the Oct. 9 Markets page list of S&P 500 biggest gainers/losers contained wrong information under the headings for Tyson Foods and Nordstrom stocks.\n\nVideo: On Oct. 2, a video titled \"Basket of baby sloths? Yes please.\" was posted to USA TODAY’s website, Facebook and Instagram that incorrectly sourced the video. The correct source of the video is Sloth Relief & Shelters. The posts have been updated where possible. https://www.usatoday.com/videos/news/animalkind/2018/10/03/basket-baby-sloths-yes-please/1508057002/​\n\nPhoto gallery: A previous version of this caption misspelled the owner's name. https://www.usatoday.com/media/cinematic/gallery/1480161002/who-let-the-dogs-out-to-surf/\n\nMoney: A previous version of this story misstated the value of Amazon’s purchase of Whole Foods in 2017. Amazon paid $13.7 billion for the grocery chain. https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/business/2018/10/02/amazon-minimum-wage-increase-15-all-its-employees/1495473002/​\n\nSeptember 2018\n\nSports: A previous version of this video had the incorrect credit. This video was provided by BreAnna Boon, Coupeville Cheer coach. https://www.usatoday.com/media/cinematic/video/1484832002/runaway-deer-outshines-high-schoolers-90-plus-yard-touchdown/\n\nNews: This version clarifies how many African-Americans are in the Senate. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/elections/2018/09/30/midterms-mike-espy-seeks-local-votes-national-cash-senate-upset/1381142002/​\n\nTwitter: A prior tweet misidentified Jemele Hill’s new position. It’s with The Atlantic. https://twitter.com/usatodaysports/status/1046776074200383493\n\nTwitter: A previous tweet contained a statement that has since been edited out of a sports column. That tweet has been deleted. The updated opinion column and editor’s clarification are here: https://twitter.com/USATODAY/status/1046161602133848065\n\nOpinion: Supreme Court nominee Judge Brett Kavanaugh has told members of the Senate Judiciary Committee he loves coaching his daughters' girls basketball teams, but said in testimony Thursday “thanks to what some of you on this side of the committee have unleashed, I may never be able to coach again.” The intent of this commentary was to address that question. The column was re-edited to more closely reflect that intent and labeled to reflect it as the writer’s opinion. https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/columnist/erik-brady/2018/09/28/brett-kavanaugh-right-he-can-no-longer-coach-girls-basketball/1459496002/\n\nMoney: An earlier version of this story misstated the number of chairmen Tesla will add to the company board. https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2018/09/29/tesla-elon-musk-settle-sec-over-musk-bid-take-company-private/1474270002/​\n\nLife: An earlier version of this story misidentified Robert Wu, the actor who will appear as Tam on “The Big Bang Theory.” https://www.usatoday.com/story/life/tv/2018/09/26/best-big-bang-theory-crossovers-young-sheldon-final-season/1417975002/\n\nNews: The name of Sen. Ted Cruz's wife, Heidi, has been corrected. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2018/09/26/brett-kavanaugh-senate-judiciary-committee-members-watch/1422267002/\n\nNews: This story has been corrected to say The New York Times reported Rod Rosenstein suggested he secretly record Trump. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2018/09/26/rod-rosenstein-testimony-mccabe-memos/1430710002/​\n\nMoney: An earlier version of this story misspelled the name of Rob Popovic. https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2018/09/26/counteroffer-workers-risks-accepting-job-market/1349717002/​\n\nNews: Facebook and Twitter posts on Sept. 26, 2018, used emoji inappropriately and did not meet our editorial standards. The Facebook post has been updated and a statement appended, and the Twitter post was removed.​ https://www.facebook.com/usatoday/posts/10156461952480667\n\nNews: A previous version of this video misidentified Ford's scholastic association with Kavanaugh. https://www.usatoday.com/videos/news/2018/09/25/6-people-you-should-know-before-kavanaughs-sexual-allegations-hearing/1417024002/\n\nOpinion: A prior version of this editorial cartoon by Ed Wexler misspelled the name of Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh. https://www.usatoday.com/picture-gallery/opinion/2018/07/31/the-elephants-in-the-room-todays-toon/37232557/\n\nOpinion: An earlier version of this column incorrectly identified who was invited to meet with Attorney General Jeff Sessions. It was a bipartisan group of state attorneys general. https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2018/09/25/jeff-sessions-attorneys-general-facebook-google-twitter-column/1413271002/​\n\nSports: A chart in the Sept. 25 editions listing Heisman Trophy favorites included an incorrect class for West Virginia quarterback Will Grier. He is a senior.\n\nThe City: A previous tweet used an incorrect title for Gladys Woodson. https://twitter.com/thecitypod/status/1042541112391544834\n\nSports: A correction in Sept. 18 editions misstated the position for Oklahoma State’s Justice Hill. He is a running back.\n\nMoney: An earlier version of this story misstated Julie Rice’s title, her time on the corporate leadership team compared with other members and the focus of her job. It also misstated the number of months she had been on the job and gave an incorrect number of WeMRKT locations. The story was published accidentally. https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2018/09/17/wework-spreads-its-wings-some-say-may-forgetting-its-roots/755608002/\n\nMoney: A video published on Sept. 11 was incorrect on China and Boeing planes. The video was provided by Time and has been removed from the site.\n\nSports: A previous version of this story had an incorrect score for the Texas-Southern California game. https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/college/columnist/dan-wolken/2018/09/15/college-football-observations-week-3/1325866002/​\n\nSocial media: In a Sept. 14 tweet we misidentified when Hurricane Florence had made landfall in North Carolina. https://twitter.com/USATODAY/status/1040550644103479296\n\nOpinion: A previous version of this column misstated the number of the flight hitting the North Tower of the World Trade Center. It was Flight 11. https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2018/09/11/remember-sept-11-attacks-9-11-tsa-transportation-security-terrorism-airlines-column/1254851002/\n\nSports: A previous version of the story misidentified the number of NBA championships Stephen Curry has won. He has won three. https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/tennis/2018/09/12/serena-williams-us-open-steph-curry-praise/1276969002/\n\nLife: An earlier version of this story misstated the number of years since the death of Natasha Richardson, who died in 2009. https://www.usatoday.com/story/life/movies/2018/09/11/natasha-richardson-dennis-quaid-talks-parent-trap-co-stars-death/1275282002/​\n\nNews: This is a corrected version of the graphic, which fixes a misspelling and a mislabeled city.https://twitter.com/USATODAY/status/1039902733225086976\n\nLife: An interview with Brian Henson in the Aug. 21 Life section incorrectly described the broadcast of “The Muppet Show.” The TV series aired on various channels in syndication. https://www.usatoday.com/story/life/movies/2018/08/20/brian-henson-proud-raunchy-puppet-world-happytime-murders/1024310002/\n\nOpinion: Information provided by Kids Count initially misstated the proportion of children in Michigan living in poverty with a single mother; the correct figure is 50.9 percent. https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/nation-now/2018/09/11/single-moms-census-column/1255814002/\n\nNews: A prior version of this story misstated the ban on semi-automatic weapons. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2018/09/07/parkland-survivor-testifies-supreme-court/1224915002/​\n\nSports: In an earlier version of this story, Mookie Betts' run total was miscategorized. Betts had 110 runs through Sept. 3. https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/mlb/columnist/bob-nightengale/2018/09/04/mlb-awards-mookie-betts-javier-baez-al-nl-mvp/1194385002/\n\nSocial media: A story on former Papa John’s chairman John Schnatter was shared on Facebook and Twitter with the wrong language. The language has been corrected on Facebook and a new post has been tweeted. https://twitter.com/USATODAY/status/1038072720875913216\n\nSocial media: A previous tweet and Facebook post had an incorrect photo for \"The Longest Yard.\" https://twitter.com/USATODAY/status/1037839496430186497\n\nhttps://www.facebook.com/usatoday/photos/a.100797840666/10156413201290667/?type=3&theater​\n\nSocial media: Headline and chatter in a Facebook post on Dolores O’Riordan of The Cranberries weren’t clear in indicating when she died. The post has been corrected. https://www.facebook.com/usatoday/posts/10156411765595667?__tn__=-R-R\n\nNews: An earlier version of this story has been updated to note that during the ceremony, four fighter jets flew overhead in the traditional \"missing man\" formation to honor Sen. John McCain, a former fighter pilot. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2018/09/02/john-mccain-buried-naval-academy-after-weekend-tributes/1180358002/​\n\nAugust 2018\n\nNews: A previous version of this story stated that the federal government sent only Japanese immigrants to internment camps during World War II. Most held were Japanese-Americans who were U.S. citizens. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2018/08/24/iowa-murder-casts-spotlight-farms-hiring-undocumented-immigrants/1075320002/\n\nNews: An earlier version of this report misstated Stephen Willeford's actions after the shooting. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation-now/2018/06/29/autopsy-sutherland-springs-texas-church-gunman/745951002/\n\nLife: An earlier version of this story misidentified the prize for winning “America’s Got Talent.” It’s $1 million and a short-term Las Vegas gig. https://www.usatoday.com/story/life/tv/2018/08/14/americas-got-talent-enduring-appeal-explained-nbc-simon-cowell-reality-tv/955906002/​\n\nNews: Jackson Butler will resign from the Tybee Island, Georgia, council, effective Sept. 13, and Jason Buelterman will continue as mayor. The information was incorrect in the State-By-State feature Aug. 27.\n\nNews: A prior version of this story had the incorrect state for Dakota County, Minnesota. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2018/08/24/lip-sync-battle-seattle-police/865716002/​\n\nNews: A prior version of this story misspelled the name of Tom Mangelsen. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2018/08/28/grizzly-hunt-pits-tourists-against-sportsmen-wyoming/1065854002/\n\nTwitter: An earlier tweet in a Twitter thread misstated the landfall of Hurricane Katrina. It was Aug 29. https://twitter.com/USATODAY/status/1034480094683774976\n\nMoney: An Aug. 27 article on businesses feeling the effects of the trade war incorrectly stated the country in which boat dealers have received millions of dollars from a Florida boat maker to partly offset the cost of tariffs. The boat maker, Correct Craft, is rebating the money to dealers in Canada, Mexico and Europe. https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2018/08/27/trump-trade-war-takes-growing-toll-american-businesses/1045792002/​\n\nLife: This story has been updated to reflect that both boys and girls watched the dress-code video though only girls were featured in the video. https://www.usatoday.com/story/life/allthemoms/2018/08/20/questionable-school-dress-code-video-goes-viral-principal-apologizes/1043770002/\n\nMoney: A previous version of this article incorrectly stated who gets a percentage of transactions made through Apple Pay. https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/news/2018/08/23/costco-walmart-apple-pay/1071330002/​\n\nMoney: A story on Aug. 21 about animal trainer “Sled” Reynolds incorrectly identified the title of a film he worked on. The movie was “The Ghost and the Darkness.” https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/careers/getting-started/2018/08/14/sled-reynolds-how-became-animal-trainer-film-tv/973306002/\n\nLife: A photo caption in an earlier version of this report gave the wrong year for Betty White's 93rd birthday. The actress turned 93 in 2015. https://www.usatoday.com/story/life/tv/2018/08/20/betty-white-gets-pbs-tribute-first-lady-television/1026883002/\n\nNews: Long Nook Beach is located in Massachusetts. The state was misidentified in the State-by-State feature on Aug. 17.\n\nNews: An Aug. 16 story about gun control ads misstated the location of the National Rifle Association’s headquarters, which are in Fairfax, Virginia.​\n\nMoney: An earlier version misstated the number of 401(k) millionaires from a year earlier. https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2018/08/16/number-401-k-millionaires-hits-new-record/1000228002/\n\nNews: An earlier version incorrectly stated the number of ads aired from January to July by Democratic candidates and outside groups. The figure should be nearly 56,000. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/elections/2018/08/07/2018-election-exclusive-health-care-trump-dominate-political-ads-senate-races/914978002/\n\nTech: A previous version of this story misstated the title of AI4All's CEO Tess Posner. https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/news/2018/08/10/google-gives-1-million-help-more-young-blacks-latinos-and-women-create-artificial-intelligence/915627002/​\n\nTech: On Aug. 14, we posted a headline that incorrectly stated the number of seats on the Crew Dragon. It can seat up to seven. https://www.usatoday.com/videos/tech/2018/08/15/blue-origin-says-itll-start-selling-tickets-space-tourists-2019/37491385/\n\nMoney: An earlier version of this story misspelled the first name of Jon Reidy. https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2018/08/14/home-prices-midsize-more-affordable-markets-have-become-pricier/941147002/\n\nLife: In a story Aug. 14 about Stevie Wonder and Rev. Jesse Jackson visiting Aretha Franklin at her home, The Associated Press reported erroneously that Jackson visited Franklin on Tuesday. Jackson was originally scheduled to visit Tuesday but later rescheduled for Wednesday. https://www.usatoday.com/story/life/people/2018/08/14/aretha-franklin-stevie-wonder-jesse-jackson/987590002/\n\nTech: Clarifies the countries in which you can use your phone to make payments. https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2018/08/06/apple-google-samsung-mobile-phone-payments-still-need-work/897025002/\n\nLife: Because of a production error, the Aug. 7 Puzzles section was repeated in some editions Aug. 8. We regret the error.\n\nMoney: An earlier version of this story conflated Apple's stock market valuation with its ability to make purchases and should have been clearer about the difference between stock market value and GDP. https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2018/08/02/1-billion-iphone-xs-what-apple-can-buy-1-trillion/889009002/\n\nMoney: A previous version of this story misstated the state in the United States where Rolls-Royce cars were once built. https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/cars/2018/08/03/rolls-royce-goodwood/888039002/\n\nSports: An earlier version of this column included incorrect information about the manner in which former Ohio State coach Jim Tressel left the school. https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/ncaaf/bigten/2018/08/03/urban-meyer-zach-smiths-defense-shifts-focus-ohio-state-gene-smith/902467002/​\n\nNews: Mike Abatti grows melons, broccoli, beets and alfalfa. https://twitter.com/USATODAY/status/1025187604432646144​\n\nJuly 2018\n\nSports: Of all the Packers inside linebackers, Jake Ryan best fit the mold of the old 3-4 defenses. Now he's lost for the season. https://twitter.com/usatodaysports/status/1024674508492427265​\n\nSports: An earlier version of this story incorrectly identified the tournament as an AAU event. https://ftw.usatoday.com/2018/07/lebron-james-jr-son-bronny-aau-game-canceled-heckling-fan-video-basketball\n\nNews: In the July 30 State-by-State page, the city of Wichita, Kansas, was misspelled.\n\nNews: A previous alert incorrectly stated that the CBS board suspended CEO Les Moonves. That decision has not been made. https://twitter.com/USATODAY/status/1023960031375577089\n\nNews: An earlier version of this article misstated the location of Salinas Pueblo Missions National Monument. The story has been updated with the correct information. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2018/07/19/artificial-light-dark-sky-park-night-sky/773451002/\n\nNews: An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated George Zimmerman's title. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2018/07/13/trump-queen-elizabeth-theresa-may-supermoon-wimbledon-blacklivesmatter/774441002/​\n\nNews: An earlier version of this article contained the incorrect name of an Air Force veteran. The name should have been Daniel Bliss. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/militarykind/2018/07/11/veteran-shows-little-boy-how-brave/772537002/\n\nMoney: Story updated to indicate Jeffersonville is in Indiana. https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/business/2018/07/16/papa-john-schnatter-rich-wealthy-papa-johns/788005002/​\n\nSports: A previous version of this story described the actions of a referee inaccurately. That has been corrected. https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/2018/07/09/players-officials-fight-boys-basketball-brawl-atlanta/767447002/\n\nSports: A story about the Boston Red Sox’s Mookie Betts in the July 11-17 edition misstated the number of major leaguers who had at least 20 homers and 15 stolen bases at press time. It was Betts and the Cleveland Indians’ Jose Ramirez.\n\nLife: The USA TODAY airplay charts that appeared in the June 29 Life section were based on outdated data. The July 6 charts reflect current numbers.\n\nLife: An earlier version of this story misstated the number of David Foster's children. He has five biological children and six stepchildren. https://www.usatoday.com/story/life/people/2018/07/03/katharine-mcphee-and-david-foster-engaged/755277002/\n\nLife: An earlier version of this story misidentified Smoke Dawg in a wire service photo. https://www.usatoday.com/story/life/people/2018/07/01/drake-tourmate-toronto-rapper-smoke-dawg-shot-dead/749557002/​\n\nLife: An earlier version of this report gave an incorrect title for Shailene Woodley's HBO series “Big Little Lies.” https://www.usatoday.com/story/life/entertainthis/2018/07/01/shailene-woodley-drank-cope-hunger-goes-viral-again/749433002/\n\nNews: An earlier version of this story had the incorrect maker for “Wave Gliders.” It is Liquid Robotics. Also, Roger Hine’s title was incorrect; he is the CEO. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation-now/2018/06/28/kilauea-volcano-robots-dive-into-hawaiis-lava-filled-ocean/734127002/​\n\nJune 2018\n\nTravel: An earlier version of this story misidentified the employer of the flight attendant shown in the video. https://www.usatoday.com/story/travel/nation-now/2018/06/28/delta-attendant-kicks-passengers-off-plane-over-airplane-mode-dispute/741161002/​\n\nLife: An earlier version of this report incorrectly characterized the origins of the study of identical siblings. The experiment was conducted by the Child Development Center in New York, which later merged with the Jewish Board of Family and Children’s Services. https://www.usatoday.com/story/life/movies/2018/06/26/three-identical-strangers-true-story-triplets-separated-birth/727003002/​\n\nNews: An earlier version of this story incorrectly characterized the therapy performed on the patient. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/humankind/2018/06/26/burn-victim-finds-strength-through-music/731973002/​\n\nTwitter: An earlier version of this graphic incorrectly quoted Apple CEO Tim Cook. Here’s why he’s speaking out about immigration. https://twitter.com/USATODAY/status/1011595651216494592\n\nOpinion: A previous version of this opposing view misstated Peter O’Rourke’s title. He is acting secretary of Veterans Affairs. https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2018/06/20/va-usa-today-article-misleading-editorials-debates/36223067/​\n\nLife: An earlier version of this story mislabeled the episode as the second-season finale. It is the10th installment in a longer, 13-episode season. https://www.usatoday.com/story/life/tv/2018/06/20/handmaids-tale-season-2-finale-recap-review-how-much-more-can-we-take/715075002/​\n\nTech: An earlier version wrongly characterized the timing of the American Psychiatric Association's position on gaming disorders and the date when it included it in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders appendix. https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/nation-now/2018/06/18/gaming-disorder-who-classifies-video-game-addiction-health-disorder/709574002/​\n\nNews: A June 17 story on Seattle’s housing crisis misstated the amount raised by the No Tax on Jobs group that opposed a Seattle corporate head tax. The group raised $350,000 to fight the tax. https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2018/06/17/after-amazon-tax-fails-seattle-has-no-clear-path-help-homeless/698575002/\n\nMoney: An earlier version of this story misstated the name of Verizon's Above Unlimited plan. https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2018/06/14/verizons-latest-unlimited-plan-targets-data-heavy-users/698452002/​\n\nOpinion: Dr. Colleen Kraft's name was misspelled in an earlier version of this column. https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2018/06/14/donald-trump-immigration-puerto-rico-policies-lethal-nonwhites-column/697856002/\n\nOpinion: A prior version of this column misspelled Halle Berry's name. https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2018/06/09/kate-spade-suicide-anthony-bourdain-depression-culture-success-column/687388002/​\n\nSports: A previous version of this story incorrectly said Steve Spurrier coached Tim Tebow at the University of Florida. https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/mlb/mets/2018/06/11/tim-tebow-has-shown-signs-hes-improving-baseball-player/690807002/\n\nNews: An earlier version of this story misstated where Rickie Vargas-Garcia worked. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation-now/2018/06/06/disney-world-legoland-employees-arrested-child-porn-bust/676131002/​\n\nSports: An item in some June 7 editions included an incorrect name for the Baltimore Ravens coach. He is John Harbaugh.\n\nMoney: A 1B story on June 6 misstated ex-Mozilla CEO Brendan Eich's position on a California gay marriage ban. He supported the ban. https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2018/06/05/google-employee-activism-diversity-pentagon-shakes-up-internet-giant/665423002/\n\nMoney: A previous version of this story misspelled Beacon Wealth Solutions. https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/personalfinance/lifestages/2018/06/04/wills-power-attorney-strategies-end-life-planning/652066002/\n\nNews: A previous version of this video incorrectly stated the office Nathan Larson is seeking. https://www.usatoday.com/media/cinematic/video/35590637/pedophile-and-white-supremacist-running-for-congress/\n\nMay 2018\n\nOpinion: An earlier version of this column mischaracterized the legal status of 1,475 undocumented migrant children who crossed the U.S.-Mexico border without their parents. Those children were placed in the custody of sponsors screened by the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services. They are no longer in federal custody. https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/nation-now/2018/05/25/immigration-children-separated-families-lost-column/643793002/​\n\nLife: An earlier version of this report included a photo of Ty Hardin, who replaced Clint Walker as the star of Cheyenne. https://www.usatoday.com/story/life/people/2018/05/22/clint-walker-cheyenne-dies-91/635248002/​\n\nSports: A previous version of this story included the wrong night for Game 5 of the series. https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/nba/columnist/sam-amick/2018/05/22/warriors-rockets-game-4-western-conference-finals/635873002/​\n\nTech: An earlier version of this story indicated Siri's answers pertained to WWDC 2018. They were from last year. https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/talkingtech/2018/05/21/apple-teasing-new-smarter-siri-new-voice-new-look-wwdc/630725002/​\n\nNews: Amy McGrath is running for Kentucky's 6th congressional district. An earlier version of this story stated the incorrect race. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2018/05/22/president-trump-south-korea-facebook-youtube-music-stephen-king/628354002/​\n\nOpinion: A previous version of this opposing view misstated the subject of one of special counsel Robert Mueller’s indictments. The indictment did not include charges related to hacking of Democratic Party computers. The article also misstated the status of Justice Department disclosure of a memo describing the extent of Mueller’s authority. The memo has been disclosed to a federal judge. https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2018/05/20/end-robert-mueller-investigation-michael-mukasey-editorials-debates/35157745/​\n\nNews: An earlier version of this video misidentified the wrong animal as a squirrel. https://www.usatoday.com/videos/news/have-you-seen/video/2018/05/18/sneaky-squirrels-stash-pine-cones-car-engine/34961443/\n\nOpinion: A prior version of this column misspelled Aptiv. https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2018/05/17/ceos-real-wages-pay-gap-column/612615002/\n\nLife: An earlier version of this report incorrectly characterized Adam Driver’s background. His character in ‘BlacKkKlansman’ is Jewish. https://www.usatoday.com/story/life/movies/2018/05/16/adam-driver-cant-avoid-star-wars-cannes-promoting-blackkklansman/615248002/\n\nNews: An article May 11 about moving the U.S. Embassy in Israel to Jerusalem misspelled the last name of Jerusalem resident Daniel Jonas.\n\nTech: An earlier version of this story misspelled the first name of Afton Heitzenrater. https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/nation-now/2018/05/08/opioid-pill-dispenser-electronic-timer/589906002/\n\nTech: A prior version of this story had the wrong date of the fatal Uber crash in Tempe. https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2018/05/07/uber-hires-senior-safety-official-after-deadly-arizona-self-driving-car-crash/587222002/\n\nTech: A prior version of this story had the wrong date of the Windows 10 update. https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/columnist/2018/04/27/microsoft-windows-10-update-new-features-boost-productivity/557312002/\n\nMoney: A previous version of this story misstated the unemployment rate. https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2018/05/04/labor-department-expected-report-191-000-job-gains-april/579411002/\n\nApril 2018\n\nTech: Amazon's smart speakers with displays are the Show and Spot. https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/columnist/baig/2018/04/25/amazon-echo-dot-kids-alexa-thanks-them-saying-please/547911002/\n\nNews: A previous version of this story misstated Elliot Rodger's weapons. He used both a knife and a gun. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2017/03/31/masculinity-traditional-toxic-trump-mens-rights/99830694/​\n\nVideo: A previous version of this video misstated the number of Americans living with unhealthful levels of pollution. https://www.usatoday.com/media/cinematic/video/33952141/8-of-americas-10-most-ozone-polluted-cities-are-in-this-state/​\n\nOpinion: Because of an editing error, a headline in an earlier version of this column incorrectly described Amy Wax's job status. https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2018/04/20/black-students-law-school-amy-wax-column/510510002/\n\nNews: A previous version of this article had the wrong date for Barbara Bush’s quote at the Houston Astrodome. It was Sept. 5, 2005. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2018/04/17/barbara-bush-quotes-memorable-famous/518489002/​\n\nVideo: This video has been corrected to reflect that Netflix does not share viewing data with movie studios and to clarify the types of data Netflix lets users delete. https://www.usatoday.com/media/cinematic/video/33954049/what-netflix-knows-about-you/\n\nOpinion: A previous version had the wrong year for when Bennett College became all-women. It was 1926. https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/nation-now/2018/04/17/spending-mothers-day-barbara-bush-column/526704002/​\n\nNews: A previous version of this story misstated the number of pardon requests pending with the Office of the Pardon Attorney as of March 31. That number is 2,197. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2018/04/13/trump-pardons-scooter-libby-bush-cheney-aide-convicted-lying-fbi/513953002/\n\nLife: Destiny's Child last performed together in a brief appearance at Beyoncé's 2013 Super Bowl halftime show. An earlier version of this report gave the wrong year for their most recent reunion. https://www.usatoday.com/story/life/entertainthis/2018/04/15/beyonce-brings-destinys-child-back-coachella-and-internet-wasnt-ready/518416002/\n\nMoney: An earlier version of this article misstated the plant number and Julian date range of the eggs possibly contaminated with salmonella. https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/nation-now/2018/04/14/200-million-eggs-recalled-over-salmonella-fears/518245002/\n\nLife: Marc J. Seifer is the author of Wizard: The Life and Times of Nikola Tesla. His name was misspelled in USA TODAY’s Best-Selling Books list of April 12.\n\nNews: Rep. Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., was House speaker for four years starting in 2007. Some April 5 editions listed incorrect years.\n\nOpinion: An earlier version of this column misidentified a writer affiliated with Little Green Footballs. He is Charles Johnson. https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2018/04/06/kevin-williamson-atlantic-fired-hanging-women-who-have-abortion-column/491590002/​\n\nLife: Because of technical difficulties, A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking was listed at No. 38 on USA TODAY’s Best-Selling Books list of March 22. It should have been No. 18, and the books listed that week at No. 18 through 37 drop by one rank each.\n\nLife: A previous version of this video misidentified Jenna Dewan. https://www.usatoday.com/media/cinematic/video/33508907/5-celeb-couples-that-shattered-our-faith-in-love/\n\nMoney: A story on April 2, 2018, in our print edition misstated the rate of Tesla vehicle sales in comparison to DeLorean Motor Co. sales. Tesla sells about as many cars monthly as DeLorean sold during its operational history.\n\nMoney: An earlier version of this story attributed data about women's salaries to the wrong year and provided an incorrect comparison of black women's salaries. Also, the shaving products company Billie was actually founded in 2017. https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2018/03/29/pink-tax-women-pay-more/417648002/\n\nMarch 2018\n\nMoney: An earlier version of this story incorrectly stated how spouses who receive alimony are taxed. https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/taxes/2018/03/12/divorce-under-new-tax-law-may-get-more-complicated-getting-divorced-how-new-tax-bill-may-complicate/376837002/\n\nMoney: An earlier version of this story cited the wrong source for GDP growth data. That information came from the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis. https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/economy/2018/03/27/9-states-with-the-fastest-growing-economies/33169983/\n\nDigital: The length of Emma Gonzalez’s moment of silence at the March for Our Lives was misstated in posts on Facebook and Twitter on March 24. The entire speech, including the moment of silence, was about six minutes long. The posts were updated, with corrections appended, and the language in the accompanying article was clarified. https://twitter.com/USATODAY/status/977699688550891521\n\nhttps://www.instagram.com/p/BguZb7GlF9R/?taken-by=usatoday\n\nDigital: A 2014 article about Hunter Biden failing a drug test was posted to USA TODAY Facebook and Twitter on March 23. It should not have been shared. The posts were corrected, and then removed.\n\nOpinion: This editorial was updated to reflect the fact that Kentucky, not New Jersey, has the strictest limit on the length of initial opioid prescriptions. https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2018/03/19/doctors-can-help-cure-opioid-crisis-editorials-debates/439628002/​\n\nOpinion: This column has been updated to reflect a major correction from Pro Publica and The New York Times about Gina Haspel's role in the CIA torture program. She did not oversee the waterboarding of Abu Zubayda. https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2018/03/14/gina-haspel-nomination-welcome-u-s-where-torture-rocket-fuel-your-career-jonathan-turley-column/423619002/\n\nLife: Some editions of the USA TODAY Best-Selling Books List for March 15 misidentified the publisher for The Last Jedi: Expanded Edition by Jason Frey. The publisher is Del Rey.\n\nNews: An article in some March 12 editions about the worst countries for women misrepresented the U.S. ranking. The United States was listed as the 22nd best place to be a woman.\n\nVideo: A previous version of this video contained deals that were no longer being offered. https://www.usatoday.com/videos/news/2018/03/13/celebrate-pi-day-these-delicious-deals/32891387/\n\nNews: An earlier version of this story misidentified the home state of the pygmy rabbit and wolverine and misnamed the yellow-billed cuckoo. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2018/03/11/endangered-species-recovering-americas-wildlife-act-oil-gas-royalties/410636002/​\n\nSports: An earlier version of this report misidentified the winner of the women's 200. Gabrielle Thomas of Harvard set a collegiate record. https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/college/2018/03/10/world-collegiate-records-highlight-ncaa-indoor-track-and-field-championships/414025002/\n\nNews: The organization that runs the annual Transcatheter Cardiovascular Therapeutics meeting was misidentified in a March 9 story. The conference is put on by the Cardiovascular Research Foundation.\n\nTech: A previous version of this story misstated the amount Amazon Prime members are estimated to spend annually on Amazon. https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/news/2018/03/07/amazon-offers-low-cost-prime-memberships-those-medicaid/401601002/​\n\nTech: Luke Cage was the first original series for Netflix with a black superhero. https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/talkingtech/2018/03/06/netflixs-reed-hastings-no-interest-inclusion-riders-diversity/401606002/\n\nFebruary 2018\n\nNews: An article about President Trump’s ambassador appointments that ran in February misstated how ambassadors and other senior foreign service officers are chosen. Most are department veterans with years of experience. Some ambassadors and other senior appointee positions are chosen from outside the State Department.\n\nSports Weekly: Chase Headley’s home run total for 2017 was incorrectly listed in a photo caption on the San Diego Padres page of the Feb. 14-20 issue. He hit 12 homers for the New York Yankees last season but 31 for the Padres in 2012.\n\nMoney: An earlier version of this story cited the wrong source for data about anxiety Americans face over finances. The original data came from MoneyLion.com.https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/personalfinance/budget-and-spending/2018/01/23/more-americans-feel-anxious-than-optimistic-about-their-finances/109729020/\n\nNews: An earlier version of this story should have said Daniels’ wife identifies as a woman. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2018/02/08/massachusetts-elementary-school-principal-announces-she-transgender/318946002/​\n\nMoney: An earlier version of this story misidentified the $3.7 billion in earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization. https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2018/02/20/albertsons-and-rite-aid-plan-merger-creates-u-s-supermarket-and-healthcare-giant/353958002/​\n\nMoney: A Feb. 19 Ken Fisher column about homes as investments omitted some data and used the wrong time frame in the example given. As a result, the annual return listed for the home investment appeared smaller than it would have actually been. https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/columnist/2018/02/18/why-your-home-lousy-investment-when-you-think-its-great/340516002/​\n\nSports: A previous version of this story incorrectly reported on how far Lindsey Vonn finished behind gold medal winner Sofia Goggia. https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/winter-olympics-2018/2018/02/20/lindsey-vonn-father-bronze-medal-downhill/357662002/\n\nTech: Wired did not include Lewis Bernstein in its tally of advisers who took funding from Facebook. https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/news/2018/02/16/facebook-isnt-backing-off-messenger-kids-despite-critics/346513002/\n\nSports: The Jeff Sagarin college men’s basketball ratings in Feb. 22 editions were the final ones for the 2016-17 season. The current ratings may be found on 4C in today’s edition.\n\nOpinion: Because of an editing error, Jonesboro, Ark., was mislabeled. https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2018/02/19/parkland-school-shootings-not-new-normal-despite-statistics-stretching-truth-fox-column/349380002/​\n\nLife: An earlier version of this report incorrectly credited the 1996 Summer Olympics performance of The Power of the Dream. Celine Dion sang the theme at the opening ceremony; the song was performed again at the closing ceremony by Rachel McMullin and a choir of other children. https://www.usatoday.com/story/life/entertainthis/2016/08/04/olympics-theme-songs-katy-perry-whitney-houston/87968806/​\n\nSports: A previous version of this graphic incorrectly located hockey player Megan Keller's hometown on the map. https://www.usatoday.com/pages/interactives/sports/winter-olympics-2018-team-usa/#/profile/megan-keller/\n\nSports: An earlier version of this story misidentified the U.S. hockey player who is quoted in the third paragraph. https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/winter-olympics-2018/2018/02/17/ilya-kovalchuk-hockey-olympics-usa-russia/348011002/\n\nOpinion: An earlier version of this column mischaracterized who could receive a tax credit for campaign donations. It would be refundable and available to all Americans who file taxes. https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2018/02/14/paul-ryan-tax-cut-how-start-fixing-democracy-1-50-week-jason-sattler-column/332739002/\n\nSports: A photo in some editions Feb. 8 incorrectly identified the person next to New England Patriots coach Bill Belichick. The person was special teams coach Joe Judge.\n\nSports: A headline in some Feb. 12 editions had an incorrect result of Serena and Venus Williams’ doubles match in the Fed Cup. The sisters lost.\n\nTwitter: On Feb. 11, a previous tweet misidentified Olympic gold medalist Jamie Anderson. https://twitter.com/USATODAY/status/962907261801783296\n\nLife: This story makes a correction to remove Touch of Grey and Brown Eyed Woman, which John Perry Barlow did not write. https://www.usatoday.com/story/life/people/2018/02/08/internet-pioneer-songwriter-john-perry-barlow-dies-at-70/110215684/​\n\nCrossword: Because of a production error, the answers to the Feb. 11 crossword puzzle were not printed in some editions.\n\nMoney: An earlier version of this story misidentified one of Bon-Ton's two corporate headquarters. It should have been York, Pennsylvania. https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2018/02/05/bon-ton-stores-chapter-11-bankruptcy-department-stores-reel/306299002/​\n\nNews: A previous version of this story misstated the gender of the lawmaker who introduced the new bill and did not make clear that the previous Canadian flag only featured Britain's Union Jack. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2018/02/01/o-canada-bill-passed-make-national-anthem-gender-neutral/1086282001/\n\nLife: An earlier version of this report incorrectly characterized Uma Thurman’s award-winning work. She was nominated for a best supporting actress Oscar for Pulp Fiction. https://www.usatoday.com/story/life/people/2018/02/03/uma-thurman-harvey-weinstein-alleges-he-made-unwanted-advances/303597002/\n\nTech: A graphic in a previous version of this story had an incorrect classification for Washington, D.C. The graphic has been updated. https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2018/02/01/amazons-second-headquarters-gay-groups-say-amazon-should-avoid-these-9-cities/1082126001/\n\nYouTube: Dylan O'Brien sat down with USA TODAY to share what it was like to see his completed movie 'Maze Runner: The Death Cure' for the first time, along with the scene that led to his production-stopping injury. A previous version of this video incorrectly spelled O'Brien's name. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CjhpUAZ9BNs\n\nMoney: A previous version of this video included an incorrect wing count. https://www.usatoday.com/videos/money/2018/02/02/1.35-billion-chicken-wings-consumed-during-sblii/110027640/\n\nJanuary 2018\n\nNews: An earlier version of this story contained a photo that has been removed. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2018/01/30/indian-man-dies-after-being-sucked-into-mri-machine-while-carrying-oxygen-cylinder/1078114001/\n\nMoney: An earlier version of this story listed the incorrect national average for the price of a gallon of gas. https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/energy/2018/01/30/gas-prices-no-sign-falling-gasbuddy/1078191001/\n\nNews: This story originally misidentified who will give the Democratic rebuttal to President Trump's State of the Union address. Rep. Joe Kennedy III, D-Mass., will deliver the response. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2018/01/30/5-things-you-need-know-tuesday/1074168001/\n\nMoney: A quote on \"range anxiety\" in the original version of this story was attributed to the wrong executive at TE Connectivity. It should have been attributed to Steven Merkt, president of Transportation Solutions for TE Connectivity. https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/cars/2018/01/25/new-electric-cars-2018-spark-need-more-charging-stations/810137001/​\n\nLife: A previous version of this video misidentified one of Elston John's Tony-winning musicals. https://www.usatoday.com/videos/life/2018/01/25/farewell-sir-elton-john-announces-final-tour/109786340/\n\nOpinion: The previous version misidentified Opposing View writer Michael Stumo’s organization. He is CEO of the Coalition for a Prosperous America. https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2018/01/24/trade-predators-destroy-american-jobs-editorials-debates/109779496/​\n\nNews: A previous version had the wrong first name for Jeffrey Trout. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation-now/2018/01/19/fish-kill-cold-weather/1048984001/​\n\nNews: A Jan. 22 Facebook Live event of former gymnastics doctor Larry Nassar's sentencing hearing was deleted from the USA TODAY Sports Facebook page. A victim who wished to remain anonymous was named during the hearing, which counters USA TODAY's standard of protecting the identity of sexual abuse victims.\n\nNews: A Jan. 17 Page One story about bitcoin stated the wrong year for the cryptocurrency’s peak. It took place in December 2017.\n\nOpinion: An earlier version of this column overstated the farm subsidies received by former congressman Stephen Fincher. https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2018/01/22/medicaid-work-requirements-who-judge-character-judges-jill-lawrence-column/1052270001/​\n\nButterfly: Because of a production error, answers to the crossword puzzle were omitted from some editions Sunday.\n\nNews: A previous version of this article misstated the number of Democratic and Republican congresswomen expected to run for re-election. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2018/01/17/5-major-wins-womens-rights-across-world/1040353001/​\n\nTech: An earlier version of this story had incorrect details about access to Amazon Video. It's included for monthly Prime subscribers. https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/news/2018/01/19/amazon-raises-monthly-prime-rate-annual-rate-stays-99/1046646001/\n\nNews: An accident involving a driver for Performance Team Freight Systems was included in a Dec. 29, 2017, graphic showing potential time violations by truckers. The company was not contacted before publication and later provided evidence that its driver had not been behind the wheel for excessive hours. https://www.usatoday.com/pages/interactives/news/rigged-asleep-at-the-wheel/\n\nSport: A previous version of this story included an incorrect name for the president of Robert Morris University. https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/ncaaf/2018/01/17/college-football-playoff-names-six-new-selection-committee-members/1040668001/\n\nNews: Former CNN producer Teddy Davis has been removed from this list. He was accused of inappropriate behavior, according to CNN. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2017/11/22/weinstein-aftermath-all-men-accused-sexual-misconduct/884778001/​\n\nMoney: An earlier version of this story was incorrect about RMDs as they relate to Roth 401(k)s. https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/personalfinance/retirement/2018/01/15/5-things-you-need-to-know-about-required-minimum-distributions/109182364/​\n\nNews: A USA TODAY story that ran Jan. 12 should have said that Rep. Katie Hall was the first African American from Indiana to serve in the U.S. House of Representatives.\n\nSports: A previous version of this story included incorrect information about funding for TRACK-TBI. https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/nfl/2018/01/05/nfl-commits-another-16-43-million-concussion-research/1007405001/​\n\nNews: An earlier version of this story overstated the amount of money the IRS may need to implement the tax bill. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2018/01/10/irs-may-need-extra-1-billion-implement-new-tax-law-over-next-two-years/1020393001/​\n\nMoney: An earlier version of this story erroneously included a Sears Auto Center location that is not closing. https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2018/01/04/your-local-kmart-sears-closing/1005274001/​\n\nNews: A prior version of this story misstated House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy's title. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2018/01/09/trump-meets-congressional-leaders-immigration/1016369001/​\n\nNews: A photo of Jenny Qaqundah at the Grateful Desert Herb Shoppe & EcoMarket in Joshua Tree was used incorrectly to illustrate a Jan. 1 story on the legalization of marijuana in California. Neither Qaqundah nor the store are involved in the marijuana industry.\n\nTech: A Jan. 9 photo gallery about robot pole-dancing entertainment at CES was removed because it did not meet USA TODAY’s editorial standards.\n\nMoney: An earlier version of this story misspelled the first name of Nasir and didn't make clear the date of the Gates-edited issue of Time. https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2018/01/04/buffett-time-u-s-kids-live-better-than-parents-he-writes-gates-edited-issue/1001218001/​\n\nNews: The previous headline had the wrong year. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation-now/2017/12/08/south-texas-snow/933790001/​\n\nNews: A previous version of this story misstated the name of the supreme leader who made the comments. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2018/01/02/six-days-iran-protests-least-20-dead-450-arrested/995096001/​\n\nOpinion: An earlier version of this column should have disclosed that the author, Ed Rollins, is chairman of Kelli Ward's Senate campaign. https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2018/01/03/trump-outsiders-like-kelli-ward-republican-revolutionaries-2018-ed-rollins-column/997358001/\n\nNews: A previous version of this column mischaracterized the Marist Poll results. “Being a better person” tied with “losing weight.” https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2017/12/26/most-popular-new-years-resolution-2018-better-person-but-what-does-mean/981680001/​\n\nOpinion: An earlier version of this column mischaracterized changes to the state and local tax deduction. The deduction was capped at $10,000. https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2018/01/03/trumps-tax-bill-destined-failure-thanks-gop-trying-get-even-democrats-melvyn-krauss-column/997785001/\n\nLife: An earlier version of this report incorrectly characterized when Carolyn Bryant Donham made her confession. https://www.usatoday.com/story/life/entertainthis/2017/12/31/dave-chappelle-addresses-trans-joke-backlash-goes-trump-voters-special/987371001/​\n\n2016:Corrections & Clarifications 2016\n\n2017:Corrections & Clarifications 2017\n\n2019:Corrections & Clarifications", "authors": [], "publish_date": "2020/04/27"}, {"url": "https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/50-states/2021/05/03/virus-sniffing-dog-vegas-boom-vaccine-hecklers-news-around-states/115956336/", "title": "Virus-sniffing dog, Vegas boom: News from around our 50 states", "text": "From USA TODAY Network and wire reports\n\nAlabama\n\nMontgomery: Vaccines for COVID-19 are now widely available, but some people remain hesitant to take the shots, State Health Officer Scott Harris said Friday. After months of struggling with getting an adequate supply into the state, Harris said health officials are now trying to battle some people’s reluctance to sign up for doses. While people can be reluctant to take the vaccine for a variety of reasons, one is the false belief that the vaccine is more dangerous than the coronavirus, he said. “If you can identify one single issue that is a problem, it’s that there are people who are just convinced that the vaccine is somehow more dangerous than the disease,” Harris told reporters. “That’s a false belief we have to try to combat as often as we can. It’s simply not true.” Nearly one-third of Alabama’s population has received at least one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine. However, that figure ranks the state third from last in the nation, ahead of Mississippi and Louisiana, and Alabama is last nationally in its overall rate of vaccination. Harris said health officials are conducting media campaigns and asking doctors to contact their patients about the benefits of getting vaccinated. He emphasized that vaccination “is the fastest way to get back to normal.”\n\nAlaska\n\nAnchorage: Gov. Mike Dunleavy on Friday ended the state’s COVID-19 disaster declaration, saying the state is in such a good position he doesn’t need emergency powers bestowed by the Legislature. “Alaska is in the recovery phase where an emergency declaration is no longer necessary,” Dunleavy said in a statement. “Our systems are fully functioning with vaccine distribution, adequate testing, and health care capacity. It is important our focus remains on getting Alaska’s economy back on track and welcoming summer tourism throughout our great state.” Dunleavy acted on the recommendation of health commissioner Adam Crum, who concluded the emergency disaster declaration is no longer necessary. “While COVID-19 is still present in Alaska, the urgent nature of the pandemic has passed and we are no longer anticipating the widespread emergency that Alaska faced earlier in this pandemic,” Crum wrote in a memo to Dunleavy. The Republican governor also signed a bill that his office says ensures the continuation of COVID-19 federal relief to affected Alaskans and liability protections for businesses in the state.\n\nArizona\n\nPhoenix: Numerous doctors’ offices and clinics will be able to directly obtain COVID-19 vaccines starting this week, state health officials said Friday. Dr. Cara Christ, director of the Arizona Department of Health Services, announced eligible physicians and local health care providers will no longer have to rely on allocations from their county public health department. That means nearly 1,200 providers registered with the state can order up to 200 doses within a two-week period from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. They will receive the Moderna vaccine because it has less complex storage requirements. The hope is that being able to go to a primary care doctor for a shot will “be a major driver,” Christ said. “Based on our community listening sessions, people indicated that a recommendation from their health care provider, that would be one of the things that would drive them to get vaccinated,” Christ said. State officials are expecting 100,000 doses to be available for these smaller providers to order directly during the first week. As vaccine demand declines, state health officials have been working with community groups on pop-up vaccination events in underserved areas like Yuma and south Phoenix. Strategies include telephonic town halls, door-to-door canvassing and targeted social media posts.\n\nArkansas\n\nLittle Rock: Gov. Asa Hutchinson has signed into law legislation banning state and local mask mandates for preventing the spread of the coronavirus, even though the prohibition will not take effect until later this summer. Hutchinson dropped the state’s mandate in March, but cities including Fayetteville and Little Rock were allowed to keep their requirements in place. The bill is the latest measure the Republican governor has signed to curb Arkansas’ pandemic-related restrictions. On Wednesday he signed bills prohibiting the state and local governments from requiring vaccinations against COVID-19 or “vaccine passports” to access services. The mask mandate ban does not prevent businesses from imposing their own requirements, unlike an earlier version of the bill Hutchinson had said he would veto. The new law doesn’t take effect until late July at the earliest. Hutchinson cited the delay in the prohibition taking effect and its exemption of private businesses. “It is important to respect the individual decisions made by private businesses,” Hutchinson said in a statement. “It also does not have an emergency clause, so the law will not go into effect until the current school year ends.” The measure doesn’t apply to state-owned or state-controlled health care facilities, state prisons or facilities operated by the Division of Youth Services.\n\nCalifornia\n\nLos Angeles: Mayor Eric Garcetti announced Friday that the COVID-19 mass vaccination site at Dodger Stadium will close by the end of May, part of a trend in California to bring doses closer to where people live as appointments in some places go unfilled. Winding down operations at the stadium marks the transition of the city’s vaccination efforts to appointment-free options and putting more doses into walk-up centers and mobile clinics, the mayor said in a statement. Dodger Stadium became one of the nation’s most prominent sites for coronavirus response, first for testing and then for delivery of vaccines to people waiting in long lines of cars. “Dodger Stadium set the standard for sports franchises and community institutions playing a starring role in our COVID-19 response for the country,” Garcetti said. More than 1 million people were tested at the stadium, and the number of vaccine doses administered there has topped 420,000, according to the city. Orange County’s big vaccination site at Disneyland closed Friday as the theme park reopened to visitors for the first time in more than a year. Similarly, a major site at Six Flags Magic Mountain in northern Los Angeles County recently closed as that park welcomed visitors back. North of San Francisco, Marin County will close two mass vaccination sites in San Rafael by the end of May.\n\nColorado\n\nFort Collins: A little more than a year since schools and all their events shut down, some traditions, like prom, are returning – or, as some schools called them, “prom-like events.” Poudre School District’s four comprehensive high schools – Fort Collins High School, Fossil Ridge High School, Poudre High School and Rocky Mountain High School – hosted proms Saturday night, with a few stark differences from those of years past. At this year’s events, students could choose to wear formal or informal attire, food was not served for safety reasons, and the dances were all hosted outside to allow for social distancing and airflow. Tickets had to be bought ahead of time through an application that allows a school’s COVID-19 response team to perform contact tracing if a student who attended tests positive for the coronavirus. Students also had to register for the dance in a “pod” of no more than 10 and be limited to hanging out with that group for the evening. The district said by having students register in groups, kids within a pod were able to be less than 6 feet away from each other. Students were unable to attend if they had “any illness symptoms or are probable/positive for COVID-19.”\n\nConnecticut\n\nHartford: Several of the state’s best-known museums have signed on to a proposal by Gov. Ned Lamont designed to combat some of the learning lost during the pandemic by allowing children to visit for free this summer. Mystic Aquarium, Mystic Seaport Museum, Beardsley Zoo, the Connecticut Science Center and the Maritime Aquarium at Norwalk have all expressed interest in participating, Lamont said Friday. Under the initiative, all Connecticut children 18 and under and one accompanying adult can visit the museums free of charge from July 1 to Sept. 6. “By participating in this program, we hope to provide more children access to a fun and educational destination and instill a love of the ocean that motivates young audiences to make a difference in our world,” said Dr. Stephen M. Coan, president and CEO of Sea Research Foundation Inc., the nonprofit that operates Mystic Aquarium. The governor’s plan would fund the program with $15 million from the state’s federal recovery funds. “Connecticut has some of the best museums in the region, and they were significantly impacted by the pandemic,” Lamont said. “Investing these recovery dollars into our museums just makes sense.” The Legislature must sign off on the proposal.\n\nDelaware\n\nWilmington: The state had the highest foreclosure rate in the country so far this year, according to a nationwide realty data analysis. One in every 1,705 housing units in Delaware had a foreclosure filing in the first quarter of 2021, according to the report from ATTOM Data Solutions. Of the state’s three counties, Kent County saw the highest foreclosure rate at the start of this year, with 1 in every 1,281 housing units seeing a foreclosure filing. New Castle County saw 1 in every 1,691, and Sussex County saw 1 in every 2,094. While the First State ranked first in terms of its foreclosure rate this past quarter, it was 31st in the total number of foreclosure filings, according to the data. The state had 254 filings, showing that even a small change in the small state can have a big impact on its ranking. And some state officials questioned the data. The Delaware State Housing Authority launched a mortgage assistance program in August to help people struggling to make their payments during the COVID-19 pandemic. That program was paused at the end of last year because the state was unsure if the federal government would continue to help fund the program, according to Jessica Eisenbrey Welch, a spokeswoman for the Delaware State Housing Authority.\n\nDistrict of Columbia\n\nWashington: Fully vaccinated people may do more without wearing a mask under a new order from Mayor Muriel Bowser, WUSA-TV reports. People who are fully vaccinated – meaning at least two weeks have passed since their final dose of a COVID-19 vaccine – may now gather outdoors with a small group of vaccinated and unvaccinated people without wearing a mask, but social distance must be maintained, and people in the group who are not fully vaccinated must continue to wear masks. Fully vaccinated people can visit with a small group of fully vaccinated people only at a private indoor setting without wearing a mask. They may travel within the United States without getting tested for the coronavirus before or after their trip. Those flying into the U.S. from another country still need to show a negative test before boarding and get tested three to five days after their return. Fully vaccinated people may also continue activities after being exposed to someone with COVID-19 without needing to get tested or quarantine, unless they have symptoms or live in a group setting. Businesses and other institutions may ask to see a person’s vaccine card or other proof of inoculation. Employers are also required to provide masks for their employees and can implement mask mandates at the office, according to the order.\n\nFlorida\n\nSarasota: Three days a week, Buffy greets visitors at the entrance to Doctors Hospital of Sarasota. If they grant permission, she sniffs their feet, seeking a whiff of active COVID-19 infection. Few decline the offer when they see the yellow Labrador retriever with a wagging tail. People generally don’t love going to a hospital, said CEO Robert Meade, but “who doesn’t love labs?” Buffy was trained by Palmetto-based Southeastern Guide Dogs as part of a four-dog pilot program for scent detection. The original plan was to train dogs to detect heightened levels of cortisol, the stress hormone. The coronavirus pandemic derailed that plan but opened the door to another. Small, early studies on dogs trained to detect the virus in Europe – though still unproven – showed promise. Southeastern decided to give it a shot. The four dogs selected had flunked out of Southeastern’s guide dog training, seen as easily distracted or “a little high-energy,” trainer Laska Parrow said. But “they were dogs that never gave up when a treat was hidden somewhere.” Saliva samples were collected from Doctors Hospital patients with active COVID-19 infections and “inactivated,” rendering them noninfectious. The dogs trained for three months. At the end, Buffy was 95% accurate at detecting the virus samples. Meade said he believes Doctors Hospital of Sarasota is the first hospital in the U.S. with such a pooch.\n\nGeorgia\n\nAtlanta: Gov. Brian Kemp is removing many remaining requirements for social distancing and masked employees from businesses, saying the state’s efforts to control COVID-19 have been successful – even as its vaccination rate lags and as federal officials continue to warn that infection rates remain relatively high. While Kemp was touring the Mexican border in Texas on Friday, the Republican’s office released a new executive order that took effect Saturday and runs through May 30. “Businesses across the Peach State have followed COVID-19 restrictions for over a year to keep their employees and customers safe and will now be able to make informed decisions about how their business operations move forward,” said Mallory Blount, a spokesperson for Kemp. “Georgians know best how to protect themselves and their families, and they deserve to be able to return to normal.” But public health experts fear another surge, possibly driven by more infectious variants of the coronavirus. “Too soon,” Emory University infectious disease expert Carlos del Rio wrote on Twitter, pointing to federal statistics. “We still have ‘substantial transmission’ and our percent of population fully vaccinated is low.” More than 6 million doses of vaccines have been given in Georgia, but the state ranks 44th in doses per capita to people 18 and up.\n\nHawaii\n\nHonolulu: Gov. David Ige says the state’s mask mandate will remain in place for now. Ige urged people to continue wearing masks despite the latest guidance from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention about vaccinated people not having to wear masks in certain outdoor situations, Hawaii News Now reports. “We believe that the basic mask mandate is still appropriate, and we won’t be making changes, or making significant changes, at this time,” Ige said. He said said it would be difficult to determine who has been vaccinated against COVID-19 when it comes to enforcement. Some people at a beach park agreed. “It’s great that he’s not going to change it because how can you tell if somebody’s vaccinated or not?” said Terry Kakazu. “For my own protection, I’m gonna wear it anyway.” And beachgoer Claire Nakamua-Rochon asked: “What are we gonna do, put a ‘V’ on everybody’s arm to let everybody know you’re the vaccinated one?” Ige said he believes masks have helped keep the coronavirus in check in the state. “Hawaii continues to have amongst the lowest per capita infection rates and fatality rates in the country,” he said. “I do believe that our mask mandate is part of that success.”\n\nIdaho\n\nBoise: Lawmakers hesitant to leave the governor in charge of pandemic decisions after the legislative session are delaying their adjournment, a move that analysts say could cause a government shutdown by threatening the start date of some 200 pieces of legislation. A measure intended to change the effective date of the legislation should be amended to avoid a potential government shutdown starting in June, a legal analysis has determined. The Idaho attorney general’s office sent the analysis Thursday to the Idaho Legislative Services Office, a nonpartisan government entity that supports state lawmakers. The document obtained by the Associated Press said the legislation as written could pass a court challenge, but the consequences for failing could be severe. The 200 bills include 65 critical appropriations bills. They would typically not take effect until at least 60 days after the Legislature adjourns. But the Legislature still being in session pushes their effective date past the start of the new fiscal year, starting July 1. If the bill is found unconstitutional, “some 200 bills, including appropriations bills to fund parts of state government, would not take effect on July 1, 2021,” wrote Chief Deputy Brian Kane, and “there could be funding issues for parts of state government as early as June 12.”\n\nIllinois\n\nSpringfield: Consistent statewide procedures and ongoing drills that target infection response and other emergencies will be routine at Illinois veterans’ homes after COVID-19 caught the LaSalle Veterans’ Home unprepared and claimed 36 lives last fall, said the newly appointed director of the state Department of Veterans Affairs. Terry Prince, a 31-year Navy veteran and former senior adviser to the U.S. surgeon general, has issued a six-point plan for improving readiness at the state’s veterans’ homes in Anna, Manteno, Quincy and LaSalle. The plan follows a blistering investigative report that laid out a string of miscommunications, lax policy and missed opportunities when the pandemic hit the home in LaSalle, 94 miles west of Chicago. The report by the inspector general of the Illinois Department of Human Services, released Friday, noted that despite escaping all traces of the deadly respiratory illness for eight months after it entered Illinois, little was done to devise protocols for preventing or managing infections. After the first four cases were reported Nov. 1, the virus spread to 60 residents and 43 employees as confused staff operated in an environment that was “inefficient, reactive and chaotic,” the report said.\n\nIndiana\n\nIndianapolis: Gamblers will have to keep wearing face masks inside the state’s casinos at least through the end of May. Updated health guidelines issued by the Indiana Gaming Commission said operators of the 13 state-licensed casinos decided to keep the mask rule in place to stem COVID-19 spread even though Gov. Eric Holcomb lifted the statewide mask mandate as of April 6. The casino rules require customers to wear masks except when eating, drinking or smoking while seated at a slot machine, bar or restaurant table. Gamblers must wear masks at table games, and employees are required to have masks on at all times. The gaming commission said casinos will review whether to continue the mask requirement past June 1. The state guidelines direct casinos to obtain permission from local health officials before holding any events involving large crowds and continue extra spacing between slot machine players.\n\nIowa\n\nDes Moines: Gov. Kim Reynolds said she rejected $95 million in federal money for coronavirus testing in schools because she didn’t think there was a need for the funding. Reynolds, a Republican, announced her decision on a Thursday night Fox News show and criticized President Joe Biden’s administration for offering the money aimed at expanding testing. “I think he thinks that COVID just started,” Reynolds said on the show, which was televised from a forum with other Republican governors in Florida. ”I just returned $95 million because they sent an additional $95 million to the state of Iowa to get our kids back in the classroom by doing surveillance testing. And I said we’ve been in the classroom since August. Here’s your $95 million back.” Kelly Garcia, director of the Iowa Department of Human Services, confirmed later that Iowa had turned down the funding. The Republican Party of Iowa praised Reynolds’ decision, saying the Biden administration had failed in its efforts to return students to in-person classrooms, but “Gov. Reynolds fought back against the teachers unions and succeeded.” Democratic state Auditor Rob Sand questioned the rejection of federal money that would have assisted testing at schools and funded Iowa jobs.\n\nKansas\n\nOverland Park: A Kansas City-area high school athletic director is pleading with families to take pandemic safety protocols seriously after instructing about 200 students to quarantine last week. John Johnson, who oversees athletics at Shawnee Mission South High School, said in a message to parents and athletes that “there are more students with positive tests, and that is causing an extreme domino effect of COVID transmission concerns.” He also warned that post-season play could be affected, The Kansas City Star reports. Elected officials in Johnson County voted Thursday to switch the mask mandate to a recommendation, although the decision doesn’t affect schools. Health officials in the county, which is the state’s largest, have warned that while the number of new coronavirus cases is down, the drop in testing makes it more difficult to know how widespread transmission of the virus has become. And they are urging eligible residents to get vaccinated, saying demand has slowed. District spokesman David Smith said it is typical for student-athletes to be quarantined from playing sports after a potential exposure but still be allowed to attend class. “At school, we have protocols, including mask-wearing and social distancing. But when you’re participating in sports, it’s not always possible to do those things,” Smith said.\n\nKentucky\n\nLouisville: Thousands of spectators gathered in the infield at Churchill Downs on Saturday for the Kentucky Derby, many not wearing face masks required amid the coronavirus pandemic. Hundreds stood in lines that were not spaced out to use ATMs or buy food. Unlike some Derby tickets this year that are all-inclusive, infield tickets don’t include drinks or food, so fans have to use cash to make purchases. Sydney Lowe of Columbus, Ohio, said she and her friends were fine with not wearing masks because they were outside and had been vaccinated. “We’re outside; I feel like it’s not that big a deal,” Lowe said. “I wish there were more ATMs and that it wasn’t only cash, that’s one thing,” added her friend Halle Vozar. A recording played over a loudspeaker at the entrance said guests were required to wear masks over their mouths and noses. Ticket-takers reminded people coming in the front gate: “Please have your mask on! Masks on! Masks on!” A sign posted indoors by the wagering windows reminding spectators to wear masks largely went ignored. Others had masks pulled down covering their chins. The crowd at the Downs reportedly topped 50,000 people, which would make the Derby the biggest gathering for a U.S. sports event since the pandemic began.\n\nLouisiana\n\nBaton Rouge: Gov. John Bel Edwards has proposed spending $1.6billion of the state’s $3.2billion in federal funding from the latest pandemic relief package on Louisiana’s bankrupt unemployment trust fund, tourism and infrastructure to help stand up the economy. “It’s my belief that these are the three most important things we can do right now ... to have a transformative, positive impact on Louisiana,” Edwards said at a Thursday press conference. Edwards, who will need approval from the Legislature, wants to direct $230 million to repay federal loans that have propped up the state’s unemployment trust fund and another $400 million to replenish the trust fund to avoid triggering tax hikes on businesses. “I don’t believe it’s a good thing to increase taxes on businesses when we’re trying to grow the economy coming out of a pandemic,” he said. Edwards is proposing $750 million go toward infrastructure – $400 million to roads and bridges, $300 million to upgrade dilapidated water systems and $50 million for ports. He’s also recommending $125 million for Convention and Visitors Bureaus and other tourism venues and $20 million for the Office of Culture, Recreation and Tourism. “That’s incredibly important to jump-start our economy,” he said.\n\nMaine\n\nAugusta: Cities and towns would be able to get access to federal coronavirus aid under a pandemic law change. The Legislature on Wednesday passed a proposal to set up an account for the state to receive and distribute federal funds for the municipalities via the American Rescue Plan. The proposal, which was a governor’s bill, is now before Democratic Gov. Janet Mills. Democratic Senate President Troy Jackson said the money is important for Maine cities and towns to “work to rebuild local communities and economies.” The American Rescue Plan allocated funds to Maine municipalities based on their populations, the Maine Legislature Office of the Presiding Officers said. Every town in the state will receive money, Democratic Rep. Teresa Pierce said. That will result in more than $600 million going into the communities, she said.\n\nMaryland\n\nAnnapolis: Preliminary data from 2020 reveals a dramatic increase in deaths linked with opioids in the state, particularly fentanyl, and health officials blame the pandemic. The number of unintentional intoxication overdoses – those involving all drugs and alcohol – rose 18.7% to 2,773 in 2020 from 2,379 in 2019, according to data collected by the Maryland Department of Health. In more than 90% of cases, opioids were detected in bodies postmortem. That’s the highest rate recorded in the state’s history of collecting this data. While too early to formally determine the extent to which COVID-19 has influenced this increase, experts agree the pandemic is likely to blame for the widespread increase in drug use. Dr. Aaron Greenblatt, medical director of the University of Maryland Medical Center Addiction Treatment Programs, said pandemic-induced stress is likely a major factor in drug users’ relapses, but COVID-19 restricted treatment options, too. “I think that access to treatment – particularly access to psychosocial treatments – was really significantly impacted by COVID … we haven’t had groups,” Greenblatt told Capital News Service. Outpatient addiction treatment programs are intense and may require patients to visit an office or a clinic to get supervised therapeutic medication dosing up to six days a week.\n\nMassachusetts\n\nBoston: The state is pouring $70 million into summer educational programs to benefit students who have fallen behind academically and socially while learning remotely during the coronavirus pandemic, Gov. Charlie Baker said Friday. “Studies continue to show that amid the school closures, many students did miss out on some fundamental issues around math and reading,” the Republican governor said after touring a Canton middle school. The programs designed for every grade level – including high school seniors graduating this spring – will feature a mix of academic and recreational opportunities at schools, after-school providers, community colleges and recreation sites, he said. Many students were out of school for longer than a year during the pandemic, and some high school students continue to learn remotely. The programs include so-called Acceleration Academies, which will offer intensive instruction in one subject with smaller classes, longer instructional blocks and individualized attention. Under the Summer Acceleration to College program, class of 2021 high school graduates will be able to take math and English courses for credit at no cost at 14 community colleges. Another program is aimed at incoming kindergartners.\n\nMichigan\n\nLansing: Republican legislative leaders on Friday welcomed Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s metric-based approach to further relaxing coronavirus restrictions, but they questioned what will happen if Michigan’s COVID-19 vaccination rate falls below targets. Their comments came a day after the Democratic governor announced four benchmarks that will trigger additional economic reopening – when 55%, 60%, 65% and 70% of people ages 16 and up get at least one shot. About half have done so to date. The state, where the seven-day infection rate remains highest in the U.S. but is dropping, now needs at least 2 of every 5 unvaccinated residents to receive a dose. “I think that we need a little more of a discussion on this metric of vaccines alone. I believe there’s a little more breadth that needs to be taken into consideration there, especially if we run into resistance and reluctance that causes us to plateau below the numbers that have been indicated,” Senate Majority Leader Mike Shirkey, R-Clarklake, said during a virtual event sponsored by the Detroit Regional Chamber. It included all four legislative leaders. House Speaker Jason Wentworth, R-Clare, applauded Whitmer for providing people “some sense of hope” and said both the vaccination rate and vaccine accessibility are important.\n\nMinnesota\n\nSt. Cloud: About 100 people gathered at Lake George on Saturday morning to memorialize the nearly 400 area residents who have died from COVID-19 in the past year and to share messages of resilience and hope for the future. The event was organized by St. Cloud Times journalists Nora Hertel and Sarah Kocher. “I had the idea to do something like this in January,” Hertel said after the memorial. “I just thought, how are we honoring these people?” Each death has added to a “huge community loss,” Hertel said, and “I just felt like we needed to reckon with it.” The memorial took place on the deck on the east side of Lake George. Guests were invited to tie strips of cloth, donated by Gruber’s Quilt Shop in Waite Park, to the railing, where they will remain until Friday. Those ribbons fluttered in the breeze behind each speaker during the event. The Rev. James Alberts, of the Higher Ground Church of God in Christ, was the first guest to speak, opting to use his “pastor voice” instead of a microphone. “It’s good to see your faces, in a shared space and to be able to do this together,” Alberts said, before leading the group in prayer. “It’s so important that we recognize the loss of nearly 400 people in our area,” Mayor Dave Kleis said. “I hope there’s a day not too distant in the future where we will celebrate the last case of COVID.”\n\nMississippi\n\nJackson: Gov. Tate Reeves on Friday erased most restrictions he had set to try to slow the spread of the coronavirus. The Republican governor left one rule in place: a mandate for students 6 or older to wear masks in schools for the rest of the current academic year. The school year ends within the next few weeks in most parts of the state. Reeves’ new executive order removes capacity restrictions for sports events. Previously, indoor arenas could only fill two-thirds of their seats to allow for social distancing. School sporting events and other activities were limited to 50% capacity for both indoor and outdoor events. Now, both indoor and outdoor school activities are no longer under capacity restrictions. “Getting our kids back in school last August was one of the most important decisions of the pandemic and keeping them in the classroom is one of my top priorities,” Reeves said in a statement Friday. “Even so – our class of 2021 has not been afforded a normal senior year. I want every one of them to attend their graduation and I want everyone in their family to be able to join them!” Reeves had already removed mask requirements in public spaces and all capacity restrictions for restaurants, bars and other businesses.\n\nMissouri\n\nReeds Spring: A southwest Missouri school district that dropped its mask mandate last month has decided to reinstate it after several students became infected with the coronavirus, leading to dozens of quarantines. The 1,700-student Reeds Spring district had gone weeks without a case when it decided to make masks optional beginning April 22. Several other districts in the Springfield area also have ditched mask orders in recent weeks. “It’s getting harder and harder to even get kids to keep those masks on as they are seeing people, adults and everyone in the community, not wearing masks,” Superintendent Cody Hirschi said in a video at the time. The change didn’t last long, though, before the district decided to reinstate the mandate starting Friday. “The cases of quarantine are really our biggest concern,” said district spokesman Ben Fisher, noting that six positive tests led to 95 quarantines in several buildings. “We really think it is essential for kids to be able to participate in end-of-year activities, so we decided this was the best option to keep kids in school.” Statewide, the percentage of Missouri residents receiving at least one shot of a COVID-19 vaccine barely budged Friday, remaining a little above 37% of the state population, KMIZ-TV reports.\n\nMontana\n\nGreat Falls: The state posted 169 new COVID-19 cases Saturday, bringing Montana’s total to 108,985 confirmed reports. Of the 108,985 cases, 106,324 are recovered, and 1,087 remain active. There are 53 people who are now hospitalized out of 5,021 total COVID-19 hospitalizations since the pandemic began, according to the state website covid19.mt.gov. Montana added two deaths overnight, bringing the total to 1,574 fatalities related to the respiratory illness. The state has thus far administered 1,302,221 tests for the coronavirus. The first case of COVID-19 in Montana was reported March 11, 2020. The state’s highest daily total of newly detected cases came Nov. 12, when 1,429 new cases were reported.\n\nNebraska\n\nOmaha: A community college is using federal COVID-19 relief funds to pay for tuition and books for high schoolers from the state to take courses this summer. The Omaha World-Herald reports officials at the Metropolitan Community College hope their newly approved offer will pull in thousands of students. The college saw about a 15% drop in summer enrollment from 2019 to 2020, said Bill Owen, the college’s vice president for strategic initiatives. “If we’re truly in recovery mode, and we hope we are, we think we’ll see a return to those numbers,” he said. Typically, high school students pay $33 per credit hour – half the full rate – if they enroll in a program called CollegeNow that is designed for high school students to jump-start their college education. While those students will be allowed to attend courses for free this summer, they will be responsible for tools and other required supplies.\n\nNevada\n\nLas Vegas: The city has been almost elbow-to-elbow lately with pandemic-weary tourists looking for excitement and entertainment, after casinos rose from 35% to 50% occupancy March 15 under state health guidelines. Capacity limits in Las Vegas casinos dropped again Saturday – allowing 80% occupancy – while person-to-person distancing went from 6 feet to 3 feet. Masks are still required. “People were just yearning to go someplace and let loose,” said Alan Feldman, a former casino executive who is now a fellow at the International Gaming Institute at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Among the first arrivals were people ages 60 and older who were recently vaccinated with time and disposable income, he said. Analysts said pent-up demand, available hotel rooms and $1,400 federal pandemic recovery checks have contributed to the rush. “People are feeling more comfortable traveling as science appears to be getting ahead of the COVID-19 pandemic,” said Jeremy Aguero, principal analyst at Applied Analysis in Las Vegas. And every Sunday, a nearly 20-mile line of vehicles jams southbound Interstate 15 near the Nevada-California state line. “You have visitors coming throughout the week, all leaving at the same time,” Nevada Highway Patrol Trooper Travis Smaka said. “It’s very busy every Sunday.”\n\nNew Hampshire\n\nConcord: Gov. Chris Sununu says state health officials and private agencies have begun a number of initiatives to encourage residents to get vaccinated. Officials warn that New Hampshire, which has been leading the nation in the percentage of the population that’s received at least one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine, is starting to see growth in the number of fully vaccinated residents slow down. WMUR-TV reports many people who are eligible to receive a shot have not signed up for an appointment. Data from the Department of Health and Human Services shows more than 790,000 New Hampshire residents have received their first dose, about 60% of the population, while more than 351,000 of those people are fully vaccinated, or about 26% of the population. The state says a series of public service announcements and electronic billboards will encourage people who may be hesitant to get vaccinated. Experts say it is important for everyone to get inoculated. “They may not become ill. They may be a transmitter and simply part of an asymptomatic transmission,” said Martha Wassell, director of Infection Prevention at Wentworth-Douglass Hospital. “That could in turn spread this to someone who either was vaccinated, and it didn’t work well, or for whatever medical reason could not be vaccinated.”\n\nNew Jersey\n\nAtlantic City: Business, casino and political officials called on Gov. Phil Murphy on Friday to ease coronavirus regulations enough to allow conventions and trade shows to resume in the city. Saying the convention industry generates nearly $2 billion in annual revenue for Atlantic City, the groups asked the Democratic governor to allow meetings to utilize available space at 50% of capacity, as is permitted on the gambling floors of the city’s nine casinos. Michael Chait, president of the Greater Atlantic City Chamber of Commerce, praised Murphy’s handling of the pandemic but said state-imposed rules are inconsistent and are hurting the convention industry. “I can only have 25 people in a meeting room, but I can have 225 people in a banquet hall,” he said at a press conference on the Boardwalk as workmen attended to the facade of Boardwalk Hall in anticipation of the summer tourism season. “I can have 50% capacity on the casino floor, but I can only take 25 of them and put them into an adjacent meeting room.” Chait said the city would like to be able to host conventions and trade shows at 50% of capacity, using the same safety and distancing protocols the casinos have been using since they were allowed to reopen last July. He said the casino industry has proven it is possible to operate at higher levels without compromising safety.\n\nNew Mexico\n\nSanta Fe: A judge has ordered education officials to provide computers and high-speed internet to students who still don’t have them in a landmark ruling that for the first time in the state has set a standard for internet speeds for public school children. The ruling requires state officials to immediately determine which students covered by the sweeping lawsuit are still lacking quality internet or devices and to provide them with what they need, including transportation if they can’t get fast internet from home. “Children who are lacking access to internet and technology for remote learning are not getting much of an education, if at all, let alone one that is sufficient to make them college and career ready,” state District Judge Matthew Wilson said in the ruling Friday morning. It’s unclear how the court might compel state officials to act on the ruling or when it might hold them in contempt. The vast majority of New Mexico schools are open to in-person learning. But school districts serving tribal areas, which were particularly hard-hit by COVID-19 cases and deaths, are still under lockdown orders, and some are still in remote or partially remote learning. About 10% of New Mexico children are Native American and often confront major barriers to online and in-person learning.\n\nNew York\n\nNew York: Restaurants in New York City can increase their indoor dining to 75% of capacity starting Friday, May 7, in line with the rest of the state, Gov. Andrew Cuomo announced Friday. That will let city eateries fill more of their tables on Mother’s Day, May 9. Cuomo on Friday also said personal services including hair salons and barbershops could expand to 75% capacity starting May 7 as well. Gyms in New York City can go to 50% capacity starting May 15. Cuomo and New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio both spoke Thursday about wanting to see coronavirus-related restrictions lifted in the next couple of months. Infection rates throughout the state have continued to fall at a steady pace in recent weeks as more people have become vaccinated against COVID-19. The number of new infections reported daily in New York has dropped 56% since the start of April, even as more and more social activity has resumed. Still, the crisis isn’t over yet. A majority of New Yorkers have yet to receive even a single dose of the vaccine. The state recorded 25,000 positive coronavirus tests in the prior seven days, more than it did in the entire month of September.\n\nNorth Carolina\n\nRaleigh: Some low-income families missed out on getting coronavirus relief grants last year because of administrative and qualifying hurdles required by the General Assembly, a state audit concluded last week. The legislature in September approved using federal COVID-19 relief funds to give families one-time $335 payments. The “Extra Credit Grant” money was designed to assist with virtual schooling and child care costs during the pandemic but could be used for any purpose. Lawmakers tasked the Department of Revenue with managing the program. More than 1.1 million payments had been sent by the department through December totaling about $375 million, according to State Auditor Beth Wood’s office. They were sent automatically to families who were 2019 tax filers and reported having at least one child age 16 or under. But parents or guardians who didn’t make enough money in 2019 to file a return were required to fill out an application to obtain payments. By the end of 2020, about 25,000 payments had been made to those who had applied, the performance audit said. Wood’s report found that other low-income families didn’t receive payments because of the additional steps the Revenue Department had to complete within a matter of weeks to accept applications and award payments.\n\nNorth Dakota\n\nBismarck: The 2021 Legislature reached its finale early Friday in a session marked by a record-high state budget, the first expulsion of a lawmaker and pandemic protocols that greatly dampened public participation at the state Capitol. Lt. Gov. Brent Sanford, the state Senate’s presiding officer, hit the final gavel at 12:26 a.m. Friday. House members officially completed their work at 12:18 a.m. after finishing a brief chorus of “Auld Lang Syne.” Lawmakers from both sides exchanged handshakes and hugs after a marathon day that came to an end after approval of the spending bill for the Office of Management and Budget, which also serves as Legislature’s last-minute catchall measure. Thursday was Day 76 for the Legislature, just short of the 80-day maximum set by the North Dakota Constitution. The Legislature will use the remaining days later in the year to approve new legislative districts. The Republican-led Legislature has passed record-setting budgets in most of the past several sessions, but the spending plan for the next two-year budget cycle is particularly eye-popping, due in part to federal coronavirus aid. As the session wound down Thursday, lawmakers completed work on a nearly $17 billion, two-year budget, about $2.1 billion more than the current budget cycle ending June 30.\n\nOhio\n\nCincinnati: Teens have been trickling into COVID-19 vaccination clinics ever since Gov. Mike DeWine opened up eligibility to everyone 16 and older March 29. Soon, experts say it’s possible a vaccine will be allowed for children as young as 5. Dr. Robert Frenck, director of the Gamble Vaccine Research Center at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center, said that could happen by August or September. Until then, public health officials are working to get more and more eligible teens vaccinated. In some cases, that means bringing clinics to school buildings. Milford High School in Clermont County hosted a vaccination clinic in partnership with Clermont Public Health last month. District spokesperson Wendy Planicka said about 200 people came to the clinic, 150 of whom were students. Milford senior Jack McKenney, 18, said he caught the coronavirus in the fall. He said he didn’t feel very sick, and a sinus infection he had last March was much worse. Still, he went to Milford’s clinic because he’s worried about spreading COVID-19.“I mean, I know if I were to get COVID again, I would most likely be OK, but it’s just I’m relieved that I wouldn’t give it to someone else as easily,” he said. Other school districts are considering hosting vaccine clinics or at least encouraging students to get shots if able.\n\nOklahoma\n\nOklahoma City: Mask mandates intended to slow the spread of the coronavirus are ending in the state’s two largest cities, Oklahoma City and Tulsa. The requirement ended Friday in Oklahoma City and Saturday in Tulsa, although the mandate continues at places such as city offices. Mayors David Holt in Oklahoma City and G.T. Bynum in Tulsa both credited COVID-19 vaccinations for lowering the number of virus cases and hospitalizations. “It is possible we are taking the miracle vaccinations for granted,” Holt said during a Friday news conference. “These proven, safe vaccines are remarkable.” Bynum said residents should also continue wearing masks when in groups of people outside their family. “While we’re in a position to end the city’s mandate that people wear masks in public, that doesn’t mean everyone should have a mask-burning party over the weekend,” Bynum said Thursday. In both cities, private businesses can continue requiring masks if desired. The Oklahoma State Department of Health on Friday reported 448,305 total virus cases since the pandemic began. The seven-day rolling average of new cases in the state has declined from 314.4 daily to 240.7, according to data from Johns Hopkins University.\n\nOregon\n\nBend: A vaccine clinic set up inside a high school attracted anti-vaccine protesters who heckled teenagers as they entered the site Thursday, prompting the church that provided a parking lot for the event to call police. The Bend-La Pine School District plans to offer COVID-19 vaccines at six different clinics at Central Oregon high schools through June 3 in hopes of stemming an outbreak that’s sickened at least 95 students and staff, The Bulletin reports. Before the school clinics began, Bend-La Pine School Board members received hundreds of angry emails from anti-vaccine activists, said board member Julie Craig. Most had the exact same copy-and-paste wording, but a few were especially nasty, she said. Board member Carrie McPherson Douglass shared emails with The Bulletin that called the school board Nazis for allowing vaccine clinics. In one, a parent promised to “exact cruel and inhuman revenge” if their child was harmed by the shot. “I’m frankly so done with it,” Craig told the newspaper. “I’m so disappointed in community members who feel that is the best way to try and have a conversation, when they don’t agree with something that we’re doing.” In Oregon, teens 15 and up can agree to medical services – including immunization – without parental consent, according to the Oregon Health Authority.\n\nPennsylvania\n\nPittsburgh: Light of Life Rescue Mission’s plans to hold a vaccine clinic for homeless people last month were upended about three hours before the event was supposed to start, when news broke that use of the single-dose Johnson & Johnson vaccine had been paused, the Tribune-Review reports. The shelter quickly shifted gears and administered the Moderna option instead, said Jerrel Gilliam, executive director. But the development altered Light of Life’s vaccine strategy, as clinicians had to inform patients without consistent housing that they needed to return for a second dose. “It is very frustrating,” Gilliam said. “This was part of our strategy to use in the camps because of the one shot.” U.S. health officials later lifted the 11-day J&J vaccine pause, but many of the challenges facing shelters and the homeless during the pandemic will remain. More than 70% of residents in Light of Life’s long-term program have been fully vaccinated, which provides some peace of mind, Gilliam said. But in a population with so much transience and turnover, he said the shelter can’t let its guard down. Barriers to health care, mental health care, food and other basic needs will remain, even after COVID-19 is resolved. “There is some concern that this population will once again go to the back burner,” Gilliam said.\n\nRhode Island\n\nProvidence: The state Department of Health is partnering with nine colleges and universities to make getting a COVID-19 shot as easy as possible for all students, faculty and staff before the end of the spring semester. Under the program announced Thursday, schools will either hold on-campus vaccination clinics or provide free shuttle service from campus to vaccination sites. “Now that vaccine eligibility is open to all people 16 and older who live, work, or go to school in Rhode Island, it’s important that we get our young people who live in congregate settings vaccinated,” Gov. Daniel McKee said in a statement. For example, Brown University is participating at a designated day at the Dunkin’ Donuts Center in Providence by providing shuttle service to the clinic. Roger Williams University is partnering with the town of Bristol to host an on-campus clinic. Bryant University, the University of Rhode Island, Providence College, Community College of Rhode Island, New England Institute of Technology, Rhode Island College and the Rhode Island School of Design are also participating in the program. Many colleges are requiring students to be vaccinated before returning to campus for the fall. There is no cost to get a shot, and participants do not need health insurance.\n\nSouth Carolina\n\nGreenville: Masks continue to be important in schools and many other crowded public settings, state health officials said Friday, after Gov. Henry McMaster last week called masks in schools the “height of ridiculosity.” McMaster criticized the requirements Wednesday, and in a Twitter post he also urged cities and towns to remove mask requirements. Other state officials, from education and health departments, have voiced concern about the Republican governor’s mask recommendations. The South Carolina Department of Education and state Department of Health and Environmental Control have both issued statements saying mask usage is critical to preventing the spread of the coronavirus. South Carolina’s assistant state epidemiologist said Friday in a media briefing that mask mandates in cities and towns continue to be important. Even in cities that have taken away those orders, Dr. Jane Kelly said, “I would urge you to protect yourself, your family and your community by wearing a mask.” She said masks work and likened wearing a mask to wearing a seat belt because once traffic fatalities began to drop, and seat belts were widely adopted, the belts remained, and the fatalities stayed low.\n\nSouth Dakota\n\nSturgis: The 2020 Sturgis Motorcycle Rally caused “widespread transmission” of the coronavirus across the United States, finds a new study released Thursday. More than 463 COVID-19 cases across 30 states were directly connected to the Sturgis Rally in August and September 2020. Seventeen patients were hospitalized, and one person died, according to the report by the Oxford University Press for the Infectious Diseases Society of America. The information was reviewed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, including members of the CDC COVID-19 Response Team, though a disclaimer in the study says the findings “do not necessarily represent the official position.” A total of 649 primary and secondary cases were attributed to the South Dakota event in the study. About 56% of the Sturgis-associated cases were reported in South Dakota, Minnesota, Montana, North Dakota, Nebraska and Wyoming. “While the number of cases identified is sizable – 140 cases per 100,000 attendees – it is likely that the true national impact of the Sturgis event is underestimated,” the report says. Some attendees could have been asymptomatic or hadn’t been tested when they returned home from the rally, leading to untraceable infections.\n\nTennessee\n\nKnoxville: For the second year in a row, the University of Tennessee at Knoxville has recommended no increase in tuition or fees for students. It’s a purposeful decision to help students in a challenging time as families continue to recover from the economic effects of COVID-19, UT Knoxville Chancellor Donde Plowman said Friday. “The proposed budget with no increase in tuition and fees represents our commitment to provide affordable access to a world-class education, especially as students and families continue to recover from the economic impacts of the pandemic,” Plowman said. “We are also grateful for the state support we receive, which helps us keep tuition flat and continue to offer the academic opportunities and college experiences that make our university special.” The chancellor’s advisory board approved the flat tuition and fees for the 2021-22 school year Friday morning, as part of the budget recommendation for the next fiscal year. The budget and tuition recommendations still needs to be approved by the board of trustees later this year. Last year, tuition and fees were kept flat at all UT campuses because of financial hardship caused by the coronavirus. The year before that, tuition increased by 2%. There was no tuition increase in 2018.\n\nTexas\n\nArlington: A runoff for a U.S. House seat is set between Republican Susan Wright, whose husband was the first member of Congress to die after being diagnosed with COVID-19, and Republican Jake Ellzey. Democrat Jana Lynne Sanchez was narrowly locked out of the runoff in Texas’ 6th Congressional District, which has long been GOP territory. With nearly all votes counted, Sanchez had trailed Ellzey by 354 votes. She said in a statement Sunday that her campaign “came up short.” “Democrats have come a long way toward competing in Texas but we still have a long way to go,” Sanchez said in a statement. Ellzey is a state lawmaker who narrowly lost the GOP nomination for the seat in 2018 and carried the backing of former Gov. Rick Perry. Susan Wright had already been seen as a favorite in a crowded race to fill the seat of her late husband, who died in February after being diagnosed with COVID-19. He was 67. The date of the runoff has not yet been set. Wright will enter the runoff with the backing of former President Donald Trump, who waited until just days before the election to endorse Wright.\n\nUtah\n\nSt. George: In the past year, lifestyle changes sparked by society’s reaction to the COVID-19 pandemic have led to more time at home, more time in front of a screen and a propensity for more frequent snacking. “We call it the COVID diet,” said Dr. Daniel Cannon, a pediatrician with Red Rock Pediatrics in St. George. “We’ve seen a real uptick in weight gain in a lot of kids.” Although the problem may have increased due to factors related to pandemic-era lifestyles, it’s definitely not the first time medical professionals have seen this problem. “Childhood obesity is basically an epidemic,” Cannon said. The problem stems from an increasingly unhealthy lifestyle in children and adolescents and from behaviors sometimes learned from generations of family obesity, he said. Other causes may include a lack of education on the topic of health, poverty, home environment, and accessibility of health care and healthy nutrition. “We call these ‘social determinants of health,’ ” Cannon said, adding that these determinants and others are screened for and discussed at each well visit in order to identify concerning trends before they become a problem. When it comes to increasing activity in children and young adults, Cannon said it’s best to find something the child is interested in and build activity around that.\n\nVermont\n\nMontpelier: The state relaxed its guidance on mask-wearing outside Saturday while also moving to the second phase of reopening that allows larger gatherings, lifts industry-specific guidance for most businesses, and requires them to all follow the same rules about wearing masks, distancing and staying home when sick, Gov. Phil Scott said Friday. Vaccinated and unvaccinated Vermonters will no longer be required to wear masks outdoors if they are able to physically distance themselves. The new rules follow updated guidance last week from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Scott said during his twice-weekly virus briefing. Masks will only be required in crowds or with multiple households when distancing isn’t possible, said Health Commissioner Dr. Mark Levine. “The science and data show that outdoor transmission is rare; it poses little risk if you follow our guidance,” the Republican governor said. Municipalities and businesses can have stricter policies if they want, Scott said. More than 60% of adult residents are vaccinated, meeting the state’s goal to move to the second phase of reopening, Scott said. If the state reaches 70% of adults vaccinated by June 1, it will be able to take its final step to turn mandates into recommendations in July, he said.\n\nVirginia\n\nFalls Church: Republican candidates for governor touted plans to reopen schools and lift pandemic restrictions as they made videotaped pitches to the tens of thousands of party delegates who will choose a nominee at a convention next Saturday. Pandemic restrictions on mass gatherings have prevented the GOP from holding a traditional convention, so the party has instead opted to hold an “unassembled convention” in which delegates who preregistered to participate will cast ballots at more than 30 locations to choose a nominee. The convention will use ranked-choice voting to more closely mimic the balloting at a traditional convention, where the field is winnowed in successive votes until one candidate gets a minority. And because the candidates won’t be able to make traditional convention speeches to assembled delegates, the GOP arranged for candidates to submit videos touting themselves on the party’s website, which were posted Saturday night.\n\nWashington\n\nRepublic: About 10% of the population of this small city in north-central Washington has tested positive for the coronavirus in an outbreak traced to large indoor events last month at the local Fraternal Order of Eagles hall. Ferry County Memorial Hospital officials have confirmed more than 100 cases, with one reported death, since the April 9-11 events, including a membership drive that featured dinner, live music and a 1980s-themed karaoke night. Some patients have had to be transferred to Wenatchee and Yakima because of a lack of capacity at the 25-bed hospital – the only hospital in a 50-mile radius – and other closer facilities. “In Ferry County especially, we’re seeing really sick young people showing up in the emergency room to get care,” Northeast Tri County Health Officer Dr. Sam Artzis said, according to The Spokesman-Review. The county previously had relatively few COVID-19 cases, and many in the conservative, rural community saw mask mandates as infringing on their liberty. Less than one-quarter of the county’s residents have received a vaccine to date, according to the health district, but officials said the outbreak has increased interest in it. The situation should serve as a warning to other communities about the danger of large indoor events with unvaccinated people, they said.\n\nWest Virginia\n\nBluefield: Signs featuring the words “Now Hiring” and “Help Wanted” are an increasingly common sight outside restaurants locally, but surprisingly few people are stepping forward and taking those jobs, business owners and hiring managers say. The COVID-19 pandemic put many people out of work as restrictions kept diners out of restaurants. Adjustments such as more drive-thru traffic, deliveries and limited seating helped, but restaurants cut back on wait staff and other employees. Restrictions are starting to relax, but now they are having trouble bringing new employees in. Jamie Null, executive director of the Mercer County Convention & Visitors Bureau, said local restaurants and service industries have been looking for new employees, but they are not receiving many applicants. Some area restaurants are seeing people ask about jobs, but few are taking the next step from applicant to employee. The Corner Shop in downtown Bramwell has been hiring for months, manager Mandy Fink said. She said she believed some of the people who apply but never follow through are listing applications so they can keep receiving unemployment benefits. “Right now, there’s a lot of people who are able to work,” she said.\n\nWisconsin\n\nMadison: The state Capitol, closed to the public since late March 2020 due to the coronavirus pandemic, will reopen Monday, Gov. Tony Evers’ administration announced Friday. It will be opened for limited hours, 8 a.m. to 4:30 p.m., and only on weekdays. Before the pandemic, the building stayed open until 6 p.m. during the week and was also open on weekends. There will be no public tours of the Capitol, but the tour desk will be staffed for visitors to get information. Only one entrance to the building will be open to the public. Capitol staff, including those who work for Evers, lawmakers and the state Supreme Court, have been working out of the building for months. The Legislature has also been holding hearings and floor sessions, which are open to the public. State office buildings that surround the Capitol remain closed, but Evers has said he’s targeting a return to work for many this summer. Republicans have been pushing Evers to move faster to open the offices. As of Friday, more than 43% of people in Wisconsin had received at least one shot of a COVID-19 vaccine, while nearly 34% were fully vaccinated, according to the state Department of Health Services.\n\nWyoming\n\nCheyenne: Telephone scammers are trying to take advantage of an accidental Wyoming Department of Health data release affecting over a quarter of the state’s population, agency officials said Friday. Scammers request insurance, Medicare, Medicaid or other financial information and in some cases look like they’re calling from state government numbers, department administrator Jeri Hendricks said in a statement. “No one representing the department will ask you for insurance, Medicare, Medicaid or personal financial information. No one representing the department will call you about the breach unless they are returning a call you made to us first,” Hendricks said. The scammers appear to be targeting residents at random and not through access to phone numbers inadvertently released, department spokeswoman Kim Deti said. A department employee working with computer code accidentally posted coronavirus test results as well as associated names, addresses, birth dates and other information on GitHub.com, an internet-based software development platform. The employee released coronavirus plus flu test results for 145,698 Wyoming residents. Also posted were blood alcohol test results for 18,312 people, mainly from Wyoming but also other states, dating to 2012.\n\nFrom USA TODAY Network and wire reports", "authors": [], "publish_date": "2021/05/03"}]}
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{"question_id": "20230120_24", "search_time": "2023/01/20/16:38", "search_result": [{"url": "https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/50-states/2019/12/19/utility-bill-santa-return-ceres-zion-path-secured-news-around-states/40852997/", "title": "Utility bill Santa, return of Ceres: News from around our 50 states", "text": "From USA TODAY Network and wire reports\n\nAlabama\n\nMontgomery: The City Council has voted unanimously to repeal a controversial ordinance that required jail time for panhandlers. The ordinance passed in July required a mandatory two days in jail for panhandling but wasn’t being enforced because former Mayor Todd Strange never signed off on the city law. Mayor Steven Reed pushed the repeal through to the council Tuesday, according to a news release from the Southern Poverty Law Center. In November, the Montgomery City Council voted against an amendment that also would have criminalized giving to panhandlers after dozens of people showed up to a meeting protesting the move. SPLC attorney Micah West says repealing the ordinance doesn’t address state laws the city has been using to criminalize begging and soliciting for years. He says the city has issued more than 400 citations for begging or soliciting in the past year and a half.\n\nAlaska\n\nJuneau: An Alaska Native advocacy group is seeking land and the establishment of Native corporations for communities that were omitted from a federal settlement, officials say. Alaska Natives Without Land wants a change to the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act on behalf of Haines, Ketchikan, Petersburg, Tenakee Springs and Wrangell, The Juneau Empire reports. Some tribal communities were excluded when the act passed in December 1971, leading to the creation of Alaska Native regional, urban and village corporations. The act also transferred 68,750 square miles of land to those corporations, officials say. A change to the federal act would require a vote in Congress. Alaska Natives Without Land held an event Peratrovich Hall in Juneau last Saturday to build support and share information about the issue, says Todd Antioquia, the group’s campaign and volunteer coordinator.\n\nArizona\n\nPage: A popular tourist attraction that sometimes requires tourists to wait while professional photographers get the perfect shot is ending its photography-only tours. At the Upper Antelope Canyon, shafts of sunlight descend from the heavens, lighting the towering, multihued walls that flow on either side like molten waves. But the traffic jams from the popular photography-only tours of the slot canyon on the Navajo Reservation near Page are being discontinued Friday. Visitors can still take photos with phones or other cameras on regular tours, but no tripods will be allowed. The canyon’s narrow walls lend themselves to dramatic lighting. Guides often helped visitors get those postcard-perfect shots that made it appear as if the canyon were devoid of visitors. Guides with Antelope Canyon Tours were known to throw sand in the air, filling the shafts of light for a more dazzling effect.\n\nArkansas\n\nLittle Rock: The state Agriculture Department says it has hired a Game and Fish biologist to coordinate efforts to eradicate feral hogs. The department announced Monday that it had hired J.P. Fairhead as its first feral hog eradication program coordinator, a newly created position that’s part of a $3.4 million federal grant awarded to the department. Fairhead has been employed by the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission since 2008 as a natural resource program technician and field biologist. He’s also served as its feral hog eradication program coordinator since February 2013. Arkansas was one of 10 states to receive funding through the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Feral Swine Eradication and Control Pilot Program. The department says feral hogs are estimated to cause nearly $1.5 billion in damage nationwide annually and approximately $19 million in the Natural State.\n\nCalifornia\n\nCitrus Heights: The home of a man suspected of being the notorious Golden State Killer was sold last month to a couple who intend to live there. Joseph DeAngelo’s 1,500-square-foot, three-bedroom, two-bath ranch home in Citrus Heights was sold for $320,000, a price near the bottom of the market for three-bedroom homes in that area, the Sacramento Bee reports. DeAngelo, a former police officer, is awaiting trial on charges that he broke into dozens of homes across California in the 1970s and 1980s, raping and often killing. Police linked DeAngelo to the killings through a DNA database. DeAngelo, 74, lived in the house for several decades and worked as a night mechanic in a Roseville supermarket distribution center. After his arrest, the house was treated as a crime scene by investigators searching for clues.\n\nColorado\n\nDenver: People who traveled through Denver International Airport last Wednesday afternoon may have been exposed to measles, Colorado health officials say. Three children who were in the airport that day tested positive for the highly contagious disease after traveling to a country where there was an outbreak, officials say. Health officials don’t consider this an outbreak because the children are related, the Tri-County Health Department said in a statement. But they are warning people who were in the airport between 1:15 p.m. and 5:45 p.m. Dec. 11 that they may have been exposed. It’s unclear how many people came in contact with the children. About 179,000 people passed through the airport that day, spokeswoman Emily Williams told The Denver Post.\n\nConnecticut\n\nNewtown: The planned permanent memorial to honor the 26 people killed in the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting will be simpler but maintain the essence of the original design, members of the memorial committee said. “The heart of the memorial is still the sycamore tree with the water around it and the names of the victims inscribed on the side of the water,” Dan Krauss, the volunteer chairman of the Sandy Hook Permanent Memorial Commission, told the Connecticut Post. “You still have the engagement with the water and the peacefulness and reflection of walking along side of the ponds.” Changes include eliminating the planned pavilion, narrowing paths and limiting paved surfaces at the donated 5-acre site. The alterations will drop the estimated project budget from $10 million to $3.7 million. The dedication date has also been pushed back two years to December 2021.\n\nDelaware\n\nDover: Families living in homes on Dover Air Force Base say they have been experiencing ongoing problems with mold and leaks. Some families even speculate that ongoing illnesses are caused by conditions at their Eagle Heights Family Housing homes, managed by Hunt Military Communities. The issues come as lawmakers have begun applying pressure on military officials about persistent problems with privatized family housing at military sites. Hunt Military Communities did not respond to messages seeking comment, but at an October town hall, company representatives told Dover residents they had discovered issues with many of the home’s window weep holes, which are openings on windows designed to drain precipitation that collects in window tracks. The windows have not been replaced, according to residents interviewed.\n\nDistrict of Columbia\n\nWashington: In a few weeks, the D.C. Council is poised to vote on marijuana legislation that is currently in effect for schools on a temporary basis. But a sixth grader from Northwest is lobbying for more permanent legislation from the council because it could very well save her life, WUSA-TV reports. The Student Medical Marijuana Patient Fairness Temporary Amendment Act was passed in September but will go to a full council vote Jan. 7. Zoey Carty has a rare form of epilepsy, and her mother says after six months of using CBD oil three times a day, as well as having an emergency syringe with THC, Zoey’s seizures decreased by 50%. Dawn Lee-Carty and Zoey now grow their own medical marijuana, but Zoey’s school will only allow mairjuana from an authorized dispensary.\n\nFlorida\n\nGulf Breeze: A man who once spent a Christmas without electricity has paid the power bills for 36 families with past-due accounts. Mike Esmond says he will never forget the Christmas he and his three daughters spent in 1983 without heat and power because he couldn’t pay his bill. He says it was one of the coldest days on record in Pensacola at only 9 degrees and remembers icicles hanging off the window. The 73-year-old small-business owner says he doesn’t want any other families to spend the holidays shivering. He went to the city of Gulf Breeze this month and requested a list of all utility accounts at risk of having their gas and water turned off. Then he paid off all 36 of them, totaling about $4,600. Angela Cascio says she was stunned by the stranger’s kindness. The mother of four was struggling to choose between paying bills or buying presents for her kids. She posted on Facebook that “angels absolutely walk among us.”\n\nGeorgia\n\nSavannah: The first newborn right whale of the winter calving season has been spotted off the coast of Georgia. The critically endangered whales migrate each winter to warmer waters of the southeastern U.S. coast to give birth. Scientists estimate just over 400 North Atlantic right whales remain, making each newborn calf crucial to avoiding extinction. An aerial survey team spotted the first mother-and-calf pair of the 2019-2020 season Monday in waters off Sapelo Island, about 50 miles south of Savannah, the Georgia Department of Natural Resources said in a news release. Researchers have become increasingly worried about right whales’ prospects for survival as deaths in recent years have outpaced births. Seven right whales calves were recorded last winter during daily survey flights offshore of Georgia and Florida.\n\nHawaii\n\nHonolulu: Police are reviewing body camera footage after fatally shooting a second man in less than 24 hours, amid an apparent uptick in crime in the city. Honolulu Police Chief Susan Ballard says she is concerned about a 20% increase in the number of violent crimes involving firearms. On Monday, police shot and killed a man who rammed a vehicle at officers, fled and fired at police. On Tuesday morning, an officer shot and killed a 27-year-old man with a stolen moped who lunged at him with a knife. The uptick in Honolulu crime includes the shooting death of a 71-year-old woman over the weekend. But Ballard says murders and rapes have decreased since last year. There have been some increases in aggravated assaults and robberies, according to police statistics. Gun violence is generally rare in Hawaii, where there are strict gun laws. “This is Hawaii; we’re not used to this,” Ballard says. “It’s really sad to see. Please stop. This is getting nuts.”\n\nIdaho\n\nMullan: Members of a union representing mine workers have rejected a tentative agreement that could have ended a 2 1/ 2 -year strike. United Steelworkers Local 5114 and Hecla Mining Company announced a tentative agreement in November that required ratification by a majority of union members, The Spokesman-Review reports. A third party counted 157 ballots Monday finding that 80 were against the proposed contract, union officials said. United Steelworkers represent about 200 workers at the Lucky Friday Mine near Mullan, officials said. United Steelworkers must notify Hecla Mining and return to the bargaining table, said Timothy Swallow, a union representative. Members have argued about the ability for lead miners to pick their own work crew, which has been a tradition at the 77-year-old mine, union representatives said.\n\nIllinois\n\nSpringfield: Hunters took more than 75,000 deer during the state’s seven-day firearm hunting season this fall, according to preliminary totals compiled by the Illinois Department of Natural Resources. That number represents a 7% drop in the number of deer harvested from 2018, when nearly 81,000 deer were taken. But the second part of this year’s season, Dec. 5-8, saw an uptick over last year. More than 25,000 deer were harvested during the second season, a 14% increase from 2018. That more than made up the difference from the first weekend of firearm deer season last month, which saw a drop of nearly 9,000 deer taken compared with 2018. State wildlife officials say there are other hunting opportunities underway or approaching. Those include archery hunting and hunting with muzzleloaders, late-winter antlerless-only deer hunting and Chronic Wasting Disease hunting in certain counties.\n\nIndiana\n\nBloomington: People illegally driving off-road vehicles in the Hoosier National Forest are leaving behind deep tire grooves that are causing erosion, an official says. Mike Chaveas, forest supervisor, told The Herald-Times that the erosion created by the all-terrain vehicles is more of a problem because the national forest, which spans 204,000 acres in southern Indiana from the Bloomington area to the Ohio River, is a patchwork of land sandwiched between private and other public properties. After soil is compacted by the vehicles, water is less likely to filter down off the surface, further into the ground. That leads to water following the trail, producing an artificial drainage path, which can erode the soil. That generates cuts and the formation of gullies. The muddy water and the sediment it carries ends up in the creeks and streams, which empty into larger bodies of water, including Lake Monroe.\n\nIowa\n\nDes Moines: The City Council has disbanded the city’s Citizen Odor Board. The council took the action Monday after concluding the panel was no longer needed after nearly 30 years of recording complaints. It had no enforcement powers. People still will be able to report stenches to the city’s 24/7 odor hotline: (515) 244-0336. If the city gets 10 complaints about the same smell within six hours, it will investigate the source. SuAnn Donovan, the city’s neighborhood inspection zoning administrator, said an administrative law judge would hear appeals from companies found to be significant odor generators. The council also eliminated the Des Moines Music Commission, which hadn’t met for more than seven years. City staffers said in a document given to the council that Des Moines now has a vibrant live music scene that no longer needs a commission’s help.\n\nKansas\n\nLawrence: The University of Kansas plans to close its Confucius Institute in January, in part because federal funding for universities that host the China-linked facilities has been reduced. An email distributed Monday to faculty and staff from University of Kansas interim Provost Carl Lejuez said the school believes strong engagement with China is critical to U.S. higher education, The Lawrence Journal-World reports. “However, a Confucius Institute is not a necessary component for KU to productively engage with China, support collaborative faculty research, and prepare students,” Lejuez wrote. The Confucius Institutes provides education in Chinese language and culture. At one point, China had about 500 Confucius Institutes around the world, but several U.S. universities closed the organizations in response to the criticism about the Chinese Ministry of Education’s possible political influence in academics.\n\nKentucky\n\nLouisville: A gold bar worth almost $1,500 was found among donations to one of the Salvation Army’s red kettles. Louisville Area Commander Major Roy Williams told WAVE-TV that the bar was found over the weekend in a kettle at the Kroger in Prospect. It was the fourth straight year that a 1-ounce gold piece has been donated anonymously, he said. Other smaller gold and silver coins also have been found in recent days. The Louisville Area Salvation Army said it is still about $70,000 short of its fundraising goal. The charity hopes to raise $500,000 during its annual Red Kettle Campaign, which runs through Christmas Eve.\n\nLouisiana\n\nBaton Rouge: The state’s transportation department will boost safety measures at its roadwork sites, the agency’s secretary announced at a ceremony honoring an employee killed on the job this summer. Department of Transportation and Development Secretary Shawn Wilson said Monday that the agency will require a “spotter” on two-person crews to watch traffic. A cone will be placed farther back from a work zone, equipped with an alarm that sounds if hit, to give workers advance warning if a vehicle veers into the area. The agency also said it is buying 70 trailers with flashing arrows to place in work zones, designed to absorb the impact from a crash before it reaches a work crew. In addition, the color of safety vests and uniforms will change from orange to a bright yellow/green mix, and emergency lights on the department’s vehicles will be upgraded to brighter, more visible colors.\n\nMaine\n\nKennebunk: A lab has become the first to apply for state certification to test recreational cannabis. Nelson Analytics applied to the Maine Center for Disease Control and Prevention for a testing facility certification, the Portland Press Herald reports. The state is taking steps to ensure it has enough licensed labs to test all products prepared in state. The adult-use market does not open until March 2020. Officials say the licensing and regulation of testing labs is essential to guarantee public safety. Testing for pesticides, heavy metals and residual solvents will be delayed until the market is running – likely after a year, according to Maine officials. “It takes time for independent, top-quality labs to establish themselves and develop capacity necessary to support the growing volume of product,” says Erik Gundersen, director of the Maine Office of Marijuana Policy.\n\nMaryland\n\nBaltimore: The city got a needed boost in federal funding to fight crime when the state’s congressional delegation announced a $4.6 million package of grants for public safety initiatives for the region. The city will receive more than $2.9 million, while the rest of the money provided through the U.S. Department of Justice will go to surrounding Baltimore County and other stakeholders. Part of the city’s money is meant to help law enforcement identify and track guns, support children who are crime victims of the opioid crisis, and combat elder abuse. The announcement comes as the city has seen one of its most violent years on record, tallying 327 homicides so far. That’s up from 309 in 2018. Baltimore’s share of grants also will fund efforts at the state’s attorney’s office to address wrongful convictions.\n\nMassachusetts\n\nCape Cod: Activists are working to ban commercial sales of single-use plastic water bottles at retail stores across the cape. The nonprofit organization Sustainable Practices successfully convinced most municipalities in the county this year to stop buying single-use plastic bottles and stop selling beverages in single-use plastic containers on town property. The organization said Monday that it now aims to have a petition article at the annual town meeting for every Cape Cod municipality this spring to extend the ban to commercial sales of plastic water bottles in stores, according to the Cape Cod Times. It called the municipal ban a “great first step.” Madhavi Venkatesan, the organization’s executive director, said she’s also hopeful the four municipalities that didn’t adopt the plastic bottle ban this year will do so by spring.\n\nMichigan\n\nDetroit: The largest contractor in the city’s demolition program is facing suspension again after it tore down the wrong house – for the second time in just a year. Detroit-based Adamo Group has been awarded more than $58.6 million to perform thousands of federally and city-funded demolitions since 2014. The company also has performed several large-scale, high-profile demolitions, including fulfilling the $5.9 million contract to tear down the former Joe Louis Arena. City officials confirmed Adamo tore down the wrong house, and the company received a violation notice Wednesday morning for the wrongful demolition. The contractor has seven days to appeal. The property was located one block over from the home it was actually contracted to demolish. The company, however, did not notify the city or state until last week.\n\nMinnesota\n\nMinneapolis: John Borger, one of the nation’s preeminent First Amendment lawyers, has died. He was 68. Borger had cancer for 15 years and died Monday night at his home in downtown Minneapolis, said his wife, Judith Yates Borger. Borger represented the Star Tribune and other media organizations for four decades before retiring from the Faegre Baker Daniels law firm in 2017, the Star Tribune reports. Star Tribune senior vice president and general counsel Randy Lebedoff called Borger “a brilliant First Amendment advocate who contributed greatly to our state and country by standing up for freedom of speech when it counted.” He was also the lead attorney representing the estate of “American Sniper” author Chris Kyle, which was sued for defamation by former Minnesota Gov. Jesse Ventura.\n\nMississippi\n\nGulfport: “Do you recognize me,” pleads a sketch of a young black woman believed to be killed by confessed serial killer Samuel Little. Her mouth is drawn into a frown, her dark hair either short or pinned up in a hand-drawn sketch Little provided to law enforcement. Little began confessing to killings last year and has so far admitted to killing at least 93 people across the U.S. between 1970 and 2005. Five of those killings were of women he picked up near Gulfport, according to the Harrison County Sheriff’s Office. Only three have been identified so far. The sheriff’s office shared the sketch and asked for the public’s help in identifying the woman, believed to have been in her early to mid-20s before she disappeared prior to December 1992. The FBI considers Little the most prolific serial killer in U.S. history, and he’s recounted his crimes in near-photographic detail, prompting him to create dozens of color portraits of the women he strangled.\n\nMissouri\n\nJefferson City: The statue of a Roman goddess that prompted a brief controversy returned to the dome of the Missouri State Capitol on Tuesday. The statue of Ceres, the Roman goddess of agriculture and grain crops, was taken down last year for structural and cosmetic repairs. A 550-ton crane lifted the 10-foot, 1,407-pound bronze statue back to the top of the dome, the Jefferson City News-Tribune reports. Last week, State Rep. Mike Moon, R-Ash Grove, asked Gov. Mike Parson to stop the state from returning the “false god” to the Capitol dome, citing his and Parson’s Christian faith. Parson did not respond to Moon’s letter, and supporters said the statue, which shows Ceres holding a bundle of grain, represents the importance of agriculture in Missouri. It was originally installed on the dome in 1924.\n\nMontana\n\nBillings: The Billings Chamber of Commerce has started to remove parts of its campaign that was criticized by a local blogger who said campaign language and imagery was tone-deaf and racist. The Billings Gazette reports blogger Alexis Bonogofsky published an article Monday criticizing three billboards reading “Onward Pioneer” and “Conquer New Endeavors.” Officials say the campaign tagline read, “Today is ours for the taking – and tomorrow too.” Officials say the Visit Billings tourism website also promoted similar language. Bonogofsky says the campaign was not culturally sensitive to hundreds of years of genocide, forced assimilation and racism against Native Americans. Department executives say the “Forge Your Own Path” campaign was used for 18 months, and “Onward Pioneers” was one of the multiple aspects of the campaign set to expire in 2020.\n\nNebraska\n\nLincoln: Dozens of people who helped respond to flooding in the state this year were honored Tuesday for work saving lives and rescuing stranded neighbors. Gov. Pete Ricketts and first lady Susanne Shore presented awards to individuals and groups that contributed to the effort. Special accolades went to James Wilke, a Columbus farmer who died trying to save a stranded motorist from floodwaters; the Nebraska National Guard; and a group of firefighters and volunteers whose air boat capsized as they worked to rescue a family from their home. Ricketts also honored air boat owners, a search-and-rescue task force and 45 individuals who assisted in various ways. Ricketts called the group “flood heroes” and said they “showed their strength, grit and compassion in countless ways.”\n\nNevada\n\nReno: The Burning Man organization is tired of waiting on a decision that could potentially recover it millions of dollars. Black Rock City LLC, the nonprofit that produces the annual Burning Man event, filed a lawsuit in D.C. District Court on Friday after waiting four years to hear whether the U.S. Bureau of Land Management would be required to justify its nearly $3 million in annual charges to Burning Man. “This case is our attempt to break this cycle,” Burning Man spokeswoman Megan Miller said in a statement. The BLM, which oversees public land use, permits Burning Man organizers to hold a weeklong, 80,000-person event each year in Nevada’s Black Rock Desert. The Burning Man organization is seeking “relief from defendants’ ongoing, unlawful and prejudicial conduct towards (Black Rock City LLC) that threatens the viability of the iconic Burning Man event,” the lawsuit said.\n\nNew Hampshire\n\nConcord: The overall number of people experiencing homelessness in the state is dropping, though four of its 10 counties saw increases in recent years, according to a report released Wednesday by a nonprofit advocacy group. The New Hampshire Coalition to End Homelessness draws on state and federal data for its annual report. Its comparison of the annual “point in time” counts shows the overall number of people experiencing homelessness decreased by 5% to 1,382 from January 2017 to January 2019, but the numbers went up in Carroll, Cheshire Coos and Hillsborough counties. And while the number of families and veterans experiencing homelessness decreased, the number of homeless students increased by 12% to 3,993.\n\nNew Jersey\n\nNewark: Gov. Phil Murphy on Wednesday signed legislation restoring voting rights to convicts who are out of prison on parole or probation. The measure will restore voting rights to roughly 80,000 convicts. Murphy, a Democrat, cast the measure as part of a progressive agenda aimed at reducing racial disparity in the state’s criminal justice system, which has disproportionately higher rates of incarceration for black residents compared to whites. He also signed a bill aimed at making it easier for people convicted of lower-level crimes to clear their records. According to the National Conference of State Legislatures, New Jersey would join 16 other states and the District of Columbia that bar only those convicts who are incarcerated from voting. Most Republicans opposed the bill, saying it lacked common sense since the convicts hadn’t yet paid their “debt to society.”\n\nNew Mexico\n\nTsaile: The first college established by an American Indian tribe in the United States is now working to create a law school. Formal efforts picked up speed with a recent two-day symposium held at Diné College on the Navajo Nation. Officials talked about everything from the college’s original mission and accreditation to student courses, judicial advocates and what community such an institution would serve. Rex Lee Jim, the director of the college’s Navajo Sovereignty Institute, said that ideally, the law school would specialize in emerging areas of Indian law that are significant to the Navajo Nation economy. Jim organized the symposium and will help set up an advisory committee going forward. Diné College began in 1968 as the first tribe-controlled institution of higher learning in the U.S.\n\nNew York\n\nRomulus: Tours of a rare white deer herd on a wildlife sanctuary at a former Cold War weapons depot are slated to end soon because of financial troubles, but the property owner says he’ll continue protection of the herd and look for ways to resume public access. The board of directors of the nonprofit Seneca White Deer Inc. voted to end tours Dec. 29 at the former Seneca Army Depot in upstate New York’s Finger Lakes region because donations weren’t meeting expenses, says the organization’s president, Dennis Money. Earl Martin, who is redeveloping the former military facility, told the Canandaigua Daily Messenger he’ll continue protection and management of the deer herd that roam 3,000 fenced acres set aside as a wildlife sanctuary. The sanctuary is home to the world’s largest herd of white deer. They’re not albinos but are leucistic. In the wild, such deer usually succumb quickly to predators and hunters because they’re so visible.\n\nNorth Carolina\n\nRocky Mount: A highway marker honoring a Native American Olympic gold medalist has gone missing, officials say. The marker honoring James “Jim” Francis Thorpe was still at its post in Rocky Mount as of last week, news outlets report, citing a state news release. The state Department of Natural and Cultural Resources is now asking for the public’s help in recovering the marker, according to the statement. Thorpe was born on an Oklahoma reservation in 1888 and became a professional baseball player in 1909 when he joined the Rocky Mount Railroaders in North Carolina, according to the state’s website about the marker. He also played professional football and was a standout in track and field, winning gold medals in the pentathlon and the decathlon at the Olympics in Stockholm three years later, it says. It was then that he was declared the “greatest athlete in the world” by the King of Sweden.\n\nNorth Dakota\n\nBismarck: The state will work with the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe to help develop a response plan for a potential spill of the Dakota Access pipeline, a state official says. State Emergency Services Director Cody Schulz says tribal leaders recently requested a response plan and resources to prepare for a spill near the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation in the south-central part of the state. Schulz told a committee of state and tribal leaders headed by Gov. Doug Burgum that his agency would be happy to either “participate or facilitate” a training exercise. The state also would work with the tribe to obtain federal grant money for planning and equipment. Standing Rock Chairman Mike Faith, who sits on the panel, said oil spill response training would be “awesome,” and he appreciates the state’s effort to work collaboratively with the tribe.\n\nOhio\n\nCincinnati: The name of a slave owner will be removed from the University of Cincinnati’s largest college after a unanimous vote Tuesday by the school’s trustees. The University of Cincinnati Board of Trustees voted to formally end the association of Charles McMicken’s name with the school’s College of Arts and Sciences. The university created a commission last year to examine McMicken’s legacy. He owned slaves and created a will before his 1858 death that set aside funds to create a university for “the education of white boys and girls.” The board agreed with the commission’s recommendation that McMicken’s name be removed from the college, but his name will remain on other spaces on campus. Digital displays outlining his biography will be placed near those areas to more fully and fairly represent the histories associated with McMicken, according to the university.\n\nOklahoma\n\nTulsa: Scientists surveying a cemetery and a homeless camp in the city found pits holding possible remains of black residents killed nearly 100 years ago in a race massacre, investigators have revealed. In a report presented Monday night to the 1921 Race Massacre Graves Investigation Public Oversight Committee, Oklahoma Archaeological Survey scientists Scott Hammerstedt and Amanda Regnier said forensic archaeologists scanning with ground-penetrating radar at the sites in north Tulsa found anomalies in the ground that they think should be excavated and tested further. “There have been other searches that have found some anomalies, but I think that ours is the most promising one,” Hammerstedt says. “There was a commission in the late ’90s, but their results never went anywhere.” The violence in 1921 left as many as 300 dead on Tulsa’s Black Wall Street.\n\nOregon\n\nPortland: A city auditor’s report released Tuesday says Portland leaders failed to fully deliver on promises they made to voters as they implemented arts, cannabis, affordable housing and street repair programs funded by voter-approved taxes and bond measures. The Oregonian/OregonLive reports the audit focused on measures and taxes passed in 2016. The audit also analyzed the 7-year-old Portland art tax for schools and nonprofit programs that assesses a $35 charge per resident annually. Auditor Mary Hull Caballero’s report says the city has used vague language when laying out commitments to voters, doesn’t consistently determine how realistic it is to keep promises made, lacks consistent monitoring to make sure commitments are delivered on and has diverged from some voter promises due to bureau leadership changes and the city’s commission form of government.\n\nPennsylvania\n\nHarrisburg: The state’s high court on Wednesday turned down an effort to resume cash welfare assistance to the poor and disabled while litigation continues over a law that ended the payments this summer. The Supreme Court’s six-justice majority said Commonwealth Court had grounds to determine that the groups challenging the law did not prove they were likely to prevail in the ongoing lawsuit. At issue is a Depression-era program, known as general assistance, that typically provided about 11,000 recipients with some $200 a month. The payments stopped in August after Republican lawmakers pushed through a bill that ended the $24 million annual program while also reauthorizing payments to Philadelphia hospitals.\n\nRhode Island\n\nProvidence: A community development organization has announced it’s planning an affordable housing project for young adults who have been in foster care. The Smith Hill Community Development Corporation announced Tuesday that it received a $100,000 grant from the Housing Ministries of New England to pursue the project, The Providence Journal reports. The grant will be used for pre-development costs for the $3.5 million project in Providence, according to the executive director of Smith Hill Development Corporation, Jean Lamb. The target tenants for The Cornerstone of Smith Hill will have experienced hardships in their childhood and be 18-24 years old, the age when people are aged out of the foster system, says Kate Corwin of Smith Hill Community Development Corporation. The development company says it will provide 26 units.\n\nSouth Carolina\n\nColumbia: University of South Carolina fans will soon join a handful of other SEC schools in allowing alcohol sales at home athletic events. The policy was approved by the University of South Carolina board of trustees Tuesday, news outlets report. Sales of beer and wine will begin at Colonial Life Arena starting with the women’s basketball game against Kentucky on Jan. 2, followed by the men’s basketball game against Florida on Jan. 7, athletic director Ray Tanner says. The rollout will continue into football and baseball seasons at Williams-Brice Stadium and Founders Park. Prices will average about $8 per beer, Tanner says, and he hopes the change could bring in “seven figure” earnings but cautions that it’s hard to predict whether that will happen. Louisiana State University reported earning $2.2 million in alcohol sales this football season.\n\nSouth Dakota\n\nRapid City: South Dakota School of Mines & Technology has received its largest gift in the university’s history. The donation of $3.6 million from 1969 graduate Willard Goodman and his wife, Billie Kay Goodman, was made to the school’s Department of Civil Engineering and doubles its annual operating budget that funds scholarships, graduate student stipends, faculty endowments, student activities and lab facilities. Willard Goodman, who grew up in Philip and died in 2013, was appreciative of the support he received as a student from the head of the civil engineering department, Bill Coyle, a news release said. “When he would talk about his professor, Bill Coyle, he would start by saying, ‘I’m probably going to start to cry when I tell you this.’ He was very open about how South Dakota Mines changed his life,” said Brad Johnson, vice president for development of the South Dakota Mines Foundation.\n\nTennessee\n\nNashville: The Volunteer State won’t stop resettling refugees, Republican Gov. Bill Lee said Wednesday, rejecting the option offered to states by President Donald Trump’s administration. The issue forced Lee, who campaigned on his Christian beliefs, to consider his own experience helping refugees and weigh it against the will of fellow Republicans in the Legislature. GOP lawmakers had sued the federal government over its refugee resettlement program, and legislative leaders hoped Lee would accept Trump’s offer. “The United States and Tennessee have always been … a shining beacon of freedom and opportunity for the persecuted and oppressed, particularly those suffering religious persecution,” Lee said in a statement. In Lee’s conservative state, his pro-refugee decision was viewed as far from a sure thing. He wrote that his decision is initially valid for a year.\n\nTexas\n\nHouston: A federal judge ruled Tuesday that the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is liable for damages to a group of Houston-area homes and businesses that were flooded by two federally owned reservoirs during Hurricane Harvey because the inundation was due to how the federal government built and maintained the dams. The ruling by Senior U.S. Judge Charles Lettow on the U.S. Court of Federal Claims in Washington, D.C., is part of a test case involving 13 properties located upstream of the Addicks and Barker reservoirs that were flooded during Harvey in 2017. Attorneys for the property owners said the Corps of Engineers knew for decades that the reservoirs’ capacity would exceed federal land and inundate homes and businesses on adjacent private property. Their lawyers say structures upstream of the reservoirs were built in areas known as flood pools, where water collects as the dams fill up.\n\nUtah\n\nSalt Lake City: A farming family has reached an agreement with land officials allowing permanent access to a portion of private land along a trail bordering Zion National Park. The Salt Lake Tribune reports the Bulloch family owns about 1.5 square miles of land known as Simon Gulch outside the park’s eastern boundary. Simon Gulch includes a 1-mile stretch of the 16-mile Zion Narrows Trail that starts outside the park, passes through the family’s private property and continues to Zion Canyon, officials say. The Trust for Public Land orchestrated the $1.5 million deal with the family that shields the land from development and guarantees permanent access to the trail, land officials say. The family has allowed hikers to pass through its property but posted for-sale signs last year, officials say.\n\nVermont\n\nMiddlesex: A post-Christmas event will aim to create the world’s largest s’more. The annual S’morestice Celebration will be hosted at Camp Meade on Saturday, Dec. 28. This marks the second time organizers will be attempting to build the world’s largest s’more, inviting the public to be a part of the record-breaking campfire treat, but the event in 2018 did not have a Guinness world record official in attendance. The current titleholder for world’s largest s’more is Deer Run Camping Resort in Gardners, Pa., who in 2014 built a 5-foot by 5-foot s’more weighing in at 267 pounds. To best that, the S’morestice Celebration organizers plan to build their s’more to be 4 feet by 8 feet. Vermont bakeries and chocolatiers have contributed: Crackers and chocolate will be provided by Red Hen Baking and Rabble Rouser Chocolate. Aside from the s’more-related activities, the event will include bonfires, music and food.\n\nVirginia\n\nRichmond: The state is the only one in the country whose workers’ compensation system doesn’t cover injuries sustained through repetitive work activities, like repeatedly lifting boxes over several weeks, a new state report says. The Joint Legislative Audit and Review Commission recommended in a recently released report that Virginia should allow such injuries to be compensated. Stakeholders argued that potential high costs to employers are why Virginia doesn’t allow such injuries to be claimed through workers’ compensation, the report said. But such injuries are not a “major cost driver” of workers’ compensation premiums in other states, the report says.\n\nWashington\n\nSeattle: Puget Sound has a 75% or greater chance of being struck by a damaging earthquake in the next 100 years, according to a new earthquake danger assessment by the U.S. Geological Survey. The Daily News reports for a region hit by at least three fatal, brick-busting earthquakes in the past 70 years, that might come as little surprise. What the update released in late November does show is that Puget Sound is on par with California in the earthquake danger zone. Only western Nevada and a small area where Idaho, Montana and Wyoming meet share the red zone – the map’s highest level. The rest of western Washington has a 36%-74% chance of being hit by a damaging quake in the next 100 years. The USGS uses the latest research from academics, government and industry to produce the National Seismic Hazard Model.\n\nWest Virginia\n\nCharleston: The city is about to get a new park. The City Council has approved a donation of 65 acres of woodlands in South Hills that is set to become a new recreation area with trails and other activities. The land, which comes as three adjoined parcels, was donated by Callen Jones McJunkin and will be called the Herbert and Gloria Jones Woodlands. The purpose of donating the land was to preserve its natural setting and create a passive recreation spot, a news release from the city said. The city will maintain and enhance the area with the help of community volunteers. “Because of this generous donation, members of our community will have greater opportunities to take part in family fun and create lasting memories for generations,” Mayor Amy Shuler Goodwin said.\n\nWisconsin\n\nMadison: Gov. Tony Evers said Wednesday that the state will continue welcoming refugees, joining several other governors to make such an announcement since President Donald Trump gave states and counties the power to reject refugees. In a letter to the Department of State, Evers said Wisconsin has “a rich history of opening its doors” to people of all backgrounds and has done so for more than 16,000 refugees in the past two decades. Evers, a Democrat who defeated Republican Scott Walker last year, also criticized the Trump administration for creating “an overly cumbersome and inappropriate process” for agencies involved in refugee resettlement, and he said its policies risk discouraging immigration that’s essential to the state’s economy. Wisconsin took in 472 refugees in fiscal 2018 who came from counties including Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan and many others.\n\nWyoming\n\nCheyenne: The governor says he doesn’t support a proposal to increase his salary and those of the other four statewide elected officials. The Legislature’s Joint Appropriations Committee on Friday discussed boosting the governor’s pay by two-thirds and the other four statewide officials’ salaries by about 60%, KGAB Radio reports. Those four are the secretary of state, superintendent of public instruction, state treasurer and state auditor. The raises would take effect after the 2022 election. Wyoming’s elected officials have not had pay increases in almost 20 years. Wyoming’s governor makes $105,000 a year and the other four statewide elected officials $92,000 a year. Gordon said Tuesday that he ran for governor to serve the people, not because of the pay. He hasn’t suggested any change to elected officials’ salaries and is more focused on providing appropriate compensation for other state employees, Gordon said.\n\nFrom USA TODAY Network and wire reports", "authors": [], "publish_date": "2019/12/19"}, {"url": "https://www.usatoday.com/story/life/home-garden/2021/09/16/10-weeds-are-pollinator-friendly-native-wisconsin-plants-common-milkweed-virginia-creeper-jewelweed/5714957001/", "title": "10 'weeds' that are really pollinator and animal friendly native ...", "text": "Jennifer Rude Klett\n\nSpecial to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel\n\nWeedy native plants can pose a dilemma for home gardeners.\n\nThey often mysteriously pop up in the tidiest of established gardens or must be confronted on a larger scale in new yards or disturbed areas. Weedy natives often reveal themselves when they flower or when their leaves change color or drop in the fall.\n\nEven shrubs and trees can shoot up considerably in just one growing season.\n\nFirst-time homeowners as well as seasoned gardeners, including those who embrace native plants, can become perplexed and overwhelmed. Pity, guilt and procrastination can compound the situation.\n\nShould these plants go or stay? To decide, home gardeners must make judgment calls, and that usually depends on their definition of a weed.\n\nRELATED:What's the difference between a weed, native plants, wildflower and an invasive plant? Here's your guide.\n\nWeed is a plant out place, ecologist says\n\nThe definition, however, may not be clear cut in many cases. Labeling something a weed can even ignite controversy in some gardening circles.\n\n“The word weed is highly variable,” said Neil Diboll, consulting ecologist and president of Prairie Nursery in Westfield.\n\nDiboll said a weed is merely a plant out of place, so property owners should carefully evaluate plants and think about desired outcomes.\n\n“One person’s weed is another person’s wildflower,” he said.\n\nCommon milkweed, the poster plant for helping monarchs, is a good example of how perceptions of plants, especially native ones, can change.\n\n“It was a weed 10 years ago; now it’s a beneficial plant,” Diboll said. “Five years ago, we couldn’t give it away; now we can’t grow it fast enough. People want to support monarch butterflies.”\n\nWeedy natives like milkweed that bloom in late summer and fall provide late-season food sources for butterflies to fuel their migration or aid overwintering birds. Yet, they may also be aggressive and take over a garden.\n\nStill, just because a plant is native doesn’t mean it’s wanted, hence the term native weed, which denotes an indigenous plant that’s aggressive. In any case, indecision and inactivity will only intensify the weedy native plant dilemma.\n\nRELATED:Invasive plants, some 'essentially immortal,' are spreading across Wisconsin this summer\n\nRELATED:Be on the lookout for these invasive plant species in Wisconsin\n\nAggressive plants, native as well as non-native, can depress biodiversity and kill off other plants. Plus, they can take over like an invading army ... making the job harder if you kick the gardening can down the road.\n\nConsider these questions to help determine if something is a weed:\n\nDo you want to provide food and shelter for birds and other wildlife?\n\nAre you looking for a bee- and butterfly-friendly yard?\n\nIs establishing a meadow or prairie with native grasses and flowers your goal?\n\nAre you seeking a low-maintenance yard?\n\nDo you want to encourage biodiversity?\n\nDo you prefer a tidy, manicured yard or something more free-form?\n\nDo you need to control erosion?\n\nIs the area established with existing plants that can compete with aggressive natives, or is it an area that needs to be filled quickly?\n\n10 weedy natives\n\nHere are 10 Wisconsin natives with wildlife benefits that can be perceived as weeds, sometimes because they're mistaken for invasive lookalikes.\n\nCommon milkweed is the No. 1 beneficial native that can be mistaken for a weed, according to Kelly Kearns, invasive plant coordinator for the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources.\n\nConsidered a weed by many until relatively recently, the milkweed’s upgrade arises from concern over monarch butterflies. Monarchs lay their eggs exclusively on plants in the milkweed family.\n\n“They are really in serious decline,” Kearns said of the big orange and black butterflies.\n\nCommon milkweed\n\nCommon milkweed, and other milkweeds, are “critical” late-season nectar sources for butterflies, “particularly monarchs,” Kearns said. “The ones that you are seeing now are the ones flying to Mexico. “They need to bulk up.”\n\nEchoing Diboll’s observations, Kearns said people are now planting common milkweed all over. Some farmers, however, still consider milkweed a weed, she said. It spreads rapidly by rhizomes and grows readily from seed.\n\nCanada goldenrod\n\nCanada goldenrod is another source of critical late-season food for wildlife, yet the tall yellow plant can spark heated debate.\n\n“A lot of people consider that a weed because it’s an aggressive native,” Kearns said.\n\nDiboll called Canada goldenrod a “thug” because it aggressively spreads by rhizomes, suppressing other plants and reducing biodiversity.\n\nNew England aster\n\nNew England aster is among the latest bloomers of the season, making it an important last nectar stop for migrating butterflies, according to Diboll. Structurally, it resembles Canada goldenrod before blooming, but the native New England aster becomes distinctively different when it flowers heavily in September and October with bright purple petals and contrasting yellow centers.\n\nA tall, showy perennial, New England asters can be pruned nearly to the ground around July 1 to prevent them from becoming too leggy. They are a recommended perennial addition to any butterfly garden, according to the University of Wisconsin Extension website.\n\nJewelweed\n\nJewelweed is a self-seeding native annual.\n\n“A lot of people think it’s a weed ... but the hummingbirds love it,” Kearns said.\n\nIt also can be used as a native defense against at least one vexing invasive.\n\n“It’s one of the few species that can compete with garlic mustard,” she said.\n\nTwo types of jewelweed are native to Wisconsin: one with yellow flowers and the more common variety with orange blossoms.\n\nJewelweed can pop up in moist and disturbed areas, according to the UW Extension website. Its small flowers bloom from midsummer to first frost. In addition to hummingbirds, butterflies, bumblebees and other long-tongued bees are attracted to jewelweed. Ground birds eat the seeds.\n\nFor gardeners, it’s a good addition to moist, partially shady areas or rain gardens.\n\nJewelweed, sometimes called touch-me-not, can fill open areas and suppress weeds, then return each year once established. It has few pest problems.\n\nWoodland sunflower\n\nWoodland sunflower is a tall native perennial often growing along edges of woods with large, dark green leaves and yellow daisy-like flowers that bloom in late summer and fall. Its seeds are relished by sparrows and finches.\n\n“I’ve got goldfinches feeding on mine right now,” Kearns said.\n\nThis sunflower will form colonies over time and might not be ideal for smaller areas unless divided.\n\nGolden Alexanders\n\nGolden Alexanders is an early spring bloomer native to Wisconsin that can be mistaken for wild parsnip, which is a non-native plant common along roadsides that can cause skin to blister.\n\nWild parsnip can cause mild panic among gardeners who display graphic photos of skin damage on social media. Just don’t mistake the two plants.\n\n“Golden Alexanders is usually 2 to 3 feet high, and the wild parsnip is usually 3 to 5 feet high,” Diboll said.\n\nGolden Alexanders also blooms earlier than wild parsnip. “Wild parsnip doesn’t usually bloom until the Fourth of July,” Kearns said.\n\nGolden Alexanders is a host plant for the black swallowtail butterfly.\n\nVirginia creeper\n\nVirginia creeper is another native that can prompt disagreement because of its aggressive nature.\n\nYes, it turns a beautiful scarlet color in the fall, often gracefully climbing tree trunks or utility poles. Yes, it can produce fruits that are an important food source for overwintering birds. But this deciduous, woody creeper in the grape family can quickly overrun an area and smother other plants, lawns, even trees.\n\nAccording to the UW Extension, Virginia creeper is also called five-leaved ivy and can grow up to 20 feet in a single year. It can be mistaken for poison ivy as the two plants have a similar growth habit and can be found growing near each other. But poison ivy, also a native plant, has three leaflets instead of five.\n\nVirginia creeper can provide erosion control on slopes and good seasonal coverage for trellises, arbors or chain-link fences, but it should be managed and is very tolerant of pruning, especially in spring, according to the UW Extension website.\n\nIt’s a good plant choice provided it has room to grow.\n\nCommon elderberry\n\nCommon elderberry pops up in moist or disturbed areas; it is common along roadsides as it tolerates a wide set of conditions.\n\nThis large native shrub flowers in late May or June with showy white blossoms that turn into glossy, flat-topped, blue-black berry clusters.\n\n“The seeds are very delectable for a lot of birds,” Diboll said. The cooked berries are edible and can be used in winemaking, jam, pies and other desserts. A good erosion-controller, the elderberry bush attracts butterflies, songbirds, hummingbirds, pollinators and small mammals.\n\nIt makes a good addition to naturalized areas as it can spread to form a thicket. Also consider elderberry for rain gardens, native gardens, butterfly and pollinator gardens.\n\nFall leaf color is gold.\n\nSilver maple\n\nSilver maple is a tall native Wisconsin tree with deeply lobed leaves that is dominant along riverbeds and key to preventing erosion and flooding along floodplain forests, especially with many of the state’s green ash dying, according to Kearns.\n\n“In their habitat, they are incredibly important,” Kearns said.\n\nSilver maples make good urban trees as they grow fast. But, Kearns added, “It can put out a whole lot of seeds.”\n\nThe seeds, sometimes called whirlybirds or helicopters, are important food sources for evening grosbeaks, finches, wild turkeys, squirrels and chipmunks, according to the USDA.\n\nSilver maples tend to develop cavities that are sought by cavity-nesting birds and mammals such as raccoons, opossums, squirrels, owls, woodpeckers and others. The trees' early pollen helps beneficial insects such as bees.\n\nFall leaf color is yellow to orange.\n\nBlack cherry\n\nBlack cherry is a native tree that can reach 75 feet; it is the largest member of the cherry tree family.\n\nThe dark reddish bark forms large scales on mature black cherries that distinguish this tree. But when young, “the black cherry bark is very easily mistaken for buckthorn,” Diboll said, referring to the notorious invasive.\n\nInterestingly, while the European buckthorn is invasive in Wisconsin, the black cherry is considered invasive in Europe, Kearns said.\n\n“There are a lot of things that kill it over here,” she said of black cherry trees in Wisconsin.\n\nA wildlife magnet for its fruits, black cherry can be undesirable to homeowners as it tends to suffer from diseases such as fungus black knot. But even when the tree is dead, homeowners might wish to leave the snag (a dead tree left standing), as it can reveal beautiful raw wood tones and provide shelter for many cavity-dwelling mammals and birds.\n\n“The wood is super valuable” for milled lumber and furniture making, Kearns added.\n\nFall leaf color is yellow.\n\nJennifer Rude Klett is a Wisconsin freelance nonfiction writer and author of a new cookbook, “Home Cooking Comeback: Neighborly Advice & 40 Pleasing Recipes from the Farm Kitchen of a Midwestern Food Journalist.” Contact her at jrudeklett.com.\n\n*****\n\nFor more information\n\nFor online help with native planting for beginners, monarch gardens, bird gardens, native plant recommendations, webinars and garden tours, go to:", "authors": [], "publish_date": "2021/09/16"}, {"url": "https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/50-states/2019/11/04/lighthouse-peril-wizard-rock-cable-la-carte-news-around-states/40541683/", "title": "Lighthouse in peril, Wizard Rock: News from around our 50 states", "text": "From USA TODAY Network and wire reports\n\nAlabama\n\nDothan: An event that bills itself as the world’s largest celebration of the peanut is underway in the city. The National Peanut Festival opened Friday and continues through next Saturday with rides, exhibits, music and agricultural competitions. Now in its 76th year, the festival began in 1938 as a three-day event with an appearance by agricultural scientist George Washington Carver of Tuskegee. It has been held each year since except during the 1940s, when organizers took a break for World War II. The festival now lasts 10 days and draws an estimated 200,000 people annually. The festival site isn’t hard to find if you make it to Dothan: A 24-foot-tall peanut marks the entrance.\n\nAlaska\n\nFairbanks: A local teacher has been named 2020 Alaska Teacher of the Year, an honor revealed in a surprise ceremony at West Valley High School. Amy Gallaway walked into the gym Oct. 25, as the school had been told they’d be filming an assembly for another activity, the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner reports. Students and teachers competed for a moment in a hopscotch activity before Principal Sarah Gillam called in a “VIP team” of legislators, school district staff, and members of the Department of Education and Early Development, including Education Commissioner Michael Johnson. Johnson announced there was one more person on his team: Amy Gallaway, the 2020 Alaska Teacher of the year. The students erupted into applause as Johnson noted Gallaway was selected for many reasons, one of them because “she doesn’t just teach democracy; she has you do democracy.” Gallaway is a Kid’s Voting liaison. She teaches the We the People government class and has encouraged students to participate in the national “We the People: The Citizen and the Constitution” program.\n\nArizona\n\nPrescott: A boulder that mysteriously disappeared two weeks ago from a national forest is back, and authorities aren’t asking any questions. Prescott National Forest officials said a forest employee on patrol Friday noticed that the 1-ton boulder dubbed “Wizard Rock” had been returned to a site along State Route 89. The much-admired boulder is black with streaks of white quartz running through it. District Ranger Sarah Clawson said forest officials were thrilled that the rock was returned and “grateful that whoever took it was conscientious enough to give it back to the public.” According to forest officials, heavy equipment would’ve been needed to move the boulder. Permits are required to gather and remove most forest products, including rocks, plants and trees.\n\nArkansas\n\nLittle Rock: Markers to 12 men convicted of murder and sentenced to death, before eventually being released, in connection with the Elaine Race Massacre will be placed along the Arkansas Civil Rights Heritage Trail. The University of Arkansas at Little Rock said a marker to each of what is known as the “Elaine 12” will be located along the trail from the Old State House Convention Center to the William J. Clinton Presidential Center in Little Rock. They are to be unveiled Tuesday. The men were black sharecroppers convicted and sentenced by an all-white jury following the 1919 massacre in eastern Arkansas during what is known as “Red Summer,” when hundreds of African Americans nationwide were slain by white mobs. More than 200 people died in Elaine, mostly black men, women and children.\n\nCalifornia\n\nLos Angeles: Authorities say a dam could fail during an extreme storm and send water flooding into Mojave Desert communities that are home to about 300,000 people. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers announced Friday that it’s changed its risk characterization of the Mojave River Dam from low to high urgency of action. The earthen dam was built in the 1970s near the San Bernardino Mountains. It has never breached, but an assessment last year found that during an extreme storm, water could flow over the top and erode the dam. That could threaten Apple Valley, Hesperia, Victorville, Barstow and even the tiny town of Baker, more than 140 miles downstream. Officials say the chances of such a storm are small – about 1 in 10,000 – but they’re working with communities on emergency preparations anyway.\n\nColorado\n\nAurora: A middle school dean has pleaded not guilty after authorities accused him of bringing a handgun to school and threatening administrators in April. The Sentinel reports 31-year-old Tushar Rae was charged Oct. 21 with three felonies and one misdemeanor in Arapahoe County. The Aurora West Preparatory Academy dean also pleaded not guilty to two additional felony and three misdemeanor charges filed against him Oct. 3 in connection with a Denver case accusing him of making threats against an administrator weeks earlier. School officials say Rae remains on paid leave.\n\nConnecticut\n\nEast Hampton: A police officer has retired after a civil rights organization raised concerns about his membership in a far-right group known for engaging in violent clashes at political rallies, a town official said Friday. Officer Kevin P. Wilcox retired from the East Hampton Police Department on Oct. 22, according to Town Manager David Cox. That was one week after the Associated Press reported that Wilcox had been a Proud Boys member and made online payments to a group leader. Wilcox had been an East Hampton police officer since 1999. His retirement was a “revision” of a previously planned retirement date in December, Cox wrote in an email. In September, East Hampton Police Chief Dennis Woessner had told the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law that Wilcox’s Proud Boys membership didn’t violate department policies.\n\nDelaware\n\nBlades: Federal officials are recommending that a residential area in this town where high levels of toxic chemicals were discovered in municipal wells be added to a national priority list of environmental cleanup sites. State and federal officials plan to hold an informational meeting in the Blades area next month regarding the proposed Superfund listing. Officials announced in February 2018 that concentrations of perfluorinated compounds above the human health advisory level of 70 parts per trillion were found in all three of the town’s drinking water wells. The sampling was part of an effort to identify areas where certain chemicals used in textiles, food packaging, firefighting foams and metal plating may have been released. Blades has been home to two metal plating businesses, one of which is still operating.\n\nDistrict of Columbia\n\nWashington: The song “Baby Shark” blared over loudspeakers and a wave of red washed across this politically blue capital Saturday as Nationals fans rejoiced at a parade marking Washington’s first World Series victory since 1924. “They say good things come to those who wait. Ninety-five years is a pretty long wait,” Nationals owner Ted Lerner, who is 94, told the cheering crowd. “But I’ll tell you, this is worth the wait.” As buses carrying the players and team officials wended their way along the parade route, pitcher Max Scherzer at one point hoisted the World Series trophy to the cheers of the crowd. At a rally just blocks from the Capitol, Scherzer said his teammates grinded their hearts out to “stay in the fight.” And then, after backup outfielder Gerardo Parra joined the team, he said, they started dancing and having fun. And they started hitting. “Never in this town have you seen a team compete with so much heart and so much fight,” he said.\n\nFlorida\n\nTallahassee: A commission investigating the Parkland school shooting wants state lawmakers to boost funding for mental health services. The commission is sending its second report to lawmakers, 10 months after an initial report urged immediate improvements to school safety following killings of 17 people at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School last year. Lawmakers have already responded by enacting a package of school-safety measures, including raising the legal age for gun purchases, requiring armed security officers on every campus and adopting a “red flag” law. The 389-page document released Friday advocates new laws that would allow authorities to act more quickly against threats of violence. It calls for more funding and better coordination of mental health services for children.\n\nGeorgia\n\nPlains: Former President Jimmy Carter taught a Bible lesson on life after death Sunday, less than two weeks after breaking his pelvis in a fall. Using a walker, the 95-year-old Democrat slowly entered the crowded sanctuary at Maranatha Baptist Church in the southwest Georgia town of Plains. “Morning, everybody,” he said cheerfully. With help, Carter sat on a motorized lift chair at the front of the room to teach a 45-minute lesson based on the Old Testament book of Job. Referring to a cancer diagnosis that resulted in the removal of part of his liver in 2015, Carter said he is “at ease” with the idea of dying and believes in life after death. More than 400 people were on hand in the main hall and smaller, overflow rooms where the lesson was shown on television.\n\nHawaii\n\nWailuku: Hundreds of fish died in Maui’s Wailuku River last week as the state was implementing measures to improve their habitat. The Maui News reports the die-off occurred as officials installed a ladder to help fish climb a 22-foot, man-made wall in the river. Officials arranged for river flows to be diverted to create safe working conditions during the installation. State officials say the reduced flows and low rainfall contributed to the deaths. On Thursday, residents who frequent the river mouth scrambled to rescue ’o’opu floundering on dry stream beds and puddles of warm water below the project site. Small piles of dead fish and shrimp were strewn about the riverbed. Department of Land and Natural Resources Director Suzanne Case said her agency regrets the situation and offered its sincere apologies.\n\nIdaho\n\nLewiston: The University of Idaho has anticipated more budget cuts as tuition revenue is estimated to drop $8 million by 2022. The Lewiston Tribune reports the Moscow university has already imposed $14 million in budget reductions this year that are set to become permanent. University officials say current enrollment trends reflect a tuition revenue decline, and the university has also routinely spent more than what it is bringing in, citing low reserves and no expected revenue increases. Officials say budget cuts could include layoffs, not renewing contracts, salary reductions, elimination of academic programs, early retirement and outsourcing services. They say the university’s goals include balancing revenue and expenses while rebuilding and maintaining reserve funds.\n\nIllinois\n\nChicago: A city official says hundreds of overdue books have been returned in the three weeks since the city eliminated overdue fines at public libraries. Library Commissioner Andrea Telli told City Council members Wednesday that the number of returned books has increased by 240%. On Oct. 1, Chicago became the nation’s largest major city to eradicate overdue library fees. Telli said people who owe fines can be afraid to go to the library because they can’t afford to pay them. She said fines lead to loss of books and patrons. Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s 2020 budget includes an $18 million property tax increase to fund adding Sunday hours at all 81 libraries, which will gradually roll out throughout the city.\n\nIndiana\n\nOxford: An autopsy has determined that a woman found with an 8-foot-long python wrapped around her neck was killed by the reptile. State Police said Friday that the autopsy found 36-year-old Laura Hurst’s cause of death was “asphyxiation due to strangulation by a snake.” Those findings are pending a final toxicology report. The Battle Ground, Indiana, woman was found unresponsive Wednesday on the floor of a snake-filled home in the northern Indiana town of Oxford. The reticulated python was wrapped loosely around her neck. Medics were unable to revive her. The home contained about 140 snakes, about 20 of which were owned by Hurst, who police said apparently kept them there and visited the home about twice weekly. The home’s owner had renovated it to house a snake collection.\n\nIowa\n\nAnkeny: A state board has approved post-traumatic stress disorder and intellectual disability with aggression to the list of medical conditions that can legally be treated by medical marijuana but rejected two other conditions petitioners had requested. The Iowa Medical Cannabidiol Board voted Friday not to allow patients with opioid dependency and those with Alzheimer’s disease to have legal access to medical marijuana. Board members expressed concern over lack of studies or other evidence that medical marijuana would help those conditions. The Iowa Board of Medicine must agree with the addition of PTSD and intellectual disability before they can be added to a list of diagnoses for which medical marijuana can be prescribed. The conditions would join seizures, Crohn’s disease, AIDS, Lou Gehrig’s disease and Parkinson’s disease as approved conditions.\n\nKansas\n\nTopeka: The state is reporting it collected nearly $37 million more in taxes than anticipated in October. The Department of Revenue said Friday that the state collected $553 million in taxes during the month when its official revenue forecast predicted $516 million. The surplus was 7.1%. Gov. Laura Kelly called the better-than-expected tax collections “a positive sign.” For the four months since the start of the state’s 2020 fiscal year in July, the state collected nearly $2.3 billion in taxes and exceeded expectations by nearly $85 million, or nearly 3.9%. Tax collections also are running 4.1% ahead of collections for the 2019 fiscal year. They have exceeded expectations 28 of the past 29 months.\n\nKentucky\n\nMayfield: A prominent painter whose works capture the state’s rural, small-town culture is turning 100. Helen LaFrance visited a church in Mayfield on Saturday to celebrate her birthday with an unexpectedly large group of friends and family. A documentary about her also was shown at a separate church in town. According to a press release, LaFrance’s paintings are housed in museums in the U.S. and Europe and in the collections of Oprah Winfrey and Bryant Gumbel. The self-taught, African American painter’s works show people at church, family gatherings, funerals and other aspects of small town life in western Kentucky. One of her first known public works is a mural in the St. James AME Church in Mayfield, completed in 1947. LaFrance also has worked in wood carving and quilting.\n\nLouisiana\n\nLafayette: A man was sentenced to probation Friday for killing one of the state’s oldest whooping cranes. Gilvin P. Aucoin Jr., of Ville Platte, shot the endangered whooping crane in July 2018 in Evangeline Parish. In a hearing before U.S. Magistrate Judge Carol B. Whitehurst, Aucoin changed his plea to guilty for a misdemeanor violation of the International Migratory Bird Treaty Act. Whitehurst sentenced Aucoin to two years’ probation, during which time he cannot hunt or fish, and 120 hours of community service to be served with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Aucoin, 53, also must complete a hunter education course. Whooping cranes are among the world’s most endangered birds. About 850 are alive, with about 660 of them in the wild. Nearly all of Louisiana’s birds, like the one killed in 2018, were raised by people in crane costumes so that the birds will stay wary of humans.\n\nMaine\n\nPortland: A federal judge is considering a request to put on hold a state law requiring cable companies to offer channels on an a la carte basis. Comcast, joined by Disney, Fox Cable and NBC/Universal, is seeking a temporary restraining order to delay the law. The Portland Press Herald reports District Judge Nancy Torreson didn’t provide a timetable for her ruling after hearing arguments Friday. The state law requiring cable companies to offer channels individually took effect in September. Comcast contends enforcement of the law would mean limited choices and higher prices than the current packages it offers to consumers. The newspaper reports that Maine would become the first state in the country to require a la carte cable selections if the law is upheld.\n\nMaryland\n\nBaltimore: A community vigil, art workshops and a poetry-writing workshop were among many peace-themed events aimed at promoting nonviolence during “Baltimore Ceasefire” weekend. The first ceasefire weekend was held in 2017 by organizers who urged that it be seen as a 72-hour period when no murders are committed in the violence-plagued city. The weekends are held every three months. The hopes of Erricka Bridgeford and other founders of the ceasefire weekends are often dashed, as they were Saturday afternoon when two men were shot. A 24-year-old man was pronounced dead, becoming Baltimore’s 286th homicide victim of the year. But the ceasefire weekends do seem to have some effect. The Baltimore Sun reports a study conducted by Bridgeford’s organization found an average 52% reduction in shootings on ceasefire weekends.\n\nMassachusetts\n\nBoston: Contests that involve the hunting of predator or fur-bearing animals like coyotes would be banned under a proposal being considered by state wildlife officials. Critics of the contests say that they’re cruel and that randomly killing coyotes won’t prevent conflicts with people, pets or livestock. The Massachusetts Division of Fisheries and Wildlife is planning to hold a hearing Tuesday evening at the Richard Cronin Building in Westborough to hear from the public. Wildlife officials say the current level of coyote hunting doesn’t reduce the population, nor would hunting have an appreciable impact on coyote populations. They say despite the presence of coyotes, deer populations are thriving in Massachusetts.\n\nMichigan\n\nMount Pleasant: Gov. Gretchen Whitmer is ordering state agencies to step up collaboration with Native American tribes. Whitmer signed an executive directive Thursday affirming commitment to the sovereignty and right of self-governance of Michigan’s federally recognized tribes. The document outlines a process for communication between tribes and state departments and agencies on matters of mutual concern. It also makes a first-time requirement of training on tribal-state relations for all state employees who work on matters with direct implications for tribes. Whitmer issued the directive during a meeting with the state’s tribal leaders in Mount Pleasant.\n\nMinnesota\n\nMinneapolis: Environmental groups and activists in Minneapolis and Duluth are advocating for a new strategy on plastic bag restrictions. Minnesota Public Radio News reports advocates are pushing for fees for paper and plastic bags in the two cities. They want customers to think about whether they’re needed. Bag It, Duluth and other environmental groups pivoted to this tactic after Minnesota prohibited cities from banning plastic bags in 2017. The ordinances would place a nickel fee on both paper and plastic disposable bags. But Duluth’s council revised the ordinance there to apply only to plastic bags. The efforts in the two cities are part of a nationwide movement to reduce the use of plastic bags.\n\nMississippi\n\nJackson: A federal judge ruled Friday that he will not immediately block the state’s unique, multistep process for electing a governor and other statewide officials, which was enacted at a time of Jim Crow segregation to maintain white rule. U.S. District Judge Daniel P. Jordan III said he would not issue a preliminary injunction to prevent the system from being used in Tuesday’s elections. However, he left open the possibility of further considering the case later. Mississippi’s 1890 constitution requires a statewide candidate to win a majority of the popular vote and a majority of the 122 state House districts. If nobody wins both, the election is decided by the House, and representatives are not obligated to vote as their districts did. African American plaintiffs who sued the state this year have argued that the system unconstitutionally violates the principle of one person, one vote.\n\nMissouri\n\nSt. Louis: A bill requiring gun dealers to alert police when a firearms purchase is denied because of a criminal background check is the latest step in addressing violence in a city beset by gun crimes. St. Louis aldermen unanimously gave final approval to the bill Friday. Supporters say 30% of criminals who try to purchase guns but fail to do so because of background checks are arrested within five years. The bill awaits Democratic Mayor Lyda Krewson’s signature. Missouri’s big cities, St. Louis and Kansas City, have among the highest homicide rates in the nation. Both are seeking to address the problem through tougher local gun laws, as statewide legislation is unlikely in the conservative-led state, where Republican Gov. Mike Parson has pledged “to protect the rights of the Second Amendment for law-abiding citizens.”\n\nMontana\n\nBillings: An environmentalist has found plastic pollution in half of the water samples collected statewide this summer. The Billings Gazette reports Environment Montana Research & Policy Center director Skye Borden traveled across the state collecting 50 samples at fishing access sites. Borden says the results are meant to start a conversation on how to reduce plastic consumption and raise awareness. Borden says plastic reduction options include phasing out single-use plastics, reusing plastics and encouraging businesses to eliminate unnecessary plastics. Borden says communities could also initiate cleanup programs. A 2016 federal report found that millions of metric tons of plastic made their way into the food chain and contaminated drinking water. Scientists say long-term effects of plastic ingestion are unclear, but plastic chemicals could build up over time.\n\nNebraska\n\nLincoln: A former superintendent of the Nebraska State Patrol wants to carry a concealed firearm and is suing the patrol to get it. Bradley Rice was fired by Gov. Pete Ricketts in June 2017 amid a review that found evidence that high-ranking patrol staffers interfered with the agency’s internal investigations. The lawsuit filed Wednesday says Rice asked the agency this past April for an identification card to allow him to carry a weapon. Federal code lets qualified retired law enforcement officers carry concealed firearms with proper identification. The lawsuit says the current patrol superintendent, John Bolduc, denied Rice’s request on grounds that Rice did not depart the agency in good standing. Rice’s lawsuit says he has concerns for his safety in public places because of his work in law enforcement.\n\nNevada\n\nReno: A federal judge has dismissed a lawsuit seeking to outlaw the state’s legal brothel industry. Chief U.S. District Judge Miranda Du dismissed the lawsuit Tuesday, ruling that the allegations made against the state were insufficient “on their face to invoke federal jurisdiction.” In her court order granting the dismissal, Du said the plaintiffs relied on federal criminal statutes that prohibit illegal prostitution and sex trafficking across states. In February, Reno attorney Jason Guinasso filed the suit against the state on behalf of Rebekah Charleston, who claimed she was a victim of sex trafficking in brothels. The lawsuit additionally named two other women who also claimed they were trafficked in Nevada. The suit sought to end ordinances that allow legalized prostitution in Lyon, Elko, Lander, Mineral, Nye, Storey and White Pine counties.\n\nNew Hampshire\n\nConcord: The state’s congressional delegation is calling on the Environmental Protection Agency to level the playing field for producers of biomass energy. The four-Democrat delegation wants electricity in the Renewable Fuel Standard program in time for biomass power producers to participate in the 2020 market. They say New Hampshire’s biomass power industry has been directly threatened by the agency’s failure to include electricity in the program. The program was created by Congress in 2005 to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from the transportation sector and expand the nation’s renewable fuels sector, which includes electricity produced by biomass. The letter signed by Sens. Jeanne Shaheen and Maggie Hassan and Reps. Annie Kuster and Chris Pappas says the omission puts rural jobs and local government infrastructure at risk in farming, forestry, logging and waste-to-energy.\n\nNew Jersey\n\nMaurice River: State environmental officials are moving to protect a lighthouse on Delaware Bay considered one of the most vulnerable in the nation to rising seas and storm surges. The Department of Environmental Protection said Friday that it will begin this week to protect the East Point Lighthouse with giant, sand-filled synthetic fabric tubes meant to temporarily keep the waves and tides at bay until a long-term solution can be found. The project will cost more than $460,000 at the lighthouse in Maurice River Township in Cumberland County, using a grant from the National Park Service. The two-story brick structure was built in 1849 and is on the National Register of Historic Places. It sits just 90 feet from the mean high-water mark, but during storms the surf pounds against an earthen wall just 10 yards from the lighthouse’s front steps.\n\nNew Mexico\n\nAlbuquerque: Many state lawmakers say they want to build up the government workforce, but the vacancy rate in the state’s executive branch has clung to about 22% even after pay raises and increased recruitment efforts. The Albuquerque Journal reports state agencies are competing with strong demand in the private sector for workers, especially in southeastern New Mexico, where an oil boom is generating high-paying jobs. Officials say low pay in some state departments and the reputation of state government itself after years of belt-tightening also are factors. State Personnel Director Pamela Coleman says she’s optimistic the vacancy rate will fall as the new administration’s priorities take hold. Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham took office Jan. 1, when the vacancy rate in state government was also about 22%.\n\nNew York\n\nNew York: New York City voters used to picking one candidate per race may soon be marking their ballots for up to five. A measure on the city’s ballot Tuesday will let voters rank their choices in primaries and special elections for mayor, city comptroller, public advocate, borough president and City Council starting in 2021. The system is known as ranked-choice or instant-runoff voting. It is in effect in U.S. cities including San Francisco, Minneapolis and Cambridge, Massachusetts, as well as throughout Maine. Backers say ranked-choice voting forces candidates to broaden their appeal beyond a narrow base in hopes of being chosen second or third by voters whose favorite is someone else. Critics of the system call it unconstitutional or confusing.\n\nNorth Carolina\n\nAsheville: Cold weather is hitting western North Carolina, but fewer homeless shelters are allowing men inside. The Asheville Homeless Coalition called a “code purple” for Friday. That means organizations will open shelters from the cold. But in recent years, a number of shelters have said they would no longer host men. The shelters cite growing security concerns and an inability to ensure the safety of women and children. They also said they need more support from local police. A yearly census of the homeless in the area found that more than 70% were men.\n\nNorth Dakota\n\nBismarck: Gov. Doug Burgum is asking for federal help for farmers and ranchers struggling with wet harvest conditions. State Agriculture Commissioner Doug Goehring says unusual and relentless wet weather has been overwhelming for agricultural producers. Excessive rain, an early October snowstorm, widespread flooding and high winds have caused hundreds of millions of dollars in commodity losses in North Dakota. Burgum is asking for a secretarial disaster designation, which would make federal loans available to farmer and ranchers. To qualify for a secretarial designation, a county must have experienced a minimum 30% production loss of at least one crop due to natural disaster. In North Dakota, 45 of the state’s 53 counties report meeting that threshold.\n\nOhio\n\nCincinnati: An analysis has found a growing number of small towns in the state have disbanded in recent years. The analysis of statewide election results found 12 small towns have gone defunct in the past 15 years. The number of small towns dying has increased as costs go up and revenues decline. Residents of Newtonsville and Amelia in southwestern Ohio’s Clermont County will vote Tuesday on whether to dissolve those villages. They would be absorbed by surrounding townships if voters approve dissolution. The imposition of a 1% tax on residents’ income in each town has spurred some supporters of dissolution, while opponents argue villages provide a personal touch not found in townships. Newtonsville has about 400 residents. Amelia has about 5,000.\n\nOklahoma\n\nOklahoma City: A former four-term Democratic congressman from the Sooner State is quitting his position as a member of the National Rifle Association’s 76-member board, citing the organization’s “mounting troubles.” In his resignation letter obtained by the Associated Press, Dan Boren suggests some current and past NRA members have lost trust in the group, which has been roiled by infighting that included severing ties with Ackerman McQueen, its longtime Oklahoma-based public relations firm. In the letter to the organization’s Secretary and General Counsel John Frazer, Boren also said he was ending his NRA membership. The 46-year-old Boren is part of one of Oklahoma’s most powerful political families. He’s the son of ex-Gov. and U.S. Sen. David Boren and the grandson of ex-congressman Lyle Boren.\n\nOregon\n\nSalem: Many users of natural gas will see an increase in their bills starting in November. The Oregon Public Utility Commission has approved rate hikes for the state’s three gas utilities, only the third time in the past ten years. The increase in the wholesale cost of natural gas is blamed on a pipeline explosion last winter that affected regional gas supplies, according to a statement from the Public Utility Commission. An overall increase of $15.142 million was approved for NW Natural, which serves nearly 670,000 customers in the Willamette Valley and on the Oregon Coast from Astoria to Coos Bay. Typical residential customers of NW Natural using 54 therms per month will see their bill increase by $2.31, or 4.4%, from $52.43 to $54.74.\n\nPennsylvania\n\nPocono Manor: Authorities said Saturday that firefighters were still looking for hot spots at a wind-whipped fire that has destroyed much of a century-old Poconos resort. No injuries were reported in the blaze reported at 6 a.m. Friday at the Pocono Manor Resort, which is on the National Register of Historic Places. Officials say guests in about 25 rooms were safely evacuated. They believe the fire started in a dining area and quickly spread. The Monroe County resort, known locally as “the grand lady of the mountains,” was built by Quakers in 1902 and designated a historic site in 1977. The inn had been set to close later this month for a two-year renovation. The Pocono Mountains Visitors Bureau said several properties offered alternatives for overnight guests, groups and weddings booked through this month.\n\nRhode Island\n\nProvidence: The state has officially taken control of the city’s struggling school district. State officials authorized the takeover shortly after researchers at Johns Hopkins University released a scathing report in June that found the district beleaguered with low test scores, crumbling infrastructure and widespread dysfunction, labeling it among the worst in the nation. The takeover, which began Friday, is expected to last at least five years. State Education Commissioner Angelica Infante-Green, who controls the school budget, program and personnel, says it’s a new chapter for Providence schools, students and families. A website was launched to provide updates. Infante-Green is searching for a superintendent to manage the turnaround.\n\nSouth Carolina\n\nCharleston: Officials have confirmed seven more cases of mumps at the College of Charleston, bringing the total number of cases to 18 since the state declared an outbreak in September. News outlets report the new cases of the viral disease at the school were confirmed Thursday. College spokesman Mark Berry says the college will operate normally “regardless of the number of positive mumps cases.” The state Department of Health and Environmental Control said the first case was confirmed Sept. 17. It said the cases involve both vaccinated and unvaccinated people. Officials say some of the cases aren’t infectious, but students should monitor themselves. Vaccination is also recommended. Mumps can be transmitted through air droplets from coughs and sneezes.\n\nSouth Dakota\n\nPierre: Opponents of the Keystone XL pipeline in the state are pointing to a significant oil spill in their neighbor to the north to help make their case. A handful of water permits were up for consideration last week before the state water management board in Pierre. The meetings were contentious enough that the process will be extended to additional meetings in December. As those meetings were underway, a spill of about 383,000 gallons was reported along the Keystone pipeline in northeastern North Dakota. Faith Spotted Eagle, a member of the Yankton Sioux Tribe, said it was a sharp contrast to assertions that the Keystone XL in South Dakota would be safe. A spokeswoman for TC Energy, developer of both pipelines, said it’s unfortunate opponents are using the North Dakota spill to claim the Keystone XL would be unsafe.\n\nTennessee\n\nNashville: Three condemned inmates in the state have chosen to die in the electric chair in the past year, claiming the state’s lethal injection method is even worse. Tennessee is one of six states that allow inmates to choose electrocution. Courts in Georgia and Nebraska have found the electric chair unconstitutional, and the U.S. Supreme Court has never fully considered its constitutionality. The Tennessee inmates argued in court that the state’s midazolam-based lethal injection method causes feelings of burning and suffocating. But their court challenge was dismissed when they failed to prove a more humane method was available. Tennessee has three executions scheduled and nine more in the works. Unless something changes, it is likely the three inmates who opted for the electric chair won’t be the last.\n\nTexas\n\nAustin: The University of Texas chapter of the Pi Kappa Phi fraternity has been shut down following a university investigation into hazing allegations. The investigation found that during the 2018-19 school year, fraternity pledges were shot with airsoft guns and forced to eat spicy soup made with ghost peppers and cat food. Officials said pledges competed in relay races where they would run back and forth between the chapter house and a nearby apartment building while chugging milk mixed with hand soap, laundry detergent or vinaigrette. The chapter officially closed Tuesday. Fraternity CEO Mark E. Timmes said shuttering the chapter was the “only appropriate action.” Fraternity officials say the students involved have been placed on disciplinary alumni status. It’s the third hazing allegation in the chapter in the past eight years.\n\nUtah\n\nSalt Lake City: Gov. Gary Herbert has asked the White House to send more refugees to the state. The Republican governor sent a letter to President Donald Trump last week. Herbert says Utah has the resources and space for refugees. In the past, Herbert says Utah has been able to accept 1,000 refugees per year, but the numbers of those settling in the state have decreased. Herbert sent the letter as the Trump administration prepares to reduce the number of refugees accepted into the country, while allowing states more say over whether they will accept them. Herbert says the compassion to welcome refugees is a part of the culture of Utah, where members of The Church of Latter-day Saints found refuge generations ago. He says Utah’s refugees contribute to the communities where they resettle.\n\nVermont\n\nKillington: The town is going to have to repay the federal government more than $137,000 it received to help pay for repairs caused by flooding from Tropical Storm Irene. But Killington won’t have to repay an additional $197,000 after it won an appeal to the Federal Emergency Management Agency. The Rutland Herald reports the issue stems from the replacement of two large culverts that washed out during Irene in 2011. The town replaced them with concrete bridge structures. FEMA says it felt the town went beyond the scope of the agreed-upon work and wants the money back. Select Board Chairman Steve Finneron says the town appealed FEMA’s ruling, which took several years. The final decision came down at the end of October.\n\nVirginia\n\nRoanoke: Nearly 5,000 acres of woodlands in northern Botetourt County are to become part of the Jefferson National Forest. The Roanoke Times reports the U.S. Forest Service used money from the federal Land and Water Conservation Fund to buy the property in what it calls one of the largest purchases for conservation in Virginia. The $5 million purchase was made possible earlier this year by a vote in Congress to reauthorize the Land and Water Conservation Fund, a $900 million program that uses royalties from offshore oil and gas drilling to pay for protection of unspoiled lands. The land, which includes 14 freshwater springs, borders Craig Creek and also includes the Grace Furnace, a historic pig iron facility that likely provided iron ore for munitions during the Civil War.\n\nWashington\n\nSnoqualmie: The Snoqualmie Tribe has purchased the Salish Lodge & Spa and the acreage surrounding Snoqualmie Falls, marking a major victory in the tribe’s pursuit to reclaim land it considers sacred. The Seattle Times reports the Snoqualmie Tribe purchased the Northwest landmark and land from the Muckleshoot Tribe for $125 million, according to a news release. The total area is about 45 acres. The purchase does not include Snoqualmie Falls itself, but the tribe said it plans to discuss ownership of the underlying aquatic lands with the state. Puget Sound Energy holds the license to two hydroelectric generating plants at the falls. The Snoqualmie Tribe has spent years fighting against development near Snoqualmie Falls. Tribal members believe that the mists of the falls carry prayers to their ancestors, who used the site as a gathering place.\n\nWest Virginia\n\nHuntington: Marshall University says it plans to open a commercial compost facility in January. The university said in a statement that it’s working to obtain funding for the last piece of equipment needed to make the site fully functional. The facility is being developed by the university’s Sustainability Department, and sustainability manager Amy Parsons-White says most of the waste produced at Marshall can either be recycled or composted. Marshall President Jerome Gilbert says it’s a way for the school to help the environment and give back to the community. The statement says compost produced by the facility will be used on the Huntington campus and sold to the public.\n\nWisconsin\n\nMadison: Gov. Tony Evers says it’s “astonishing” that Republicans want to fire his agriculture secretary. Evers appointed Brad Pfaff to lead the agency in January, but the Senate has not voted to confirm him. Pfaff angered lawmakers when he criticized the Legislature’s Republican-controlled budget committee for not releasing $200,000 to help with farmer mental health programs. Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald’s spokesman Alec Zimmerman says there aren’t enough votes in the Senate to confirm him. He says Fitzgerald asked Evers to withdraw the nomination. Evers said in a statement that removing Pfaff would “create even more uncertainty and instability” for farmers and rural communities. The Senate is scheduled to vote on Pfaff on Tuesday.\n\nWyoming\n\nCody: Yellowstone National Park officials say that despite the challenges of managing visitors eager to photograph wildlife in the park, the number of conflicts involving humans and bears was low in 2018. Yellowstone biologist Kerry Gunther says in the park’s annual bear report that it was a considerable challenge to manage visitors who stopped to view and photograph bears foraging in roadside meadows, creating what she called “large bear jams.” The Cody Enterprise reports rangers were notified of 1,627 grizzly and black bear sightings in the park between March 10, 2018, the first sighting of bear activity of the spring, through Dec. 20, 2018, the last black bear sighting of the year. Yellowstone officials predict bears will become more habituated to humans as the park welcomes more visitors.\n\nFrom USA TODAY Network and wire reports", "authors": [], "publish_date": "2019/11/04"}, {"url": "https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/50-states/2021/11/30/menorahs-aglow-toaster-bullets-wright-brothers-news-around-states/49457057/", "title": "Menorahs aglow, toaster bullets, Wright Brothers: News from around ...", "text": "From USA TODAY Network and wire reports\n\nAlabama\n\nMontgomery:Doyle Lee Hamm, an inmate whose lethal injection was halted because medical staff couldn’t find a suitable vein for the execution, has died of natural causes almost four years later, his attorney said. Hamm, who was convicted in the slaying of a motel clerk in 1987, died of natural causes on death row, said his longtime attorney, Bernard Harcourt. He was 64. Officials postponed Hamm’s execution in February 2018 because workers couldn’t find a suitable vein to connect the intravenous line used to send lethal chemicals into his body. Hamm and the state reached an agreement the following month that prevented further execution attempts, but he remained on death row at Holman Prison because of his capital conviction, Harcourt said. Hamm suffered from an aggressive lymphatic cancer for years, Harcourt said. The Holman warden called Hamm’s brother to inform him of the prisoner’s death Sunday morning, Harcourt said.\n\nAlaska\n\nKenai: A popular Kenai Peninsula recreation spot near Cooper Landing will be closed for nearly a year to partially rebuild a road and reinforce parts of the hillside along the Kenai River, U.S. Forest Service officials said. The Russian River Campground Road and campground will be closed to the public from Aug. 1, 2022, to June 1, 2023, the Peninsula Clarion reported. Among the scheduled work will be rebuilding the campground road to make it safer for cars, recreational vehicles and pedestrians, the forest service said in a statement. The shoulder will also be widened, and a new guardrail will be installed. Work to reinforce the hillside along the riverbank will make the area less prone to landslides and surface erosion, and officials said the work is scheduled to be done before the sockeye salmon sport fishing season opens. “Reducing the long-term threat of erosion and landslides is essential to preserving the water quality for healthy salmon spawning and rearing in the Russian and Kenai rivers,” the statement said. The service also said residents and visitors should be mindful of the upcoming closure when making recreation plans for the area.\n\nArizona\n\nFlagstaff: The city is pausing the construction of buildings in partnership with the U.S. Geological Survey because of soaring costs. The Arizona Daily Sun reported officials made the decision earlier this month after determining the project would cost an additional $10 million. The collaboration encompasses demolishing buildings on the USGS campus near Buffalo Park and erecting a new warehouse and lab offices. The city owns the land and buildings but leases it to the USGS. City Capital Improvements manager David Peterson said the Flagstaff City Council approved going through with the project in September but it has been in the planning stages for a decade. In 2016, the projected cost was $20.8 million. Now, it is $32.8 million. Rick Tadder, city management services director, said the project was approved by voters in 2004. He is optimistic that the city and federal officials can step back and find an alternative solution.\n\nArkansas\n\nGreenwood:A Greenwood organization is holding its annual Christmas light display to raise money for community members. Focus on Greenwood’s light display is free to visit, but the group is encouraging people to donate money to the organization, said Richard McKinney, the chairman of Focus on Greenwood. The light display usually generates a few thousand dollars for the organization. That and a fall 5K run are the group’s two largest fundraisers. The Trail of Lights has approximately 50 displays and will open Friday and last through the first week of the new year. It is located at Bell Park. On Thursday and Dec. 18, Focus on Greenwood will hold hayrides on the Trail of Lights. Hot chocolate and s’mores will be available on those dates. The Trail of Lights will also offer a live nativity scene Dec. 13, Dec. 14, Dec. 16 and Dec. 17. The nonprofit formed after members of several chapters of national organizations came together to create a group that is more Greenwood-centric. As a local organization, the members have more control over where the group’s money goes. It allows them to pour money back into the community.\n\nCalifornia\n\nOxnard: Officials are using a California naval base to help alleviate congestion at Los Angeles County ports in time for holiday shopping. The Ventura County Star reported Sunday the Port of Hueneme has an agreement with Naval Base Ventura County to use a wharf, two buildings and land inside the base. Base spokesman Drew Verbis said the wharf is typically used by the Navy to tie up war ships. He said the joint-use agreement dates to 2002, but this is the first time in more than a decade that it has been activated. It was activated earlier this month. The goal is to help alleviate port congestion to the south. Ships have been waiting offshore to unload their goods at the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach.\n\nColorado\n\nDenver Xcel Energy has proposed a tentative agreement to close Colorado’s largest coal-fired power plant by 2035, well ahead of its original retirement date of 2070, as regulators consider how the largest utility operating in the state can reduce its carbon emissions. Minneapolis-based Xcel Energy filed the agreement with the state Nov. 24 affecting its Comanche 3 coal-fired unit at the Comanche Generating Station in Pueblo, Colorado Public Radio reported. Comanche 3 has faced operational, equipment and financial problems that led to more than 700 days of unplanned shutdowns since 2010 and higher-than-anticipated electricity costs, the Colorado Public Utilities Commission said in a report earlier this year. If approved, Xcel’s plan to close it could reduce the utility’s carbon dioxide emissions in Colorado by close to 90% this decade, CPR reported. The $1.3 billion unit went into service in 2010 but has been hampered by poor maintenance and oversight, with electricity costs up to 45% higher than projected, according to the state report. Comanche 3 also was Colorado’s largest source of greenhouse gas emissions in 2018, according to U.S. Environmental Protection Agency data. The plan calls for Comanche 3 to run at half-capacity by 2025 and a third of capacity by 2029.\n\nConnecticut\n\nHartford: A dozen nursing home residents died from COVID-19 in Connecticut over a recent two-week period, which is the largest number since mid-August, new data released Friday showed. There were 125 positive cases of COVID-19 among residents between Nov. 10 and Nov. 23, with 12 deaths, according to state Department of Health data. Sixty-seven staff also tested positive during the same period. Five of those deaths occurred at Candlewood Valley Health and Rehabilitation Center in New Milford, which reported 36 positive cases among its 105 residents and eight positive cases among its staff. A message was left seeking comment with the facility’s administrator. The last time there were more than a dozen nursing deaths reported during a two-week period was between Aug. 18 and Aug. 31. At that time, there were 16 deaths from COVID-19 among nursing home residents, 111 positive cases among residents and 94 cases among staff.\n\nDelaware\n\nDover:The Capital Holiday Celebration in downtown Dover will feature a month of events including a tree lighting, caroling, visits from Santa, crafts for children, performances by musicians and programs at parks and museums. Organizing the events takes months, with cooperation from city officials, the Dover Public Library, the Central Delaware Chamber of Commerce and the Downtown Dover Partnership/Main Street Dover. “Since we were prohibited from encouraging gatherings last year due to COVID, the traditional holiday parade became a fun, lighted vehicular parade,” said Diane Laird, executive director of the Downtown Dover Partnership. The electric light parade, known as “Dashing Through Dover,” will trake place on Loockerman Street at 6 p.m. Dec. 11. The tree lighting takes place at 5:30 p.m. Friday.\n\nDistrict of Columbia\n\nWashington:The Festival of Lights kicked off in D.C. with a clear view of the White House on a chilly Sunday night as the National Menorah was lit, brightly celebrating the first night of Hanukkah, WUSA-TV reported. Doug Emhoff, husband of Vice President Kamala Harris, spoke at the ceremony, which had thousands in attendance and a record number of people watching virtually, National Menorah Media stated via a press release. “May this festival of lights bring blessings upon you and your loved ones over these next eight nights. From our family to yours, have a Happy Hanukkah!” Emhoff tweeted the afternoon of the ceremony. He is the first Jewish spouse of an American president or vice president.\n\nFlorida\n\nLauderhill: The Florida Agency for Health Care Administration has begun a process to revoke a South Florida assisted living home’s license after a 69-year-old woman who went missing ended up dead in a car in the parking lot. Yvanne Moise left Victoria’s Retirement home in Lauderhill on Sept. 18 and never returned, the South Florida Sun Sentinel reported. The state health care agency’s recent inspection said the facility lacked a plan required by state law to address Moise’s “severe or persistent mental condition.” And it did not have updated versions of those plans for seven of its 18 other residents who were also considered “limited mental health residents,” the newspaper reported. Moise didn’t sign out when she left the home on Sept. 18. The report said she repeatedly told a staff member she was going to leave, and by 8:30 a.m., she was nowhere to be found. The report said an employee watched her walk out the front gate and into the parking lot. Moise didn’t listen to the employee’s multiple attempts to get her to stay. The employee then went inside to to call the facility’s administrator to report that Moise wouldn’t come back inside.\n\nGeorgia\n\nAtlanta: More than half of absentee ballot applications rejected in Georgia in advance of the Nov. 2 election were turned down because they came in after a deadline created in Georgia’s new voting law. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported 52% of applications were rejected because voters asked for an absentee ballot within the last 11 days before the election, too late to meet the requirements of a voting law passed in March. The deadline was created in Senate Bill 202, which also limited absentee voting by restricting drop boxes and requiring voters to prove they had a driver’s license or other state identification when applying. The top reason Georgia election officials rejected absentee ballot applications this fall was that they were submitted too close to Election Day, missing a deadline imposed by the state’s new voting law. Republicans in the General Assembly pushed through the new law after a record 1.3 million Georgians mailed in or dropped off ballots in the 2020 presidential election. The newspaper reported about 26% of those who made absentee ballot requests after the deadline cast ballots in person on Election Day.\n\nHawaii\n\nHonolulu: A Kauai nonprofit now owns the island’s last remaining fishpond through a private donation and the Trust for Public Land. The 102-acre Alakoko Fishpond dates at least 600 years. Its owners put the property on the market for $3 million, Hawaii Public Radio reported. The new owner is Mālama Hulēʻia, a nonprofit that has been restoring the fishpond for the last four years. The Trust for Public Land raised funds and secured a donation from Chan Zuckerberg Kauai Community Fund of the Hawaii Community Foundation. The trust then bought the property and conveyed it to Mālama Hulē’ia. The deed ensures the fishpond will be used for conservation and Native Hawaiian education, aquaculture, and stewardship. The trust didn’t say how much it paid for the property. A trust representative didn’t immediately return a phone message from the Associated Press on Friday. Sara Bowen, Mālama Hulēʻia’s leader, said the top priority is repairing fishpond’s 2,700 feet-long wall with the ultimate goal of having Alakoko again be a source of healthy local food. The fishpond is also known as the Menehune Fishpond.\n\nIdaho\n\nBoise: Idaho’s parole board is scheduled to hold a hearing this week on a request to reduce the death penalty sentence of an inmate with terminal cancer to a sentence of life in prison. Idaho’s Commission of Pardons and Parole is scheduled to meet Tuesday to hear the request to commute the sentence of Gerald Ross Pizzuto Jr., who was convicted of a double murder in 1985, the Idaho Statesman reported. The commission agreed to the hearing in May, staying Pizzuto’s June 2 execution date. Pizzuto, 65, has been on death row for 35 years after being convicted for the July 1985 slayings of two gold prospectors at a cabin north of McCall. Pizzuto has bladder cancer, diabetes and heart disease and is confined to a wheelchair. He has been in hospice care since 2019, when doctors said he likely wouldn’t survive for another year. If the seven-member board grants Pizzuto clemency, Gov. Brad Little must approve the decision.\n\nIllinois\n\nSpringfield: Grant money from the state’s pheasant wildlife program will support upland game conservation and restoration of prairies and woodlands in northern Illinois. The Illinois Department of Natural Resources announced this weeks grants of more than $113,000. The money comes from the State Pheasant Fund Special Wildlife Funds Grant Program. It’s replenished by proceeds from the sale of habitat stamps. The Logan County-based Quail and Upland Game Alliance will receive $83,362 to complete “wildlife-friendly management work” to pheasant ranges on public and private land. The alliance will put up about $25,300 in matching funds. Work will proceed on land that is not part of the federal Conservation Reserve Program, as well as enrolled acreage. CRP pays farmers to take environmentally sensitive land out of production and use it to grow plants that will improve the environment. A grant of $30,000 was awarded to the Natural Land Institute. The Rockford-based organization’s work at Lost Flora Fen on Raccoon Creek in Winnebago County aims to restore 120 acres of native prairie and improve 277 acres of existing prairie and woodland.\n\nIndiana\n\nSouth Bend: A legal fight is emerging over the redrawing of local election districts in St. Joseph County. The Democratic-controlled County Council voted last week to hire a law firm for a possible lawsuit against the new election maps approved by the all-Republican county commissioners. Opponents of those new maps argued they wrongly shift most of the county’s Black population into one of the three commissioners districts that is confined to the South Bend city limits, the South Bend Tribune reported. Critics said it’s an example of “packing” as many racial and ethnic minorities as possible into one district to limit their influence and that the new districts favor Republicans. Commissioners President Andy Kostielney has said he’s confident the proposed maps would stand up to any legal challenge. Political tensions over the St. Joseph County redistricting grew this fall after the commissioners spent $35,000 to hire the law firm of Republican former Indiana House Speaker Brian Bosma for help drawing the maps. The County Council has set aside $50,000 to pay Indianapolis law firm Ice Miller. Former state Democratic Chairman Kip Tew, who is leading the Ice Miller legal team, said he didn’t know how quickly a court challenge to the redistricting could be resolved.\n\nIowa\n\nUrbandaleAn Iowa hospital said it is implementing procedures to ensure it doesn’t repeat a mistake made two weekends ago when more than 100 children were given the wrong dose of a COVID-19 vaccine. MercyOne said in a statement that the children under age 12 at a mass vaccination event Nov. 20 in Urbandale should have received the prescribed 10-microgram dose of the Pfizer vaccine. Instead, they received 20 micrograms, still less than the adult dosage of 30 micrograms. The hospital said the higher dosage could include more pronounced side effects such as a sore arm, mild fever, headache and fatigue. The hospital said it is reaching out to parents of the children, and pediatricians are available to answer questions from the families.\n\nKansas\n\nTopeka:State Rep. Aaron Coleman, D-Kansas City, was arrested for allegedly driving under the influence Saturday morning in Douglas County, just weeks after the embattled lawmaker was arrested and charged with domestic battery. Coleman was booked into the Douglas County jail at 1 a.m. Saturday, jail records showed, and charged with one count of misdemeanor driving under the influence. The booking report showed Coleman was stopped by the Kansas Highway Patrol at mile marker 203 of Interstate 70, heading westbound. Coleman was released on a $250 bond, jail records showed. He did not answer a phone call seeking comment Sunday night. The event came after Coleman was arrested and charged with misdemeanor domestic battery stemming from an altercation with his brother, where police records showed the 21-year-old lawmaker allegedly hit and spit on his brother and made threatening remarks to his grandfather.\n\nKentucky\n\nLouisville: Parishioners in Kentucky have accused a Roman Catholic priest of converting church funds for his personal use. Current and former parish council members at St. John Vianney Catholic Church in Louisville filed a civil lawsuit in Jefferson County against the Rev. Anthony Ngo, news outlets reported. The lawsuit accused Ngo of violating his fiduciary duties by pocketing the donations. Ngo has refused to share documents with the parish council about the church’s funds and donations and instructed a parish accountant to withhold the documents as well, it said. “Donations made by parishioners and others to the parish have been converted by (Ngo) without authority or accountability,” the lawsuit said. Ngo has declined comment, citing the ongoing lawsuit. Louisville Archdiocese spokeswoman Cecelia Price said a financial audit was conducted and “no malfeasance was found.” Ngo has been pastor for more than two decades and remains assigned to the church. Price said the audit did identify “some procedural and management issues, and financial procedures will be reinforced for good financial management going forward.” The lawsuit also said Ngo removed the plaintiffs from their volunteer roles on the parish council out of retaliation.\n\nLouisiana\n\nNew Orleans: An environmental group that makes oyster reefs from shells collected at area restaurants now has a new partner so anyone can contribute. “After enjoying oysters at home with family and friends, you can help protect our coast” by bringing shells to a public drop-off, said Kellyn LaCour-Conant, restoration programs director at the Coalition to Restore Coastal Louisiana. The organization has created four reefs with shells collected from restaurants since it began the “Restaurants to Reefs” program in 2014. The Green Project, which runs a salvage store and paint recycling project, now has purple oyster collection bins outside, the coalition said in a news release Friday. People can drop off their empty oyster shells from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Wednesday through Saturday. Another environmental recycler had been doing that. But Glass Half Full had to pause that after Hurricane Ida hit in late August, the news release said. Reefs provide homes and nurseries for hundreds of kinds of marine animals and plants. Each oyster can filter up to 25 gallons of water a day. And the reefs slow down the waves that chew continually at Louisiana’s coast. The coalition’s recycling program has used more than 5 tons of shells to build 1.3 miles of living shoreline.\n\nMaine\n\nPresque Isle: A 37-year-old Maine woman has been rescued by game wardens after falling in Aroostook State Park in Presque Isle, officials said. Wardens said the Caribou woman was hiking with three relatives Saturday when she slipped on a snowy area on the trail to the south peak and slid about 40 feet downhill. The woman suffered a possible broken hip and some facial cuts, and she was unable to walk. The first warden on the scene requested a helicopter, but because of snow and wind, none could respond. A team of seven game wardens, rescue personnel from Presque Isle and volunteers carried the woman off the trail. The woman was taken to a Presque Isle hospital. Her condition was unknown.\n\nMaryland\n\nCollege Park: Researchers at three universities in Maryland will study why there are so few women and people of color in leadership roles at universities. They’re also hoping to bring more diversity to those top jobs. The Washington Post reported Saturday that the research will be conducted by faculty from the University of Maryland in College Park, the University of Maryland Baltimore County and Morgan State University. The researchers are getting the support of a $3 million grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Phillip Brian Harper, the foundation’s program director for higher learning, noted that each of the three schools has a Black president. “(T)hese institutions already manifest the type of leadership that we are trying to promote within the U.S. academy,” he said.\n\nMassachusetts\n\nBoston: A woman with a loaded handgun in her carry-on bag was stopped at a security checkpoint at Logan International Airport on the day before Thanksgiving, according to the Transportation Security Administration. The handgun had five rounds in it when it was found in the bag, TSA spokesperson Dan Velez said in a tweet. State police were called and “cited the woman on a state charge,” according to the tweet. Her name was not made public. TSA officers have found 16 firearms at security checkpoints in Boston so far this year, he said. Firearms can be transported on a commercial aircraft only if they are unloaded, packed in a locked, hard-sided case and placed in checked baggage, the TSA said. Ammunition, firearm parts, and replica firearms are also prohibited in carry-on baggage and must be checked.\n\nMichigan\n\nBay City: Residents complaining about foul odors from a sugar beet processor in Bay City have a lost a key decision at the Michigan Court of Appeals. Michigan Sugar, which turns beets into sugar, is accused of depriving people from enjoying their property because of odors. But the appeals court said Mikkie Morley and Jonathan Morley, who moved into their home in 2016, haven’t exhausted the complaint process at state agencies. The court also dismissed a separate negligence claim. “The alleged noxious odors in this case amount to a transitory condition and the Morleys have not alleged that the condition has physically damaged their property,” the court said in a 3-0 opinion on Nov. 18. Laura Sheets said her law office has been contacted by hundreds of residents. “You want to sit out on your porch or mow your yard or play with your kids, and it smells unbearably horrible. … Those are real harms,” Sheets told the court on Nov. 3. Michigan Sugar’s attorney, Brion Doyle, said millions of dollars are being spent to control odors under a previous agreement with state regulators.\n\nMinnesota\n\nDuluth: The Superior National Forest’s first full-time tribal liaison said he wants to work with the federal government on proposed expansion of the Lutsen Mountains Ski Area. Juan Martinez started his new role in January, but he didn’t move to Minnesota until July. He coordinates communication between the national forest and the three Ojibwe bands in northeastern Minnesota. The Bois Forte Band of Chippewa, the Fond du Lac Band of Lake Superior Chippewa and the Grand Portage Band of Lake Superior Chippewa occupied the nearly 4 million acres that now make up the Superior National Forest long before the federal government acquired it. They maintain rights to hunt, fish, gather and practice their spiritual traditions on the land as part of an 1854 treaty signed with the federal government. Lutsen officials want to expand onto 494 acres of adjacent Forest Service land to build new ski runs, chairlifts and other amenities they said are needed to compete against big ski resorts. The Grand Portage Band has argued the project compromises its treaty rights, Minnesota Public Radio News reported. Martinez and Forest Service officials say all sides should be involved in the discussion.\n\nMississippi\n\nPascagoula: State officials are looking for a man who escaped from a hospital bathroom while under police guard and then was recorded on video changing into pilfered clothes. The Jackson County Sheriff’s Department told local news outlets that Aceon Ja’shun Hopkins got away after telling a deputy he had to go to the bathroom while a patient at Singing River Hospital in Pascagoula. Hopkins, 20, had been a patient there since he was shot multiple times in Moss Point in November. Police in Meridian were seeking Hopkins to question him regarding two killings in the eastern Mississippi city. Hopkins hasn’t been charged in connection with the slayings. WTOK-TV reported Hopkins and his brother were charged with shooting up a Meridian shopping center in February. It’s unknown if either was arrested. The Jackson County Sheriff’s Department said Hopkins has warrants for other criminal charges, though, including drug charges in Gulfport. Jackson County Sheriff Mike Ezell said his office is investigating how Hopkins escaped the deputy guarding him.\n\nMissouri\n\nSt. Louis: Bus service will be reduced in St. Louis along more than three dozen routes this week because of a significant worker shortage. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported that Metro Transit has about 150 openings it is struggling to fill, with most of those jobs being driver positions. Typically, the agency employs about 2,300 people. “Our employment crisis is at such a depth that we had to reduce service temporarily while we try to increase our employment,” said Taulby Roach, the president and CEO of Bi-State Development, the agency that oversees Metro Transit. “We had to make a hard decision about what we could reasonably sustain.” Officials are trying to find more workers by organizing job fairs, offering $2,000 hiring bonuses and trying to bring back some retired operators, but they’ve had only limited success with those efforts. Roach said that Metro is “literally begging for employees.” So starting Monday, Metro Transit will reduce service along 38 bus routes and suspend service entirely on six other lines. Roach said Metro has “never had a circumstance where we were literally begging for employees” as is now the case.\n\nMontana\n\nHelena: Strong winds, with occasional gusts of up to 100 mph, made travel difficult along the Rocky Mountain Front in northern Montana, and record high temperatures were seen in some areas, the National Weather Service said Sunday. Southwest winds of 40 to 70 mph were forecast along the eastern side of the Rocky Mountains, which is along the western edge of Glacier National Park. Motorists were warned the wind would cause difficult travel conditions on Interstate 15 from Great Falls to the Canadian border, along Montana Highway 200 from Great Falls to Simms; U.S. Highway 89 from Monarch to Babb; U.S. Highway 2 from Cut Bank to Marias Pass and U.S. Highway 87 from Great Falls to Lewistown. Isolated power outages, downed trees and property damage were possible, the weather service said. A wind gust of 102 mph was recorded at Deep Creek, an area southwest of Browning, on Sunday morning, while East Glacier recorded a gust of 85 mph, the weather service said. A high wind warning was also in effect for the rest of north-central Montana, east of the Continental Divide, where wind gusts could reach 50 to 70 mph. Temperatures Sunday and Sunday night were forecast to be about 20 degrees Fahrenheit above normal, with records expected in several locations, the weather service said. Helena reached 65 at midday Sunday, eclipsing the record of 56 set in 2014. Bozeman, Dillon, Chinook and Havre also set record high temperatures on Sunday. Chinook reached 66, breaking the record of 62.\n\nNebraska\n\nNorth Platte: Chadron State College freshman Ashley Tolstedt became the first female Scout to earn an Eagle Rank last weekend in the Overland Trails Council, which stretches from Ogallala to Cozad and from the South Dakota to Kansas borders. “I’m proud that I am,” the 18-year-old said, “but I think (the honor) should be worth the same that it’s worth to anyone else who earns it. I don’t think me being the first girl should mean that much.” The North Platte Telegraph reported Tolstedt received her Eagle rank pin and neckerchief during a short ceremony in the St. Patrick’s school gymnasium on Nov. 21. She officially earned the honor Oct. 1. Tolstedt also received a bronze Eagle Palm pin during the ceremony for the five additional merit badges she received over the required 21. Her required community service project was refurbishing the stage in St. Patrick’s High School. Girls between the ages of 11 to 17 were allowed to join the Boy Scouts in 2019, but before that, Tolstedt would unofficially tag along when her younger brother, Billy, became a Cub Scout in 2012.\n\nNevada\n\nLas Vegas: Fire crews were able to repair an ammonia leak at a Las Vegas food processing plant before it turned into a more serious incident. Las Vegas Fire & Rescue officials said in a news release they received several 9-1-1 calls Saturday shortly before 10 p.m. about an odor coming from the downtown processing plant. A hazardous materials response team, along with Desert Gold Food Company technicians, responded. Although the odor was gone, they did find a source of a leak. Fire officials said there were no injuries and the leak was fixed relatively quickly. The plant was closed at the time reports started coming in. A few nearby businesses were evacuated as a precaution. Desert Gold Food Company is a local food service distributor.\n\nNew Hampshire\n\nConcord: The New Hampshire Department of Education is offering competitive grants to public schools and public charter schools to set up robotics teams and participate in contests. “Robotics is a great way to reinforce academic concepts while also fostering curiosity among children, promoting teamwork and improving critical technology skills,” said Frank Edelblut, commissioner of education. “These grants will provide more New Hampshire students with the opportunity to embrace STEM concepts and learn through imaginative play and engineering.” The estimated budget for each proposal is $2,000 to $15,000. Applications will be scored by independent peer reviewers. To be eligible, schools must have an established partnership with at least one sponsor. Proposals must include participation in at least one competitive event. The deadline for applications is Dec. 10.\n\nNew Jersey\n\nLong Branch:Gov. Phil Murphy received his Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine booster shot Sunday at Monmouth Medical Center, his office posted to Twitter. Murphy urged everyone 18 and older to schedule shots if six months have passed since their second dose of the Pfizer or Moderna shots, or two months after receiving one dose of Johnson & Johnson’s vaccine, especially as families gather and travel for the holidays. “The best way to strengthen your protection against COVID-19 is to get your booster shot – that’s why, today, I got mine,” Murphy tweeted. “I encourage everyone who’s eligible to get theirs too.” Murphy, 64, first lady Tammy Murphy and three of their children posed for a picture holding up their vaccination cards. The family joined more than 1.2 million people who work, live or study in New Jersey who received a third dose or booster of the vaccine, according to state data. Close to 6.2 million New Jersey residents are fully vaccinated, meaning they received two shots of either the Pfizer or Moderna vaccines, or one dose of Johnson & Johnson.\n\nNew Mexico\n\nAlbuquerque: Three state watchdog offices have dismissed a nonprofit group’s complaints accusing New Mexico Attorney General Hector Balderas of ethics violations in connection with a proposed merger involving the state’s largest utility company. The actions were taken by the state Ethics Commission, the State Auditor’s Office and the New Mexico Supreme Court’s disciplinary board on complaints filed by New Energy Economy, the Albuquerque Journal reported. The complaints alleged a conflict of interest was created when Avangrid, the company seeking to merge with Public Service Co. of New Mexico, hired an attorney to promote the merger. The attorney, Marcus Real Jr., has previously represented Balderas in some matters and early in their careers they briefly worked together. “We were always confident that these complaints would be fairly reviewed and found to be baseless,” Balderas said. NEE Executive Director Mariel Nanasi said she had “no comment” on the complaint dismissals.\n\nNew York\n\nNew York City: The city’s health commissioner said he is “strongly recommending” that everyone wear masks in indoor public settings as scientists work to learn more about the newly identified omicron variant of the coronavirus.Dr. Dave Chokshi said he was recommending that all New Yorkers wear masks “at all times when indoors and in a public setting like at your grocery or in a building lobby, offices and retail stores.” The guidance was in line with the recommendation issued by the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in July that even vaccinated people wear masks indoors in areas where the virus is surging. Much is still not known about the omicron variant, which was identified last week by researchers in South Africa, including whether it is more contagious than other coronavirus variants, or more able to evade the protection of vaccines. Cases of the omicron variant have been found in countries including Canada, Australia and the Netherlands, but no cases have yet been detected in the United States.\n\nNorth Carolina\n\nWinston-Salem: The U.S. Geological Survey has reported another minor earthquake that took place near Winston-Salem. The Winston-Salem Journal reported that Saturday’s quake was the seventh seismic event to occur in Forsyth and Surry counties in the past six days. The National Earthquake Information Center in Golden, Colorado, reported that no injuries or structural damage has resulted from any of the seven earthquakes. Saturday’s 1.9 magnitude quake occurred shortly before 8 a.m. about 3.1 miles southwest of Winston-Salem. USGS said that the other minor earthquakes occurred last Wednesday and Nov. 21 near Winston-Salem and near Mount Airy. “Right now, these events are very minor,” said Jana Pursley, a geophysicist with the USGS.\n\nNorth Dakota\n\nBismarck: North Dakota wants to extend the state’s abandoned well plugging program by tapping into $4 billion made available in the federal infrastructure bill for the purpose of cleaning up old oil and gas sites across the nation. The Bismarck Tribune reported funding could potentially come North Dakota’s way each year over the next decade to continue the work the Oil and Gas Division started in 2020 to clean up hundreds of wells. North Dakota spent tens of millions of dollars in federal coronavirus aid plugging more than 300 abandoned wells and reclaiming the sites over the past two years. The cleanup work is ongoing. State officials billed the program as a way to keep oil workers employed when the pandemic prompted a downturn in their industry, as well as a means to address the growing number of wells producers had abandoned. State Mineral Resources Director Lynn Helms said the state initially overestimated how quickly it could complete reclamation work during colder fall and winter weather. He said the additional funds available through the infrastructure bill President Joe Biden signed into law earlier this month could help North Dakota address the unfinished work.\n\nOhio\n\nDayton: The Dayton Board of Zoning Appeals has approved the city’s request to demolish a 129-year-old historic building that once was the site of the Wright brothers’ first bicycle shop. The city wants to tear down the site because the building has deteriorated to a point where it can no longer be maintained and redeveloped, the Dayton Daily News has reported. Public safety concerns have also been raised by some who fear the building could collapse. Although agreeing that most of the building should be demolished, the Dayton Landmarks Commission rejected the demolition request in September. The panel instead recommended the city re-advertise the property and encourage its renovation in a way that preserves the historic facade. Preservation groups had also opposed the city’s plan. They argued that keeping the building’s facade and incorporating it into a redevelopment project would make the project eligible for historic tax credits. The city appealed the landmarks commission’s decision to the zoning appeals board, claiming it erred in its application of architectural design standards. The board voted 5-1 last week to reverse the commission’s decision and gave the city permission to raze the property. The shop was built in 1892 to serve as the Wright brothers’ first bicycle shop. Soon thereafter, Gem City Ice Cream Co. bought the property and housed it until 1975 until it was sold to another company.\n\nOklahoma\n\nStillwater:A complaint has prompted a federal investigation of Oklahoma’s Public Health Lab in Stillwater, health officials said. Interim Health Commissioner Keith Reed said he did not have details about what the complaint entailed, saying those are considered confidential and are often made anonymously. The investigation of the lab was first reported Nov. 19 by The Frontier. After the story was published, the Health Department released a statement acknowledging that the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services had conducted a review of the Public Health Lab and the lab had made changes to address the agency’s findings, including modernizing lab security, reviewing and adjusting staff training protocols, ensuring proper temperature control, storage and transportation of samples and resolving reporting on COVID-19 sequencing results. Reed declined to provide more details about the changes.\n\nOregon\n\nPortland: As Oregon prepares to take in approximately 1,200 Afghan refugees in the next 12 months, state lawmakers are asking the Legislature’s emergency board for an additional $18 million to expand services and capacity. Oregon Public Broadcasting reported a letter – issued last week by state Rep. Khanh Pham and state Sen. Kayse Jama – outlined the need for the state to invest in everything from housing assistance and case management to legal services for newly arrived Afghans. Although dozens of refugees have already arrived in Oregon, 570 more are expected by the end of February. There are five resettlement agencies operating in Portland and Salem that are working to identify long-term housing while providing culturally specific education – including language and job training, schooling for families with children and legal aid. The $18 million requested by the two Democratic lawmakers is composede of $5.3 million to support the Department of Human Services’ emergency management unit, $3.7 million to bolster case management and community outreach, $6 million for housing assistance and $2.9 million for legal services.\n\nPennsylvania\n\nYork:“Spruce’d Up! A Celebration of Trees“ holiday tree decoration display and winter shopping market returns to PeoplesBank Park in York this holiday season. Admission is free and the event runs from 5 p.m. to 8 p.m. every weekend through Dec. 19. The event was created last year as a way to hold a safe, socially distanced outdoor event during the pandemic. Each tree is sponsored by either an area business or nonprofit and will be decorated with a theme. Event attendees can vote for their favorite trees and the top three winners will receive cash donations to a nonprofit of their choice.York Revolution has partnered with Downtown Inc. to bring some York County artisans and vendors to the event space this year a pop-up shop offering local goods. Spruce’d Up will also feature unique promotions throughout the duration of the event, including a visit from Santa Claus, a gingerbread house decorating competition, Christmas caroling and more.\n\nRhode Island\n\nProvidence: Rhode Island’s education department has awarded grants to eight districts to support homeless students. Gov. Dan McKee and Commissioner Angélica Infante-Green said the department awarded more than $336,000 in McKinney-Vento Homeless Assistance Act Education for Homeless Children and Youth sub-grants to eight school districts. The districts are: Central Falls, Middletown, Newport, North Kingstown, Providence, Warwick, West Warwick and Woonsocket. “It is critical that we support our most vulnerable students in Rhode Island’s recovery,” McKee said in a statement. “These funds are specifically geared to help students and families experiencing homelessness and will make a positive difference in many lives during a time of great need.” Infante-Green said that students experiencing homelessness were severely impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic and it is their duty to ensure these students are provided the support needed to get ahead. The latest round of sub-grants is part of the third year of a three-year award that each of the selected districts received, totaling more than $970,000. The money comes from a federal grant administered by the state. The municipalities each received between $40,000 and $44,000.\n\nSouth Carolina\n\nGreenwood: Police responding to a fire alarm and the sound of gunshots at an assisted living facility said a resident had placed several rounds of ammunition in a toaster. The ammunition discharged on Sunday night, making employees believe a shooter was on the property, police in Greenwood said. Greenwood is about 70 miles northwest of Columbia. A small fire in the resident’s room was extinguished. The resident was found unconscious and taken to a hospital to be treated for apparent smoke inhalation. No other injuries were reported, police said. Police did not say why they believe the ammunition was in the toaster.\n\nSouth Dakota\n\nSioux Falls:Big cats are back on display at the Great Plains Zoo after a snow leopard died of COVID-19. The animals, including tigers and snow leopards, have tested negative for the virus and were to return to their exhibits on Wednesday, zoo officials said. On Oct. 6, the zoo reported that a tiger tested positive for the virus . Shortly after, other big cats at the zoo began exhibiting similar symptoms, zoo officials said. A day later. a snow leopard died. Necropsy results on the snow leopard confirmed she had died from pneumonia induced by the virus, zoo officials said. The Argus Leader reported the zoo’s veterinary staff has run consistent lab tests on the big cats throughout their illness. Lab tests confirm all of the zoo’s big cat collection is clear of the virus and can once again be in the exhibit space and seen by the public.\n\nTennessee\n\nNashville:The Metro Nashville Board of Education recently declined to update the district’s policy regarding student-athlete eligibility to align with a new state law banning transgender athletes from participating in girls sports. At least six board members met during a governance committee meeting earlier this month to review a variety of policy updates and recommended the entire board should vote to defer the policy. The policy has to do with who is allowed to play on which sports teams in the district, which has a policy promising athletic opportunities to students of both sexes and that “no person shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, be treated differently from another person, or otherwise be discriminated against in any athletic program of the school.” But it hasn’t been updated since Tennessee lawmakers passed a state law in the spring requiring transgender students to compete in school sports according to their sex at birth. The law bans transgender middle and high school students from participating in sports under their gender identity. Metro Nashville Public Schools’ updated policy would have added that students participating in interscholastic athletics “must meet the eligibility requirements set forth by the state and the governing body of the sport” if it had been approved.\n\nTexas\n\nAustin:The remains of more than 30 people who were exhumed from East Austin’s historically segregated Oakwood Cemetery were reburied this month and will be memorialized in the coming weeks. The bodies were discovered underneath the cemetery’s chapel in 2017 as employees were working on a restoration project. After the discovery, an academic partnership between the University of Connecticut and the University of Texas began to understand the lives of the people buried at Oakwood. On Nov. 15, city officials began to sort out what the best location would be to rebury the remains. The first phase of the process required archaeologists monitoring the selected area west of the chapel to confirm that the city wasn’t going to disturb any unmarked burials on the site. After that confirmation, the reburial process was completed Nov. 17. The remains, which date to the mid- to late 1800s, were originally set to be reburied in 2020, but the timeline was delayed when archaeologists at the University of Connecticut approached the city with a pro bono offer to conduct DNA analysis, said Kim McKnight, Austin Parks and Recreation Department director. The archaeologists completed the DNA extraction, allowing for the return of the bodies, but the DNA analysis is ongoing and is expected to continue for 24 to 36 months. Osteological analysis showed the people to be racially diverse – including people from Anglo American, African American, Mexican American and indigenous descent. People who believe they might be related to the people reinterred will later be able to submit saliva samples to the University of Connecticut to see if there are genetic matches.\n\nUtah\n\nSt. George:Mayor Michele Randall spoke at the 4th annual Menorah Lighting ceremony Sunday night to help promote religious freedom in St. George. About 100 attendees showed up for the event at the city’s Town Square Park downtown, celebrating the first of eight days of Hanukkah. Locals who are part of the Jewish community joined in singing, dancing, and traditional holiday foods. The Menorah Lighting ceremony was one of 15,000 public Menorahs worldwide as part of the world’s largest Hanukah observance. Rabbi Mendy Cohen, who is part of the Chabad Jewish Center, organized this event and had visitors from as far away as New York. “It’s beautiful to see everyone come together from all walks of life all with the same message of unity, the message of light, the message of religious freedom,” Cohen said. Last year’s Menorah Lighting ceremony was virtual because of the COVID-19 pandemic. The St. George Fire Department came to do the “chocolate drop” where firefighters threw candy from the top of the fire truck for children to collect. “I think it’s awesome that our community is so diverse, and our Jewish community is growing, which is exciting to see,” Randall said.\n\nVermont\n\nDanville: Students at Danville Middle and High School will soon be deciding on the school’s new nickname, after the school board voted in March to end the use of “Indians” following hours of testimony from students, teachers, alumni and community members. A committee of students, parents, community members and staff narrowed 34 submissions from the wider community down to the four: Trailblazers, Bears, Mountaineers or Bobcats, the Caledonian Record reported. Students will be voting on the new name Friday. Adult participation in the voting process was discussed, said Middle and High School Principal David Schilling. “There were several students on the committee and everybody really felt that it that the students are the ones who are going to be living with… and that it really should be a student decision,” he said. In response to a petition opposing the decision to change the name, the school board voted 4-1 in June reaffirming the policy to prohibit the representation of the school by any race or ethnic group as a mascot.\n\nVirginia\n\nRichmond: The Virginia Department of Health will be monitoring sewage in various parts of the state to predict future outbreaks of COVID-19. The Danville Register & Bee reported Saturday that VDH is deploying up to 25 wastewater monitoring sites across the commonwealth. That’s according to a recent report from the University of Virginia’s Biocomplexity Institute, which collaborates with state health officials. The report does not state where those monitoring sites will be. But VDH has been polling utilities to assess their willingness to participate in a sampling program. Testing sewage can help health officials gauge COVID-19 infection in a community because people who are sick shed the virus in bodily waste, even if they’re not showing symptoms. Combined with other programs that monitor COVID-19 infection in communities, the goal is to provide warnings before a surge begins.\n\nWashington\n\nSeattle: King County Councilmember Reagan Dunn, a Republican, said he will run for Washington’s 8th Congressional District House seat, seeking an office once held by his mother. Dunn told The Seattle Times he will challenge Democratic incumbent Rep. Kim Schrier.The announcement sets up a potential top-tier challenge for the congressional seat that had been held by Republicans since the district was created in 1983 until Schrier won it for Democrats in 2018. Dunn, 50, has been a member of the county council since 2005. Schrier, 53, is a pediatrician in her second term in Congress. Dunn’s mother, the late Jennifer Dunn, was the 8th District representative from 1993 to 2005.\n\nWest Virginia\n\nHuntington: Negotiations are set to resume for striking maintenance and service workers at Cabell Huntington Hospital. Representatives for the hospital and more than 900 members of the the Service Employees International Union District 1999 are scheduled to return to the bargaining table Tuesday, the hospital said. Union members went on strike in early November after their contract with the hospital expired. Hospital human resources director Molly Frick said union members are being asked to begin paying health insurance premiums. Under the hospital’s latest offer, it would have contributed more than 90% of health care costs for employees and their dependents. The offer also included 3% average annual wage increases, increased shift differentials, an enhanced uniform allowance and continued automatic annual contributions to eligible employees’ retirement accounts. A temporary restraining order against striking workers will remain in place through Dec. 10. It prohibits certain activities outside the hospital.\n\nWisconsin\n\nMilwaukee: A survey of Midwest farm bankers found Wisconsin farmland values are up 10% from the same period in 2020. Wisconsin Public Radio reported the rise in land values is driven by strong commodity prices, and demand from nonfarm buyers. The Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago surveyed 151 bankers in their district, which includes Iowa and parts of Wisconsin, Illinois, Indiana and Michigan. The bankers reported the value of good quality farmland across the region had increased by 6% from the second quarter to the third quarter of this year. Compared to the third quarter of 2020, bankers reported that land values were up 18%. In Wisconsin, surveyed bankers reported land values were up 1% from the previous quarter and 10% from the same time last year. David Oppedahl, senior business economist for the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, said the value of land started increasing last fall as the agriculture industry recovered from the initial shocks of the COVID-19 pandemic.\n\nWyoming\n\nCheyenne:The Highlands Presbyterian Church in Cheyenne received a $40,000 gift from the Westminster Presbyterian Church in Fort Collins, Colorado. “For us, it’s an affirmation of our commitment to mission,” said the Rev. Rodger McDaniel of Highlands Presbyterian, who added that the gift gave them another reason to be thankful this year. “And then the idea that at some point, we will be in the same position that Westminster is in finding another congregation with a mission commitment to give the gift to pass along the gift ... it’s really an exciting opportunity.” More than 25 years ago, a parishioner at a church in Waterloo, Iowa, gifted his church money to be used “for nonlocal mission giving,” with the stipulation that the church share the gift with other Presbyterian churches in $40,000 increments.", "authors": [], "publish_date": "2021/11/30"}, {"url": "https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/50-states/2021/04/01/music-festivals-opening-day-casino-clinics-news-around-states/115660304/", "title": "Music festivals, Opening Day: News from around our 50 states", "text": "From USA TODAY Network and wire reports\n\nAlabama\n\nAuburn: Auburn University officials say they will reinstate the school’s bass fishing team this spring following allegations that it repeatedly violated COVID-19 policies. The school had initially suspended the team for the entire year but agreed to the shorter punishment after a meeting that involved school administrators and team members. The team violated the travel and events policy in July 2020, February 2021 and March 2021, school officials said in a memo. The team will now be able to return to competition April 22. During the suspension, no member of the team will be allowed to compete, recruit or represent the Auburn University Bass Fishing Team. “I am thankful that Auburn University and its administration were willing to listen to us and consider all of the facts with an open mind,” said Logan Parks, president of the Auburn University Bass Fishing Club. “We have reached an agreement, and, most importantly, the Auburn Team is excited about being able to resume representing Auburn University as we pursue another National Championship.” Auburn’s team is one of the country’s top-ranked programs. Several former members have gone on to compete in professional bass fishing competitions.\n\nAlaska\n\nJuneau: The state health department is floating the idea of providing COVID-19 vaccinations to travelers at the state’s busiest airports with the summer tourism and fishing seasons looming. The department released a request for information last week to determine interest among potential contractors to provide a one-dose vaccine to interested travelers in a secure section of the airports in Anchorage, Juneau, Fairbanks and Ketchikan. Implementing strategies to reduce the spread of COVID-19 through Alaska communities is critical with the levels of travel activity expected between May and October, the document said. The department says its Division of Public Health intends to use the one-dose Johnson & Johnson vaccine for such a program, subject to availability. Under emergency use authorizations, people 18 and older can receive the J&J shot, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Division of Public Health Director Heidi Hedberg said officials would need to wait for increased allocations of the vaccine from the federal government. But she said the state health department is looking at “sometime late spring, hopefully before tourist season picks up,” for when it could set up vaccine sites at airports. Alaska provides optional coronavirus testing at airports.\n\nArizona\n\nPhoenix: Pima County officials said Tuesday that they will continue to enforce a mask mandate to contain the spread of the coronavirus, joining a group of local leaders defying Gov. Doug Ducey’s order banning government requirements for face coverings. Officials in Arizona’s second-largest county said health inspectors will continue enforcing mask requirements in restaurants, and other businesses face possible fines up to $500 or the loss of their operating permits. “We believe we are on solid ground,” said Dr. Francisco Garcia, Pima County’s chief medical officer. “Do we believe we are going to be challenged on this? Absolutely. Bring it on.” Garcia said the county had 10 straight weeks of declining COVID-19 cases before an increase last week. “So this is real, and this is concerning. And this is the reason we cannot let up on masking mandates in Pima County,” he said. The reaction to Pima County’s action was swift, with three Republican lawmakers asking the state attorney general to review it to determine if it conflicts with Ducey’s order. Rep. Bret Roberts of Maricopa is seeking an official opinion as to whether the county’s order is enforceable. GOP Sens. Vince Leach of Tucson and Michelle Ugenti-Rita of Scottsdale joined in sending a similar request.\n\nArkansas\n\nLittle Rock: Lawmakers on Tuesday gave final approval to Gov. Asa Hutchinson’s plan to overhaul the state’s Medicaid expansion by encouraging work by recipients rather than requiring it. The House voted 64-34 for the legislation, sending it to the Republican governor’s desk. Under the measure, the program will continue to use Medicaid funds to place recipients on private health insurance. But under the proposal, those who don’t work or attend school could be moved to the traditional fee-for-service Medicaid program. More than 300,000 people are currently on the state’s Medicaid expansion. Hutchinson and GOP lawmakers proposed the overhaul after a work requirement for the expansion was blocked by federal courts and President Joe Biden’s administration. The Biden administration must still approve the changes. The state Department of Health has said it will submit its proposal for the new expansion program by July. The proposal includes other changes, including a home-visiting program for at-risk moms.\n\nCalifornia\n\nSacramento: A sheriff announced in January that a man died hours after receiving a COVID-19 vaccine even though his county’s health officials said the declaration was premature and detrimental, The Sacramento Bee reports, citing emails obtained under the state Public Records Act. The announcement by Placer County Sheriff Devon Bell on Facebook quickly spread around the world and was used by anti-vaccine activists to try to discredit COVID-19 vaccinations, according to the newspaper. The man, identified only as a 64-year-old health care worker, died Jan. 21 after receiving the shot in Auburn, northeast of Sacramento in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada. Eventually, it would be determined that the vaccination was coincidental to the death, but at the time the sheriff’s statement on Facebook said the man had received a shot “several hours before their death.” The Bee said its review of county emails shows an intense internal debate about the death, the language of an announcement, how an announcement could feed fears about the vaccine and the intent of the Sheriff’s Office to proceed with an announcement. The sheriff apologized a week later in a statement that said the man’s death was unrelated to the vaccine.\n\nColorado\n\nDenver: Residents over age 16 will be eligible for COVID-19 vaccines starting Friday, Gov. Jared Polis announced Monday. “We still anticipate by mid-to-late May … everybody who wants the vaccine will have had the vaccine. So it’ll take about six to eight weeks,” Polis said. He said there will be six mass drive-in sites for the state’s eligible population and four mobile bus clinics to distribute vaccines to underserved communities. More than 1 million Colorado residents have been fully vaccinated, and over 1.5 million have received their first doses, Polis said. Despite the expanded eligibility, Polis said vaccine providers have been ordered to prioritize people in higher risk groups. Polis said 16- and 17-year-olds can only receive the Pfizer vaccine, and people over 18 can get the Pfizer, Moderna or Johnson & Johnson vaccines. With the updated distribution, Polis said the state could look forward to a “fairly normal summer” due to widespread immunity from vaccines. Polis also said he would likely extend the statewide mask mandate into mid-April, until the state transitions to county-controlled COVID-19 public health orders. He said the mask mandate would remain in place in public schools for the rest of the school year to avoid scaling back on in-person learning.\n\nConnecticut\n\nHartford: Lawmakers granted final legislative approval Tuesday to extending Gov. Ned Lamont’s emergency powers during the coronavirus pandemic to May 20, despite concerns raised by Republicans who argued it’s time for the General Assembly to take back its authority. The Democratic-controlled Senate voted along partisan lines, 24-10, to authorize the Democratic governor to renew the state’s public health and civil preparedness emergency declarations through May 20. They were set to expire April 20. The measure already cleared the Democratic-controlled House of Representatives. “We do not have this pandemic in the rear-view mirror, as of yet. It is still staring us in the face,” said Senate President Pro Tempore Martin Looney, D-New Haven, noting the administration reported more than 3,200 new confirmed or probable cases of COVID-19 over the weekend. Looney credited Lamont with handling his extraordinary executive authority in a “prudent and measured way,” noting that the state Supreme Court on Monday, in elaborating on an earlier decision involving a Milford tavern owner, affirmed the governor has the authority to order closures and partial shutdowns during the pandemic.\n\nDelaware\n\nDover: Firefly Music Festival has teased a fall return to The Woodlands on Sept.23-26, according to its website. The festival, which was canceled last year due to COVID-19, posted the new date on its website without notice Monday morning. State officials said the Division of Public Health has been in communication with AEG Presents. “Event organizers are aware they will need a formal plan approval from the agency before the event takes place. We will continue to actively work with the organizers to ensure their plan meets all necessary health and safety requirements and the necessary mitigation and safety measures are in place,” public health officials said. State Sen. Trey Paradee, D-Dover, said he’s had many people reach out to him about the Firefly news, including friends, family and constituents. Some were “thrilled,” he said, while others “have expressed to me they’re really concerned about where we will be in terms of the virus.” Paradee is optimistic the festival will be safe if it happens because of President Joe Biden’s progress with vaccinations. Paradee, who hopes previously scheduled 2020 headliner rap-metal band Rage Against the Machine will be on this year’s lineup, said he wants the festival to return because it’s great for the economy.\n\nDistrict of Columbia\n\nWashington: Ahead of Opening Day on Thursday, restaurants and bars near Nationals Park have been getting ready to welcome back fans before the ballpark opens with limited seating to start the regular season, WUSA-TV reports. Last month, Mayor Muriel Bowser announced that 5,000 fans would be let into the park to watch baseball. While attendance will be notably low due to COVID-19 restrictions, managers at nearby bars voiced excitement Tuesday for the start of the season. “We’re so close you can actually hear the crack of the bat within the ballpark,” said Atlas Brew Works founder Justin Cox. “You can expect there to be a lot more people that are coming down just to watch the game near the ballpark.” Staff set up a socially distanced patio outside and hope to get a projector screen up so fans can watch the games, he said. Mission BBQ Navy Yard owner Fritz Brogan remembers the thousands of fans it saw during the Nationals 2019 World Series run. He said fans in the stands and the foot traffic that brings are great for him and his employees. “I mean, it’s been a tough year for the restaurant industry,” Brogan said. “I think our staff and regulars are really excited about having something to look forward to ... some optimism.”\n\nFlorida\n\nTallahassee: Schools and universities that took precautions to prevent the spread of COVID-19 would be protected from pandemic-related lawsuits, including parents and students who sue seeking a refund of tuition, under a bill approved by a Senate committee Tuesday. Several universities have been sued after moving to online classes and shutting down campus activities. Students argue they weren’t given the full campus experience. The measure unanimously approved by the Senate Education Committee would prevent those lawsuits and be retroactive to when the public health emergency was declared in March 2020. Sandra Harris, a lobbyist for Nova Southeastern University, said colleges would have been sued no matter how they responded to the pandemic. “The irony is, if we had required students to go to campus to finish their semester, we would have been faced with lawsuits. If we had just suspended educating our students, we would have been faced with lawsuits,” Harris said. “Students are claiming that they were not allowed to get the rich learning experience as provided on a campus.” The bill also would allow parents of students in kindergarten through fifth grade to ask schools to have their children repeat the grade for academic reasons.\n\nGeorgia\n\nAtlanta: The state will not grade schools and districts using state test results for the second year in a row, the Georgia Department of Education announced Tuesday, saying federal officials had waived the requirement for the state accountability system. Georgia will not compute its College and Career Ready Performance Index, a numerical system that the governor’s office then uses to assign letter grades to schools and districts. Last year, the state couldn’t produce the index because it didn’t administer its Milestones tests to students in third grade and up. This year, the federal government is requiring Georgia to give the tests, but districts won’t be graded on how students do. “The intent of these accountability waivers is to focus on assessments to provide information to parents, educators, and the public about student performance and to help target resources and supports. This is particularly crucial this year, due to the COVID pandemic,” the Department of Education wrote to Georgia in the letter granting the waiver. State Superintendent Richard Woods has instructed districts that they can’t deny course credit or deny promotion to the next grade to any student who has been attending class virtually and declines to come in person to take a test citing health and safety concerns.\n\nHawaii\n\nHonolulu: Officials are looking into vaccine passports, especially for inter-island travel. Lt. Gov. Josh Green said the state hopes to work with a local company to create an app that would verify a traveler has been inoculated, KHON-TV reports. Green also said that while the app is being developed, people could simply show their COVID-19 vaccination cards to travel without current testing restrictions. “You would have a company that would do spot checking, and certainly you can check the card itself and make sure that it looks legitimate,” Green said. He said he is not concerned about people trying to falsify records, noting that being caught doing so could mean a fine of up to $5,000, a year in jail or both. Green said people who have been fully vaccinated might be able to travel between islands with fewer restrictions as early as April. Tourism officials are supportive of the idea. “That’s what we see, families that haven’t seen each other for a while that live in Kauai, Maui, Hawaii Island, Oahu. And this will allow that kind of travel to take place without the additional cost of being tested,” said Mufi Hannemann, president and CEO of the Hawaii Lodging and Tourism Association. The decision about vaccine passports will ultimately be made by Gov. David Ige in consultation with island mayors.\n\nIdaho\n\nBoise: More areas of the state are opening even earlier to additional categories of people wanting to get COVID-19 vaccines. Republican Gov. Brad Little last week opened eligibility to those 16 and older starting April 6. But four of the state’s seven health districts say that category is open as of Wednesday. Central District Health officials in heavily populated southwestern Idaho opened the category Tuesday afternoon, saying health care providers had open appointments and doses available. That category is also open in the Southeastern Idaho Public Health and two health districts in northern Idaho. About 280,000 residents are fully vaccinated, and another 160,000 have received the first dose of vaccines requiring two shots. State health officials have said they are speeding up eligibility because there appears to be reluctance among some residents to get the vaccine and because increasing supplies of vaccine doses are arriving into the state. Health officials have said people who want the vaccine should sign up at coronavirus.idaho.gov. The state website was set up last month to link providers with vaccine doses to people who want them.\n\nIllinois\n\nChicago: As thousands of people get ready to flock to Wrigley Field on Thursday for the city’s largest mass gathering in more than a year, officials warned that they may again shut the venerated ballpark to fans if the number of COVID-19 cases keeps climbing. The warning from the city’s Office of Emergency Management and Communications also applies to the White Sox’s ballpark, as well as bars, restaurants and other businesses, and comes amid an increase in the number of cases in Chicago and Illinois, particularly among young adults. The Cook County Medical Examiner’s Office announced a few hours later that the county that includes Chicago had recorded its 10,000th COVID-19 death. Just this week, state public health officials announced that the lifting of some restrictions was being delayed because of increasing numbers of COVID-19 infections and hospitalizations since mid-March. Both the Cubs and the White Sox will be allowed to admit as much as 25% capacity. For Wrigley Field, that means a maximum of a little more than 10,000 fans in the stands. Many more are expected to watch the game from nearby bars and restaurants that are routinely crowded with fans during home games. Those establishments are limited to 50% capacity, and customers must wear masks, just like at Wrigley. City officials already have said they are on the lookout for whether bars and restaurants are complying with restrictions.\n\nIndiana\n\nIndianapolis: The state Senate voted Monday to approve a proposal that would curb the governor’s authority under the state emergency powers law following months of complaints from conservatives about Gov. Eric Holcomb’s coronavirus-related orders. The bill would establish a new process for the General Assembly to call itself into a 40-day emergency session to consider legislative action in response to a gubernatorial declaration of a statewide emergency. That limits a governor’s authority to impose long-lasting emergency restrictions such as mask rules and business closures. The proposal would additionally give lawmakers more control over federal economic stimulus funds Indiana receives, although the bill does not require legislators to appropriate any of the funds. Senators contended they’ve been shut out of conversations about how to respond to emergency situations and said the legislation wouldn’t impede how the state responds to emergencies but instead would involve lawmakers in decision-making. The Senate Rules Committee dialed back the plan last month, removing provisions from the legislation that would have allowed local units of government to adopt less stringent public safety guidelines than those contained in the governor’s executive orders. A total prohibition on emergency restrictions applying to religious worship was also deleted.\n\nIowa\n\nDes Moines: Residents from the state’s racial and ethnic minorities are increasingly willing to accept COVID-19 vaccinations if offered the shots, advocates say. Before the vaccines started arriving in December, experts worried about hesitancy especially among Black Americans, whose history includes inadequate or unethical treatment by health care authorities. But recent state and national polls have shown people’s acceptance of the vaccines varies little by race or ethnicity. A Des Moines Register/Mediacom Iowa Poll found 27% of white adults and 29% of nonwhite adults don’t plan to be vaccinated. The gap between those demographic groups is far smaller than the partisan gap between Democrats and Republicans: Just 8% of Democrats say they do not plan to be vaccinated but 41% of Republicans. Jacquie Easley McGhee, a longtime African American advocate in Des Moines and health chair for the Iowa/Nebraska NAACP, said she has been gratified to see how many trusted community leaders – religious leaders, familiar health care professionals and other respected figures – have joined the effort to provide accurate COVID-19 information to Iowans of color. “That is the key: They’re trusted messengers,” she said. “They’re not coming in at the 11th hour, trying to bring information to these communities.”\n\nKansas\n\nTopeka: Republicans in the GOP-controlled state House formally registered their opposition Tuesday to Democratic Gov. Laura Kelly’s plan for encouraging counties to keep mask mandates in place as a potentially more infectious strain of coronavirus became more widespread in the state. The House voted 84-39 along party lines for a resolution telling legislative leaders to revoke any order from Kelly for a statewide mask policy. Kelly issued such an order in November that was due to expire Wednesday, and she has said she will issue a new order Thursday. A law that took effect last week extends a state of emergency for the pandemic from March 31 until May 28, but it also allows eight top legislative leaders to revoke orders the governor issues during a state of emergency. The new law leaves the final decision about mask mandates and restrictions on businesses and public gatherings to counties. But Kelly’s planned order would require their elected county commissions to take a specific public vote to opt out of a statewide policy requiring people to wear masks in indoor businesses and public spaces. Kelly said in a statement that the resolution is “unnecessary” because counties can opt out her planned order and said Republicans are engaged in “political games.”\n\nKentucky\n\nLouisville: The Libertarian Party of Kentucky compared COVID-19 “vaccine passports” to star-shaped identification badges people of Jewish descent were forced to wear during the Holocaust in a tweet this week, drawing outrage from across the nation. The post Monday compared such credentials, which would show whether a person has received a vaccine and theoretically grant access to businesses and other spaces that will require proof of vaccination before entry, to “the stuff of totalitarian dictatorships” that the party considers a “complete and total violation of human liberty.” “Are the vaccine passports going to be yellow, shaped like a star, and sewn on our clothes?” the party wrote on Twitter. Thousands of responses flowed in, including one from Anti-Defamation League CEO Jonathan Greenblatt that called the post an “ignorant and shameful comparison” and another from Jewish actor Seth Rogen, who explicitly suggested the party take its message elsewhere. The Kentucky Democratic Party ripped the statement as “unconscionable and unacceptable,” while Republican Party of Kentucky spokesman Mike Lonergan said the commonwealth’s GOP members “will always condemn this kind of hateful and extreme rhetoric.” In a tweet, Gov. Andy Beshear said that “comparing vaccines to the Holocaust is shameful.” Jewish people in Nazi-occupied Europe were forced to wear yellow badges shaped like the Star of David to make them easier to identify and separate from society.\n\nLouisiana\n\nShreveport: The parish’s school district has approved a $1,000, one-time supplement for employees to thank them for their work during a school year filled with challenges due to the coronavirus pandemic. The Caddo Heroes Supplement, estimated to cost $6 million, is made possible through higher-than-estimated sales tax revenues. “Well, almost within a period of days, they had to totally reformat the way they planned,” said Keith Burton, the chief academic officer of Caddo Parish Schools. “The way they pulled resources together, as well as how they delivered instruction – many of them had to incorporate, within days, technology they never used before.” The money will be distributed in June to employees who worked at least 90% of their scheduled workdays during the calendar year, KSLA-TV reports. Employees absent for workshops, trainings or due to COVID-19 would not have those days counted against the eligibility requirements, according to the television station. Caddo Parish is the first school board in Louisiana to approve funds to be dispersed not only to full-time and part-time employees of the district but also to any substitutes who meet the criteria, school officials said.\n\nMaine\n\nRockland: The state’s celebration of all things lobster is a no-go for this summer. The board of the Maine Lobster Festival voted unanimously Tuesday night to cancel the event for a second straight year because of the pandemic. “Because we hold a festival that serves food in tents to tens of thousands of guests, there are not safe ways for us to do this and comply with CDC guidelines,” festival officials said on social media. The event, normally held each August in Rockland, features multiple attractions and serves up tens of thousands of pounds of lobster. Meanwhile, the state is working to get more COVID-19 vaccines into small and independent pharmacies. Maine Center for Disease Control and Prevention Director Dr. Nirav Shah said nearly a third of residents have received at least their first dose of the vaccine. He said Tuesday that the state is working to “chart a course for independent pharmacies here in Maine” to participate more in the rollout via long-term care facilities and their own storefronts. “For a lot of Maine communities, the independent pharmacies are the most trusted source in town,” Shah said. “We’re working to get them vaccines.” Maine opened eligibility for vaccines to people 50 and older in late March. The state is scheduled to open eligibility to everyone 16 and older April 19.\n\nMaryland\n\nAnnapolis: A bill that would require the Maryland Department of Health to create and implement a two-year plan for COVID-19 recovery by June 1, among other measures, is nearing passage in the General Assembly. Central to the measure, with a price tag of at least $152.5 million in federal funds, is a framework that would require the state agency to collaborate with local health departments to organize efforts to “monitor, prevent, and mitigate the spread of COVID-19,” the fiscal note says. Included in the guidelines the bill lays out for state and local health departments are requirements to set precise targets for the number of coronavirus tests to administer each month, creating methods for addressing responses that have fallen short, and a requirement to bill health insurance, when applicable, for all virus tests. The bill also prioritizes the assessment and improvement of contact tracing. Through the proposed Maryland Public Health Jobs Corps, local health departments would recruit unemployed or displaced workers to serve in different roles that aid in the COVID-19 response. When their duties are complete, the workers would transition to more permanent roles that target “post-pandemic population health needs of underserved communities and vulnerable populations.”\n\nMassachusetts\n\nBoston: U.S. Rep. Stephen Lynch is urging government agencies, schools and businesses to use their federal COVID-19 relief funding to buy medical protective equipment made in the U.S. rather than China. “We’ve got China hacking federal agencies, hacking our military and hacking our domestic companies; we’ve had theft of intellectual property,” the Massachusetts Democrat said Tuesday. “We shouldn’t put our future and our safety in the hands of a government that’s been hostile to the interests of the United States.” President Joe Biden’s $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan provides billions of dollars for the purchase of masks, gloves, gowns and other equipment needed to help protect people against COVID-19. There are plenty of companies in Massachusetts and across the nation manufacturing such equipment, Lynch said after a tour of the Hynes Convention Center mass vaccination site in Boston. “We’re asking all those given money to purchase PPE in the U.S.,” he said. “Support that market that we’re trying to create here in the U.S. There are companies all over the U.S. that are trying to provide product for the protection of U.S. citizens, but that can’t happen if we continue to buy product from China.”\n\nMichigan\n\nLansing: Gov. Gretchen Whitmer on Wednesday doubled the state’s daily COVID-19 vaccination goal to 100,000 shots. She cited continuous week-over-week increases in vaccine allotments the state is receiving and an expanded number of providers who can administer doses. She called vaccinations safe, effective and essential to getting the country back to normal. “These new, higher vaccine targets are a testament to what we can do together, and we need to meet them so we can keep rebuilding our economy,” the Democratic governor said in a statement. Michigan is facing a third surge in cases. It had the nation’s second-highest infection rate over the past two weeks. Rates in the Thumb region’s counties – Huron, St. Clair and Sanilac – ranked fourth, fifth and eighth highest in the U.S. Daily deaths are also rising, though they are still well below the peaks of last April and December. Whitmer loosened some restrictions meant to slow the spread of the virus after cases and hospitalizations dropped and amid a constant stream of Republican criticism. During a CNN appearance, she again appeared reluctant to tighten them a third time. “We’re continuing to have robust conversations,” she said. “There’s a lot of push and pull. What we need to do is double down on our masking and get more people vaccinated.”\n\nMinnesota\n\nMinneapolis: Gov. Tim Walz and former Gov. Tim Pawlenty each received a COVID-19 shot in a bipartisan display aimed at boosting acceptance of the vaccine as eligibility opened up to all Minnesotans 16 and older Tuesday. The Democratic governor and former Republican governor both received doses of the single-shot Johnson & Johnson vaccine Tuesday, when the state expanded its eligibility guidelines after a projected increase in its weekly allotment of doses from the federal government. Minnesota eclipsed the milestone of 1 million residents fully vaccinated Tuesday, and more than 1.6 million have received at least one dose. Over the weekend, the state reported its two highest days on record for the number of vaccines administered, and health officials counted over 70,000 people who received a shot in the two days. Walz and Health Commissioner Jan Malcolm said the state will be ramping up outreach efforts to expand access to the vaccine to underserved communities and combat potential vaccine hesitancy across the state. Pawlenty speculated that hesitancy from conservatives may come from a skepticism of the government and government programs but urged that “these vaccines are safe and incredibly helpful, and everyone should get them.”\n\nMississippi\n\nJackson: Health officials are recommending that churches and other religious organizations continue to hold off on hosting indoor worship services during the coronavirus pandemic, even after Gov. Tate Reeves relaxed regulations on other kinds of social gatherings. “To prevent the spread of COVID-19 and to protect the vulnerable, the safest options continue to be virtual or outdoor services,” the state Health Department said in a news release this week detailing new guidelines for faith-based gatherings and worship. Last month, Reeves, a Republican, rolled back mask mandates on the state level and all capacity regulations for restaurants. As for worship services, health officials say they recommend everyone 65 and older or 16 or older with high-risk medical conditions be fully vaccinated against COVID-19 before attending indoor services. All congregants should wear a face mask at all times during in-person services and Sunday school classes and maintain 6 feet of separation from people who don’t live in the same house as them. People should not gather in close groups while entering or exiting the building and should use hand sanitizer. Singing at services is “a high-risk activity that can quickly spread viral particles,” officials said.\n\nMissouri\n\nSt. Louis: A federal lawsuit seeks a return of the 1% earnings tax paid by people who normally work in the city but instead worked from their suburban homes during the pandemic. The lawsuit filed Monday on behalf of three suburban St. Louis residents seeks class-action status, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reports. If successful, the lawsuit could cost the city millions of dollars. The plaintiffs’ attorney, Bevis Schock, said last year that he planned to file a class-action lawsuit after St. Louis Collector of Revenue Gregory F.X. Daily issued a policy barring city earnings tax refunds for employees working outside city limits. Thousands of people, particularly white-collar office workers, who are employed at businesses in St. Louis but live outside the city have worked from home since March 2020 to slow the spread of the coronavirus.“The way we view it, you and your company have agreed (to have you) work at home. You’re still utilizing all the computer software that your company provides” from its base in the city, Daly told the Post-Dispatch in June. More than one-third of the city’s general revenue comes from the tax, or about $180 million last year. A city spokesman declined to comment.\n\nMontana\n\nGreat Falls: The Lake County-Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes Unified Command Center is hosting two vaccine clinics open to all Lake County and Flathead Reservation residents 16 or older. The clinics, to be held April 10 and April 17 at the Salish Kootenai College Joe McDonald Gymnasium in Pablo, run from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m., according to a news release. Appointments are required, with sign-up available at mtreadyclinic.org or 406-745-3525. The Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes, which offered COVID-19 vaccines to Lake County teachers a month before they were eligible in Montana, are among many tribes offering vaccines to non-Natives. The Blackfeet Nation is offering vaccines to all Glacier National Park staff and hosted a “street corner clinic” where it vaccinated 103 people. The Indian Family Health Clinic, an Indian Health Service-funded facility, has vaccinated more than 80 non-Native Great Falls educators. Relying on a centralized health care system, personal outreach methods and incentives, Native American tribes’ vaccination efforts have been a huge success. The Blackfeet Nation has vaccinated about 95% of its eligible population on the reservation, and 70% of adults on the Crow Reservation have received at least one dose.\n\nNebraska\n\nOmaha: Two health care companies have agreed to settle with the state attorney general’s office on charges of misleading advertising, marketing, distribution and sales of coronavirus antibody testing. Attorney General Doug Peterson alleged in a July complaint that Pivot Concierge Health and Banyan Medical Systems violated Nebraska’s consumer protection law and a federal deceptive trade practices law, according to the Omaha World-Herald. Under a settlement signed last week, both companies must disclose the risks and limitations of coronavirus testing products and comply with the law. Pivot Concierge Health must also pay $25,000 to the state. State attorneys alleged that both companies advertised and sold coronavirus infection and antibody tests from at least March 19 to April 29, 2020, at an Omaha drive-thru clinic.\n\nNevada\n\nLas Vegas: The world’s two biggest casino companies are bringing vaccines to their Las Vegas Strip employees, with inoculation clinics at the Mandalay Bay resort convention center and the Rio All-Suites Hotel. Easing COVID-19 vaccine availability for thousands of hotel and hospitality workers in the tourism-dependent city comes with the University of Nevada, Las Vegas setting a July 1 date to return to in-person activities and city workers fanning out following the lifting of sports restrictions to reinstall basketball hoops at city parks. MGM Resorts International said Tuesday that it saw vaccinations as “a critically important tool in helping to end the pandemic and accelerate our community’s economic recovery.” Caesars Entertainment Inc. said it will start offering shots Thursday at the Rio for all company workers, with a goal of 10,000 vaccinations in April. It will partner with Albertsons supermarkets to administer up to 2,000 doses per day by appointment only. MGM Resorts – the largest employer in Nevada, with nine major resorts on the Las Vegas Strip – had more than 50,000 workers before closures began in March 2020 to stem the spread of the coronavirus. The company laid off about 1 in 4 of its 70,000 employees nationwide, and not all have returned to work.\n\nNew Hampshire\n\nConcord: Out-of-state college students may not be out of luck, after all, when it comes to getting a COVID-19 vaccine. Gov. Chris Sununu said last week that only New Hampshire residents would be eligible when eligibility expands Friday to include anyone age 16 and over, and out-of-state college students should return to their home states to get vaccinated. But the head of a nonprofit consortium that includes 21 public and private campuses said Wednesday that it is working to change that. Michele Perkins, chair of the council and president of New England College, said colleges recognized the need to prioritize residents, but as the vaccine process unfolds ahead of the original schedule, they are hopeful the state will offer shots to all students who want them. The announcement came hours after Democratic lawmakers and college students held a news conference to object to the governor’s decision. “Vaccinating the student population would save lives and livelihoods,” said Hannah Dunleavy, a student at Dartmouth College. “Clearly, students at Dartmouth are contracting COVID-19 at high rates, and we risk spreading the virus to people in the town of Hanover if we don’t vaccinate students. The virus doesn’t care if we live in New Hampshire nine months out of the year or all year round.”\n\nNew Jersey\n\nTrenton: As the state races to vaccinate its adult population faster than coronavirus variants spread, state statisticians predict that even in their best-case scenario, this summer New Jersey will see thousands more new cases each day compared to last summer. In the more dire predictions under Department of Health models Gov. Phil Murphy presented Wednesday, the state could see a record high of infections, depending on how effectively vaccines work against variant strains, whether New Jerseyans follow public health measures and how quickly they get vaccinated. “These are models, not certainties,” Murphy said. “We can change them with our behavior. It really is that simple.” In the worst-case scenario, the number of people who test positive for the virus each day peaks in mid-May and starts a steady but slow decline. If New Jerseyans don’t follow public health guidelines as strictly during Memorial Day, if variants spread and vaccines only protect against 65% of variant cases, and if 70% of adults are vaccinated by June 15, the peak could produce the highest number of daily cases New Jersey has ever reported. In a moderate-case future, the Garden State could see a lower peak of cases a month earlier, in mid-April.\n\nNew Mexico\n\nAlbuquerque: Organizers are planning for the Albuquerque International Balloon Fiesta’s return this year, and spectators will likely be allowed, with ticket sales for the annual fall event expected to begin in July. The fiesta’s early morning mass ascensions, fireworks shows and launches of special-shaped hot air balloons attract hundreds of thousands of spectators from around the globe and hundreds of balloon pilots and their crews. Last year’s event wasn’t held because of the coronavirus pandemic. Fiesta spokesman Tom Garrity said Tuesday that the board of directors is committed to following the state’s public health mandates and will have updates on the status of the event each month. The board also plans to identify health measures for pilots and guests by the time tickets go on sale. New Mexico has had some of the nation’s most restrictive rules in place to curb the spread of COVID-19. Despite criticism, Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham and state health officials have argued that the rules were necessary because of the lack of access to health care in the state and the high numbers of people with existing health conditions that put them at greater risk. Some of the restrictions have been relaxed in recent weeks as more counties have met the state’s benchmarks. But the mask mandate remains in place statewide.\n\nNew York\n\nNew York: America’s top dogs won’t have their pack of fans on hand at this year’s Westminster Kennel Club dog show. The club announced Monday that spectators and vendors won’t be allowed because of coronavirus limitations. No tickets will be sold. It’s the latest in a series of pandemic shake-ups to the nation’s most prestigious canine competition. It’s been moved from its longtime February date to June 12-13 and from New York City’s Hudson River piers and Madison Square Garden to an outdoor setting at a riverfront estate in suburban Tarrytown, north of Manhattan. It will be the first time in over a century that Westminster’s coveted best in show prize won’t be awarded at Madison Square Garden, where thousands of dog lovers usually cheer on their favorite breeds and contestants. The 2020 show was held in mid-February, about a month before virus shutdowns began. The show usually also offers spectators a chance to interact with dogs and breeders when they’re out of the ring, a highlight for many showgoers. This time, fans can watch the final rounds from afar on Fox channels. Preliminary rounds – including the agility competition’s early stages June 11 – and an obedience competition will be streamed on Westminster’s website. The club says it’s planning to return the show to New York City next year.\n\nNorth Carolina\n\nRaleigh: Gov. Roy Cooper on Tuesday announced a three-month extension of the statewide eviction moratorium that had been set to expire at the end of March. The updated executive order came a day after the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention directed states to extend protections through June 30. The CDC order applies to all standard rental housing but doesn’t cover those living in hotels, motels or other temporary guest home rentals, nor individuals making more than $99,000 a year. Cooper signed two other orders Tuesday. One directive extends to-go alcohol sales by a month until 5 p.m. April 30, while the other expedites unemployment insurance claim processing. “Even though North Carolina is turning the corner on this pandemic, many are still struggling,” Cooper said in a statement. “These executive orders will help families stay in their homes and help hard-hit businesses increase their revenue.”\n\nNorth Dakota\n\nBismarck: State officials on Monday announced a new food assistance program for families whose children have been eligible for free or reduced-price school meals during the current school year. The Pandemic Electronic Benefits Transfer program provides EBT cards to eligible families to buy food. They will receive benefits for days that students in the household are learning at home, rather than in a school building. Families do not need to apply for the benefit. Schools are gathering information about which students qualify. Eligible households will receive letters to notify them about the P-EBT benefit, and they will be mailed EBT cards in the coming weeks. The benefit will equal $6.82 for each day a student has been learning through distance instruction. The amount is the current daily federal reimbursement that schools receive per student for providing a free breakfast, lunch and after-school snack.\n\nOhio\n\nColumbus: The lieutenant governor dug in his heels Wednesday on a tweet in which he referred to the coronavirus as the “Wuhan virus,” even as advocates warn such rhetoric is a driving force behind violence against Asian Americans. Republican Lt. Gov. Jon Husted’s tweet Friday marked the second time in a week that Democratic state Sen. Tina Maharath, the first Asian American woman elected to the Ohio General Assembly, heard an elected official call the virus that first emerged in Wuhan, China, the “Wuhan virus,” she said. Maharath said Husted and others are following the lead of former President Donald Trump, who sometimes used overtly racist terms to refer to the virus. “When you say those things, such as attach locations or ethnicities to the disease, it creates racial profiling, and then it turns into xenophobic behavior,” Maharath said. “And when leaders with that kind of power repeat those terms in confidence and double down on it, it leads to more hate crimes.” His intention with the tweet, Husted said in an interview with the Associated Press, was to criticize the Chinese government. “I was just pointing out that this is an international crisis, in my opinion, that the Chinese government is responsible for, and I wanted an independent investigation,” he said. The World Health Organization on Tuesday said it was “extremely unlikely” that the virus emerged accidentally from a Chinese laboratory and was likely spread from animals to humans.\n\nOklahoma\n\nOklahoma City: The City Council voted Tuesday to delay for two weeks a vote on whether to lift a mask mandate imposed to curb the spread of the coronavirus. The mandate, which requires face coverings to be worn in buildings open to the public, was established in July and is set to expire April 30. Two council members have proposed ending the mandate early, despite recommendations from city health officials that it remain in place. “Masks have worked throughout the pandemic and are still working,” Dr. Patrick McGough, executive director of the Oklahoma City-County Health Department, and Dr. Gary Raskob, chair of the City-County Board of Health, wrote in a letter Tuesday to Oklahoma City Mayor David Holt. “Getting back to normal is a two-part process, with vaccines and masks working hand-in-hand to keep case counts, hospitalizations, and deaths down, and prevent variant strains of COVID-19 from gaining traction in our community.” State health officials are working to quickly roll out COVID-19 vaccines and on Monday opened up eligibility for all residents 16 and older, but less than one-third of people in the state have received a first dose of the vaccine, according to data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.\n\nOregon\n\nPortland: The state House of Representatives returned to action Tuesday after a week of canceled floor sessions due to multiple confirmed COVID-19 cases within the Capitol. Lawmakers began using a computer program to automatically read hundreds of pages of proposed bills after Republicans refused to suspend the full reading of bills before a final vote – a tactic that could add hours to the passage of even simple legislation. The slowdown has been used by the minority Republican Party as frustrations about the priorities of the 2021 session increase. The refusal to back down led to a chilly reaction from Democrats, who called the GOP’s actions “reckless and pointless,” and the coronavirus cases further raised tensions in the Capitol. “They’re also putting the health of all legislators, staff and their families at risk as we’re still fighting a global pandemic,” Democratic Rep. Rachel Prusak, tweeted Tuesday. In an attempt to decrease the COVID-19 risk, lawmakers are working in their Capitol offices as the bills are read and will return to the floor for discussions and voting.\n\nPennsylvania\n\nHarrisburg: Every adult in the state will qualify for a COVID-19 vaccine starting April 19, and emergency responders, grocery workers and people in other high-risk groups are able to schedule their shots immediately, Gov. Tom Wolf’s administration announced Wednesday in a dramatic expansion of the statewide rollout. Acting Health Secretary Alison Beam said the new timeline is possible because Pennsylvania’s vaccine supply is growing and getting more predictable, and providers across the state report they are ready for a fresh influx of people seeking protection against the coronavirus. The state is racing to vaccinate its population while it contends with a spring surge in coronavirus infections. Pennsylvania is averaging more than 4,000 cases per day – up 60% in two weeks – and hospitals are caring for hundreds more seriously ill patients than they were just 10 days ago. “Our numbers are really, really rising very quickly,” said Val Arkoosh, who chairs the Montgomery County Board of Commissioners. “I’m very concerned about the direction that this pandemic is going.” Despite rising case counts and hospitalizations, Beam said the state is forging ahead with its plan to ease pandemic restrictions on bar seating, restaurant capacity, and indoor and outdoor events starting Sunday.\n\nRhode Island\n\nProvidence: Gov. Daniel McKee on Wednesday nominated Providence City Council President Sabina Matos as his lieutenant governor. If confirmed by the state Senate, she will be the first person of color in state history to hold the job. About 80 people initially applied for the job, but the Democratic governor said at a news conference that Matos shares his vision. “In selecting a lieutenant governor, I was looking or someone to be a true governing partner,” he said. “Someone who shares my commitment to supporting our 39 cities and towns and our small businesses, and that’s exactly what I found in Sabina. I know that Sabina Matos will help our administration serve all Rhode Islanders as we recover and rebuild from this pandemic.” He noted that she, like him – a former town councilor and mayor in his hometown of Cumberland – rose through the ranks of local politics. Matos, 47, was first elected to the Providence City Council in 2010 and voted president in 2019. Matos said her priorities will be continuing the state’s COVID-19 vaccination efforts, getting the state back to work and children up to speed in the classroom after the pandemic, and addressing what she called the “affordable housing crisis.”\n\nSouth Carolina\n\nColumbia: Lawmakers are considering a proposal to prevent employers from mandating COVID-19 vaccines for workers. The resolution passed by the state Senate Medical Affairs committee Wednesday says that employers can’t punish or fire their workers for refusing to get the shots. The proposal makes some exceptions for hospitals and other employers working with populations who are especially vulnerable to the coronavirus. Employers could still require quarantines for workers exposed to the virus and provide incentives for employees to get the vaccine. The proposal now heads to the full Senate for a vote. Senators already passed a separate bill that would prevent lawsuits against businesses and other groups by people who contract COVID-19 as long as federal and state health guidelines were being followed.\n\nSouth Dakota\n\nSioux Falls: Anyone over 16 will be eligible for a COVID-19 vaccination starting Monday. Gov. Kristi Noem’s announcement Wednesday followed an uptick in cases statewide. Over the past two weeks, the rolling average number of daily new cases has increased by 34%, according to Johns Hopkins University researchers. But state health officials also reported that 43% of residents have received at least one dose of a vaccine, and about 65% of those people have completed vaccination, which requires two shots in most cases. More than 400,000 South Dakotans will have access to vaccines with the broadening of eligibility next week. Shots will be made available for free through health care providers and at pharmacies statewide. “There will not be the heavy hand of government mandating that you get the vaccine,” Noem said in a video announcement. “Instead, we will do what we always do. We’ll trust our people to do the right thing.” No states have mandated that the general public get a vaccine. The Republican governor credited former President Donald Trump for initiating a vaccine development program, saying Democratic President Joe Biden is “yielding the fruits” of those efforts.\n\nTennessee\n\nManchester: After canceling its 2020 event due to the pandemic, the Bonnaroo Music & Arts Festival has revealed its 2021 lineup, filled with familiar names and a few big surprises. Foo Fighters, Lizzo, Tyler the Creator, Tame Impala, Megan Thee Stallion and Lana Del Rey top the bill at this year’s festival, slated for Sept. 2-5 in Manchester. Other big acts include Lil Baby, Run the Jewels, Janelle Monae, Phoebe Bridgers, Julien Baker, deadmau5, G-Eazy, Jack Harlow, Jason Isbell & The 400 Unit and Brittany Howard. Tickets went on sale Wednesday at bonnaroo.com/tickets. Many of the acts on this year’s lineup were originally slated to perform at the canceled 2020 Bonnaroo. This year will mark the first time Bonnaroo hasn’t taken place in June. Bonnaroo said in a press release that organizers “always will be in regular communication with local health and public safety officials and will continue to abide by relevant recommendations.” Gov. Bill Lee also said in a statement: “It’s exciting to see Tennessee stages come back to life in time to celebrate the 20th anniversary of this internationally acclaimed festival. Fans are ready to gather together and celebrate their shared love of music once again. We welcome them back for a full Bonnaroo and what is sure to be a truly unforgettable event!”\n\nTexas\n\nAustin: The state opened vaccine eligibility to all adults this week, joining a rapid national expansion as state health officials continue monitoring whether spring break will change a downward trend in coronavirus cases. Texas is receiving more than 1 million new doses of COVID-19 vaccines this week, and shipments are expected to increase in April, said Imelda Garcia, head of the state’s expert vaccine allocation panel. Vaccination rates in Texas have lagged much of the nation. Although officials put some blame on data reporting delays, they acknowledged some appointment slots are going unfilled. “We have heard from some of our providers that demand has definitely decreased over the past couple of weeks,” said Garcia, adding that some unused doses are being transferred to other providers. Texas has administered more than 10 million vaccine doses. Garcia said it’s still too early to tell how spring break affects Texas COVID-19 cases. However, officials are pleased with recent trends, she said. Texas’ seven-day rolling average of new cases did not increase over the past two weeks, going from roughly 4,500 new cases per day March 13 to about 4,000 on Saturday.\n\nUtah\n\nSalt Lake City: Utah Jazz player Donovan Mitchell will give the keynote address for the University of Utah’s 2021 commencement, the school announced Tuesday. The campuswide commencement will take place virtually May 6. In-person college convocations will be held May 5-8. The university said in a statement that Mitchell “is known as a team player and community builder who is passionate about education and social justice.” University President Ruth Watkins said in a statement that Mitchell “shows by example what one person can do to influence the lives of countless others and how to step forward to advocate for change with grace and goodwill.” Mitchell was awarded the offseason NBA Cares Community Assist Award in January for his commitment to advancing social justice and educational access for students of color. Ephraim Kum, president of the university’s student association, said he is “incredibly excited for students to hear from Donovan Mitchell. He has long been one of my favorite players, not just because of his abilities as an athlete, but also for his inspiring leadership, his genuine commitment to our community and his willingness to speak up on social justice issues.”\n\nVermont\n\nNewport: Recent testing at a prison in the city returned no positive results for the coronavirus in inmates or staffers – the first time results were all negative since an outbreak started at the facility in late February, the Vermont Department of Corrections said Wednesday. “We will continue to test the facility and monitor the situation closely, we aren’t in the clear yet, but today is encouraging,” Corrections Commissioner Jim Baker said in a statement of the results from testing Monday. The Northern State Correctional Facility currently has two cases among inmates and three staff cases, the department said. A total of 177 people have been medically cleared to leave isolation, it said. Staffers and inmates will be tested again Thursday.\n\nVirginia\n\nRichmond: The Richmond and Henrico health districts have scheduled the first round of Phase 1c-eligible residents for COVID-19 vaccine events. The health districts said in a news release Wednesday that up to 7,500 Phase 1c eligible individuals will receive an email that will allow them so schedule an appointment. Vaccinations for people eligible in Phases 1a and 1b will still be available. The groups of people in Phase 1c are considered essential to the functioning of society or are at higher risk of exposure. They include people who work in fields such as energy, wastewater, construction and food service. Those who work in higher education, transportation and legal services are also eligible. The state began inoculating health care personnel and people living in long-term care facilities in December. It then expanded to people over the age of 65, people with underlying health conditions and some front-line workers who are considered essential. Anyone over age 16 who lives or works in Virginia is expected to be eligible for the vaccine by May 1.\n\nWashington\n\nYakima: Just in time for the asparagus harvest that will employ large numbers of farm workers, the federal government has opened a mass COVID-19 vaccination center in the center of the state’s agricultural region. Washington’s first federal mass vaccination center, at the Central Washington State Fair Park in Yakima, opened Wednesday and will administer close to 1,200 doses per day, according to the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which operates the site along with state and local officials. Vaccine will come to the site directly from the federal government rather than from the state’s weekly allocation. The additional doses will help vaccinate more Washingtonians, including those in rural and agricultural communities that have been particularly affected by the pandemic. COVID-19 has hit Yakima County hard, with high infection and hospitalization rates compared to the rest of Washington. People from racial and ethnic minority groups have accounted for approximately 50% of the county’s coronavirus cases. “We are so appreciative to FEMA and our other federal partners for working with the state to make significant additional resources available to the people of the Yakima Valley,” Gov. Jay Inslee said in a statement. FEMA officials said the center will operate for eight weeks.\n\nWest Virginia\n\nCharleston: Gov. Jim Justice announced 34 previously unreported coronavirus deaths Wednesday. Justice for the first time pinned blame on the Department of Health and Human Resources for a data issue that has led to the late disclosure of more than 200 deaths so far. “Once we got into this situation, our people at DHHR should’ve recognized this issue and moved. They didn’t move, and I’m not happy about that,” the Republican governor said. “I can’t tell you that it is completely over yet, but I surely hope and pray that this is the last” of unreported deaths. Justice said he has ordered the department to implement “a new electronic death reporting system.” Dr. Ayne Amjad, the state health officer, said the new system would be in place “as soon as possible,” but officials are searching for a vendor for the program. Justice and Amjad have previously said batches of unreported deaths, including 165 last month, were a result of hospitals and nursing homes not reporting the fatalities in a timely manner to the state. But Justice was less certain this time. “I don’t really know if it has come from a nursing home or a hospital or within DHHR; I don’t know,” Justice said about the deaths. “But I know they’re just getting to us.” The governor said an internal review didn’t find any purposeful intent to cover up data.\n\nWisconsin\n\nGreen Bay: Dozens of high schools are playing football this spring after opting out of the fall season because of the pandemic. According to the Wisconsin Interscholastic Athletic Association, about 250 high schools played football last fall, but more than 100 are playing this spring, including about 50 games this past weekend. The association’s deputy director, Wade Labecki, said teams will play seven games during the alternate spring season. There’s no postseason because football is set to start again in the fall, Wisconsin Public Radio reports. At Notre Dame Academy in Green Bay, head coach Mike Rader said there are some logistical challenges with playing in the spring. His football squad will have to start sharing its turf with the soccer and lacrosse teams. Rader said athletics has been a helpful outlet after a hard year. “As we started to open things back up a little bit, and we would have kids throwing footballs around to each other and stuff like that, in a lot of cases the high school kids kind of looked like grade school kids because they were just happy to be out there,” he said. Swimming and volleyball are also underway. And safety is the top priority, Labecki said. Wisconsin is in a better place now than in the fall, officials said. Still, Notre Dame is taking precautions including weekly virus testing, Rader said.\n\nWyoming\n\nCasper: The governor is rejecting a call by President Joe Biden for states to reimpose mask orders in response to the coronavirus. Gov. Mark Gordon lifted a statewide mask mandate March 16 that had been in effect since December. Several other Republican governors have done the same. Gordon has no plans to reimpose Wyoming’s mandate but urges people to take personal responsibility to keep communities safe, spokesman Michael Pearlman said Tuesday. Biden and the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Monday that this is no time to relax safety measures. CDC Director Rochelle Walensky told governors in a call Tuesday that a growing rate of COVID-19 infections nationwide is concerning. New cases in Wyoming have fallen off sharply since December. They’re down to the level recorded last September – about 50 new cases per day, down from a peak of over 600 daily cases. Almost 700 people in the state have died of COVID-19 over the past year, according to the Wyoming Department of Health.\n\nFrom USA TODAY Network and wire reports", "authors": [], "publish_date": "2021/04/01"}, {"url": "https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/50-states/2021/06/21/slavery-reckonings-radio-citys-return-marijuana-movements-news-around-states/117129826/", "title": "Slavery reckonings, Radio City's return: News from around our 50 ...", "text": "From USA TODAY Network and wire reports\n\nAlabama\n\nMobile: Descendants of the white Alabama businessman who financed the voyage of the last slave ship to land in the United States more than 160 years ago have agreed to sell a building that will become a hub for Africatown USA, the community settled by the freed Africans after the Civil War. A long-closed credit union building owned by relatives of Timothy Meaher will open within weeks as a food bank and as home of the Africatown Redevelopment Corp., officials told a news conference Thursday. The family sold the brick building to the city for $50,000, well below its appraised value of $300,000. The family, which tax records show owns millions of dollars’ worth of land around Mobile, issued a statement that described selling the building as a way “to give back to the community.” Mayor Sandy Stimpson said he contacted a representative of the family about acquiring the property in Africatown, located just a few miles north of downtown Mobile. Large parts of the once-vibrant community are blighted, but the area has received new attention since the wreckage of the slave ship, Clotilda, was found in 2018. Community leaders are now trying to revitalize the area with a museum and other attractions that could bring visitors and an infusion of money into the area.\n\nAlaska\n\nJuneau: A special legislative session limped toward a bitter end Friday, with the threat of a partial government shutdown looming and Gov. Mike Dunleavy and House majority leaders sharply disagreeing over the adequacy of the budget passed by lawmakers last week. Dunleavy called the budget “defective,” pointing in particular to the House’s failure to get the two-thirds support for a procedural effective-date vote. His office said notices were sent to thousands of state workers warning of possible layoffs with the new fiscal year beginning July 1. He called another special session, set to begin Wednesday and again focus on the budget, shortly after the House held a brief floor session for which attendance was not mandatory Friday afternoon. House majority leaders were among those who criticized Dunleavy’s stance on the budget. House Speaker Louise Stutes characterized it as a needless choice and said Dunleavy has tools available to prevent shutting down parts of the government, including asking minority Republicans to change their votes to support the effective-date clause. Minority Republicans, who say they have felt marginalized and want to be included in talks on what pieces should be considered as part of a broader fiscal plan, take responsibility for their votes, House Minority Leader Cathy Tilton told reporters Friday.\n\nArizona\n\nTucson: Researchers at the University of Arizona will be launching a study of how prone Hispanic children are to asthma in Tucson compared with their peers on the other side of the U.S.-Mexico border in Nogales, Sonora. The study will follow 500 pregnant women of Mexican descent in both cities and their newborns for the next five years to see how prevalent asthma is. Dr. Fernando Martinez, a principal investigator of the project and director of the University of Arizona Health Sciences Asthma and Airway Disease Research Center, said there is four times less asthma in Nogales, Sonora, than in Tucson, which is about an hour’s drive away. A study of teenagers in Nogales, Arizona, showed 16% had asthma compared with 4% to 6% of teens in the same age range just across the border in Nogales, Sonora. Mexicans who come to the United States also have less asthma than Mexican Americans, researchers have found. The Arizona Daily Star reports the University of Arizona study will look into how the risk of asthma is affected by the “hygiene hypothesis,” which suggests that a child’s reduced exposure to germs stunts the immune system’s ability to fight infectious organisms. The study was delayed due to COVID-19, but researchers plan to begin enrolling pregnant women in August and finish by August 2023.\n\nArkansas\n\nLittle Rock: A federal judge Friday refused to allow a man arrested after he was photographed sitting at a desk in House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s office during the Jan. 6 U.S. Capitol riot to travel for a classic-car swap meet. U.S. District Judge Christopher R. Cooper rejected the request by Richard Barnett to loosen the 50-mile restriction on how far he can travel from his residence while he’s on home detention awaiting trial. Barnett’s attorney said the Gravette, Arkansas, man needed to be able to travel to make a living buying and selling classic cars. Petit Jean Mountain, where the car show was being held over the weekend, is 200 miles from Gravette. “The Court is not persuaded that the defendant cannot pursue gainful employment within a 50-mile radius of his home as permitted by the current conditions,” Cooper’s order said. Barnett, 61, was among supporters of President Donald Trump who stormed the Capitol as lawmakers assembled to certify Joe Biden’s victory over Trump. Prosecutors say Barnett was carrying a stun gun when he entered the building. Federal prosecutors opposed Barnett’s request and said his conduct while awaiting trial – including an interview with Russian State Television – indicated more conditions, not fewer, were needed.\n\nCalifornia\n\nLos Angeles: Attorney General Rob Bonta launched new anti-human trafficking teams to apprehend perpetrators and support survivors Friday amid an alarming increase in labor and sexual exploitation statewide amid the coronavirus pandemic. California’s lockdown exacerbated problems with human trafficking, officials said Friday, and made it much harder for victims to escape and find housing and other services. Kay Buck, the chief executive officer for Los Angeles-based nonprofit Coalition to Abolish Slavery and Trafficking, called it “the most unforgettable and heart-wrenching year” as advocates saw a huge demand in services combined with a shortage of resources. In LA alone, the nonprofit saw a spike of 185% in urgent human trafficking cases during the pandemic, Buck said. Advocates in LA County see victims – many who come from Mexico and the Philippines – who were duped into thinking they would have a job in the U.S. but are instead sold into “modern-day slavery.” Actors and activists Mira Sorvino and Alyssa Milano; state Assemblyman Miguel Santiago; and Angela Guanzon, who escaped her trafficker and aided law enforcement in their prosecution, joined Bonta on Friday to implore Newsom and lawmakers to approve another $30 million in new grants over the next three years, doubling the funding level for the efforts.\n\nColorado\n\nDenver: U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra visited a mobile vaccine clinic near the city Friday to promote COVID-19 shots among underserved communities of color that have some of the nation’s lowest vaccination rates. He also met with Democratic Gov. Jared Polis, getting briefly interrupted by the governor’s dog, Gia, and another dog dashing through their closed-door session, giving the two a laugh. They discussed the state’s pandemic response and a new law creating a state-administered health insurance plan designed to reduce premiums and costs of care as well as get more people covered. Later, Becerra, the agency’s first Latino leader, and Democratic members of Colorado’s congressional delegation toured a mobile vaccine clinic focused on underserved communities in the Denver suburb of Aurora, which is nearly 30% Hispanic. It’s one of nine mobile units made from converted buses. While Hispanic people make up 20% of Colorado’s population, less than 10% have been vaccinated, according to the state’s vaccine dashboard. Democratic U.S. Rep. Jason Crow said many minorities and immigrants have trouble finding the time to get vaccinated while working multiple jobs, highlighting the need for the mobile resources. “Where you are, we will go. Donde tú estás, iremos nosotros,” Becerra said.\n\nConnecticut\n\nHartford: The state has become the first in the nation to make all prison phone calls free, addressing one of the biggest emotional and financial burdens faced by incarcerated men and women and their families as they try to stay in touch. The state has a prison contract with phone vendor Securus Technologies, which charges up to $5 for a 15-minute call – some of the highest phone rates in the country. Gov. Ned Lamont signed a bill into law Wednesday that allows incarcerated men, women and juveniles a minimum of 90 minutes a day of free calls. Supports said the change could go into effect as early as next month. “We’re on the right side of history,” said Democratic state Rep. Josh Elliott, one of the legislation’s supporters. “Corporations can no longer be allowed to exploit the love between incarcerated people and their families – not in our state, not on our watch.” Several more local jurisdictions in the U.S. have also taken steps to make prison and jail phone calls free, including New York City, San Francisco, San Diego and Los Angeles. “This historic legislation will change lives,” said Bianca Tylek, executive director of Worth Rises, which has been working with local advocates to slash prison phone costs. “It will keep food on the table for struggling families, children in contact with their parents, and our communities safer.”\n\nDelaware\n\nWilmington: President Joe Biden announced Saturday that Champ, the older of the family’s two dogs, had died “peacefully at home.” The German shepherd was 13. “He was our constant, cherished companion during the last 13 years and was adored by the entire Biden family,” Biden and first lady Jill Biden said in a statement posted to the president’s official Twitter account. The Bidens, who were spending the weekend at their home in Wilmington, got Champ from a breeder after Joe Biden was elected vice president in 2008. Champ was a fixture both at the vice president’s residence at the Naval Observatory and at the White House. In their statement, the Bidens said when Champ was young, “he was happiest chasing golf balls on the front lawn of the Naval Observatory,” and more recently he enjoyed “joining us as a comforting presence in meetings or sunning himself in the White House garden.” “In our most joyful moments and in our most grief-stricken days, he was there with us, sensitive to our every unspoken feeling and emotion,” the Bidens said. Champ’s passing leaves the Bidens with their younger German shepherd, Major, whom the family adopted from the Delaware Humane Society in 2018.\n\nDistrict of Columbia\n\nWashington: Residents getting their first dose of COVID-19 vaccine at select sites through the end of July will receive $51 gift cards and be entered for a chance to win free flights and other incentives, WUSA-TV reports. Mayor Muriel Bowser said Washington has reached 70% of adults having received at least one dose. While anyone can get a COVID-19 shot at district vaccination sites, the gift cards are only available to D.C. residents. Those between the ages of 12 and 17 must be accompanied by a guardian. Residents will receive the gift card after getting their shot. Additionally, Washingtonians getting their shots at Anacostia High School, Ron Brown High School or RISE Demonstration Center will be entered to win two round-trip American Airlines tickets to anywhere the airline flies, including international locations. Other prizes offered in a series of drawings starting Saturday include a new car, a year’s worth of groceries, and a one-year Metro pass. More information about the giveaways can be found at coronavirus.dc.gov/incentives. A full schedule of the days and hours of the current walk-up sites can be found at taketheshotdc.com.\n\nFlorida\n\nSt. Petersburg: A federal judge on Friday ruled for the state in a lawsuit challenging a U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention order making it difficult for cruise ships to resume sailing due to the coronavirus pandemic. U.S. District Judge Steven Merryday wrote in a 124-page decision that Florida would be harmed if the CDC order, which the state said effectively blocked most cruises, were to continue. The Tampa-based judge granted a preliminary injunction that prevents the CDC from enforcing the order pending further legal action on a broader lawsuit. “This order finds that Florida is highly likely to prevail on the merits of the claim that CDC’s conditional sailing order and the implementing orders exceed the authority delegated to the CDC,” Merryday wrote. Florida Attorney General Ashley Moody praised the decision in a statement. “Today’s ruling is a victory for the hardworking Floridians whose livelihoods depend on the cruise industry,” said Moody, a Republican. “The federal government does not, nor should it ever, have the authority to single out and lock down an entire industry indefinitely.” While the CDC could appeal, Merryday ordered both sides to return to mediation to attempt to work out a full solution – a previous attempt failed – and said the CDC could fashion a modification in which it would retain some public health authority.\n\nGeorgia\n\nAtlanta: Georgia’s secretary of state is making public a list of nearly 102,000 voters who will be removed from the rolls unless they act to preserve their registration. Republican Brad Raffensperger announced the list Friday, part of an every-other-year bid to remove voters who may have died or moved away. The state has about 7.8 million voters, and his office said the removals include about 67,000 voters who submitted a change-of-address form to the U.S. Postal Service, plus about 34,000 voters who had election mail returned. Voter purges in Georgia became a hot-button issue during the 2018 governor’s race between Democrat Stacey Abrams and Republican Brian Kemp. As secretary of state before being elected governor, Kemp oversaw aggressive voter purges during his tenure. More than 1.4 million voter registrations were canceled in Georgia between 2012 and 2018. In the current purge, election officials said, cancellation notices will be mailed, and those who respond within 40 days will have their registration switched back to active. Anyone who is removed could register again. On a monthly basis, the secretary of state been removing voters who were convicted of felonies or who died.\n\nHawaii\n\nHonolulu: Civil rights activist the Rev. Al Sharpton is condemning the Honolulu Police Department for the fatal shooting of a Black man as various versions of what led to the death continue to emerge. “Lindani Myeni’s killing is yet another sensational racialization and criminalization of an innocent, unarmed black man at the hands of police not following the law and proper police procedures,” Sharpton said in a statement Thursday. Interim Honolulu Police Chief Rade Vanic said the police department is committed to public service, and these “are challenging times for police departments everywhere.” Sharpton weighed in on the April 14 shooting of Myeni after lawyers representing his widow in a wrongful-death lawsuit made public last week a doorbell video showing the 29-year-old arriving at a house, taking off his shoes and quickly leaving after his presence confused the occupants. Myeni repeatedly apologized to the couple. The lawsuit said he likely mistook the home for a temple next door that’s open to the public. Police responding to a 911 call shot him a short time later outside the house, with body camera footage showing an officer fired several gunshots before saying, “Police!” An attorney representing the homeowner and the tourists who were staying in the house said Myeni’s presence wasn’t as innocuous as lawyers for his wife portrayed.\n\nIdaho\n\nBoise: The Northwestern Band of the Shoshone Nation is suing Gov. Brad Little and state wildlife officials in federal court, contending Idaho has wrongly denied the tribe hunting rights guaranteed by the 1868 Treaty of Fort Bridger. The lawsuit, filed in Idaho’s U.S. District Court last week, asks a judge to declare that the Northwestern Band is protected under the treaty. On its surface, the legal case could come down to whether one of the Native American leaders who signed the treaty was representing the Northwestern Band along with other bands of the Shoshone Nation and whether the Northwestern Band itself has remained a cohesive unit in the time since. But at the heart of the dispute is a dilemma faced by many Native American governments across the U.S. who sometimes find themselves at odds with game wardens, mining companies, water users or other groups as they try to preserve their use of the land they were promised in treaties signed centuries ago. Some Northwestern Band tribal members have faced criminal convictions after Idaho game wardens said they were hunting without tags. In 1997, two brothers were found guilty for hunting out of season in Idaho, though they had hunting tags issued by the Northwestern Band. Shane and Wayde Warner appealed their convictions, claiming rights under the Fort Bridger treaty.\n\nIllinois\n\nChicago: The state is dangling millions of dollars in cash prizes and scholarships to encourage residents to get vaccinated, Gov. J.B. Pritzker announced Thursday. Illinois will offer $7 million in cash prizes and $3 million in scholarships through a new lottery open to all residents who have received at least one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine. Pritzker made the announcement at a community health center in Chicago’s Back of Yards neighborhood. Prizes will range from $100,000 to $1 million, and children can win a college savings plan worth $150,000. Names in Illinois’ vaccination database will be automatically eligible for the lottery. Participants will be required to have a shot by July 1. Weekly drawings will begin July 8. “ ‘All In For The Win’ is yet another way we’re working to ensure every single resident is protected from COVID-19,” Pritzker said. Nearly 67% of Illinois’ residents have received at least one vaccination dose, and a little over 50% have received two doses of a COVID-19 vaccine.\n\nIndiana\n\nBristol: A grain mill that opened more than 180 years ago in northern Indiana saw a sales boom during the pandemic after it opened a drive-thru for customers eager to buy freshly milled grains. The historic Bonneyville Mill was closed to visitors during the COVID-19 pandemic, like many Indiana businesses. But staff at the 1830s mill converted its original horse and wagon bay that farmers once used to deliver freshly harvested grain into a drive-thru for automobiles, which helped the mill along the Little Elkhart River rack up its most profitable year on record for grain sales, said Ronda DeCaire, director of the Elkhart County Parks system. “This was one of the few places in the Midwest where you could still buy flour and other freshly milled grains,” she told The Elkhart Truth. To prevent spreading the coronavirus, the mill’s staff used a pole with a bucket on its end to accept payments from drive-thru customers. Packages of flour and other milled grains were then handed to those customers through their car windows. “For the first time in over a hundred years, that wagon bay was busy again,” said Courtney Franke, the mill’s manager. DeCaire said the Bonneyville Mill is the oldest continuously operating grist mill in Indiana. It’s located just south of the Michigan border about 25 miles east of South Bend.\n\nIowa\n\nIowa City: A divided state Supreme Court on Friday banned police from searching people’s uncollected trash without a warrant, outlawing an investigative technique that had been used for decades. The court ruled 4-3 that officers commit an unreasonable search and seizure under the Iowa Constitution when they look for evidence of crimes in trash left for collection outside homes. The tactic amounts to an unconstitutional trespass on private property and violates citizens’ expectations of privacy, especially in cities that have ordinances barring residents from accessing others’ trash, Justice Christopher McDonald wrote for the majority. “We do not question the utility of warrantless trash grabs for the purposes of law enforcement, but the utility of warrantless activity is not the issue under our constitution,” he wrote, adding that “garbage contains intimate and private details of life.” The ruling overturned Iowa courts’ long adherence to a 1988 U.S. Supreme Court decision that found the U.S. Constitution’s Fourth Amendment does not prohibit the search of garbage outside one’s home. Just a small number of other states have limited trash searches by holding that their state constitutions provide greater protections than the U.S. Constitution against warrantless searches.\n\nKansas\n\nShawnee: A judge is beginning to evict tenants who are behind on rent in advance of the expiration of a federal moratorium that some experts predict will bring a tide of people being forced from homes nationwide. Johnson County Magistrate Judge Daniel Vokins said during a Zoom eviction hearing last week that he doesn’t think the moratorium, which was issued last year by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and expires at the end of the month, is enforceable. Eric Dunn, director of litigation for the National Housing Law Project, said he has heard of judges elsewhere – including in Florida, Georgia and North Carolina – ignoring the CDC moratorium but couldn’t say whether it’s been a widespread practice. The federal moratorium has kept many tenants owing back rent housed. More than 4 million people nationally say they fear being evicted or foreclosed upon in the months following its expiration, census data shows. Making matters worse, the tens of billions of dollars in federal emergency rental assistance that was supposed to solve the problem has not reached most tenants. “We thought 2021 was going to be better, and it is turning out to be just as bad,” said Denise Wall, 31, of the Kansas City suburb of Shawnee, who applied for rental aid in March but is still trying to find out whether she qualifies.\n\nKentucky\n\nLouisville: With tourists flocking to distilleries, concerns about a pandemic hangover for the state’s world-famous bourbon industry are quickly evaporating. A $19 million tourist center that Heaven Hill Distillery opened just days ago in the heart of the state’s bourbon country is already overflowing, with reservations filling up quickly to learn about whiskey-making and sample its spirits, including its flagship Evan Williams whiskey. It’s a similar story for the numerous other distilleries in the region that last spring were temporarily closed to visitors because of the COVID-19 pandemic. More than a year later, the businesses are facing such overwhelming demand for tours that one industry official has started encouraging people to call ahead or check tour availability online before pulling off the highway. Starting last summer, some distilleries began allowing limited numbers of visitors in accordance with coronavirus restrictions. With capacity limits now lifted, the attractions are gearing up for a full resurgence of guests, many from outside Kentucky. “We saw it coming, but I don’t think we saw it coming this quick,” said Kentucky Distillers’ Association President Eric Gregory, who predicted bourbon tourism will quickly rebound to pre-pandemic levels.\n\nLouisiana\n\nBaton Rouge: The iconic bald cypress trees will be protected on state-owned property, after Gov. John Bel Edwards signed a new law banning the trees’ harvesting on more than 1million acres of state land. Rep. Neil Riser said he sponsored the bill – which won unanimous passage in the state House and Senate – to give nature time to reestablish dense stands of cypress that once covered vast tracts of land. “The cypress tree symbolizes Louisiana and the Mississippi Delta,” said Riser, R-Columbia. “I hope this new law will help people have a true appreciation of these trees’ majesty.” The new law doesn’t apply to cypress trees growing on privately owned land. Cypress trees grow throughout Louisiana’s swamps and can have lifespans of more than 1,000 years. The bald cypress was named the official Louisiana state tree in 1963. Riser said the forests will return on state-owned lands with protection, though it will take almost a century for the slow-growth trees to mature. “They will come back with Mother Nature as the manager and forester,” he said. In a twist, Riser was involved in harvesting the trees as a teenage logger in the 1970s when forests were being cleared for farmland. “I remember my dad telling me, ‘Take a look at this forest; one day it will all be gone,’ and it was,” he said.\n\nMaine\n\nAugusta: The Legislature has approved an initial proposal that would allow four Native American tribes to build gambling businesses on their lands, in a reversal from years of resistance and laws that opposed Native ownership of casinos in the state. Breaking years of opposition against the bill, the House and Senate approved it with an overwhelming majority Thursday, the Portland Press Herald reports. Rep. Rena Newell, a nonvoting member of the Legislature who represents the Passamaquoddy Tribe, gave a speech following the approval of the bill, which she had pushed legislators to advance. The bill was only a small part of what the state could do for the tribes in Maine, she said. “Our ancestors watched from inside the bounds of our reservation as nontribal members got rich from cutting down our trees on our land, leaving us with little,” Newell said. The gambling legislation is one part of a series of changes the Legislature wants to amend the 1980 Maine Indian Claims Settlement Act. If these amendments are enacted, the revisions would restore some of the sovereignty that tribal leaders say they lost years ago, according to the Press Herald. Maine voters have rejected tribes’ past proposals but approved referendum questions that led to the establishment of two corporate-owned casinos.\n\nMaryland\n\nAnnapolis: The state is awarding $10million to entertainment venues that struggled during the pandemic, including the Delmarva Shorebirds, the Maryland Theatre and the Maryland Symphony Orchestra, among others. The money will help stabilize businesses that had to shut down or drastically reduce their capacity as COVID-19 surged. As the state begins to emerge from the pandemic, the money will also help venues prepare for the busier fall arts season, said Nicholas Cohen, the executive director of Maryland Citizens for the Arts. “The arts season is a little quiet in the summer. It comes back in the fall,” Cohen said. “What this does is it helps float these venues until then, to really be like, ‘Here we are; we’re back; we’re maybe close to full capacity.’ ” The additional $10 million in state grants will go to more than 60 venues and organizations. For the nearly century-old Potomac Playmakers, the money will help maintain the nonprofit’s new home, which volunteer grant writer Greg Berezuk said the group moved into just before the pandemic shut everything down. “We got in there just before COVID. It’s a wonderful facility for an audience to enjoy a live performance, and we couldn’t use it,” Berezuk said. Fixed costs, such as the mortgage and utilities, had to be paid even without shows, he said.\n\nMassachusetts\n\nBoston: A union that represents about 800 city employees who have been working remotely during the pandemic has filed an unfair labor practices claim against acting Mayor Kim Janey’s administration for unilaterally ordering them back to the office. The Service Employees International Union Local 888 filed the complaint with the state Thursday, the Boston Herald reports. “The City refused in good faith to bargain about health and safety issues, family and childcare issues (especially single and low wage employees), and productivity issues (as the evidence will show that many of the job tasks have been accomplished at a higher rate due to the use of virtual meetings and technology),” the union wrote in the complaint. Janey this month ordered remote workers back in phases in late June and early July. “The city did not explain why the return to physical work locations was necessitated on the dates picked for reopening other than they have the right to do it,” the SEIU wrote. In response to the complaint, a city spokesperson said in a statement: “Mayor Janey remains committed to flexibility, as we fully restore vital services to Boston residents. We do not have further comment at this time on the pending litigation.”\n\nMichigan\n\nLansing: People with a disability or a positive HIV test could not be discriminated against during the organ transplant process under legislation passed by the state House. Though the federal Americans with Disabilities Act bans discrimination on the basis of disability during the organ transplant process, organizations such as the National Down Syndrome Society say certain disability designations affect where a person sits on a transplant list, if they even get on a list at all. One bill passed by the House puts Michigan on the same path several states have taken, outlawing the denial of a transplant or lowering a person’s place on an organ waiting list because of their disability. However, no penalty for discrimination is listed in the bill. The other bill would allow patients with HIV to donate their organs to HIV-positive recipients. Both bills must be passed by the state Senate and signed by the governor in order to become law. Nationally, in 2013 the HIV Organ Policy Equity Act lifted a decades­long ban on transplanting HIV-infected organs into recipients. Current state law doesn’t allow Michigan residents to receive organs from individuals who test positive for HIV, so organs that test positive get shipped off to out-of-state recipients.\n\nMinnesota\n\nSt. Paul: Staunch conservatives and advocates of legal marijuana have formed an unlikely alliance to pressure the Legislature to allow medical cannabis patients to own guns. The more than 35,000 patients in Minnesota’s program can’t own guns as the law now stands because the federal government classifies marijuana as an illicit drug, on par with heroin, and prohibits anyone who uses an “unlawful” substance from purchasing a firearm. So some gun-rights supporters and pro-legalization groups and legislators are lobbying during the special session to allow the Minnesota Department of Health to petition the federal government for an exemption. The change is being debated as part of the state’s public safety and health and human services budget bills. If their effort is successful, the Star Tribune of Minneapolis reports, Minnesota would be the first of 36 states that allow medical marijuana in some form to appeal directly to the federal government on behalf of its enrollees. The ranks of the state’s medical marijuana patients are expected to triple or quadruple over the next few years under a new law that liberalizes the state’s restrictive program to allow smokable marijuana instead of more expensive pills or liquid extracts.\n\nMississippi\n\nNatchez: The National Park Service on Friday accepted the city’s donation of land at a site that was once one of the largest slave markets in the United States. The federal agency eventually will develop exhibits that tell the history of Forks of the Road, where Black people were sold to work in slavery in Southern plantations from 1833 to 1863. The site in Natchez has had a sign and a small monument made of concrete and shackles. Officials have been working since 2005 on proposals to create a detailed memorial. More than 100 people watched Friday as the city donated nearly 3 acres to the park service in a ceremony that took place a day after President Joe Biden signed legislation to create a federal holiday for Juneteenth, which commemorates the end of slavery in the U.S. on the date when enslaved people in Texas got word of the Emancipation Proclamation. “As we commemorate the celebration of liberty, Juneteenth, and we gather to remember the system of enslavement and the oppression the proceeded this freedom, we acknowledge the tragic story of what happened here at Forks of the Road and within the city of Natchez,” said Lance Hatten, deputy regional director for the National Park Service. “When that truth is told and heard, the journey to healing and unity begins.”\n\nMissouri\n\nSpringfield: Frustrated health officials in the area are imploring residents to get COVID-19 vaccinations as the faster-spreading delta variant of the coronavirus pushes case numbers and hospitalizations higher. Random testing of virus samples has determined that the delta variant, which is more infectious and potentially more deadly than other strains, has become dominant around Springfield and in much of southwest Missouri, said Kendra Findley, administrator of community health and epidemiology with Greene County. Administrators at the two largest hospitals serving the state’s southwestern region – Mercy and CoxHealth – are pleading with residents to get inoculated because COVID-19 patient loads are increasing at a rate they have not previously seen during the pandemic, The St. Louis Post-Dispatch reports. In Greene County, 36% of the population has begun the vaccination process. In most surrounding counties, the figure is below 30%. Erik Frederick, chief administrative officer at Mercy Hospital Springfield, said hospitalizations averaged in the teens a month ago but reached 72 by Thursday. CoxHealth has seen similar numbers. Many of the new patients are young, healthy adults and pregnant women, he said. The delta variant “has become prevalent” across Missouri, state health officials said last week.\n\nMontana\n\nBozeman: Wildlife officials are seeking feedback on a proposal to expand fishing restrictions to protect declining brown trout populations. Biologists with Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks and the U.S. Geological Survey have tracked declining numbers of juvenile brown trout in southwest Montana rivers, including the Big Hole, Ruby, Boulder, Beaverhead, upper Yellowstone and upper Stillwater rivers, the Bozeman Daily Chronicle reports. Eric Roberts, fish management bureau chief with Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks, said the trend is concerning because low numbers of younger fish indicate that older fish are not being replaced. Biologists are now gathering public comments on the proposed changes, which include seasonal fishing closures from September to May, catch-and-release requirements, and evening fishing restrictions from 2 p.m. to midnight daily. The changes could also apply to the rivers’ tributaries. Residents can submit comment online, by mail or by attending public meetings Tuesday and Wednesday. Department officials will then develop proposals to be considered in August. Roberts attributed the trout population decline, in part, to changing water temperatures and habitat alterations. He said there are long-term plans in place to address stream flows and enhance habitat.\n\nNebraska\n\nLincoln: Amtrak trains are once again rumbling through the state capital on a daily basis. The California Zephyr, which runs from Chicago to San Francisco, has resumed its pre-pandemic schedule of one eastbound and one westbound train stopping in Lincoln in the early hours of each day. ProRail Nebraska, a group of citizens that supports the continuation of passenger train service in the state, met the westbound train at the Lincoln Amtrak station on the first day of resumed daily service, May 24. According to ProRail’s District 1 director, Richard Schmeling, ProRail opposed the pause in daily service, lobbying Nebraska’s federal representatives to support Amtrak through the pandemic. Amtrak spokesman Marc Magliari said daily service was halted on many routes after the Senate declined to pass funding for the service during the pandemic. Now that legislation providing the funding has been passed and signed by the president, he said, Amtrak has resumed service at full capacity. “It enables us to be a better service in the 500 places we serve,” he told the Lincoln Journal Star. It also enabled Amtrak to recall more than 2,000 workers nationally that it put on furlough while service was decreased, Magliari said, including conductors, engineers and service people.\n\nNevada\n\nLas Vegas: A new kind of jackpot is coming to the Silver State, Gov. Steve Sisolak said Thursday, but only for residents who’ve gotten a COVID-19 shot. The Democratic governor announced a broad effort to encourage reluctant or forgetful residents to get shots, adding his state to a growing list offering unconventional incentives to revive flatlining vaccination programs amid waning demand. Sisolak didn’t call it a lottery, instead terming the “Vax Nevada Days” prize program a raffle because entrants aren’t paying to participate, and vaccines are free. The program makes all residents who have received at least one dose of vaccine since December – along with military members and their dependents – automatically eligible to receive part of $5 million in prize money. Winners will be announced every Thursday for eight weeks beginning July 8. Students ages 12 to 17 can get college tuition credits worth $5,000 to $50,000. People 18 and up are eligible for prizes from $1,000 to $250,000. Among almost 2,000 winners, a $1 million grand prize winner will be announced Aug. 26. “If people are looking for reasons not to get vaccinated, they’re going to come up with one. I’m trying to give people 5 million reasons to get vaccinated,” Sisolak said, referencing the total cash prizes being offered.\n\nNew Hampshire\n\nHanover: Dartmouth College is providing up to $1 million to encourage students to move off campus to ease a housing crunch this fall. Students can opt to have their names included in a one-time lottery for $5,000 to encourage as many as 200 returning students to live off campus, Mike Wooten, associate dean of residential life, said in an email to students who are on a housing waitlist. Dartmouth is shifting some of its larger doubles to triples and converting lounges to student rooms where possible, but that isn’t enough to alleviate the housing crunch, Wooten said in the email. “As expected, demand has exceeded our capacity,” he wrote. “Although this has been the case in prior years, interest in living on campus has understandably surged following the easing of COVID-19 restrictions.” Some students said the school should be trying harder to house them – or at least better communicate why it can’t. “It hasn’t been made clear of what actions they’ve taken to mitigate this other than the lottery,” David Millman, a sophomore, told WMUR-TV.\n\nNew Jersey\n\nPaterson: Landlords won’t be able to inquire about potential renters’ criminal histories under a new law Gov. Phil Murphy signed Friday. The Democratic governor signed the Fair Chance in Housing Act on what was the state’s first official celebration of Juneteenth as a paid holiday for state workers. “We must commit to both remembering the past and continuing to take action to ensure communities of color, especially Black Americans, achieve the full equity they deserve,” Murphy said in a statement. He also signed legislation making the third Friday in June a state holiday. June 19 – or Juneteenth – commemorates when word reached enslaved people in Galveston, Texas, that slavery had been abolished. President Joe Biden signed similar nationwide legislation Thursday. The new housing measure aims to eliminate housing instability that contributes to recidivism, according to the governor. The new law won’t apply in cases where federal law permits landlords to ask about certain criminal convictions.\n\nNew Mexico\n\nAlbuquerque: Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham said Friday that all remaining pandemic-related public health restrictions on commercial and day-to-day activity in the state will be lifted July 1, clearing the way for restaurants and other venues to operate without any capacity limits and for cities to plan in-person Fourth of July celebrations and other summer festivals. The Democratic governor made the declaration as state health officials continued to crunch the vaccination numbers following a push that included a multimillion-dollar sweepstakes, other cash incentives and offers that included free child care for those who needed it in order to get their shot. Lujan Grisham wanted at least 60% of residents 16 and up to be vaccinated two weeks ahead of the reopening. Her office said that vaccinations stood at 59.4% on Thursday but that health officials were waiting for more federal data to come in that would push the state closer to its goal. Still, the governor said in a statement that she had hoped the numbers would be higher by now. “The variants across the globe and in the U.S. present very serious risks to unvaccinated people, even young people,” she said. “We all, each of us, have the power to stop the serious illnesses and deaths: Get your shot. It’s safe. It works. It’s that simple.”\n\nNew York\n\nNew York: Fifteen months after shuttering for the pandemic, Radio City Music Hall reopened its doors Saturday for the Tribeca Festival premiere of a new Dave Chappelle documentary for a full-capacity, fully vaccinated audience. The debut of “Dave Chappelle: This Time This Place,” which chronicles Chappelle’s pandemic stand-up series held in rural Ohio cornfields, marked the first time the hallowed hall was packed since closing in March 2020. The premiere Saturday evening, the closing night gala for the 20th Tribeca Festival, was seen as a symbolic reawakening of the arts in New York, where many of the world’s most famous stages – Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, Broadway theaters – remain dark. On Sunday, Madison Square Garden hosted its first full-capacity concert with the Foo Fighters. “Springsteen on Broadway” is set to resume performances June 26. After the Tribeca screening, Chappelle took the stage and paused for a moment to apologize for those who lost someone during the pandemic before signaling a note of revival. “But, man, let’s get up,” he said, before introducing a New York feast of hip-hop acts who performed according to their native borough, including Q-Tip, Talib Kweli, Fat Joe, A$AP Ferg, Redman, Ghostface Killah and De La Soul.\n\nNorth Carolina\n\nRaleigh: Gov. Roy Cooper vetoed gun-rights legislation Friday that would allow parishioners at more churches to be armed, marking the second year in a row that he’s blocked the idea. The legislation affirms that people going to religious services at a location where private schools or some charter schools also meet can carry handguns in full view or under clothing if they have a concealed weapons permit. There would be other limits. The Democratic governor said the measure, which cleared the Legislature this month, would endanger educators and children. State law otherwise prohibits guns on educational property for nearly everyone. “For the safety of students and teachers, North Carolina should keep guns off school grounds,” Cooper wrote in his veto message. The bill’s supporters contend these houses of worship where K-12 schools also are located are at a security disadvantage for their congregants compared to stand-alone churches. There are no such blanket prohibitions in these churches on carrying a pistol, provided the person has a purchase permit or concealed weapons permit. The bill also contains another provision that allows additional law enforcement employees – such as a civilian front desk worker at a police station – to carry a concealed weapon on the job if the police chief or sheriff allows.\n\nNorth Dakota\n\nBismarck: State regulators have again extended a deadline for Meridian Energy Group to begin construction on its $1 billion oil refinery near Theodore Roosevelt National Park or risk losing its permit. Meridian’s permit from the state Department of Environmental Quality was set to expire June 12 unless construction had begun on the Davis Refinery. Earlier this month the company asked for an extension on that deadline, citing delays related to the coronavirus pandemic and litigation. Recent lawsuits against Meridian have called into question the company’s ability to pay workers, the Bismarck Tribune reports. Regulators granted an extension until Sept. 12 to start construction, a month short of what Meridian had requested. “The reasons seemed to make sense, and we thought, ‘We’ll give you guys the summer to hopefully work out your stuff and then start construction,’ ” state Environmental Engineer David Stroh said. “We requested an update from them in a little over a month so we could get a better feel for how things are progressing out there, knowing there’s a lot of attention to this facility.” Refinery opponents are concerned in part about its proximity to the national park. The North Dakota Supreme Court issued a pair of rulings last year clearing the way for the refinery to move forward.\n\nOhio\n\nCleveland: Some casinos and racinos could be left with losing tickets if the state Senate’s sports betting legislation giving professional teams priority for obtaining brick-and mortar sports book licenses is ultimately enacted. A bill approved Wednesday by the Senate and sent to the House for consideration assigns the 30 total sports books to counties based on population. If professional sports teams in Cleveland, Columbus and Cincinnati all decided to apply for licenses, casinos and racinos in Cuyahoga, Franklin and Hamilton counties would be shut out at the sports betting window of opportunity in the Senate’s bill. Cuyahoga County, which includes Cleveland, for example, has three professional sports teams as well as a downtown casino and a racino in the suburbs. Dan Reinhard, a senior vice president for the JACK Cleveland casino and a spokesperson for the casino and racino group Get Gaming Right Ohio, said Friday that the Senate bill “disrespects” casino employees. “An artificial cap that locks out gaming companies in the biggest, most populous counties doesn’t make a lot of sense,” he said. “We know how to do this. This is the business we’re in. We’re going to work with all parties to make sure this cap is dealt with.” The original Senate bill introduced in May excluded casinos and racinos altogether.\n\nOklahoma\n\nPryor: Electric vehicle company Canoo announced Thursday it has selected Pryor for its U.S. manufacturing facility, which is expected to employ 2,000 people. The Los Angeles-based company plans to build its factory on a 400-acre campus at the MidAmerica Industrial Park near Tulsa. It will include a paint and body shop, along with a general assembly plant, and is targeted to open in 2023. “Oklahoma has always been a pioneer in the energy industry, and this partnership with Canoo shows that our state is an innovation leader in electric vehicle technology,” Gov. Kevin Stitt said in a statement. “We are thrilled to partner with Canoo and Chairman and CEO Tony Aquila to provide high-paying jobs for Oklahomans and position America as the global leader for vehicle manufacturing for decades to come.” Aquila cited Oklahoma’s strategic location and business-friendly policies as reasons Oklahoma was selected. Tulsa was in the running last year for a Tesla electric vehicle manufacturing facility that ultimately went to Austin, Texas.\n\nOregon\n\nSalem: A second Republican in the state Senate is facing a recall effort after showing up to oppose a gun-control bill earlier this year. Oregon Public Broadcasting reports a Mount Vernon resident named Patrick Kopke-Hales has initiated a petition process that, if successful, could force a recall election against state Sen. Lynn Findley, R-Vale. Findley was one of six Republicans to attend a March 25 floor session, granting quorum to supermajority Democrats against the wishes of many gun-rights supporters. Though Findley spoke forcefully against Senate Bill 554 that day, Democrats passed the proposal to create new gun storage laws, ban guns in the Capitol and Portland International Airport, and allow Oregon schools and universities to implement their own bans. Senate Majority Leader Fred Girod is also facing a prospective recall because of SB 554’s passage, reflecting increasing pressure on Republicans to flee the Capitol over controversial bills after doing so to block climate change legislation in 2019 and 2020. The gun-control bill is currently the subject of a referendum effort that could give voters a final say on the law in November 2022. Findley said in a statement that “fighting for conservative values in Salem is my priority, not playing political games.”\n\nPennsylvania\n\nPhiladelphia: Consuewella Dotson Africa, a longtime member of the Black organization MOVE and mother of two children killed in the 1985 bombing of the group’s home, has died at age 67. A member of the MOVE family, Janine Africa, said Consuewella Africa had tested positive for the coronavirus when she went to a hospital around the beginning of the month but had largely recovered when doctors said last week that she was not getting enough oxygen. “Through the stress with everything that was happening, her body just could not fight to get the air in her lungs because she was too burnt out and tore down from the stress,” Janine Africa said. Africa’s death follows painful revelations in the past few months about the treatment of the remains of her two daughters who were killed in the police bombing of the organization’s Philadelphia home, where 11 members – including five children – were killed, and more than 60 homes were burnt to the ground. Her daughters, 14-year-old Katricia “Tree” and 12-year-old Zanetta “Netta,” died in the bombing while Consuewella Africa was in prison serving a 16-year-sentence for simple assault related to the city’s 1978 attempt to evict the group during which a police officer was killed. Consuewella Africa held the title “Minister of Confrontation” for MOVE, which identifies as both a family and an organization.\n\nRhode Island\n\nBristol: A town that was a center of the trans-Atlantic slave trade commemorated Juneteenth by unveiling a new marker recognizing its role in slavery. Officials on Saturday placed the first of two planned slavery markers in town at the Linden Place Museum, a mansion built in the 1800s by General George DeWolf, a prominent merchant and slave trader. Another medallion will be placed later this month at DeWolf Tavern. The markers are being installed at sites around the state connected to the trans-Atlantic slave trade by the Rhode Island Slave History Medallion project. They’ve been placed at Smith’s Castle in North Kingstown, Bowen’s Wharf in Newport, and Patriot’s Park in Portsmouth, according to organizers. Students and faculty from Roger Williams University planned to discuss their original research into the town’s slavery legacy. University officials say the work includes new information about the town’s lesser-known slave-trading families, as well as stories of enslaved Africans who lived and worked in town, such as Bristol Finney, a 19-year-old enslaved African who ran away from his owners. Saturday’s ceremony featured music and dance from a local African performance group, and the museum offered tours.\n\nSouth Carolina\n\nDarlington: Historians are trying to shed light on five forgotten cemeteries in the state’s Pee Dee region. WMBF-TV reports the Darlington County Historical Commission and Clemson Professor Jim Frederick located the five graveyards near Dargan’s Pond on current Clemson property. The experts identified two African American cemeteries, two Native American burial grounds and a graveyard that dates back to the Revolutionary War. One of the sites is the cemetery of Cpt. William Standard, who was deeded land in Darlington County for his heroic service during the Revolutionary War. The pair of Native American burial grounds could date back more than 500 years. And one of the African American cemeteries is linked to one of the county’s oldest African American church congregations, the historians said. It started shortly after emancipation and was connected to the Pleasant Grove Baptist Church, where it was active until the church moved locations in the 1950s. “It relates to an African American congregation that is one of the oldest congregations in Darlington County,” he said. “They lost their connection in a very unique way, and I believe there’s three factors to that.” The historians say they are now working to identify individuals in the old church cemetery.\n\nSouth Dakota\n\nSioux Falls: The union representing workers at a Smithfield Foods plant said Friday that its members have voted in favor of a new contract. Union leaders say the deal sends a message to the meatpacking industry that companies need to recognize the sacrifices its employees made during the coronavirus pandemic. The Smithfield plant was the nation’s most active hot spot for COVID-19 cases in the early weeks of the pandemic. Nearly 1,300 workers at the Sioux Falls pork processing plant tested positive for the virus, and four workers died. B.J. Motley, president of the Union Food and Commercial Workers Local 304A, said in a statement that the new contract includes fair pay, benefits and safety protections that workers have earned and deserve. “Ensuring these jobs continue to provide the good pay and benefits working families need is the best way for us to honor our country’s essential workers,” Motley said. The contract includes a base rate of $18.75 an hour, up from $17, and a $520 bonus. The union had voted earlier this month to authorize a strike after Motley said that Smithfield wanted the workers to pay more for health care and refused to increase pay to comparable rates of other meatpacking plants in the region.\n\nTennessee\n\nMemphis: A development that organizers say “is poised to become the second-largest Black-owned film studio in the United States” moved one step closer to fruition this month when the Land Use Control Board approved the zoning adjustments necessary to build BLP Film Studios, an 85-acre production facility in the Whitehaven neighborhood. “Our goal is to make Memphis the international epicenter for producing films and projects led by Black and brown creators on the production and directing side of those projects,” said Jason A. Farmer, 52, a former Marine and business executive who for the past few several years has been working to launch BLP, which he said would be eclipsed only by Tyler Perry’s facilities in Atlanta. Farmer said he believes BLP – the name is an acronym for Black Lens Productions – will attract investors as film and TV companies work to address the “diversity, equality and inclusion” concerns that have sparked debate within the entertainment industry. “Black and brown consumers are becoming more savvy,” he said, “and we find ourselves with none of the legacy production companies” that produce most of the high-profile content that brings customers to move theaters, cable channels and streaming service. He said groundbreaking is scheduled to begin in the fall.\n\nTexas\n\nAustin: Gov. Greg Abbott followed through on a threat Friday and vetoed the new state budget’s line item providing for legislative staff pay. The Republican governor had threatened the veto after a walkout by House Democrats in the final hours of the regular legislative session. The walkout denied a House quorum to vote on controversial voting restrictions that Abbott had prioritized. “Texans don’t run from a legislative fight, and they don’t walk away from unfinished business,” Abbott said in Friday’s veto message. “Funding should not be provided for those who quit their job early, leaving their state with unfinished business and exposing taxpayers to higher costs for an additional legislative session.” However, a summer special session already was expected so that the Legislature can redraw district lines for congressional, legislative and other government offices. The budget is to take effect Sept. 1. Abbott is expected to push the voting-restrictions bill again during the summer special session. Rep. Chris Turner, who chairs the House Democratic Caucus, engineered the walkout. In a statement Friday, he called Abbott’s veto “tyrannical” and the latest indication the Republican governor “is out of control.” The caucus is considering all of its options, Turner said, “including immediate legal options.”\n\nUtah\n\nSalt Lake City: Home prices around the capital city jumped a staggering 31% over the past year in the latest sign of Utah’s housing crisis. Wasatch Front real estate agents have decried the dire lack of homes on the market as prices climb and sales bog down, the Salt Lake Tribune reports. Salt Lake County’s median price on a single-family home inched past the eye-catching $500,000 mark sometime in March and then reached $535,000 last month, new data shows. Average new home listings now draw 30 to 40 offers and sell in five days, the Salt Lake Board of Realtors said. The group said more construction is desperately needed to fill the gap. Nationwide, there’s a housing deficit of roughly 5.5 million units, according to an industry study that calls for ramping up the rate of U.S. homebuilding to add 2 million homes yearly over the next decade, compared with last year’s 1.3 million units built. In Utah, the shortfall is between 45,000 and 50,000 single-family homes, apartments and other housing types, with an especially serious need for more affordable homes accessible to residents making average wages.\n\nVermont\n\nBurlington: The University of Vermont Food Systems Research Center is getting $11 million in federal funding to support its work researching the regional food system, from production agriculture to food security, UVM and U.S. Sen. Patrick Leahy announced Friday. The center is a collaboration between the university and the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Agricultural Research Service, officials said. Vermonters turned to their local farms for food security when the pandemic struck, Leahy said in a statement. “Farms are an economic driver for our rural communities and local food is a defining feature of Vermont,” Leahy said. “We must continue to cultivate our food systems so our state can thrive and weather future emergencies.” USDA scientists are now being picked to work on campus with university researchers. “This is the first and only ARS research unit designed specifically to study diversified food systems and the smaller farms that contribute to those systems,” said UVM College of Agriculture and Life Sciences Dean Leslie Parise. “We are proud to be leading this work at UVM and believe there is much the rest of the world can learn from the successful small- and medium-sized farms that characterize Vermont agriculture.”\n\nVirginia\n\nRichmond: After twists and turns on the road to legalizing simple possession of marijuana, advocacy groups have been flooded with calls from people trying to understand exactly what will be allowed under state law as of July 1. Legislators initially voted in February to legalize possession of up to an ounce of cannabis for adult recreational use – but not until 2024, when retail sales would begin. An outcry ensued over the three-year wait before ending pot possession penalties, so in April the Legislature voted to move up legalization to this July 1. Adding to the confusion: Lawmakers included a “reenactment clause,” which means the General Assembly will have to vote again next year on major portions of the law, mainly to establish a regulatory framework for the legal pot marketplace. The process has resulted in some contradictions that may not get resolved until years after legalization begins. Sen. Adam Ebbin, one of the lead sponsors, said people “still need to be careful.” Possession of up to one ounce with no intent to distribute will become legal for those 21 and older. Adults will also be allowed to grow up to four plants per household. But not much else will change. Buying and selling marijuana will remain illegal until 2024, when retail sales are expected to begin. Smoking marijuana in public also remains against the law.\n\nWashington\n\nMount Vernon: The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has proposed listing a bird found in the North Cascades as threatened under the Endangered Species Act due to the likelihood that climate change will shrink its high-elevation habitat throughout the state. The Mount Rainier white-tailed ptarmigan is found in the Cascade Mountains from southern British Columbia to southern Washington, the Skagit Valley Herald reports. It is one of few animals that spend their entire lives on mountaintops. White-tailed ptarmigans move seasonally between snow-covered habitat and summer alpine meadows. As temperatures continue to warm, the region’s snowpack will decline. Alpine meadows may also be at risk as conditions move tree lines to higher elevations. “As the iconic alpine meadows of Washington diminish with climate change, this alpine bird … will be pushed out of the home it is specially adapted to,” U.S. Fish and Wildlife spokesperson Andrew LaValle said. The state Department of Fish & Wildlife lists the Mount Rainier white-tailed ptarmigan as a species of greatest concern and as highly vulnerable to climate change. The Fish and Wildlife Service proposal includes rules to protect the birds from types of intentional and unintentional harm and says a species recovery plan will be written after the listing becomes official.\n\nWest Virginia\n\nCharleston: Gov. Jim Justice declared an end to the state’s indoor mask requirement Sunday as a $1 million winner was revealed in a drawing for residents who have received COVID-19 vaccines. Karen Foley of Mineral Wells won the top prize announced on a sweltering Father’s Day at the Capitol Complex during a celebration of the state’s 158th birthday. “Now we’re going to probably change somebody’s life in lots of ways,” Justice said before Foley’s name was announced. Prizes in separate drawings also held Sunday included custom pickup trucks, state park weekend trips, lifetime hunting and fishing licenses, and hunting rifles and shotguns. Two younger vaccinated residents won college scholarships, including tuition, room and board, and books. Justice announced a series of random drawings May 27. The deadline for Sunday’s drawing was last Wednesday, and the winners were drawn Thursday. More than 246,000 West Virginians had registered. The names of entrants who don’t win will be carried over week to week. Residents can still sign up for six other drawings, which will be held on Wednesdays from June 30 to Aug. 4. The final drawing will include a $1.588 million grand prize and a $588,000 second prize.\n\nWisconsin\n\nMilwaukee: Republican U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson joined in a Juneteenth Day celebration in his home state only to see his speech drowned out by a chorus of boos. Johnson made an appearance Saturday at a Republican Party booth in Milwaukee, where he drew a growing crowd once people recognized him. Some people swore at him and said: “We don’t want you here.” Last year Johnson blocked legislation to make Juneteenth a national holiday. Last week he relented while saying that “it still seems strange” that taxpayers should fund time off for federal employees to celebrate the end of slavery. The bill was quickly passed and signed by President Joe Biden. When asked what he thought of the boos Saturday, Johnson said: “This is unusual for Wisconsin. Most people in Wisconsin say, ‘You are in our prayers; we are praying for you.’ … But you got some people here that are just sort of nasty at some points.” One attendee, Robert Agnew, said he thought the reason for the taunting was that “Ron Johnson’s politics are not for us.”\n\nWyoming\n\nCheyenne: Supporters of two new marijuana ballot petitions say they’re optimistic about getting pot questions before voters next year, especially with growing support from conservatives in the deep-red state. Even so, they face daunting odds because of the difficulty of getting such initiatives on the ballot and failing to do so four years ago. The Legislature legalized hemp and hemp oil in 2019, but Wyoming is among a dwindling number of states that haven’t approved marijuana in some form. Thirty-six states now allow medical marijuana, and 17 have approved recreational marijuana, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. This time around, some Republicans are finding common cause with Democrats and others on marijuana. “It’s well past due,” state Rep. Mark Baker said. “If they’re successful in reaching the ballot and putting the question to the people, I do think it is going to be successful.” Baker, R-Green River, stepped down as director of the state chapter of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws after being elected last year. Other outspoken supporters include a state representative who last year became the first Libertarian Party candidate elected to a U.S. statehouse in 20 years. One petition would seek to legalize marijuana for medical use. The other would decriminalize it.\n\nFrom USA TODAY Network and wire reports", "authors": [], "publish_date": "2021/06/21"}, {"url": "https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/50-states/2019/09/27/scrambled-eggs-pa-road-stolen-golden-coffin-chocolate-university-news-around-states/40208517/", "title": "50 states", "text": "From USA TODAY Network and wire reports\n\nAlabama\n\nMontgomery: The Alabama Forestry Commission issued a statewide fire alert Wednesday because of extremely dry weather. It was an upgrade from a previously issued fire danger advisory. The extremely dry weather means any fire can quickly spread out of control. The commission said over the last week firefighters responded to 182 wildfires across the state, burning about 2,608 acres. Those included a 470-acre fire in Talladega County and a 39-acre fire in DeKalb County. The commission said permits for outdoor burning will be restricted and issued on an individual basis at the discretion of the state forester. Anyone who burns a field, grassland or woodland without a permit could face prosecution.\n\nAlaska\n\nAnchorage: Two pilots have been fined $3,000 apiece for flying airplanes low over walruses on the shore near Point Lay two years ago. U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service spokeswoman Andrea Medeiros said names of the pilots who disturbed walruses can’t be released, but didn’t explain why. Residents of Point Lay in September 2017 saw two airplanes flying near resting walruses. Cameras that monitor the marine mammals captured photos of the airplanes and walruses leaving the remote beach in response. Low-flying aircraft can cause stampedes that crush young animals. Walruses’ preferred habitat is sea ice. Ice since 2007 has retreated beyond the shallow continental shelf to water too deep for walruses to dive for clams. Walruses this year began showing up on shore in July. On Saturday, about 40,000 walruses were near Point Lay.\n\nArizona\n\nPhoenix:A miniature pig “craze,” paired with a lack of education on how to raise them, has led to owners surrendering or releasing them into the desert at an alarming rate, said Danielle Betterman, owner and director of Better Piggies Rescue, a pig sanctuary in Phoenix. The overflow of miniature pigs is so bad, she said, that her sanctuary has had to stop accepting owner surrenders. The Ironwood Pig Sanctuary in Marana has more than 100 pigs on its surrender waitlist to date, said Mary Schanz, its president and co-founder. Most of them aren’t spayed or neutered. Schanz, who has been in the pig rescue business for 18 years, said her sanctuary has largely been able to keep up with the incoming pigs, “but now, it’s just beyond our capability.” The problem, she said, is that there are no regulations for pig breeding. Backyard breeders rear too many pigs and then sell them to people who mistakenly think they will stay small. The Arizona Department of Agriculture saw an increase in pickups of stray pigs in the last year. There have already been 17 pig pickups in 2019, compared to 15 in all of 2018, said Cody Egnor, an assistant state veterinarian for the agriculture department.\n\nArkansas\n\nHot Springs: Oaklawn Racing Casino Resort is raising the minimum wage for its nearly 1,000 employees. The racetrack and casino said it would increase the minimum wage for nontipped employees from $9.25 an hour to $13 an hour starting at the end of the month. Tipped employees will see their minimum wage increase from $2.76 an hour to $6 an hour. Oaklawn said the change affects about 970 full-time, part-time and seasonal employees. Oaklawn is expanding after voters legalized casino gambling in four counties in 2018. Construction is underway on a $100 million expansion, which includes adding a hotel and event center. In 2018, Arkansas voters approved an initiative to gradually raise the state’s minimum wage to $11 an hour by 2021.\n\nCalifornia\n\nSan Francisco: The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency said California is falling short on preventing water pollution, largely because of its problem with homelessness in big cities such as San Francisco and Los Angeles. EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler outlined the complaints Thursday in a letter to Gov. Gavin Newsom. Wheeler is demanding a detailed plan for fixing the problems within 30 days. The letter said “piles of human feces on sidewalks and streets” could cause water contamination. It criticized San Francisco for routinely discharging inadequately treated sewage into the Pacific Ocean. Wheeler said if the state doesn’t meet its responsibilities, the EPA will have to take action. The letter escalated a feud between the Trump administration and California, a predominantly Democrat state that has fought the administration’s efforts to weaken environmental regulations.\n\nColorado\n\nDenver: A flight was diverted to Denver after a passenger was found trapped inside the airplane’s bathroom. KUSA-TV reported that Denver International Airport spokeswoman Emily Williams said the door to one of the airplane’s bathrooms got stuck, but could not confirm why or how. Officials said United Flight 1554 was scheduled to travel from the District of Columbia to San Francisco before it made an emergency landing Wednesday in Denver. Williams said the flight crew called for assistance and the Denver Fire Department responded to the airport and helped open the door. Williams said there were no calls for medical assistance. United Airlines confirmed that someone was in the bathroom.\n\nConnecticut\n\nHartford: A service dog that was the subject of several books by an Iraqi war veteran who suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder has died. Tuesday, a golden retriever, was 13 when he died Tuesday in Burlington, according to Educated Canines Assisting with Disabilities, a service dog training organization that places dogs with veterans. Tuesday gained fame touring the country with former U.S. Army Cpt. Luis Carlos Montalvan, who wrote the memoir “Until Tuesday: A Wounded Warrior and the Golden Retriever Who Saved Him.” The book, the first of four written by Montalvan about his life with Tuesday, became a bestseller in 2011. It was credited with helping raise awareness of PTSD and the availability of service dogs for veterans. Montalvan, who was wounded in Iraq, earned two Bronze Stars and a Purple Heart. Montalvan became a leading advocate for military veterans’ mental health and increasing access to more service animals. Montalvan took his own life in 2016. He had left Tuesday with family members and the dog was not with him at the time. Tuesday was later placed as a service dog with a Connecticut cancer patient. He died in the arms of that man, Gordon Schafer, at their home after being diagnosed with a mass in his abdomen.\n\nDelaware\n\nSeaford:The Seaford School District issued an apology for a mix-up and is investigating why a parody version of the national anthem sung by Rosanne Barr was used before a volleyball match Tuesday between Seaford and Milford high schools. In a letter to the district and community, Superintendent David Perrington said pregame proceedings will be improved to prevent it from happening again. Called “disgraceful and disrespectful” by parents on social media, the incident sparked uproar from spectators wondering how it was allowed to happen, and whether not it was an honest mistake made by students. “The district plays the National Anthem prior to sporting events to honor our country and in support for the men and women who serve in the nation’s armed forces,” Perrington wrote in the apology. “In the future, the district will utilize our district-approved version at athletic events.” The school district also reached out to Milford School District on Tuesday night to apologize. Performed in 1990 before a San Diego Padres game, Barr’s screeching rendition rocked the country before there was such thing as a viral video. Complete with spitting and midsong laughter, Barr’s off-key shrieks often are ranked among the worst performances the anthem.\n\nDistrict of Columbia\n\nWashington: A technology developer who filed a lawsuit against the District’s $215 million no-bid sports gambling contract has requested a temporary restraining order to stop the district from upholding it. WTOP-FM reported that Dylan Carragher filed the motion Tuesday, stating the single-source contract awarded to Intralot violates the city’s procurement laws that ensure competitive bidding. Carragher’s attorney, Donald Temple, said if the contract is illegal, and the government shouldn’t be allowed to execute it. Carragher’s lawsuit said the contract illegally bars him and other potential vendors from participating in the “potentially lucrative enterprise.” The D.C. Attorney General’s Office declined to comment. Court documents said the order, if granted, will block Intralot from receiving a $30 million payment due Oct. 1.\n\nFlorida\n\nMelbourne:A local zoo assisted 39 green and loggerhead sea turtle “washbacks” that were pushed ashore when heavy waves disrupted their habitat. Brevard Zoo’s sea turtle manager Shanon Gann said in a news release that the washbacks were found on Brevard County’s beaches over the last week. Gann said staff members and volunteers cared for the turtles, which were then sent to Gumbo Limbo Nature Center in Boca Raton. They were expected to be taken by boat to the weed line and released on Thursday. Sea turtles rely on energy stored in their yolk sac upon hatching to make the multimile swim to offshore weed lines. If the seaweed is disrupted by strong winds or waves, they might get washed back onshore.\n\nGeorgia\n\nSavannah: A Georgia sheriff’s employee has been fired over a video that showed him confronting a 19-year-old Latina for speaking Spanish at a McDonald’s and then admitting to being a racist. Chatham County Sheriff John Wilcher told reporters that the man has been fired from the department, but declined to identify the man or provide his job title. The expletive-filled video shared on Twitter showed the white man confronting Cristina Riofrio for speaking Spanish to her friends, saying she probably came over on a boat. At one point, Riofrio said“I’m videoing this. You’re a racist,” to which the man replies, “I know I am.” Riofrio said the man shouldn’t be proud of that fact just before an off-screen employee told the man he needs to leave.\n\nHawaii\n\nHonolulu: Wildlife officials on Tuesday euthanized two emaciated, sick dolphins that stranded on a Maui beach less than a month after another mass stranding in the same area. The two animals were breathing heavily and had abnormal heart rates, said David Schofield, the regional stranding coordinator for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. They also had critically low levels of an enzyme called alkaline phosphatase, which in dolphins and whales indicates inflammation, illness or poor nutrition, Schofield said. Veterinarians who examined the animals determined the most humane thing to do would be to euthanize them, he said. The two were among six pygmy killer whales, a species of deep-ocean dwelling dolphin, that agency officials had been monitoring for about 10 days in shallow waters off Maui. The remaining four were still in the area off Sugar Beach in the coastal town of Kihei. Pygmy killer whales are often confused with false killer whales and melon-headed whales. The species is found primarily in deep waters throughout tropical and subtropical areas of the world. Eleven pygmy killer whales stranded on the same beach on Aug. 29. One calf died and officials euthanized four adults after that stranding. Dorsal fin marks showed different individuals were involved in the two stranding events.\n\nIdaho\n\nBoise: Idaho Humane Society officials said they’re seeing an increase in the number of people surrendering their pets because of housing issues. Kristine Schellhaas with the Idaho Humane Society told KBOI-TV in Boise that some owners can’t afford pet insurance or the higher rental rates they must pay with pets. So far this year, the shelter has taken in more than 1,500 owner-surrendered cats and dogs. Schellhaas said it’s heartbreaking because the families love their animals even though they need to rehome them. For pets needing temporary help, the Idaho Humane Society has a pet food pantry. Owners facing financial issues can get six months of access to the pantry. The shelter’s animal clinic also provides veterinary care to low-income pet owners.\n\nIllinois\n\nSpringfield: The Illinois State Museum has agreed to return 42 culturally significant objects to Australia. The gesture comes nearly a century after they were brought to the United States. The museum said in a news release that it’s the first institution in the world to repatriate artifacts as part of the Australian government’s Return of Cultural Heritage Project. It’s an attempt to bring back indigenous materials taken from the country. Boomerangs, necklaces, shields, spears and other items that will be returned were collected in Australia between 1929 and 1931 by University of Chicago linguistic anthropologist Gerhardt Laves. They were transferred by the university to the state museum in 1942 for incorporation into its rotating exhibit series on international cultures. They haven’t been exhibited by the museum since 1981.\n\nIndiana\n\nIndianapolis: Marketing research firm J.D. Power released its 2019 North America Airport Satisfaction Study, and Indianapolis International Airport ranked highest in customer satisfaction for medium-size airports, which service 4.5 million to 9.9 million passengers a year. This is the second time the airport received this honor, topping the list in 2016. Indianapolis International earned 833 points, ranking first in the cleanliness of terminal concourses, hallways and restrooms, as well as comfort in the terminal, ambiance, Wi-Fi service and clarity of signs and directions. Jacksonville International Airport in Florida was second with 831 points and Buffalo Niagara International Airport in New York came in third with 829 points. Detroit Metropolitan Wayne County Airport topped the satisfaction list for mega airports and Portland International Airport in Oregon earned the title for large airports. Indianapolis International Airport first earned a top J.D. Power ranking in 2010 for the best small airport in North America. It landed in the top three each year except for 2011 through 2014, when no study was published. In July, the airport landed at No. 2 on the Travel + Leisure Top 10 Domestic Airports list. In April, construction began on a refresh of the airport’s dining and retail options. The three-year plan will see new restaurants, including Shake Shack and Bub’s Burgers. At an Indianapolis Airport Authority Board meeting this month, officials said some restaurants would start to close in October, replaced by temporary food and beverage vendors.\n\nIowa\n\nDes Moines:Gov. Kim Reynolds signed a proclamation Wednesday naming Sept. 28, 2019, as “Carson King Day” in Iowa to honor the 24-year-old Altoona resident who has raised more than $1 million for charity. “Individuals like Carson King demonstrate how ‘Iowa Nice’ isn’t just a slogan, but our way of life,” the proclamation reads. Reynolds, joined by King, read it aloud and signed it in her formal office in the Capitol on Wednesday afternoon. She also signed a proclamation designating September as “Childhood Cancer Awareness Month.” King rose to prominence after hoisting a sign on ESPN’s “College GameDay” in Ames that read “Busch Light Supply Needs Replenished,” and requesting beer money be sent to his Venmo account. When he received several hundred dollars, King said he would donate it to the University of Iowa Stead Family Children’s Hospital, a move that prompted more donations to start pouring in, along with matching donations from Busch Beer and Venmo. King now is hoping to raise $2 million for the hospital by the end of the month.\n\nKansas\n\nLawrence: A couple from Emporia, Kansas, has committed $1 million to the internal medicine program at the University of Kansas School of Medicine in Wichita. The university on Wednesday announced the gift from Scott and Julie Smiley. The money will be divided into three funds. One will benefit the Department of Internal Medicine, another will support residents in the internal medicine program, and the third will fund student scholarships, with preference given to students interested in internal medicine. Scott Smiley, a native of Newton, Kansas, who graduated from the school of medicine in Wichita, is a physician in Emporia. Julie Smiley is a veterinarian who also practices in Emporia.\n\nKentucky\n\nMammoth Cave: A historic Baptist church at a state park has been vandalized with orange spray paint. WBKO-TV reported graffiti now covers parts of Mammoth Cave Baptist Church’s exterior and interior, along with its windows and benches. One wall now reads “I heart Satan,” with a drawing of a heart. Mammoth Cave National Park Superintendent Barclay Trimble said the church is one of only three that remain from the time before the park was established in 1941. Park officials said the process of removing graffiti can destroy the historic wood, making the graffiti’s complete removal nearly impossible. Repairs are estimated to cost at least $10,000. The station said those caught spray painting surfaces in the park can face up to six months in jail and fines of up to $5,000.\n\nLouisiana\n\nFort Polk: A helicopter crashed on an Army base, killing one person and injuring three others, military officials said Thursday. The Army chopper crashed early Thursday in the Fort Polk training area, Fort Polk officials said in a statement. There were four crew members on board, authorities said. Their names weren’t being released until relatives are notified. The fort said the cause of the crash is under investigation, and no further details were immediately released. About 8,000 soldiers are stationed at Fort Polk, its website states. The base is in central Louisiana, about 150 miles northwest of Baton Rouge.\n\nMaine\n\nCastine: A referee who was hit in the face by a cannon blast during a Maine Maritime Academy football game is recovering from his injuries. The referee was taken to a hospital with nonlife-threatening injuries Saturday. The Hancock County Sheriff’s Department told WCSH-TV that an academy alumnus brought the cannon to the game in Castine. The alumnus reportedly loaded the cannon with black powder and a substance that had been made into a wad. It is a tradition for a cannon to be fired with a blank shotgun shell when the academy scores.\n\nMaryland\n\nBaltimore: A Baltimore official said the city is still looking for an organization that wants to acquire the Confederate monuments it removed in the middle of the night two years ago. The Baltimore Sun reported the statues have been hidden in a city-owned lot since their August 2017 removal. Historical and Architectural Preservation official Eric Holcomb told the newspaper a museum expressed interest in the bronze statues but they were too large. He said the commission is looking for any organization that will provide a “historically accurate interpretation” of them. Former Mayor Catherine Pugh ordered the monuments taken down following violent clashes over similar statues in Charlottesville, Virginia. Since then, suggestions have ranged from destroying them to adding contextual markers, to melting them and turning them into statues of civil rights figures.\n\nMassachusetts\n\nBoston: State public health officials said a fourth Massachusetts resident has died of the mosquito-borne eastern equine encephalitis virus. The state Department of Public Health announced Wednesday that the latest victim was an Essex County resident. No additional information about the person was disclosed. Officials also said they have confirmed an 11th human case of the virus, a Worcester County man in his 70s. As a result, the communities of Auburn, Charlton, Dudley, Leicester, Southbridge and Spencer have been elevated to high risk for the disease. There are now 35 communities in the state at critical risk, 46 at high risk and 122 at moderate risk. State epidemiologist Dr. Catherine Brown said residents should continue to protect themselves from mosquito bites until the first hard frost.\n\nMichigan\n\nHolland: High water along a west Michigan river has forced Hope College to move its annual tug-of-war contest for the first time in more than a century. The Holland Sentinel reported the Pull traces its roots back to 1898 and the 122nd installment is Saturday. But instead of being held across the Black River, the competition between the freshman and sophomore classes will take place along a Holland street. The newspaper said the Pull has only been held in two locations, with teams competing across a stream in the early years. The Pull’s staff adviser, Richard Frost, said “students agonized over this.” He said they’re dedicated to tradition but “mindful of the safety of the participants.” Frost said the competition is expected to return to the Black River.\n\nMinnesota\n\nAlbany: Officials are monitoring a farm near Holdingford where about 20,000 gallons of liquid manure leaked from an above-ground storage tank. The Stearns County sheriff’s office said the farmer, Mark Leukam of Albany, reported Wednesday that he had a manure leak from a tank that holds 400,000 gallons. An estimated 20,000 gallons leaked out and drained into a low area, which contains an intermittent stream that flows through several miles of swampy area before connecting with a creek. The leak was stopped with a temporary fix. A trench and dirt berm were dug to contain any future leaks until the tank can be fixed. The Minnesota Pollution Control Agency will continue to monitor the spill and pumping efforts, and work with the farm owner to mitigate the impact.\n\nMississippi\n\nGulfport: A heating, ventilation and air conditioning technician found a slithering surprise while repairing an outdoor unit at a home. WLOX-TV reported that what started as a typical day for technician Conner Smith quickly turned into an episode on National Geographic after Smith found a ball python inside the HVAC unit. Homeowner Steve Ramos said he heard Smith say “whoa,” but he thought Smith was shocked by the repair work. Smith told Ramos he found the homeowner’s snake. But Ramos doesn’t own a ball python. Smith said it’s not uncommon to find animals, especially reptiles, inside AC units. Ramos said finding the snake explained a few household mysteries, such as why his dogs were barking at a nearby tree.\n\nMissouri\n\nSpringfield:A homegrown program that mixes international business, entrepreneurship, community development – and chocolate – will mark its 10th year by taking another crop of area high school students to Tanzania. Chocolate University, a partnership between Askinosie Chocolate and Drury University, is now accepting applications for the immersive program that includes an overseas trip next summer. The deadline to apply is Monday. Missy Gelner, chief kinship officer for Askinosie Chocolate, said students from Greene and Christian counties – who will graduate in 2020 or 2021 – are eligible to apply for one of 14 spots. Founded in 2009, Chocolate University completed its first immersion program with a trip in 2010. The trips are offered every other summer and the 2020 trip will be the sixth in the history of the program. The selected students will participate in a 10-day immersion of entrepreneurship, craft chocolate and cacao agronomy during a trip to rural Tanzania, where they will meet with farmers who provide raw ingredients for Askinosie Chocolate. They will also learn about leadership, the Tanzanian culture and the Swahili language. Before the trip, the students gather for learning sessions regarding direct trade and the ways a local business can give back and invest in the people of another culture. Shawn Askinosie, the founder of Askinosie Chocolate, said students get to know farmers that partner with the Springfield-based company and help harvest cacao. The 2018 trip cost $4,000 per traveler with scholarships available through grants and private donations. To apply, visit www.chocolate university.org. The online application process requires an essay and recommendation letters, from which a narrowed pool of applicants are chosen for in-person interviews.\n\nMontana\n\nBozeman: State wildlife officials have been unable to locate a grizzly bear that mauled an Ohio hunter in southwestern Montana. Fish, Wildlife and Parks wardens began investigating Tuesday, shortly after the attack was reported in the Gravelly Mountains. FWP spokesman Morgan Jacobsen said Thursday the hunter reported he was walking through blown-down timber when he was attacked by a bear at close range. The hunter said he fired several shots at the bear until it left. Investigators did find evidence the bear was injured. The Beaverhead-Deerlodge National Forest has posted signs warning visitors of bear activity. Tuesday’s mauling happened about 8 miles south of where three hunters were injured in two separate attacks on Sept. 16. The bear or bears involved in those attacks were not found.\n\nNebraska\n\nLincoln: The Nebraska Capitol Commission has approved spending $181,000 on emergency repairs, in part to keep gold tiles from falling off the dome. Work will begin soon to protect the dome from moisture and winter’s freeze-thaw cycles now that the state’s Capitol Commission voted to shift around funding. A July inspection discovered caulking applied to expansion joints in 2001 had deteriorated so much that water was getting inside the inner dome structure. Some exterior tiles had been moved out of place, raising the risk they could fall off, Ripley said. The caulking had been replaced as part of a masonry restoration project completed in 2010. But current caulking products don’t last as long as previous formulations, which contained more toxic ingredients, he said. Recaulking of joints in the lower parts of the building has been done every year, but budget limitations prevented the commission from checking the dome previously, Ripley said. To inspect the dome, contractors use rope harnesses and rappel down from the base of the Sower statue. He decided this year that the dome inspection could wait no longer. Plans for the emergency repairs call for workers to rappel down the dome and temporarily seal the expansion joints to keep the tiles in place. The longer-term solution will require scaffolding so workers can remove the tiles, fix the underlying structure and put the tiles back in place, he said. Caulking work also will be needed on the tower.\n\nNevada\n\nLas Vegas: Officials said that the number of passengers using McCarran International Airport was up in August compared with the same month a year ago. The Clark County Department of Aviation on Wednesday reported 4.4 million arriving and departing travelers last month. That’s a 3.1% increase from August 2018. The airport has handled nearly 34.2 million passengers this year, keeping it on pace to surpass 50 million for the year for the first time. McCarran handled a record 49.7 million passengers in 2018. It’s one of the 10 busiest airports in the U.S. based on passenger count. Southwest Airlines was the busiest carrier at McCarran in August. Spirit overcame Delta for second, followed by American and United.\n\nNew Hampshire\n\nConcord: The New Hampshire Office of the Child Advocate has started a review of how restraint and seclusion are being used on about 400 children in behavioral health settings. The review will look at children placed in private residential facilities and the Sununu Youth Services Center by the Division for Children, Youth and Families. Child Advocate Moira O’Neill said the patterns of how restraint and seclusion are used in New Hampshire are poorly understood. She said the only statewide data available is an aggregate number that shows the total incidents of restraint and seclusion across all facilities. Since 2014, there have been more than 20,000 incidents of restraint and seclusion across all residential facilities. But it’s not clear what that means.\n\nNew Jersey\n\nAtlantic City: New Jersey horsemen could get millions of dollars in damages after a federal appeals court ruled that the horsemen were financially harmed while the legality of sports betting was being litigated. In a ruling Tuesday, the 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals said that the New Jersey Thoroughbred Horsemen’s Association, representing owners and trainers, is entitled to damages. The association has sought the payment, with interest, of a $3.4 million bond that the four major pro sports leagues and the NCAA posted in 2014. It was intended to secure losses that might be suffered during the month that a restraining order was in effect, prohibiting the horsemen from offering sports betting at Monmouth Park Racetrack. A lower court ruled against them, but the appeals court reversed that ruling, kicking the case back to U.S. District Court in New Jersey to determine the appropriate amount of damages. New Jersey ultimately won a U.S. Supreme Court case in May year clearing the way for legal sports betting in all 50 states. The horsemen also are seeking economic damages over not being able to offer sports betting from the time the restraining order expired in Oct. 2014 until the Supreme Court ruling in an amount Drazin estimated at $150 million. That amount was not covered in Tuesday’s ruling. When the association returns to court, it will seek to prove it should receive the $3.4 million from the bond. But it also will seek extended damages, intending to argue that the leagues acted in bad faith, something the leagues have denied in previous court filings. No hearing date has yet been set.\n\nNew Mexico\n\nCarlsbad: New Mexico’s U.S. senators want the Trump administration to defend the state’s pecan growers from tariffs during ongoing trade negotiations with India. U.S. Sens. Martin Heinrich and Tom Udall, both Democrats, recently signed on to a bipartisan letter from 12 senators urging U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer to negotiate the lifting of a trade barrier, the Carlsbad Current-Argus reported. The senators argued that rising imports from Mexico, Chinese tariffs and tree loss after Hurricane Michael strained U.S. pecan prices, and India’s growing middle class represented a market that could help minimize the economic damage. Records show India charges a 36% tariff on pecan imports, while other tree nuts such as pistachios and almonds are charged tariff rates of 10% or less. New Mexico became the largest pecan-producing state last year after Hurricane Michael ravaged Georgia’s crop. New Mexico was estimated to have produced about 90 million pounds of pecans in 2018, down about 2 million from 2017.\n\nNew York\n\nNew York City: A gilded coffin that was featured at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art is on its way back to Egypt after it was determined to be a looted antiquity. Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr. and Egypt’s foreign minister Sameh Hassan Shoukry held a repatriation ceremony in New York on Wednesday for the Coffin of Nedjemankh. The Met bought the piece from a Paris art dealer in 2017 for about $4 million and made it the centerpiece of an exhibition. It was removed last February. The Met has apologized to Egypt. Investigators said the coffin was smuggled from Egypt through the United Arab Emirates, Germany and France. They said the museum was given fraudulent documents, including a forged 1971 Egyptian export license. Prosecutors said they’ve found evidence of hundreds more antiquities thefts.\n\nNorth Carolina\n\nRaleigh: Officials said nearly half of North Carolina’s counties are experiencing a moderate drought because of a lack of rainfall. Klaus Albertin, chairman of the N.C. Drought Management Advisory Council, said in a news release issued by the Department of Environmental Quality on Thursday that water supplies, agriculture, fire threat and stream-flows statewide are beginning to reflect the lack of precipitation. Forty-five counties in the western and central parts of the state are in moderate drought stage, the least detrimental of four categories used in federal drought maps. Twenty-two counties are experiencing abnormally dry conditions, which means a drought could emerge without adequate rainfall. Albertin said although Hurricane Dorian left heavy rainfall along the coast, almost none fell west of Interstate 95. He said conditions could worsen before they improve.\n\nNorth Dakota\n\nBismarck: The flags of North Dakota’s five tribal nations will be on permanent display outside the governor’s office at the state Capitol. Republican Gov. Doug Burgum announced the decision to display the flags during his State of the State address in January. The bipartisan Legislative Procedure and Arrangements Committee approved making the display permanent on Thursday. They represent the Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara Nation; the Standing Rock Sioux; the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa; the Sisseton Wahpeton Oyate; and the Spirit Lake Nation. The relationship between North Dakota officials and tribes has been strained in the past, especially during protests three years ago against the Dakota Access pipeline near the Standing Rock Sioux reservation. Burgum said the tribal flag display was done “in the spirit of mutual respect.”\n\nOhio\n\nReynoldsburg: The Ohio Department of Health has confirmed the first human death in the state this year from the West Nile virus. Authorities said Wednesday that a 68-year-old Lucas County man hospitalized with encephalitis also was the first human case in the state this year. Health officials said Ohio had six fatalities among 65 human West Nile cases in 2017, after five deaths among 34 human cases in 2016. On Tuesday, Agriculture Department officials reported two confirmed West Nile cases among horses in the state. Most West Nile cases are transmitted by mosquitoes. Authorities urge using repellant and protective clothing and eliminating standing water and other potential mosquito breeding areas. Most infected people don’t have symptoms, but some get flu-like symptoms. A few will develop a serious neurologic illness.\n\nOklahoma\n\nStillwater: The life of Oklahoma State University alumnus and benefactor T. Boone Pickens has been celebrated on the campus where the late energy industry billionaire donated hundreds of millions of dollars to support academic and athletic programs. Pickens, who died in Dallas on Sept. 11 at age 91, was lauded at a memorial service Wednesday for his legacy of philanthropy and inspiration that university President Burns Hargis has encouraged other donors to transform the university. During his lifetime, Pickens donated $652 million to the university, including a $165 million gift in 2005 that at the time was the largest athletic gift in NCAA history. Since then, the university has raised $2 billion in cash and pledges. Pickens was a 1951 graduate of the university’s School of Geology, now known as the Boone Pickens School of Geology.\n\nOregon\n\nPortland: The pregnancy of a 26-year-old elephant known as Chendra at the Oregon Zoo has ended in miscarriage. The Oregonian/OregonLive reported veterinarians at the zoo grew concerned earlier this month when they noticed a drop in some of the Asian elephant’s reproductive hormones. Last week, more definitive tests showed that she was no longer pregnant, said Bob Lee, who oversees the elephant program at the zoo. Chendra was around eight months along, which would correspond to the first trimester in humans. The gestation period for elephants is around 22 months. Chendra came to Oregon in 1999. She was found as a young calf wandering alone near a palm oil plantation in Borneo. Twenty-five elephants have been born at the Oregon Zoo since 1962.\n\nPennsylvania\n\nHegins Township: Police said more than 136,000 eggs splattered on a road when they shifted and fell out of a tractor-trailer driving through Pennsylvania. The Republican Herald reported that 11,340 dozen eggs and 2,260 gallons of egg product were ruined when a 66-year-old driver lost control of the rig Tuesday. Hegins Township police said driver Joseph Miles had just picked the eggs up at Carl Faus Farm and was on his way to Elizabethtown, Pennsylvania. Police said Miles was driving north on Route 125 uphill. As he approached the Route 25 intersection, the load shifted causing the eggs and egg products to fall and roll down the hill. Miles reportedly did not realize the eggs had fallen and continued his drive. A section of Route 125 was closed for several hours after the incident. An investigation into the unsecured load is ongoing.\n\nRhode Island\n\nProvidence: Several models and actresses have sued a Rhode Island strip club they said used their images in social media and advertising campaigns without permission. The models, including Tara Leigh Patrick, who is better known as Carmen Electra, said by using their images, the Cadillac Lounge in Providence made it appear as if they either worked at, endorsed or were otherwise affiliated the club. The plaintiffs are alleging misleading advertising, violation of privacy, defamation and unjust enrichment. The suit filed last week in federal court in Rhode Island seeks unspecified damages, an end to the use of their images and a jury trial. No attorney for was listed for the club or owner Nancy Shappy in court records. A listed number for the club was not in service.\n\nSouth Carolina\n\nColumbia: A national organization said Gov. Henry McMaster is violating the Constitution by holding prayers before news conferences. News outlets reported the Freedom From Religion Foundation sent a letter to the governor’s office concerning two prayers earlier this month before news conferences regarding Hurricane Dorian. Foundation attorney Ryan Jayne said the practice violates the establishment clause of the First Amendment, which prohibits the government from favoring one religion over others. A spokesperson for the governor, Brian Symmes, said as long as McMaster is governor and the state has to prepare for dangerous storms, there will be a chaplain saying prayers before news conferences. The foundation also sent McMaster a letter in January concerning prayers before news conferences for Hurricane Florence last September.\n\nSouth Dakota\n\nSioux Falls:An incident that prompted Southeast Technical Institute officials to alert students of a police investigation on campus Wednesday morning was determined to not be an immediate threat. Sioux Falls police officers investigated a “potential incident” on the campus after a suspicious item was found in the Technology Center on the west side of campus, STI president Robert Griggs said. The Technology Center is home to the New Tech High School, which is where the item was found, said Capt. Mike Walsh with the Minnehaha County Sheriff’s Office, which provides security for the STI campus. Walsh did not say what the found item was that caused the incident. The initial release, sent to students at 10:29 a.m., read “The Sioux Falls Police Department is on campus to investigate a potential incident. Reminder: If you see something, say something!” At 10:57, an all-clear was sent: “The Sioux Falls Police Department has investigated the situation and it has been determined there is no immediate threat to safety or security.” Southeast Technical Institute serves more than 2,000 students and offers more than 60 programs as one of two technical colleges in the region. The school is overseen by the Sioux Falls School District’s school board.\n\nTennessee\n\nChattanooga: The guardian of an autistic kindergartener said the 5-year-old boy was for punished for hugging a classmate. Chattanooga resident Summery Putnam told WTVC-TV a teacher accused the boy of sexual activities after he hugged one child and kissed another on the cheek. Putnam said the teacher told her the child was overstepping boundaries and she said a report was filed with the state Department of Child Services. Hamilton County Department of Education spokesman Tim Hensley released a statement that said school personnel are required to report concerns regarding children. Putnam said the child doesn’t understand normal social cues and boundaries. She said he has now switched classrooms and teachers and is enrolled in special education services.\n\nTexas\n\nCaddo Mills: Emergency officials said several airplanes have been destroyed in a hangar fire at a small airport in North Texas. Fire officials said no one was injured in Wednesday’s blaze at Caddo Mills Municipal Airport, about 35 miles northeast of Dallas. Authorities are trying to determine what sparked the fire, which was brought under control after about two hours. Hunt County Fire Marshal Richard Hill said no foul play is suspected in the fire that destroyed three aircraft, an automobile and a motorcycle. Caddo Mills is a town of about 1,600.\n\nUtah\n\nSalt Lake City: State officials said they have shaved $100 million off the estimated price of a proposed pipeline that would pull water from Lake Powell. The Utah Division of Water Resources said in a news release Wednesday the cost savings come from scrapping plans for two reservoirs that would have generated hydropower at peak demand times. Division spokeswoman Marcie Larson said the project is estimated to cost $1 billion to 1.7 billion, down from as much as $1.8 billion. It would be repaid over 50 years. A legislative audit found it will require a large fee, rate and tax increases in Washington County in southern Utah to pay for the project. Critics call the pipeline an unnecessary use of funds and said the emphasis should be on getting residents to use less water. The project is pending regulatory reviews.\n\nVermont\n\nMontpelier: An after-school active shooter drill at an elementary school has raised concerns from several parents who were upset that some children heard words like “intruder” and “active shooter.” A school resource officer said the children, who were on the playground during the drill, were not meant to hear what was happening, but direct language is needed to avoid confusion in a real crisis. Several parents complained on social media about the terms that were broadcast at Union Elementary School during the drill Monday, the Barre-Montpelier Times Argus reported. Superintendent Libby Bonesteel said the drill was part of state-mandated training for all four schools in the Montpelier-Roxbury Public Schools District. The drill was meant to train faculty and staff, so students in an after-school program were sent to the playground, school administrators said. But some students could still hear the public address system, they said. Cpl. Matthew Knisley, a Montpelier Police Department school resource officer, said it was a standard drill that uses direct words to describe the threat. But he said children were not meant to be a part of the drill, which is why they were sent outside.\n\nVirginia\n\nRichmond: A Canadian-owned timber company is spending $32 million to expand sawmill and wood drying operations at two lumber mills. Gov. Ralph Northam announced Wednesday that Teal-Jones Group will create a total of 126 new jobs with expansions in Martinsville and Kinsale. The company will receive various state grants worth $650,000 to secure the project. Northam’s office said Virginia beat out Oklahoma and Washington for the projects. Northam said the company plans to buy more than $100 million in timber from Virginia sources in the next four years.\n\nWashington\n\nBremerton:U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement have arrested multiple people in Kitsap County, a move critics said was based on racial profiling. The Kitsap Sun reported Tuesday that immigration advocates have criticized ICE activity in Kitsap County for racial profiling during targeted operations. Two immigrant advocacy organizations have urged residents to know their rights. American Civil Liberties Union officials said a judge-signed search warrant is required to give police and immigration officers’ access to search property. Officials said there are some exceptions, but people should assert their rights under the Constitution, including the right to remain silent. Some county officials say increasing immigration operations in the state are inflicting fear in families and pushing communities into economic crisis when a friend or relative is detained.\n\nWest Virginia\n\nCharleston: The Appalachian Queer Film Festival is making its way back to screens in West Virginia after a short hiatus. The Charleston Gazette-Mail reported the festival will be from Friday to Sunday at the Floralee Hark Cohen Cinema in Charleston. Organizer Jon Matthews said the festival opened successfully in Lewisburg in 2015, but lost funding after a 2016 study by the Koch Brothers on government waste was critical of the festival. The newspaper reported that the study said taxpayers would find the films “objectionable.” Matthews said the festival was targeted for its use of the word “Queer.” He said the festival fought to stay afloat as it opens minds in and about Appalachia. He said it took time off to gather support. Matthews said everyone is welcome.\n\nWisconsin\n\nMishicot: The season for hunting ruffed grouse in the northwestern two-thirds of Wisconsin has been shortened by more than three weeks. The state Department of Natural Resources board voted Wednesday to make the change over concerns about a dwindling population. The ruffed grouse season currently runs from mid-September through Jan. 31 in that part of the state. The season will now end on Jan. 5. Hunters in Wisconsin took only 173,347 birds last year, the lowest total in 35 years of hunter surveys. The reason for the decline is unknown.\n\nWyoming\n\nCasper: The U.S. Department of Energy has awarded $5 million to multiple Wyoming-based research initiatives to advance alternative uses for coal beyond energy generation. The Casper Star-Tribune reported that the federal government selected Ramaco Carbon, a coal technology company in Sheridan, for four research and development grants to delve deeper into the material science behind coal. The research grants come at a time when depressed demand for coal from the electricity generation sector becomes a new normal. Ramaco will partner with two other organizations to look into using coal for products like carbon fiber, a hearty material used to build aircraft, cars and more. Ramaco also received a federal Energy Department grant about a year ago.", "authors": [], "publish_date": "2019/09/27"}, {"url": "https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/50-states/2019/05/14/good-luck-pig-dollywood-expansion-al-capone-news-around-states/39477389/", "title": "News from around our 50 states", "text": "From staff and wire reports\n\nAlabama\n\nMontgomery: A group for historians in the state has elected its first African American president after more than 70 years in existence. The Alabama Historical Association has elected Wetumpka native Frazine Taylor as president for the upcoming year. Taylor, who works in the archives department at Alabama State University in Montgomery, was also presented with an award recognizing her contributions to Alabama history. Taylor, chair of the Black Heritage Council of the Alabama Historical Commission is known for her expertise in genealogical research and African American history. She was elected during the association’s recent statewide meeting in Tuscaloosa. The organization publishes a quarterly review and oversees a program of roadside historical markers.\n\nAlaska\n\nJuneau: State environmental officials have launched the first ambient air quality study in the capital city in more than a decade to determine if air is being affected by cruise ships or other sources. The state will collect data from 21 monitors installed in late April around downtown Juneau, the Juneau Empire reports. The devices use lasers to measure particulate and report online in near-real time. They will remain in place through October. Fine particulate is tiny particles that can be inhaled and at high levels can cause health problems including respiratory illness, aggravated asthma, heart attacks and premature death. In the Fairbanks North Star Borough, where people burn wood as an alternative to expensive fuel oil, fine particulate is a perennial winter problem.\n\nArizona\n\nGrand Canyon National Park: Scenic State Route 67 will reopen Wednesday in time for the summer season of hikers, backpackers, and tourists visiting the remote North Rim of the Grand Canyon. The area closes from mid-October through mid-May each year because of heavy snowfall, more than 9 feet during an average winter, according to the Arizona Department of Transportation. When the national park lodge, campground, visitor center and restaurants reopen toward the end of spring, so does SR 67, the winding 31-mile road lined by pines and aspens that connects Jacobs Lake to the Kaibab Plateau. Only about 10% of Grand Canyon visitors go to the North Rim, but enthusiasts willing to make the extra travel are rewarded with a more intimate experience, says Grand Canyon National Park spokesperson Kris Fister.\n\nArkansas\n\nPonca: For the fourth year in a row, the Buffalo National River will host a free concert by band National Park Radio, on June 15 at Steel Creek Campground. The modern folk band from Harrison, Arkansas, is known for its hopeful, heartfelt lyrics with themes about life, love and difficult choices, echoing the band’s deep-seated roots in the Ozark Mountains. Music will begin at 6 p.m. near the boat launch at Steel Creek Campground. Free parking is available on site, but National Park Service officials advise concertgoers to carpool to minimize traffic and associated resource impacts. The annual event is sponsored by the Buffalo National River Partners, a nonprofit dedicated to the promotion, appreciation, preservation and protection of America’s first national river.\n\nCalifornia\n\nLos Angeles: Officials say a planned subway project that will connect three rail lines downtown has been delayed again. The Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority says the new completion date for the Regional Connector is mid-March 2022. Rail service is scheduled to begin five months after that. The agency’s initial target date was December 2020, but that was delayed by a year in 2017 as officials increased the budget to $1.75 billion. The Los Angeles Times reports Sunday that the latest delay comes as the contractor grapples with labor shortages. The project requires nearly 4 miles of excavation for two tunnels and three subway stations. The twin tunnels are designed to connect three lines into two mega-routes that will allow passengers to ride long distances without changing trains.\n\nColorado\n\nBreckenridge: A huge wooden troll has found a new home in this ski town. The Summit Daily reports that the troll has been relocated to a spot behind an ice arena in the south end of Breckenridge. The troll’s creator, Danish artist Thomas Dambo, visited the location Friday to affix a heart-shaped stone to the troll’s wooden body. It was originally assembled beside a trail last summer for a festival, but it was so popular with visitors that nearby homeowners complained about the crowds. It was taken down in November. The troll, named Isak Heartstone, stands 15 feet high. The site is not open to the public yet. The town is building a trail and surrounding amenities, which are expected to open by early June.\n\nConnecticut\n\nHartford: Gov. Ned Lamont has signed legislation that could lead to the production of industrial hemp in the state. The Democrat says the new law will provide farmers an opportunity to “bolster their profits with hemp.” He says it will also attract veteran and first-time farmers to a new and growing market. The legislation passed both the state House of Representatives and Senate by unanimous votes. Under the new law, the Connecticut Department of Agriculture is required to establish a pilot program for growing or cultivating industrial hemp. The federal government recently allowed states to grow, use or sell the product, which proponents say has thousands of uses. Connecticut’s regulations will ultimately need federal approval.\n\nDelaware\n\nDover: The state House is set to vote on a bill that largely prohibits retailers from providing single-use carryout plastic bags to customers. The bill slated for a vote Tuesday is aimed at cutting down on the amount of plastic bags cluttering landfills, littering roadways and clogging stormwater systems. The bill applies to stores with more than 7,000 square feet of sales space and chain stores with three or more locations having at least 3,000 square feet of sales space. Restaurants are excluded from the bag ban, which also allows exceptions for bags used to wrap meat, fish, flowers or plants or that contain unwrapped food items. You could also still carry a goldfish home from a pet store or your laundry from the dry cleaners in plastic bags.\n\nDistrict of Columbia\n\nWashington: The nation’s capital has the highest use of drugs in the entire country, according to a new report from the personal finance website Wallethub, WUSA-TV reports. The district scored a 59.95 on a 100-point scale by Wallethub’s metrics, ranking as No. 1 for the highest use of drugs and addiction. According to the findings of the report, the District of Columbia also ranked in the top five for highest use of drugs by adults and teenagers. In order to determine which states have the biggest drug problems, WalletHub compared the 50 states and D.C. in three categories: drug use and addiction, law enforcement, and drug health issues and rehab.\n\nFlorida\n\nMiami: A quiet South Beach neighborhood has become a battleground between preservationists and homeowners who want more freedom over their properties. Residents of leafy Palm View are divided over a push to repeal the area’s historic designation, which protects the neighborhood’s Mediterranean Revival homes and low-rise apartment buildings from demolition. But it also limits property owners’ ability to build more resilient structures, and residents say flooding in the area is getting worse. South Florida is expected to see 1 to 2 feet of sea level rise by 2060, according to a projection from the Southeast Florida Climate Compact. In Palm View, some residents say being able to build newer, more resilient structures has become increasingly important. The neighborhood borders the Collins Canal.\n\nGeorgia\n\nAtlanta: A group of students from Spelman and Morehouse colleges who’ve been studying Michelle Obama’s memoir, “Becoming,” had a surprise visitor to discuss the work – the former first lady herself. Obama came to Spelman to talk with the students Saturday about the best-selling book ahead of her sold-out appearance Saturday night at State Farm Arena in downtown Atlanta. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports Obama encouraged the 18 students to have faith in themselves, saying she learned through her eight years in the White House and elsewhere that she is as smart and capable as the well-educated and famous leaders she encountered.\n\nHawaii\n\nHonolulu: U.S. lawmakers representing the state want a large-scale study conducted on the impact sunscreen chemicals have on humans and coral reefs around the world. The Honolulu Star-Advertiser reports U.S. Sen. Mazie Hirono, along with Sen. Jeff Merkley, D-Ore., last week introduced the Oxybenzone and Octinoxate Impact Study Act of 2019, which would require the Environmental Protection Agency to study the impacts of the chemicals on human and the environment. Rep. Tulsi Gabbard also introduced the act along with the Reef Safe Act of 2019 that would require the Food and Drug Administration to develop standards for the “Reef Safe” designation in over-the-counter sunscreens. Last year, Hawaii enacted a law banning the sale or distribution of over-the-counter sunscreens containing oxybenzone and octinoxate.\n\nIdaho\n\nBoise: Two city parks are being renamed to honor Native Americans from the local past. Idaho Press reports the Boise City Council voted unanimously on the name changes last week. Now Quarry View Park will be renamed Eagle Rock Park, and Castle Rock Reserve will be renamed Chief Eagle Eye Reserve. The council also voted unanimously on a resolution that reasserts the city’s directives to honor contributing contributions to the area by indigenous people. Eagle Rock is the traditional name of a balancing rock above Quarry View Park, and it’s a significant site for tribes in what is now Treasure Valley. Eagle Eye was chief of a band of 70 Weiser Shoshone who moved to the mountains of Idaho secretly in 1878 instead of relocating to a reservation.\n\nIllinois\n\nUrbana: The University of Illinois is planning to name its Micro and Nanotechnology Lab after an engineering visionary who created the first practical LED. Professor emeritus Nick Holonyak Jr., a UI engineering alumnus, found a new alloy in 1962 that would emit light in the red segment of the visible spectrum. Energy-saving LEDs, or light-emitting diodes, are now universal and used in everything from flashlights and electronics to spacecraft. UI trustees will vote this week on whether to name the UI Micro and Nanotechnology Laboratory in Holonyak’s honor, the News-Gazette reports. UI College of Engineering officials say very few graduates in UI’s 152-year history have had as much influence as the Franklin County native.\n\nIndiana\n\nPorter: Indiana Dunes National Park says visitors can reserve campsites, beginning Wednesday. In past years, all 66 sites at Dunewood campground were available on a first-come, first-served basis. Under the new system, 34 sites can be reserved up to six months in advance. The remaining 32 sites will remain first-come, first-served. The price is $25 per night. The campground is open April through October. An online reservation system goes live at 9 a.m. CDT Wednesday. For more information, contact the park’s information desk at (219) 395-1882, or visit its website. The park covers 15,000 acres along the southern shore of Lake Michigan in northwestern Indiana.\n\nIowa\n\nDes Moines: Officials say a dog disease that can be passed to humans has been confirmed in the state. The state veterinarian, Dr. Jeff Kaisand, says several cases of canine brucellosis have been confirmed at a commercial breeding facility for small dogs in Marion County. The Iowa Department of Agriculture and Land Stewardship says it is notifying people who have custody of the exposed dogs. Both the animals and the facilities are quarantined while the dogs undergo testing. Signs of the disease in a dog include infertility, spontaneous abortions and stillbirths. State health officials say symptoms for humans include fever, sweats, headache, joint pain and weakness. The department says the threat to most pet owners is very low. Dog breeders and veterinary staff may be at higher risk.\n\nKansas\n\nKansas City: Nurse practitioners are fighting to get rid of the state requirement that they get permission to work from a physician. KCUR-FM reports Kansas is one of the few states that still make advanced practice nurses sign contracts with doctors. Physicians argue the contracts are to protect patients by ensuring that nurses collaborate with their more educated colleagues. But nurses are fighting back against the contracts, which they say limit patient options and can even give doctors a cut of their earnings for little to no work. A bill seeking to drop the collaborative contract requirement died in a legislative maneuver this year. But nurse practitioners hope to try again, offering to make new nurse practitioners work a few years before dropping their contracts with doctors.\n\nKentucky\n\nLouisville: In the past three years, the state has made great strides toward addressing food insecurity in distressed rural communities – and it’s become a model for other states looking to try new solutions. Earlier this year, Kentucky hosted the first-ever Summit on Rural Child Hunger, organized by the national No Kid Hungry campaign. The state was selected in part because of its Hunger Initiative, launched by Agriculture Commissioner Ryan Quarles in 2016. Since it began, the initiative has donated more than 150 refrigerated coolers and freezers to dozens of food pantries statewide; created an economic incentive for summer meal programs, encouraging the purchase of more fruits and vegetables from local farmers; and advocated for the continued funding of the Farm to Food Banks Trust Fund, which awards grants to eligible nonprofit organizations that provide food to low-income Kentuckians.\n\nLouisiana\n\nBaton Rouge: A federal judge has conditionally dismissed a lawsuit that claimed three ailing death row inmates in the state were being subjected to cruel and unusual punishment through high heat indexes. The Advocate reports attorneys for the inmates and the state Department of Corrections jointly requested to dismiss the 2013 civil rights lawsuit. U.S. District Judge Brian Jackson ruled in 2016 that cell heat indexes exceeding 88 degrees constitute cruel and unusual punishment, but the ruling was overturned because it defined a maximum heat index. The conditional dismissal requires Louisiana to remain in “substantial compliance” with an agreement it signed last year. That agreement requires the inmates to have daily showers, individual ice containers and fans, water faucets in their cells and other cooling techniques.\n\nMaine\n\nSaint George: A state agency has been awarded $1 million to help acquire an island in the state’s midcoast area for conservation. The U.S. Department of the Interior’s National Coastal Wetland Conservation Grants program is making the money available to help preserve Clark Island in the Saint George area. Democratic Rep. Chellie Pingree says the Maine Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife will work with Maine Coast Heritage Trust on the conservation project. Pingree says the money will be used to buy 168 acres of Clark Island. The acres abut an existing 250-acre state conservation easement in Saint George. Pingree says the preservation of the site will protect habitat for birds and allow for recreational opportunities.\n\nMaryland\n\nAnnapolis: Gov. Larry Hogan signed a first-in-the-nation measure Monday to make it easier for people without health insurance to find out if they qualify for low-cost insurance after they file their taxes. The new law will create a box for people to check on state income tax returns. If it’s checked, the state’s health care exchange will see if the person qualifies for Medicaid, based on information in the tax return, and those who are eligible will be enrolled automatically. The exchange will reach out to people who qualify for private coverage. Hogan, a Republican, highlighted bipartisan work in the Democrat-controlled General Assembly on other health-related measures he signed Monday. One of them raises the smoking age from 18 to 21 and includes vaping in the definition of tobacco products.\n\nMassachusetts\n\nBoston: A proposed $2 billion wind farm planned for federal waters off Martha’s Vineyard has been awarded a key permit by a state board responsible for reviewing proposed large energy facilities. The Massachusetts Energy Facilities Siting Board last week approved requests filed by Vineyard Wind for the construction and operation of the 84-turbine, 800-megawatt wind farm about 14 miles south of Martha’s Vineyard off the Massachusetts Coast. Project officials call the permit approval a significant milestone toward the wind farm’s construction. In February the project also received a key approval from Rhode Island regulators after the state’s Coastal Resources Management Council determined the project is consistent with state policies.\n\nMichigan\n\nDearborn: An exhibition at the Henry Ford Museum of American Innovation in suburban Detroit is offering a glimpse into the world of “Star Trek.” Titled “Star Trek: Exploring New Worlds,” the exhibition runs through Sept. 2 at the museum in Dearborn. It offers a look at more than 100 artifacts and props from the original TV series and its spinoffs. It also explores its enduring impact on culture, from arts and technology to fashion and literature. The traveling exhibition from Seattle’s Museum of Pop Culture includes a tricorder, communicator and phaser from the original series. It also features artifacts from the “Star Trek” films and original set pieces, including a navigation console and costumes. The exhibition is a collaboration involving CBS Consumer Products, which manages licensing and merchandizing for the network.\n\nMinnesota\n\nBrainerd: A University of Minnesota study links the decline of walleye in Mille Lacs Lake to a loss of habitat resulting from clearer water. Minnesota Public Radio reports the study was published in the journal Ecosphere. Lead author Gretchen Hansen says researchers used 30 years of data on the lake’s water clarity and temperature to estimate how walleye habitat has changed. Walleye prefer low light and cooler water. But in recent decades, Mille Lacs’ water clarity has increased, most likely due to septic system improvements around the lake and the invasion of zebra mussels. Hansen says that has reduced walleye habitat. The study suggests that altering annual harvest levels based on changing water clarity and temperature could help sustain the walleye population. State officials currently base limits on the estimated number of fish in the lake.\n\nMississippi\n\nOxford: A local chef has won a major culinary award after five previous nominations. The James Beard Foundation last week named Vishwesh Bhatt of Snackbar in Oxford as its 2019 winner for best chef in the foundation’s South region. Bhatt tells The Oxford Eagle winning was “just an incredible feeling.” He’s thanking Oxford restauranteur John Currence, whose City Grocery Restaurant Group owns Snackbar, City Grocery and other restaurants in Oxford. Bhatt also attributes his success to the restaurant’s staff. Bhatt has been the lead chef at Snackbar since it opened in 2009.\n\nMissouri\n\nSt. Louis: A popular animal at the St. Louis Zoo is celebrating a milestone birthday: Merah the Sumatran orangutan is 50 years old. Merah reached the half-century mark Monday. She was born May 13, 1969, at a zoo in the Netherlands. She came to St. Louis in 1992. Merah is a five-time mother, the grandmother of two and great-grandmother of one. The zoo says that when Merah gave birth to Ginger in 2014 at age 45, she became the oldest Sumatran orangutan in the Association of Zoos and Aquariums Orangutan Species Survival Plan to give birth and rear her offspring. Sumatran, Bornean and Tapanuli orangutan species are classified as critically endangered due to habitat loss. The zoo says fewer than 125,000 orangutans remain in the wild.\n\nMontana\n\nMissoula: A vintage plane restored by volunteers has lifted off for the first time in nearly 20 years. The Missoulian reports that the 75-year-old Dakota DC-3 known as Miss Montana flew over Missoula on a test flight Sunday. It was the first time it was airborne since arriving in 2001. Volunteers have been working hard to get the former firefighting plane ready to travel to France for the 75th anniversary of D-Day. Miss Montana is scheduled to participate in a re-enactment of the invasion, including dropping jumpers from Montana. A send-off gala Saturday night raised money to cover its fuel costs.\n\nNebraska\n\nOmaha: Landowners are seeking new solutions for a phenomenon millions of years old. Tons of sand, sediment and silt – some in dunes as high as 10 feet – have been scattered across the eastern half to two-thirds of the state by flooding in March. In some areas, washed-out cornstalks are 3 to 4 feet deep. Tree limbs are in piles, and topsoil has been washed away. “We have a mountain of sand piled up,” Valley farmer Ryan Ueberrhein told the Omaha World-Herald. Sediment from Nebraska’s rivers and streams has been deposited on nearby flooded land for millions of years. Now U.S. Department of Agriculture officials, University of Nebraska-Lincoln Extension specialists and extension educators are trying to figure out what to do with it. They’re racing against the clock because farmers need to plant, and ranchers need grass pastures to graze their cattle.\n\nNevada\n\nElko: Dozens of volunteers in the state’s northeast plan to return to an 80-year-old youth camp site next month to begin a $1 million rebuilding effort in the wake of an explosive wildfire. Elko Lions Club members who’ve launched a fundraising drive for Camp Lamoille hope to reopen it next year in the rugged Ruby Mountains, where the camp was established by the Boy Scouts of America southeast of Elko in 1939. Ten of the 16 buildings were lost in the fire last fall, including the historic lodge, six A-frame cabins and three storage units. So far, the Lions Club has raised about $343,000 of the estimated total cost of rebuilding through fundraisers, insurance proceeds, and other individual and corporate donations.\n\nNew Hampshire\n\nConcord: The schedule is set for a weeklong celebration of the Statehouse’s bicentennial. While various events have been held in recent years, the formal celebration starts Sunday, June 2, with an opening ceremony, re-enactments of the first Statehouse session in 1819 and tours of the building. On Monday, there will be special roundtable discussions featuring former governors and executive councilors. Tuesday’s schedule features the state Supreme Court hearing oral arguments in Representative’s Hall and an event highlighting the history of the Statehouse press corps. Wednesday is devoted to the state’s cultural heritage and arts, while Thursday will be Homecoming Day for former lawmakers. A “New Hampshire Made” street market Friday and closing ceremonies Saturday round out the celebrations the first week in June.\n\nNew Jersey\n\nPalmyra: The sighting of an invasive spotted lanternfly at Palmyra Cove in Burlington County has brought attention from the state and U.S. agriculture departments. After one of the insects was spotted in November, the U.S. Department of Agriculture followed up with an inspection, finding and removing a spotted lanterfly egg mass on a perimeter trail, says Kristina Merola, director of natural sciences and park manager at Palmyra Cove. This month, as the insects’ hatching season approaches, crews from the NJDA began working in Palmyra Cove, the vast labyrinth of wetlands and woodlands beneath the Tacony-Palmyra Bridge. They’re marking Ailanthus trees, which are a crucial host for the spotted lanterfly species. State crews are then treating the trees with herbicide, Merola says. The intruding bugs pose a threat to entire agricultural industries.\n\nNew Mexico\n\nCarlsbad: School districts have become increasingly reliant on substitutes as they contend with a growing number vacant teaching positions in the state. Districts needing to fill vacancies have turned to hiring substitute teachers, particularly long-term substitutes. Some of those substitutes have spent years in a classroom as temporary educators. School district leaders say it’s a necessary step as they deal with hundreds of vacant positions across the state. Still, they express concerns about the challenges that come with hiring substitute teachers who typically are not certified and do not build lesson plans or meet with parents. A New Mexico State University report says the state had about 740 vacant teaching positions last year, more than double the 300 vacancies reported in 2017.\n\nNew York\n\nNew York: Lady Liberty is ready to reveal the biggest upgrade to her island home since she first raised her torch in 1886. More than two years after breaking ground, and funded by a $100 million public campaign, the new Statue of Liberty Museum opens Thursday. The 26,000-square-foot museum, loaded with historic relics and interactive exhibits, rises uphill from the central pedestrian mall on Liberty Island, which receives some 4.5 million visitors annually. Built on the New Jersey-facing side of the island, terraced steps, made of the same Stony Creek granite used to build the statue base, lead to a 14,000-square-foot green roof, seeded with native grasses. From there, visitors can enjoy panoramic views of the Upper Bay between New York and New Jersey and, of course, Lady Liberty herself.\n\nNorth Carolina\n\nRaleigh: The Carolina Hurricanes have been rolling at home ever since their newly acquired grunter named Hamilton started hogging the corner. Not defenseman Dougie Hamilton – Hamilton the pig. The 90-pound Juliana potbelly who catches games from behind the boards in a personalized wagon has shown plenty of chops during his three-week run as the team’s unofficial good-luck charm. In the land of pulled pork barbecue, this pig pulls for the Hurricanes. “He’s like this little internet sensation that caught on,” says his owner, Raleigh real estate broker Kyle Eckenrode. “People just love it when we bring him out. It’s really crazy to watch it all unfold.” The Hurricanes can’t argue with the results: Ever since Hamilton began hanging out, the players haven’t lost with their prized pig in the building.\n\nNorth Dakota\n\nBismarck: The Capitol will soon welcome its visitors with a new public entrance. The Bismarck Tribune reports that state lawmakers have approved $2 million to remodel the Capitol building’s only public entrance before the next legislative session in January 2021. The entrance is accessed through a tunnel that’s long been closed to vehicle traffic. Sen. Ray Holmberg says the tunnel would cause winter winds and extreme cold to seep into the Capitol’s ground floor. The state’s facilities management director, John Boyle, says the plan calls for enclosing the tunnel and converting drive lanes into sidewalks with landscaping. Boyle says the remodel would also improve handicapped accessibility. Boyle says the changes will make it an “easier, user-friendly experience for people coming to the Capitol.”\n\nOhio\n\nNew Concord: The John and Annie Glenn Museum will be dedicated as a site on the National Register of Historic Places this month in the late astronaut’s hometown of New Concord. The museum, which was John Glenn’s boyhood home, will be dedicated in a ceremony Sunday in the Muskingum County village roughly 70 miles east of Columbus. The Glenns’ daughter, Lyn, will help dedicate the property. The former U.S. senator was born in Cambridge and moved to New Concord with his family in 1923. He was the first American to orbit the Earth and served 24 years as a Democrat in the Senate. The museum has also been designated an Ohio historic site and is on the National Park Service’s Register of Historic Places.\n\nOklahoma\n\nOklahoma City: A state investigator says cattle rustling is on the rise. The lead agent for the Oklahoma Department of Agriculture’s criminal investigation unit tells The Journal Record that the number of cattle reported stolen through March has already surpassed all of 2018. That comes to 1,210 stolen in the first three months of the year compared to 975 in 2018. Investigator Jerry Flowers says the state often works with federal agencies. In a recent case, that has included the FBI and the Bureau of Indian Affairs because the stolen cattle was on property north of El Reno that is under the jurisdiction of the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribal Nations.\n\nOregon\n\nSalem: The sergeant at arms of the state Senate had a new regular duty in recent days: searching the Capitol for Republican senators who have been staying away and brought the legislative body’s business to a halt. The tactic by the minority party is rare in Oregon but has been used throughout history, sometimes creating comical scenes. In Washington three decades ago, U.S. Sen. Bob Packwood, R-Ore., was carried feet-first into the Senate chamber after Democrats ordered the arrest of Republican senators who were denying a quorum. The Oregon standoff ended on its fifth day Monday. It had been caused by GOP senators’ anger at a bill that raises taxes on some businesses to fund education. After the Senate finally convened Monday afternoon, it passed the measure. To get the Republicans to return, Democrats, who hold a supermajority, agreed not to advance a measure requiring vaccinations for children to attend public schools. They also agreed to drop gun-control legislation.\n\nPennsylvania\n\nPhiladelphia: For 20 years, visitors to Eastern State Penitentiary got a glimpse of how Al Capone may have lived while incarcerated there in 1929. But a new installation at the former prison, now a historic museum, reveals something new – that Capone had a cellmate. Capone’s solo cell was for decades based on a newspaper account in the Public Ledger that described a “beautiful rug of soft colors,” refined wood furniture, “tasteful paintings” and a cabinet-style radio that played waltzes. The exact cell to house America’s most famous gangster, in what was once the world’s most famous prison, remains a guess. As part of ongoing preservation, the history museum “moved” Capone one cell over, giving the bootlegger a more historically accurate exhibit that finds him in less fancy digs, which he shares with a cellmate. The original cell on exhibit is left empty. Visitors can tour both spaces.\n\nRhode Island\n\nProvidence: Lawmakers are considering a bill to waive state college application fees for veterans. Democratic state Sen. Walter Felag introduced the measure, which passed the Senate Wednesday and was referred to the House Committee on Veterans’ Affairs. It would authorize state higher education institutions to waive application and transcript fees for veterans. It states that the Rhode Island Council on Postsecondary Education should encourage the presidents of the Community College of Rhode Island, Rhode Island College and University of Rhode Island to do so. Felag says it’s just one way to express gratitude for veterans’ service to the country and make their lives easier after they return home.\n\nSouth Carolina\n\nCharleston: A program to prevent former inmates from returning to prison has launched in the Lowcountry. WCIV-TV reports Project Evolution Inc. kicked off Friday. The program helps teach former inmates basic technology and job skills and also helps them build resumes and train for job interviews. The program begin in 2015 in Washington, D.C. Founder Barbara Magwood says she’s helped about 200 former inmates readjust to life without bars and to stay out of jail. South Carolina Department of Corrections data from 2015 shows 22.3% of inmates return to jail within three years. Magwood says through encouragement, the program is able to show ex-inmates that there’s hope after prison. Elder Walter Jackson, pastor of Greater Refuge Temple in Charleston, says his church is providing program volunteers to facilitate skills training.\n\nSouth Dakota\n\nSpearfish: A study shows that the population of a bird listed as a threatened species in the state is stable in the Spearfish and Whitewood creek watersheds but not expanding. American dippers can be found throughout the West, but the Black Hills is the farthest east the species is located, and that population also is genetically different from others. The Black Hills Pioneer reports Bird Conservancy of the Rockies biologist Nancy Drilling last year surveyed the Bear Butte, Elk, Box Elder, French and Rapid creeks. She says the results are similar to what was found in the early 2000s. The American dipper has been listed as threatened in South Dakota since 1996. The state wants a self-sustaining population in a third watershed before the bird is removed from the list.\n\nTennessee\n\nPigeon Forge: Dollywood has expanded with a newly opened land inspired by the magic of nature. Wildwood Grove, the largest expansion yet of Dolly Parton’s amusement park, opened its gates to guests for the first time Friday. The $37 million area has 11 themed attractions and sits adjacent to the Pigeon Forge theme park’s Timber Canyon area. Wildwood Grove features trees and plants native to East Tennessee. The new land’s story also connects to the area and features a young girl who discovers and touches the Wildwood Tree, and it opens her eyes and mind to everything around her. Wildwood Grove’s 11 themed attractions range from a new roller coaster to a restaurant with Southwestern cuisine. Butterflies, dragonflies, frogs and fireflies factor heavily into the imagery of the rides and decor.\n\nTexas\n\nCorpus Christi: The Texas Historical Commission has approved $150,000 to help with the “stabilization and ultimate reuse” of a historic 1914 courthouse. The commission awarded Nueces County funding for the project through a National Park Service grant, according to a release from the commission. The $12.3 million grant is meant to help historic properties in areas affected by Hurricane Harvey. Nueces County leaders have long grappled with how to save the historic building that sits in downtown Corpus Christi. In March, commissioners voted to reject an offer from the Ed Rachal Foundation to purchase the building and the property on which it sits.\n\nUtah\n\nSt. George: Federal officials and environmentalists are joining efforts to boost protection for a rare poppy that is only found in southern Utah. The Spectrum & Daily News reports that the U.S. forest Service, Utah Valley University and The Nature Conservancy are examining how to manage the dwarf bear-poppy or bearclaw poppy, which has been on the decline for the past 40 years. The flower was first put on the federally endangered species list in 1979. Experts say it can only blossom in specific geological conditions. Those conditions, which include gypsum soil, can be found in the St. George area. The Nature Conservancy established the 800-acre White Dome Nature Preserve that protects most of the habitat occupied by the poppy. Researchers have been using a drone to study the flowers.\n\nVermont\n\nMontpelier: The state has joined a handful of counterparts in renaming Columbus Day to honor Native Americans. Republican Gov. Phil Scott signed a bill May 6 recognizing the second Monday in October as Indigenous Peoples’ Day. A half-dozen states and several cities have made the change. Native American tribes and others say celebrating Italian explorer Christopher Columbus ignores the effect that the European arrival in the Americas had on the native peoples. They suffered violence, disease, enslavement, racism and exploitation at the hands of the settlers. Vermont’s law states that “Vermont was founded and built upon lands whose original inhabitants were Abenaki people and honors them and their ancestors.”\n\nVirginia\n\nChincoteague: A new walking and bicycle trail connecting Chincoteague and Assateague islands will be named after former longtime Mayor Jack Tarr. The trail will connect downtown Chincoteague with the Chincoteague National Wildlife Refuge on Assateague. The Chincoteague Town Council voted last week to name the new trail network the “John H. Tarr Bay to the Beach Trail.” Councilman Eddie Lewis suggested naming the trail after Tarr, and Councilwoman Ellen Richardson recommended “Bay to the Beach.” Lewis made a motion combining the two ideas, which was seconded by Denise Bowden and approved unanimously. Earlier this year, the town solicited ideas for naming the trail via the town’s website and Facebook page. More than 40 potential names were submitted for consideration.\n\nWashington\n\nWestport: A big rebound in the sea lion population along the West Coast in recent years has created a constant battle to wrangle the protected animals. They’re smart and fun to watch from a safe distance – but also noisy, smelly and proving to be a headache for some coastal marinas. “It’s a free zoo, kind of; just don’t pet ’em!” said Dennis Craig of Olympia as he watched a pier at Westport Marina nearly sink under the weight of dozens of burly bulls jostling and snoozing in the sun. The flip side of these flippered fish fiends can be seen in the mounting bill to the marina, including the cost of busted docks, broken electric stanchions and lost business. “Nearly all of our net revenue was used to repair damage caused by sea lions this year,” Westport Marina business manager Molly Bold said in an email.\n\nWest Virginia\n\nCharleston: A West Virginia University researcher is seeking funding to study whether using fentanyl testing strips changes the behavior of drug users, The Charleston Gazette-Mail reports. Fentanyl is a powerful opioid increasingly involved in drug-related deaths. Some harm reduction programs use the strips to warn drug users of the presence of fentanyl in other illicit substances. Dr. Judith Feinberg, a professor at the WVU School of Medicine, told the paper people might be safer knowing there is fentanyl in their drugs. But people could also use the strips to seek out dangerous drug doses. Feinberg and researcher Jon Zibbel are asking the National Institute on Drug Abuse to fund the research. They plan to study harm reduction programs at Milan Puskar Health Right, in Morgantown, and a program in North Carolina.\n\nWisconsin\n\nMadison: More people are dying in Wisconsin, but the state’s growing elderly population is living longer. Those are two findings of the annual death report from the Wisconsin Department of Health Services. The latest report released Monday looks at deaths in 2017. It found that deaths were up 15% compared with a decade ago. But the death rate for people age 65 and older decreased by 10% over 10 years. The top three causes of death in 2017 were heart disease, cancer and unintentional injury. Overall, the rates of death from cancer and heart disease both declined. But deaths from falls were up 3%, and poisonings were up 13%. Poisoning accounts for 30% of all unintentional injuries, second only to falls at 42%.\n\nWyoming\n\nYellowstone National Park: A noisy geyser in Yellowstone National Park has roared back to life after three years of quiet. Ledge Geyser is one of the biggest in Yellowstone’s Norris Geyser Basin. The Billings Gazette reports the geyser shoots hot water at an angle up to 125 feet high and a distance of 220 feet. Yellowstone geologist Jeff Hungerford says Ledge Geyser is noisy because its water and steam must pass through a narrow opening in the ground. Yellowstone has 1,300 thermal features and 500 geysers, more than anywhere else on Earth. Some geysers such as Old Faithful are predictable, but most, like Ledge Geyser, erupt erratically.\n\nFrom staff and wire reports", "authors": [], "publish_date": "2019/05/14"}, {"url": "https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/50-states/2019/06/03/fairy-houses-feuding-cousins-fish-app-news-around-states/39542079/", "title": "News from around our 50 states", "text": "From staff and wire reports\n\nAlabama\n\nTuscaloosa: Tourists flock to Tuscaloosa for Alabama football and the city’s amphitheater, but city leaders hope to attract even more for the city’s 200th birthday. The Tuscaloosa News reports that several events have already been held. Plans for Dec. 13 – the day the city was incorporated – include a parade downtown and the unveiling of a statue commissioned by the University of Alabama on the banks of the Black Warrior River. “We hope it’s going to be a big party throughout Tuscaloosa,” says Elizabeth McGiffert, events chairwoman for the Tuscaloosa Bicentennial Commission. Alabama tourism grew by 8.5% in 2018, state officials say.\n\nAlaska\n\nAnchorage: Scientists plan to survey the Bering Sea this summer and hope to shed light on why fish not normally seen in its northern stretches have been found there. Cod is caught in large numbers by commercial boats in the Bering Sea, but typically hundreds of miles south of Nome. Yet, last fall, fisherman Adem Boeckmann, who lives outside Nome, said he found cod in some of his crab pots. He told Alaska’s Energy Desk he had never seen anything like that. The surveys are being done by the Seattle-based Alaska Fisheries Science Center, an arm of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.\n\nArizona\n\nTucson: Amateur stargazers and astronomers say they are feeling less than starry-eyed with the recent launch of dozens of satellites by SpaceX founder Elon Musk. The Tucson-based International Dark-Sky Association fears the increasing number of satellites will diminish the landscape of the night skies for people and animals. SpaceX sent 60 little satellites into orbit on May 23 to facilitate global internet coverage. SpaceX spokeswoman Eva Behrend says they will dim dramatically as they orbit to greater distance.\n\nArkansas\n\nMountain Home: The Baxter County Courthouse square now sports new blue-and-gold banners and hanging baskets of flowers thanks to the beautification efforts of two local groups. Members of the Mountain Home Area Chamber of Commerce’s 2019 Leadership class purchased the 22 flags that have recently been hung around the downtown square. The Quality of Place action team with Baxter County Forward, a group of business and civic leaders tasked with encouraging area growth, purchased the 16 flower baskets recently displayed around the square.\n\nCalifornia\n\nLoomis: A rare white fawn has been rescued in northern California by a truck driver who delivered the rare animal to a rescue center. The Sacramento Bee reports that the white deer was discovered sitting in the middle of a road in Woodland. Diane Nicholas at Kindred Spirits Fawn Rescue says the 3-week-old fawn’s mother was not located.\n\nColorado\n\nDenver: Health officials have released new data indicating that Denver residents have a high rate of binge drinking. The Public Health department’s analysis found that more than one in four Denver residents binge drink. The report says Denver not only exceeds other areas of Colorado, but also has higher rates of binge drinking than peer cities such as Las Vegas, Seattle, Salt Lake City and Austin, Texas. Officials say alcohol is easily accessible due to a high density of bars, breweries and restaurants.\n\nConnecticut\n\nHartford: State lawmakers have approved legislation to modernize the state’s liquor laws and help the growing craft beer industry. Democratic Rep. Michael D’Agostino says lawmakers “really dragged this whole industry into the 21st century with this bill.” The wide-ranging legislation increases the amount of beer craft brewers can sell, from nine liters to nine gallons for off-premises consumption. The bill also allows hard cider manufacturers to sell cider and apple wine by the glass and bottle to visitors to consume on the premises. Manufacturers of craft beer, cider and now mead can sell one another’s products under the bill, which awaits Democratic Gov. Ned Lamont’s signature.\n\nDelaware\n\nWilmington: Fred Smith, 84, who was among the first five black students to enroll at Salesianum High School in Wilmington, finally has his diploma. Smith and four other blacks enrolled at Salesianum in 1950, four years before the Brown v. Board of Education case that dismantled school segregation. The Army drafted Smith, while the others graduated. After two years in the Army, Smith went straight to a job so he could support his mother and two younger siblings. He never graduated. Smith still works the overnight shift, 10 p.m. to 6 a.m., at CitiBank.\n\nDistrict of Columbia\n\nWashington: The nation’s iconic spot for enjoying cherry blossoms is one of America’s 11 Most Endangered Historic Places, The National Trust for Historic Preservation says. The Tidal Basin on the National Mall needs as much as $500 million to upgrade and maintain one of the country’s most visited sites, WUSA-TV reports. Part of the problem in the Tidal Basin is the popularity of the cherry trees, whose original stock was a gift from Japan in 1912. Every year, 36 million tourists crowd the walkways, trample on the trees’ roots and compact the soil.\n\nFlorida\n\nTampa: The outgoing president of the University of South Florida will donate an additional $3 million to the school, bringing her total donation to $23 million. Judy Genshaft, 71, is retiring July 1 after 19 years as USF’s president. She will be replaced by Steve Currall, who had been provost and a vice president at Southern Methodist University in Texas. Genshaft is from a wealthy family that made its fortune in the meat packing industry.\n\nGeorgia\n\nAtlanta: Former President Jimmy Carter has been granted tenure at Emory University in Atlanta at age 94. Carter earned the distinction after serving as University Distinguished Professor for the past 37 years. He’ll be the first tenured faculty member at Emory to hold a Nobel Prize and the first to have served as U.S. president. A statement on the university’s website says Carter used to quip during lectures that he had taught in every school of the university and published several books and articles, but hadn’t been awarded tenure.\n\nHawaii\n\nWailuku: Plagued by junked cars, Maui County has established a free vehicle disposal program. Illegal car abandonment along highways in Maui has increased by at least three times in six years, The Maui News reports. The Junk Vehicle Disposal Assistance Program allows Maui residents to dispose of one vehicle per year for free when a vehicle is delivered to a permitted scrap metal facility. One Maui business charges a recycling fee of $50 per net ton for an automobile with no fluids or tires, while fluids and tires increase the cost by $165, the newspaper reports.\n\nIdaho\n\nBoise: A special boot camp in eastern Oregon aims to bring more women into wildland firefighting careers. Boise State Public Radio reports that Cassandra Fleckenstein with the Vale District for the Bureau of Land Management sought out the grant funding to start the wildland fire boot camp, now in its second year. Fleckenstein says last year the boot camp drew applications from women as far away as Great Britain and Hawaii.\n\nIllinois\n\nChicago: More than a dozen crosswalks are to be painted rainbow colors in Chicago’s “Boystown” area for June’s LGBT pride activities. The Northalsted Business Alliance expects the crosswalks to be finished in time for Pride Fest on June 22 and 23 and the Chicago Pride Parade on June 30. The 14 crosswalks are being installed along Halsted Street in the Lakeview neighborhood on the city’s North Side. Alliance officials say their money and donations are funding the $60,000 cost. The crosswalks are made of thermoplastic polyurethane pavers. They join 20 rainbow pylons also along Halsted Street.\n\nIndiana\n\nIndianapolis: Two Indiana cousins are fighting for control of a multimillion-dollar Christian media empire started by their grandfather, trading accusations of deceit, corporate malfeasance, harassment and abuse. Lester L. Sumrall and Andrew Sumrall both want control of what one lawsuit claims could be $1 billion in donations that have flowed into the Lester Sumrall Evangelistic Association since the death of their grandfather, Lester Sumrall, in 1996, The Indianapolis Star reports. A May 2018 lawsuit by Andrew Sumrall claims Lester L. Sumrall even interfered in his cousin’s divorce proceedings.\n\nIowa\n\nDes Moines: Des Moines University has closed on its purchase of more than 88 acres of land in West Des Moines and has begun planning to move its campus out of its namesake city. The medical school’s president, Angela L. Walker Franklin, says its current 14-acre campus is just too small. “I can’t even consider adding one new degree program because we’re constricted with the size of the campus there and opportunities for parking,” she said. Construction is scheduled to begin next spring, and the school tentatively plans to move by 2023.\n\nKansas\n\nTopeka: City officials should think about turning the Topeka Zoo’s operations over to a private, nonprofit group, zoo Director Brendan Riley says. Having Friends of the Topeka Zoo oversee operations would allow the zoo to grow without risking higher property taxes, Riley says. Mayor Michelle De La Isla said last week that she’s not necessarily opposed to the idea but that any action has to be well thought out.\n\nKentucky\n\nBowling Green: Authorities say a Kentucky woman was arrested for DUI twice on Sunday. WBKO-TV reports Tiffany Henderson was booked the first time around 6 a.m. Sunday and released shortly after noon. Sheriff Brett Hightower says deputies received several complaints about a woman driving recklessly later that evening and found Henderson when they went to investigate. She was booked for the second time around 9 p.m.\n\nLouisiana\n\nBaton Rouge: State lawmakers want to crack down on parents who scuffle with referees at children’s sporting events, approving a bill to create new penalties for the behavior. The legislation will create the new crime of harassment of a school or recreation athletic contest official, authorizing penalties of up to 90 days in jail if the referee feels in “fear of receiving bodily harm” while officiating.\n\nMaine\n\nPortland: Bear hunters were hoping to bag big wins in the legislature this year, but their proposals to overhaul the state’s hunting rules will have to wait. A state panel deferred until next year a change offered by a pro-hunting group that would have given state biologists the ability to adjust the length of the season and the number of animals a hunter can kill. The bear population of Maine has grown from about 23,000 in 2004 to more than 35,000 today. “We have a growing bear population that we are not controlling,” says David Trahan, executive director of the Sportsman’s Alliance of Maine.\n\nMaryland\n\nBaltimore: How can Baltimore reduce its rampant street violence? The city’s new mayor says slugging it out might be one way. The Baltimore Sun reports Mayor Bernard C. “Jack” Young made the unconventional suggestion Sunday, saying boxing matches could be held at the Royal Farms Arena. The mayor says that’s just one approach he’s considering in the hopes of getting “people to put these guns down.” For those not open to boxing, he says, mediation is another option.\n\nMassachusetts\n\nBoston: Police officers in several neighborhoods donned body cameras Monday as the city began a permanent roll-out of the program after a one-year trial. Nearly 200 officers assigned to South Boston and Dorchester, as well as members of the youth violence strike force, were the first to use them. A new department policy says cameras should be used in “adversarial” or use of force incidents, vehicle stops, arrests, searches of individuals, police pursuits and crowd control situations.\n\nMichigan\n\nDearborn: Award-winning films depicting the diverse daily lives of Arabs and Arab Americans comprise the offerings of the 14th Arab Film Festival. It will run from Friday through June 16 in Detroit, Ann Arbor and Dearborn’s Arab American National Museum, which presents the festival. It will include Michigan premieres and prize-winners from several film festivals, including Sundance and Cannes. Selections include “Capernaum,” “Yomeddine,” “Sofia,” and “Dunya’s Day.” All films are subtitled in English.\n\nMinnesota\n\nMinneapolis: Many bilingual high school graduates will be crossing commencement stages this spring with a distinction honoring their proficiency in another language beyond English. Students must pass a test in order to receive a seal of biliteracy from the state’s Department of Education, Minnesota Public Radio reports. The award qualifies students to earn up to four semesters of college credit recognized by the Minnesota State Colleges and Universities system. “I don’t know what I’ll be in four or five years’ time,” says Edison senior Salah Mohamed. “I may need Somali, I may not. But there’s always going to be chances where you can improve your Somali, and I’ll always do that.”\n\nMississippi\n\nVicksburg: Historian and Vicksburg native William R. Ferris is being recognized with the placement of a Mississippi Blues Trail Marker in his honor. The UNC-Chapel Hill history professor’s documentation of blues and other folk legends in “Voices of Mississippi: Artists and Musicians Documented by William Ferris” won him Grammys for Best Historical Album and Best Album Notes.\n\nMissouri\n\nCape Girardeau: A 1,400-acre solar farm proposed for southern Cape Girardeau County would generate electricity while also serving as a $200 million investment into the county, according to representatives of a Florida-based company proposing the project. Representatives of NextEra Energy Resources say the solar farm would produce up to 200 megawatts of electricity, enough to power 50,000 homes. The project could be operating within two to four years.\n\nMontana\n\nBozeman: Caught a fish but not sure what it was? Now there’s help – High Country Apps has developed a Fishes of Montana app in collaboration with biologists at Montana State University and state Fish, Wildlife and Parks, The Bozeman Daily Chronicle reports. The app, which launches this month, includes photos and descriptions of the state’s more than 90 fish species as well as distribution maps. The app also lists 10 species that biologists don’t want in the state, in hopes of reducing their spread.\n\nNebraska\n\nOmaha: The Tyrannosaurus rex is enshrined in pop culture and, well, natural history as one of the most fearsome beasts to ever walk the earth. So it’s no small thing to say you’ve seen the most terrifying member of the most terrifying species. The Durham Museum will soon open its newest exhibit, “Tyrannosaurs: Meet the Family,” which explores the unique T. rex characteristics and showcases the dinosaurs’ newly revised family tree. The centerpiece of the exhibit is “Scotty,” a replica skeleton of a beast scientists are calling the largest T. rex ever discovered.\n\nNevada\n\nCarson City: A group of conservatives is hoping to recall Democratic Gov. Steve Sisolak, contending that the new governor and Democratic-run Legislature are passing or debating liberal legislation that infringes on freedoms such as gun rights. The group Fight for Nevada held a rally at a park in Carson City on Sunday as lawmakers were winding down their legislative session about a mile away. Group president Angela Blass says it will spend the summer holding rallies to build support for the cause and then will file a recall notice around November. It will then have 90 days to try to collect roughly 240,000 signatures.\n\nNew Hampshire\n\nConcord: Former New Hampshire governors have returned to the Statehouse as part of this week’s celebration of the building’s bicentennial, recalling their favorite portraits and their fondest memories of their tenures. Republican Gov. Chris Sununu was joined in a roundtable Monday by his father, former Gov. John H. Sununu, along with former Govs. Stephen Merrill, Craig Benson, Jeanne Shaheen, John Lynch and Maggie Hassan. In a mostly lighthearted affair, they discussed how they came to appreciate the transparency and civility of New Hampshire’s legislative process and how the Statehouse was filled with so much history and architectural beauty.\n\nNew Jersey\n\nTrenton: Drivers in New Jersey and across the nation are seeing a welcome drop in gas prices following the Memorial Day weekend – and analysts expect the trend to continue. AAA Mid-Atlantic says the average price of a gallon of regular gas in New Jersey was $2.88, down 2 cents from the previous week and well below the average $3.01 at this time last year. Analysts say the highest gas prices of the year may be behind us unless there are unforeseen economic, geopolitical, and/or weather-related circumstances.\n\nNew Mexico\n\nAlbuquerque: University of New Mexico administrators are considering a plan to put a 10-foot wrought iron fence around the school’s main campus for security purposes. The Albuquerque Journal reports the proposal is contained in a 45-page “Main Campus Perimeter Security Access Study” commissioned by the university. University officials aren’t saying how seriously the fence, which a spokesman says would cost about $1.6 million, is being considered.\n\nNew York\n\nRochester: Less than two months after miniature fairy houses were removed from Tinker Nature Park in Henrietta due to vandalism, the pixies have a new home. More than two dozen tiny houses now line the popular Birdsong Trail in Mendon Ponds Park. The fairy trail isn’t finished, Monroe County Parks Director Larry Staub says, but an opening ceremony will be held June 15. But park visitors can already see the creative talents of Betsy and Chris Marshall of Rush, the couple who also created the detailed fairy houses once located at Tinker. The new fairy houses are tailored to the new location, rather than retrofitted from the nature park.\n\nNorth Carolina\n\nAsheville: It’s almost time to apply for the popular ginseng harvest permits in two national forests. The Asheville Citizen-Times reports the application period for permits in the Nantahala and Pisgah national forests runs from Monday through July 12. Those seeking a permit must call or visit a ranger district office and submit their name and address for the lottery. Forest Service botanist Gary Kauffman says ginseng attracted prices of $600 to $900 a dry pound last year. It takes 300 plants to make one dry pound.\n\nNorth Dakota\n\nFargo: A man who grew up on a Wisconsin dairy farm in an Amish community says he’s found the acceptance he’s been searching for. John Shrock was 17 when he fled his Amish community after facing the pressure of “constantly trying to live up to perfection.” Shrock, 24, told KVRR-TV, “If you want to go to heaven, you have to be a good Amish kid. So I tried to be the best.” He was taken in by a man who had left his Amish community as a youth 15 years earlier. The man and his family adopted Shrock and taught him how to navigate the modern world. Shrock, who attended Master’s Baptist College in Fargo and now lives in Mapleton, said he now feels accepted by his adoptive family and his friends.\n\nOhio\n\nDayton: Two vintage C-47 aircraft will fly over a wreath-laying ceremony as part of a D-Day 75th anniversary commemoration Thursday at the National Museum of the U.S. Air Force. The museum says one of the planes successfully dropped 18 paratroopers during the invasion that led to the liberation of France and the end of the Nazi regime. The other transported cargo and paratroopers. The museum will display World War II-era military vehicles and show D-Day movies.\n\nOklahoma\n\nAda: Bill Anoatubby, longtime governor of the Chickasaw Nation, has filed for re-election for a ninth four-year term and his son, Chris, will run as his lieutenant governor. The three-day filing period continues until Wednesday for candidates running for governor, lieutenant governor, four legislative seats and a position on the tribe’s Supreme Court. The nonpartisan election is set for July 30.\n\nOregon\n\nPortland: A popular water slide will be absent this summer at the Wilson Pool in southwest Portland after the attraction was set on fire by vandals in April. The model of the 22-year-old slide is no longer made, so replacement parts are not available. Portland Parks and Recreation spokesman Mark Ross says it will take at least six months to get a replacement slide.\n\nPennsylvania\n\nBethlehem: A century-old steam engine has been put on display at Pennsylvania’s National Museum of Industrial History after workers got it running again for the first time in nearly four decades. The 115-ton Corliss engine once pumped 8 million gallons of water a day for the York Water Co. in York. It’s now a showpiece attraction at the industrial history museum in Bethlehem, which has spent 10 years restoring it. Museum historian Mike Piersa says the steam engine is the most powerful of its kind in the country and one of only four that work.\n\nRhode Island\n\nCoventry: The town has opened what it calls the state’s first furniture bank, intended to help residents in need and reduce the town’s trash bill. The furniture bank is housed in a shipping container at the town’s transfer station, and items are free. Melissa Soares, of the Department of Public Works, says Coventry spent $8,200 to dispose of furniture in April alone.\n\nSouth Carolina\n\nColumbia: The state’s college students shouldn’t have to pay more for in-state tuition next school year after state lawmakers agreed to increase university funding in exchange for a one-year tuition freeze. The $9 billion budget passed by state lawmakers included a $36 million boost to higher education funding after colleges and universities agreed to keep in-state tuition at the same rate. College presidents have said they had to keep increasing tuition because their share of the state budget kept going down after the Great Recession. Governors and state lawmakers have argued that instead of cutting back on spending, universities just raised rates.\n\nSouth Dakota\n\nSioux Falls: The Boy Scouts of America have given a Sioux Falls man the awards he earned decades ago after completing his Eagle Scout rank. The Boy Scouts awarded four Eagle Palms to Duane Greenfield while he celebrated his 101st birthday over the weekend with his family. The palms are awards given for merit badges earned after the 21 required to reach the Eagle Scout rank. Greenfield earned 41 merit badges. The palm awards weren’t around when Greenfield was a Boy Scout. So, the organization made the awards retroactively for the work that Greenfield had accomplished long ago. The Argus Leader says Greenfield joined the Boy Scouts in 1930 when he was 12.\n\nTexas\n\nSan Antonio: The San Antonio Museum of Art has welcomed a big boulder from a sister city in China. A crane was used to maneuver the more than 6-ton rock donated by Wuxi in honor of San Antonio’s Tricentennial. The donation joins the San Antonio Museum of Art’s collection of scholars’ rocks and will be installed on campus in November. Shawn Yuan, assistant curator of Asian art at the museum, says scholars’ rocks have long been prized by elite members of Chinese society.\n\nUtah\n\nAntelope Island: Authorities say a hiker has been seriously injured by a bison on Antelope Island. The 30-year-old Davis County man was struck Saturday afternoon at the state park where a 600-bison herd roams free. Parks Lt. Eric Stucki says bison rarely climb to the high elevation where the man was hurt, because their water sources are lower. Stucki says encounters between bison and humans are infrequent overall, and when they do happen it’s more common for people to be chased than struck.\n\nVermont\n\nMontpelier: Officials who work to protect and promote Vermont’s downtowns are going to be celebrating at a conference Wednesday the historic character of downtowns that also help drive local economies. Gary Holloway, program manager for the state Department of Housing and Community Development, says Montpelier is home to several initiatives that illustrate the benefits of downtowns. Those include the recent renovation of the historic French Block for affordable housing and the construction of a recreation path bridge across the North Branch of the Winooski River.\n\nVirginia\n\nBlacksburg: Two universities are collaborating to offer a professional certificate in the craft beer industry. The yearlong noncredit program will guide students through the craft brewing business, including selecting high-quality ingredients, brewing, packaging and distribution. The Virginia Tech Center for Organizational and Technological Advancement and the University of Richmond School of Professional and Continuing Studies are working together on the program, which costs $2,499.\n\nWashington\n\nUnion Gap: More than 9,000 pounds of tamales made by a central Washington state restaurant are being recalled. The U.S. Department of Agriculture says Los Hernandez, LLC is recalling the chicken and pork tamales because they were produced without federal inspection. The food was shipped to the Los Hernandez Tamales Restaurant in Union Gap between Dec. 3 and February. The food had been sold as individual products to customers through May 1, and those tamales may still be in home freezers. No one has reported getting sick, but authorities are asking people not to consume the items as a precaution.\n\nWest Virginia\n\nCharleston: Eighth-grader Karter King of Rivesville Middle School in Marion County has won a contest aimed at raising awareness of prescription painkiller abuse in West Virginia. The winning design in the Kids Kick Opioids contest illustrated how opioid abuse ruins lives and warns, “Try them and see, you might NEVER break free!” The winning entry was among 3,240 statewide and will be used in newspapers across West Virginia.\n\nWisconsin\n\nMilwaukee: Lt. Gov. Mandela Barnes says he has taken care of a $108 fine for unpaid parking tickets that prevented him from registering a vehicle he previously owned. The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported Monday on the nearly year-old fine. Barnes says he paid off the fine Friday after learning the Journal Sentinel was looking into it. Barnes says he initially had no idea that he had the tickets for an improperly registered vehicle, a meter violation and for parking too close to a crosswalk.\n\nWyoming\n\nCheyenne: Gov. Mark Gordon used foul language and “his physical presence in an aggressive and threatening manner” during a meeting with Cheyenne’s mayor, she said Monday. “For a split second I thought about walking out, but I felt like this was a very important issue,” Marian Orr said of the meeting with Gordon about a possible visit in July from a Taiwanese government delegation during Cheyenne Frontier Days. The half-hour meeting witnessed by three Gordon staffers ended on a less confrontational note, according to Orr, who said she nonetheless felt like she needed to draw public attention to Gordon’s behavior out of concern it might continue.\n\nFrom staff and wire reports", "authors": [], "publish_date": "2019/06/03"}, {"url": "https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/50-states/2019/12/29/news-around-states/40907031/", "title": "50 States", "text": "From USA TODAY Network and wire reports\n\nAlabama\n\nRogersville: A nonprofit group is accepting donations to help clean up Joe Wheeler State Park, which was badly damaged by a tornado earlier this month. The News Courier reported the Alabama State Parks Foundation will take contributions to restore the park near Rogersville. As many as 150 acres of land at the popular park was badly damaged, said superintendent Chad Davis. The damaged areas include campgrounds and day-use areas that are closed indefinitely. Dozens of trees are down and some buildings were damaged. The park would be working with the Alabama Forestry Commission during the cleanup, Davis said. The lodge, marina and some other areas have reopened at the park, which is located along park the Tennessee River. The weather service said it was struck by a twister with 110 mph maximum winds that left a trail of damage as wide as 500 yards.\n\nAlaska\n\nAnchorage: Transportation officials have launched an updated monitoring system providing drivers real-time road and traffic conditions throughout the state. The Alaska Department of Transportation launched Friday the 511 road condition alert system designed to be more user- and mobile-friendly, the Anchorage Daily News reported. Users can set up notifications and alerts on personalized routes, zoom in and out of the map and click on areas to find out more information, department officials said. The old version was removed from the store and users must download the new version, she said. The system will show traffic speeds and integrates a Google-owned application Waze allowing users to report road conditions, closures or crashes, officials said. The system can be accessed by calling 511, visiting 511.alaska.gov or downloading the mobile app from Google Play or the App Store, officials said. About 450,000 travelers used the 511 website, more than 68,000 calls were made to the 511 phone system and the app was downloaded more than 9,000 times this year, department officials said.\n\nArizona\n\nPhoenix:The mood along the streets of central Phoenix was lively, even before the Fiesta Bowl Parade officially began at 9 a.m. Saturday. Historic cars roared their engines as they drove through the blocked-off streets and children holding plastic balloon souvenirs waved hello to a team of police officers mounted on bicycles as they rode through the parade route ahead of its start. A sea of lawn chairs lined Central Avenue, with most of their occupants wrapped in blankets and clutching coffee-filled thermoses as the temperature hovered around 45 degrees — arguably a glacial temperature, by Phoenix standards anyway.\n\nArkansas\n\nFort Smith: The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs has announced plans for a new outpatient medical clinic in Fort Smith, which is expected to create about 100 jobs. The agency announced plans Thursday for the new clinic, which will have more than double the space now available at the existing VA clinic in Fort Smith. About 15,000 veterans in Crawford, Sebastian and Franklin counties use the facility, officials said. The larger clinic is expected to improve access to medical care for veterans in the area and create about 100 jobs, including positions for doctors, nurses and support staff, the Fort Smith Regional Chamber of Commerce said. The outpatient clinic will offer primary care, mental health, audiology, optometry, radiology and lab services.\n\nCalifornia\n\nSacramento: A federal judge has temporarily blocked a California law banning the import and sale of alligator and crocodile products. U.S. District Judge Kimberly J. Mueller also scheduled an April 24 hearing on Louisiana’s request for a longer-lasting order called a preliminary injunction. Both sides agreed to the temporary order, Mueller wrote. It was signed Sunday and made public Monday in online court records. Mueller noted that California is not conceding anything by agreeing to the temporary restraining order and might continue to enforce laws barring the importation of alligator and crocodile bodies and body parts that are forbidden under the Endangered Species Act. American alligators are one of only two alligator species. Chinese alligators are one of the world’s most endangered crocodilians but American alligators are thriving, partly with help from alligator farmers. Their harvest and sale remain regulated, for their own sake and, under an international treaty, because they look like some species that are endangered or threatened. American alligators were removed from the U.S. endangered species list in 1987. The alligator business has played a key part in bringing back the animals and is important in protecting marshes and swamps and other species that depend on wetlands, according to Louisiana’s lawsuit. The big reptiles don’t breed well in captivity, so farmers get permits to collect eggs from the big heaps of plants that alligators pile up as wetland nests. When the alligators hatched from those eggs are 3 to 5 feet long, the number that would have survived to that length in the wild must be returned to the wild, where most hatchlings get eaten if the eggs don’t get eaten first.\n\nColorado\n\nPueblo: A puppy that was thrown at a vehicle by a homeless man last week was adopted on Friday following a raffle organized by animal shelter officials. Officials with the Humane Society of the Pikes Peak Region set up the drawing in Pueblo. KKTV-TV reported the lucky winner is Beth Sisneros of Peyton. Shelter workers had dubbed the dog “Bob” and Sisneros renamed the pup, Buddy Junior. An anonymous donor paid for Buddy’s $400 adoption fee. The Pueblo Chieftain reported that the puppy was thrown by a man reportedly under the influence of meth at a vehicle that was occupied by a mother and her daughter Dec. 15, authorities said. Amanda Belcher was in the car with her daughter when she said the man approached her vehicle and threw the puppy at the roof of the vehicle with force, authorities said. The man was cited for animal cruelty, authorities said.\n\nConnecticut\n\nHartford: Guided hikes will be offered on New Year’s Day at 15 parks and recreation areas across the state. The free First Day Hikes, which average one or two miles, are being hosted by the Connecticut Department of Energy and Environmental Protection. It’s part of America’s State Parks’ First Day Hikes initiative, which is taking place in all 50 states on Wednesday. The goal of the First Day hikes is to encourage people to get outside, exercise, enjoy nature and welcome the new year with friends and family. Parks staff and volunteers will lead the hikes. Information about the locations can be found on the Connecticut State Parks and Forests website. Some hikes, such as one planned at Burr Pond State Park in Torrington, allow dogs on leashes. But others, such as a hike through the Candlewood Hill Wildlife Management Area in Groton do not. Those looking for adventure might consider a moderate two-mile hike through Kettletown State Park in Southbury. First Day Hikes began more than 25 years ago at the Blue Hills Reservation, a state park south of Boston.\n\nDelaware\n\nWilmington:Davian Higgins-Reeves might not have been in her new home for the holidays, but she has the keys in her hands. She and her family will be living in a new Simonds Gardens home after receiving the keys during a home dedication ceremony by Habitat for Humanity of New Castle County. The home, the fourth either built or renovated by Habitat in Simonds Gardens, will get Higgins-Reeves out of an apartment she shares with her sister and cousin and into housing that will allow her to save money and have something she helped build. Higgins-Reeves, who got the keys Dec. 20 and is expected to move into the house in January, put in more than 250 hours of “sweat equity” – the term Habitat uses for the investment the owner provides before moving into a home. This can be anything from helping build the house to being engaged in their new community. Along with the sweat equity, families in the program attend financial coaching classes, home maintenance training and civic engagement training. Higgins-Reeves will be moving into her new home with her husband and her younger sister.\n\nDistrict of Columbia\n\nWashington:A 15-year-old boy was arrested nearly a month after two individuals were shot near the ZooLights display at the National Zoo, WUSA-TV reported. Police said on Nov. 30, a group of teens set off fireworks near the zoo, which some visitors mistook for gunshots. During this incident, police said a 15-year-old suspect approached two victims in the 2800 block of Connecticut Ave., Northwest and pulled out a handgun. Then, he shot the victims. The suspect fled the scene, and the victims were taken to a hospital for treatment of their nonlife-threatening injuries. D.C. Police said they arrested a 15-year-old boy from Pittsburgh and charged him with assault of a dangerous weapon (gun). Following the incident, zoo officials looked to increase security measures and tighten up safety precautions. National Zoo spokeswoman Pamela Baker-Masson said that zoo officials held a discussion with D.C. Police, the Smithsonian Office of Protection Services and Metro Transit Police following the shootings to determine what those safety precautions will look like and how they will be carried out. Following that discussion, Baker-Masson said there would be an increase in security staff, as well as temporary screening stations that will include bag checks and wanding. In addition to increased precautions in the zoo, Baker-Masson said D.C. Police would have a heavier presence outside the zoo, as well.\n\nFlorida\n\nTampa: A cat that went missing two years ago in Florida during Hurricane Irma has been reunited with the pet’s owner. The Hillsborough County Sheriff’s Office tweeted late last week that the cat showed up at one of its offices in the Tampa area and deputies were hoping to find the owner. The sheriff’s office provided an update on Friday, saying that the owner had been traced via microchip after deputies took the cat to a local veterinarian. The sheriff’s office didn’t identify Eva’s owner but said the cat disappeared during the 2017 hurricane, whose path cut through the middle of Florida. “Tonight, the owner was reunited with Eva,” the sheriff’s office tweeted. “Eva is now living in luxury. MEOW, that is a great story!”\n\nGeorgia\n\nAtlanta: Supporters of Georgia’s South River are hoping it becomes more popular. They believe that if the river south of Atlanta was used more frequently for recreation, it might bring more funding and protection. The South River traverses for about 60 miles from East Point into DeKalb County, before it winds south through five more metro Atlanta counties into Jackson Lake Reservoir in Butts County, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported. Part of the South River traverses by Panola Mountain State Park, forming the border between DeKalb and Rockdale counties. The hope is that more use will give it added protection from development and pollution. Despite its history of sewage spills, water quality in the river has improved over the last two decades, officials said, and Jackie Echols, board president of the watershed alliance, said it is safe enough for recreational uses such as kayaking.\n\nHawaii\n\nHonolulu: Authorities said a pilot mobile homeless center program has seen success after launching multiple inflatable tents at a park on Oahu. The Homeless Outreach and Navigations for Unsheltered Persons project set up 10 tents at Waipahu Cultural Garden Park this month, providing homeless people access to food, showers, restrooms and kennels for pets, the Honolulu Star-Advertiser reported. The 400-square-foot tents house up to 10 people each, authorities said. People housed in the tents are being helped by social services agencies to find more permanent housing solutions, authorities said. The program is a three-year, $6 million pilot project staffed by the Honolulu Police Department and Department of Community Services. The program expects to spend 90 days in Waipahu before moving to another city-owned park, officials said. More than 20 of those who stayed at the camp and were placed in shelters were from Waipahu, but others have come from Kakaako, Pearl City, Ewa Beach and Waianae, authorities said. The next location for the mobile shelter could be somewhere in the McCully or Moiliili area where many complaints have been received about large homeless encampments, Lambert said.\n\nIdaho\n\nHailey: Authorities said there have been five mountain lion attacks that have killed or injured dogs in the same central Idaho community in the past week. The Idaho State Journal reported a Labrador retriever was attacked early Saturday morning near Hailey after its owners let the dog outside in their unfenced backyard. It marked the fifth case in the Wood River Valley in the span of a week, according to the Idaho Department of Fish and Game. The Labrador has since recovered and returned home, but at least three other dogs have died. The state said there has been an increasing number of predators in the area because elk and mule deer can now be found there year-round. It urged residents to be vigilant in the early morning and evening hours.\n\nIllinois\n\nAurora: A man who made more than 27,000 crosses to commemorate victims of mass shootings across the country is retiring. Greg Zanis came to realize, after 23 years, his Crosses for Losses ministry was beginning to take a personal and financial toll on him, according to The Beacon-News. Zanis has set up crosses after the school shootings at Columbine, Sandy Hook and Parkland. He also placed crosses after the Las Vegas music festival shooting and the Orlando nightclub shooting. In 2016, he made more than 700 crosses that were carried along Michigan Avenue in Chicago to honor each person who had been killed that year. Earlier this year, Zanis found himself making crosses for his hometown of Aurora after a Henry Pratt Co. employee opened fire on his coworkers. Zanis said he hopes to pass on his ministry to the nonprofit Lutheran Church Charities of Northbrook.\n\nIndiana\n\nIndianapolis:An electric car-sharing service that debuted in 2015 is pulling the plug on its network of rechargeable cars after residents failed to embrace the vehicles. Blue Indy will end its collaboration with the city of Indianapolis on May 21, saying in a statement that the car-sharing service would end “because we did not reach the level of activity required to be economically viable.” When Bolloré Logistics launched Blue Indy in Indiana’s capital in September 2015, the Paris-based company predicted it would be operating profitably by 2020, with at least 15,000 members, 200 stations and 500 cars. But as of August, Blue Indy had just 3,000 active members, a fifth of the total it had projected that it needed for profitability. And it had 92 stations and 200 cars – 80 fewer than it had two years ago. The Blue Indy project cost about $50 million, with the company investing $41 million, the city contributing $6 million and Indianapolis Power & Light Co. covering the remaining $3 million. The company did not say what would happen to the cars’ charging stations, which can be found all over Indianapolis.\n\nIowa\n\nDes Moines:A dozen people have applied to fill a vacant seat on the Iowa Supreme Court left by the death in November of Chief Justice Mark Cady. Court officials said the State Judicial Nominating Commission will conduct interviews on Jan. 9 of the applicants. Those interviews, to be held in the Iowa Supreme Court courtroom in Des Moines, are open to the public. Following the interviews, the commission will select three nominees to be forwarded to Gov. Kim Reynolds. The Republican governor will then have 30 days to appoint the new justice from the three nominees. The applicants are Joel Barrows, a district judge from Bettendorf; Romonda Belcher, a district associate judge from Des Moines; Mary Chicchelly, a district judge from Cedar Rapids; Ames lawyer Timothy Gartin; David May, an Iowa Appeals Court judge from Polk City; Des Moines lawyer Matthew McDermott; Iowa City lawyer Craig Nierman; Muscatine County Attorney Alan Ostergren; Cedar Rapids lawyer Dana Oxley; assistant Iowa attorney general Lisa Reel Schmidt; Theresa Wilson, an assistant appellate defender; and Des Moines lawyer William Miller. Iowan residents can email written comments regarding applicants to the commission no later than 5 p.m. Jan. 7 to sjnc@iowa.gov.\n\nKansas\n\nTopeka: A voluntary recall of several pork products produced in Clay Center will be issued on Monday because of possible listeria contamination, Kansas health officials said Saturday. The Kansas Department of Health and Environment said in a news release that Clay Center Locker Plant will issue the recall for any ready-to-eat product including smoked pork loins, ham hocks and smoked ham from the plant produced on Nov. 21. The department is urging the public not to consume any of the products, including those bought at the retail counter in the plant and hams that were delivered to the Future Farmers of America chapters in Clay Center and Chapman. To date, no illnesses have been linked with the recall, the department said. The department said the recall was initiated after tests from routine samplings by the state Agriculture Department found listeria monocytogenes. Listeria can cause serious and sometimes fatal infections in young children, frail or elderly people, and others with weakened immune systems.\n\nKentucky\n\nVersailles:Jim Beam was fined $600,000 earlier this month after a July warehouse fire sent a nearly 23-mile plume of alcohol into the Kentucky and Ohio rivers, killing fish. The distiller agreed to the fine in a Dec. 6 order from the Kentucky Energy and Environment Cabinet, The Courier-Journal reported. Jim Beam will also reimburse the state agency $112,000. The July 3 fire was started when lightning struck a massive barrel warehouse near the Woodford-Franklin County line. The blaze sent flames shooting into the night sky that could be seen for miles and generated so much heat that firetruck lights melted. About 40,000 barrels of aging whiskey were destroyed, with the runoff pouring into nearby Glenns Creek and then downstream into the rivers. The Kentucky Department of Fish and Wildlife Resources found dead fish along 62 miles of Glenns Creek and the Kentucky River. There were also dead fish in the Ohio River, but Energy and Environment Cabinet spokesman John Mura has described the impact there as “negligible.”\n\nLouisiana\n\nDonaldsonville: Seven people have been arrested on charges of dogfighting in south Louisiana and officials said more arrests might be pending. Ascension Parish Sheriff Bobby Webre on Friday said deputies responded to a call regarding dogfighting at a residence in Donaldsonville on Dec. 20. Detectives rounded up 10 dogs, two of them had been fighting and were severely injured. One of the injured dogs died. Investigators also searched 10 vehicles left at the scene and seized drugs, guns, cash, dogfighting paraphernalia and drug paraphernalia, news outlets reported. “Cases of animal cruelty will always be taken seriously,” Webre said. “We will not tolerate dogfighting or anything like it in Ascension Parish.” Anyone with information about this case is urged to contact the Ascension Parish Sheriff’s Office at 225-621-4636.\n\nMaine\n\nPortland: A bill backed by Republican U.S. Sen. Susan Collins of Maine that is designed to protect animals by cutting down on illegal wildlife trafficking and poaching has been signed into law. Collins joined Democratic Sen. Jeff Merkley of Oregon in proposing the Rescuing Animals With Rewards Act. The proposal authorizes the federal government to offer financial rewards for information that leads to disruption of wildlife trafficking networks, the senators said. Illegal trafficking of wildlife is a “transnational crime that requires a coordinated and sustained global effort” to be stopped, Collins said. Collins and Merkley submitted their proposal in May. It has the support of numerous animal welfare organizations.\n\nMaryland\n\nForestville: Ulysses Currie, a powerful former Maryland lawmaker who was censured in an ethics scandal has died. He was 82. Currie’s wife, Shirley Gravely-Currie, told The Washington Post that he died Friday from advanced dementia at his home in Prince George’s County. The Democrat had represented the area as a state lawmaker for more than three decades until his term ended earlier this year. The son of a sharecropper, Currie was a teacher who rose to become a popular and leading black lawmaker. He was elected to the House of Delegates in 1986 and then elected to the state Senate in 1994. Senate President Thomas V. Mike Miller praised his former colleague, saying his story “is the story of the best of our state and this country.” Currie was the chairman of the powerful Senate budget committee in 2002 but stepped down from the chairmanship when he was indicted in federal court in 2010 for failing to disclose work for a grocery store chain that paid him about $245,000 over several years. He was acquitted of all charges, including conspiracy, bribery and extortion. The Senate voted unanimously to censure him, making it the first time in 14 years the chamber had disciplined one of its own.\n\nMassachusetts\n\nWorcester: A couple reunited for extra-sweet wedding vows at the same Dunkin’ Donuts where their young love splintered nearly 30 years ago. Valerie Sneade and Jason Roy were married Friday afternoon, joined by family, friends and customers buying coffee and pastries at the Dunkin’ Donuts on Grafton Street in Worcester. Sneade and Roy mostly didn’t see each other for 25 years after a conversation about their future at the same shop in 1992 led the young, in-love couple to step back from their relationship. Sneade blamed misunderstandings at the time and words that didn’t come out right. Roy joined the Navy, married and had three children. Sneade also had a first marriage and moved to Florida. She became a singer and actress, developing her own cabaret shows. Both later divorced. When Roy learned Sneade was performing a Valentine’s Day-themed musical revue in Worcester in February 2018, he showed up and sat in the front row. Three months later, she moved back to Massachusetts. Roy proposed that New Year’s Eve.\n\nMichigan\n\nGladstone: A small-town tradition in the Upper Peninsula spread holiday cheer and helped a charity. Firefighters riding in fire trucks went door-to-door last weekend in Gladstone, distributing candy canes while collecting food and $465.79 for the local St. Vincent de Paul branch. The Daily Press in Escanaba said the tradition started more than 20 years ago with five volunteers and one truck. Now more than 20 people are involved. Children eagerly looked out their windows as fire trucks decorated with Christmas lights went up and down Gladstone’s streets, playing holiday music. Stockings full of candy canes were donated by Walmart.\n\nMinnesota\n\nMinneapolis: An 11-year-old boy who was overcome by fumes at a western Minnesota grain silo has died, becoming the third victim to die from the farm accident that claimed his father and uncle, authorities said. Alex Boesl was pronounced dead on Friday, according to the Douglas County Sheriff’s Office. The boy had been hospitalized at Children’s Hospital of Minneapolis since breathing in the silage gas on Dec. 21. The boy’s father, 47-year-old Curt Boesl, and uncle, 49-year-old Steven Boesl, also died. Authorities said Curt Boesl and Alex were working on top of the silo near Millerville when they apparently were overcome by fumes. Steven Boesl tried to rescue his brother and nephew and also was overcome. By the time deputies arrived, all three were unconscious. Emergency responders removed the three from the silo. Ambulance personnel declared Steven Boesl dead at the scene. Curt Boesl died on the morning of Dec. 22. Community members in Millerville, a town of about 100 residents, have rallied around the Boesl families. A GoFundMe account set up to be split between the two families had raised more than $65,000 from about 800 donors as of Friday night, the Star Tribune reported.\n\nMississippi\n\nJackson: The state is asking a federal appeals court to reconsider a ruling that said the state’s ban on most abortions at 15 weeks of pregnancy is unconstitutional. The ruling was issued Dec. 13 by a panel of three judges on the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, dealing a blow to those seeking to overturn the landmark Supreme Court ruling that legalized abortion nationwide. The next day, Republican Gov. Phil Bryant said he wants the state to appeal to the Supreme Court. Papers filed Friday are an in-between step. Mississippi is asking the full 5th Circuit to toss out the panel’s decision and reconsider the case. Attorneys for the state wrote that the panel’s decision conflicted with a Supreme Court ruling in an abortion case “which requires courts to consider not only the burdens a law might impose but the benefits that it provides.” The 5th Circuit panel said U.S. District Judge Carlton Reeves ruled correctly when he blocked the Mississippi law from taking effect in 2018.\n\nMissouri\n\nJefferson City: The state has stopped withholding union dues from the bimonthly paychecks of prison guards in what the union’s grievance officer calls a “pitiful attempt to bankrupt” the labor organization. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported that the maneuver by Republican Gov. Mike Parson’s administration has left the Missouri Correctional Officers Association with a funding shortfall as it negotiates a new contract with the state for 5,000-plus guards and sergeants. The decision by the state was announced in a Dec. 9 letter from the Office of Administration, which Parson controls. Stacy Neal, director of the agency’s division of accounting, said in the letter that the state would no longer withhold union dues because the bargaining unit is not covered by an existing labor agreement. The union and the state have been negotiating a new contract since the old one expired Sept. 18. Union members have been working under the terms of the old contract since then. Missouri prison guards are among the lowest paid in the nation even after Parson earmarked money for raises in the current budget.\n\nMontana\n\nBillings: A minimum of $4 million should be raised to invest in much-needed improvements to Hell Creek State Park in order to make it a “genuine destination park” on Fort Peck Reservoir. That’s the recommendation of Tom Towe, a Billings attorney who was appointed as a special liaison to Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks Director Martha Williams, the Billings Gazette reported. Towe was appointed by Gov. Steve Bullock in 2017 to lead the discussion of funding for the park. He submitted his suggestions to Williams in a letter dated Dec. 18. The last Legislature’s investment of $700,000 into a new sewer and water system for Hell Creek also demonstrated a political will for supporting Hell Creek, he said. Towe got tangled in the fray that erupted when the previous park director was dismissed and the Legislature latched on to unused park funds. After he was dismissed by the governor, Towe negotiated his term as a liaison, despite the fact that he had lobbied to make state parks a separate entity from FWP. Now he is reporting to the FWP director. In his 13 page letter to director Williams, Towe “strongly” recommended that the lease be renewed with the Corps of Engineers so that the state could enter into a 20-year contract with a concessionaire to operate the marina and hotel. That facility is currently operated by Clint and Deb Thomas. Towe said the contract for the concessionaire should be put out for bid, without the state playing “favorites.”\n\nNebraska\n\nValentine: The Nebraska Game and Parks Commission has declared a fish salvage for Hackberry Lake on the Valentine National Wildlife Refuge. The lake was scheduled to have its existing fish population renovated during 2019 to eliminate common carp on the refuge. But the renovation was not completed because of wet conditions and unsuitable water levels. The Nebraska Game and Parks Commission said length limits are rescinded during the salvage, which runs through Sept. 30, but daily bag limits are maintained. Fish can be taken only by fishing or archery. Game fish can be taken by archery from July 1-Sept. 30, and nongame fish, such as common carp, can be taken any time. Salvaged fish cannot be sold or used for stocking into other public or private bodies of water.\n\nNevada\n\nLas Vegas: Wildlife officials said the biggest threat to the state’s desert bighorn sheep is bacterial pneumonia, which continues to kill off entire herds statewide. The Las Vegas Sun reported that the problem was first identified in 2012 and has afflicted herds of the bighorn sheep across the U.S. Desert bighorn sheep, Nevada’s official state animal, number about 10,400. Pat Cummings, a game biologist for the Nevada Department of Wildlife, said officials have learned more about the origins and spread of the disease, but “it’s not in any kind of control.” Nevada Department of Wildlife veterinarian Peregrine Wolff said the sheep likely first caught the bacteria generations ago when they were brought to the U.S. from Europe. Wild bighorn sheep had no immunity to the bacteria, unlike domestic sheep, which has left them vulnerable. Wildlife officials are surveying the estimated 100 herds of bighorns in the state over the next few months. They’re collecting tissues from sheep in each herd to try to identify if they have any conditions that could make them more vulnerable once exposed to bacterial pneumonia, and try to determine what percentage of Nevada’s herds are infected.\n\nNew Hampshire\n\nHolderness: Registration opens soon for an annual program aimed at helping women learn skills for outdoor activities. The New Hampshire Fish and Game Department’s Winter Becoming an Outdoorswoman workshop will be held Feb. 22 at the Owl Brook Hunter Education Center in Holderness. Participants will choose among activities such as ice fishing, winter outdoor survival, snowshoeing and wildlife tracking and woodland target shooting. Registration will open Jan. 10.\n\nNew Jersey\n\nHamilton: A crane being used to remove a tree at a central New Jersey home somehow crashed into the residence on Friday, but authorities said no injuries were reported. The 63,000-pound tri-axle crane came down shortly after noon in Hamilton, while crews were working in the back yard of the Miry Brook Road home. The home sustained some damage in the accident, but the extent and severity was not immediately clear. The crane remained on the home for several hours as emergency responders secured the scene and sought to determine the safest way to right the machinery. The cause of the accident remains under investigation.\n\nNew Mexico\n\nAlbuquerque: A future mother-in-law tasked with making a phone recording of her future son-in-law proposing to her daughter apparently missed the moment. She ended up recording a selfie on her reaction to what she was seeing. KOB-TV reported Susan Griego somehow took a selfie video of herself watching Benjamin Steele Bacon proposed to her daughter Amber. She did capture the moment Bacon popped the question to Amber by the penguin exhibit at the Albuquerque Biopark. The couple said the selfie video made the proposal more memorable. “People have asked about it. I feel like that’s kind of our relationship. Something wacky and random,” Amber said. “It’s the perfect start to this.” Her mother admitted she’s probably “not very good at photography.”\n\nNew York\n\nLatham: The New York Army and Air National Guard are on track to provide military honors at the burials of about 11,050 veterans during 2019, the state Division of Military & Naval Affairs said Saturday. The expected total is close to the numbers in the last two years. Among the veterans who received the honors this year was Sgt. Francis S. Currey, who was one of the last three surviving Medal of Honor recipients from World War II when he died in October at age 94. Currey, of Selkirk, received the medal for his actions during the Battle of the Bulge. The New York Army National Guard also provided honors for Pfc. Needham Mayes, who had successfully appealed to the Army to reverse his 1956 dishonorable discharge, allowing him to be buried in a veterans’ cemetery with military honors. Mayes, of New York City, died on Veterans Day at age 85. In New York, the burial honors generally involve two National Guard soldiers or airmen presenting an American flag to the veteran’s family and sounding taps on an electronic bugle.\n\nNorth Carolina\n\nFletcher: A small plane landed in a fiery crash near a western North Carolina airport late Saturday afternoon, officials said. There were no serious injuries reported. The crash occurred about 5:30 p.m. at the Western North Carolina Agricultural Center about a quarter-mile from the Asheville Regional Airport, according to local television stations. There were no fatalities and no one was taken to a hospital, Buncombe County Sheriff’s Office public information officer Aaron Sarver said, according to WYFF-TV. Citing the Federal Aviation Administration and emergency officials, WLOS-TV reported a Piper PA-32 crashed east of the airport into a parking lot as it was taking off. Social media posts showed fire and smoke coming from a plane. Firefighters also could be seen watering down wreckage. The crash occurred hours after a small airplane crashed in a Louisiana parking lot, killing five people who were on board.\n\nNorth Dakota\n\nMinot: A man who was hunting pheasants in the Custer Mine area near Garrison on Thursday shot and killed a mountain lion that had emerged from tall grass and charged at him. Gary Gorney told the Minot Daily News that he expected to see a rooster pheasant after his German shorthaired dog had pointed to the area. Instead he was greeted by a female lion that weighed more than 100 pounds. Gorney said he doesn’t remember dropping his dad’s 100-year double-barrel shotgun and reaching for his 9-millimeter handgun underneath his jacket. “My instincts as a military law enforcement officer took over,” Gorney said. “There was no thought process. It was self-defense.” The lion came within 10 feet of Gorney before she was shot. Both of his dogs sprang into action and jumped on the lion. Gorney said he wanted to pull them off but “wasn’t going anywhere near that lion.” Gorney, who has a picture of himself holding the big cat, said it was the first mountain lion he had seen in 31 years of hunting. He said the grass perfectly matched the lion’s coat.\n\nOhio\n\nAda: A town long associated with the manufacturing of footballs has set a Guinness World Record for the most thrown at the same time. The organization certified the record after the attempt was made Oct. 25 by 950 people simultaneously throwing a football on the Ada War Memorial Stadium football field, the Lima News reported last week. Students from kindergarten through 12th grade joined teachers, coaches, bus drivers, school staff and community members to set the record. The Wilson Football Factory in Ada donated more than 1,000 commemorative footballs for the attempt. Workers at the factory make about 3,000 footballs a day, cutting, stitching and lacing each by hand in a 25-step process. The company supplies the football used by the NFL.\n\nOklahoma\n\nOklahoma City: A group seeking to legalize the recreational use of marijuana in Oklahoma refiled their petition on Friday after facing a fierce backlash over what the plan might do to the state’s burgeoning medical marijuana industry. Two Oklahoma City residents – Michelle Tilley and Ryan Kiesel – filed the new paperwork for State Question 807 with the Oklahoma Secretary of State’s Office. Tilley said the petition was redrafted to make sure there were greater protections for the existing medical marijuana industry and its patients. Kiesel is the executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Oklahoma. The state question also includes provisions that would allow certain people with previous marijuana convictions to be resentenced or have their criminal records expunged. Once the petition clears a review and challenge period, organizers will have 90 days to gather nearly 178,000 signatures from registered voters to qualify the question for the ballot. A second, separate petition to decriminalize marijuana in Oklahoma also was filed Friday by a Tulsa man, Paul Tay.\n\nOregon\n\nCloverdale: Authorities are searching for information after three garbage bags full of the remains of ducks and geese were found near the Oregon coast. Oregon State Police said in a release that a person walking their dog on Thursday near the Nestucca River in Tillamook County reported the gruesome discovery. Eight geese and five ducks were found in the garbage bags, with the breast meat removed from three of the geese. The remains were found near where the Cloverdale Boat Launch and the Cloverdale Water District building are located. Anyone with information should contact Oregon State Police troopers in the fish and wildlife division\n\nPennsylvania\n\nHouston: Officials said a large western Pennsylvania public burial ground thought to contain hundreds of remains actually has many more than previously thought – and there’s a new resource available to those who believe a relative might be buried there. Potter’s Field – a term for common graves, those for paupers or unclaimed bodies – was believed to contain as many as 502 people, many of whom might have fallen victim to tuberculosis, The (Washington) Observer-Reporter reported. But research conducted at the behest of Commissioner Harlan Shober, encompassing records kept for 66 years until 1945, concludes that more than 1,300 were likely buried there in unmarked graves. In 1830, state lawmakers mandated that the county care for the poorest of its residents, which often included burial in unmarked graves. Almost 300 grave markers – bearing no names, only numbers – dot the hillside on a field near the site of the old Washington County Home for the Poor in Chartiers Township. A ledger contained the names of 57 people buried from 1879 to 1882, and another microfilm list had deaths from 1912 to 1921. The rest of the data was transcribed from an old, leather-bound ledger listing all deaths at the Washington County Home for the Poor and everyone buried in Potters’ Field from 1912 to 1945, she said. A brief history of the Washington County poor farm, orphanage and homes for aged men and aged women is posted on the county website. The database is available through http://pottersfield.washcopa.org/PottersField/index.aspx.\n\nRhode Island\n\nCranston: The state will receive an extra $50 million in federal funds for bridge improvement and repair projects. The funding was included in a new federal transportation legislation co-authored by Democratic U.S. Senator Jack Reed, the ranking member of the Appropriations Subcommittee on Transportation and Housing and Urban Development. The federal transportation bill was signed into law earlier this month. Reed said the additional funds, the maximum amount allowable, will help finance repairs to six bridges in Cranston and Providence. Four of them are considered structurally deficient. Reed said the state has received nearly $350 million in federal funds for road, bridge and mass transit improvements in 2019.\n\nSouth Carolina\n\nGreenville: Minimum wage employees of Bon Secours St. Francis Health System are in line for a raise. Salaries for those workers are going up to $15 an hour by 2022, the hospital’s parent company, Bon Secours Mercy Health, announced last week. The move is designed to provide employees and their families “a dignified livelihood while working, and in retirement,” officials said in a news release. More than 8,100 employees, or 14% of the system’s 60,000 workers, will be affected by the change, which represents an additional $17 million investment over the next three years, officials said. Bon Secours St. Francis Health System had 3,452 employees in South Carolina in 2017, according to tax filings. Larry Pitts, human resources director for the hospital, said 475 employees will be affected by the increase locally, The Greenville News reported. The move will make the hospital more competitive by attracting health care workers and reducing turnover, he added. The increase will be phased in at all of the system’s U.S. markets, adjusted for cost of living variances. Exceptions include union workers whose wages are negotiated as part of their collective bargaining agreements, or about 7% of the workforce, and the Ireland market, which joined the health system in 2019, officials said. The federal minimum wage is $7.25 per hour, according to the U.S. Department of Labor. South Carolina’s minimum wage is also $7.25 according to the National Employment Law Project.\n\nSouth Dakota\n\nSturgis: Two Sturgis police officers who pulled a man from a burning home in May 2018 are among 18 people selected to receive Carnegie Medals, known as the nation’s highest civilian award for heroism. Sturgis Police Sgt. Christopher Schmoker and Officer Dylan Goetsch are being recognized by the Carnegie Hero Fund Commission for rescuing Jason McKee, who had passed out from heavy smoke in an upper-level bedroom., the Rapid City Journal reported. Using water-soaked clothing tied around their faces as makeshift masks, the officers dragged McKee’s unconscious body down a stairway and got him to the home’s front door, seconds before the fire overtook the living room and hallway where they had just been.\n\nTennessee\n\nKnoxville: Officials said a bear that decided to make its way through the University of Tennessee campus ended up stuck inside the baseball stadium. The Tennessee Wildlife Resources Agency said in a Facebook post that the bear was reported on the Knoxville campus and stuck inside Lindsey Nelson Stadium early Sunday morning. Wildlife Sgt. Roy Smith and Wildlife Officer Jeff Roberson responded to the scene, where they quickly tranquilized and removed the bear with the help of University of Tennessee police officers. The agency did not say how the bear got stuck inside the stadium. State officials will now transport and release the bear to a “more suitable bear habitat.”\n\nTexas\n\nAustin: The limestone cliffs of Santa Elena Canyon in Big Bend National Park will soon adorn priority mail postage stamps across the country. Designed by art director Greg Breeding with original art by Dan Cosgrove, the stamp depicts the Rio Grande flowing through the 1,500-feet-high canyon, one of the park’s most visited destinations. The stamp, to be released Jan. 18, is part of a focus in 2020 on stamps that celebrate “the people, events and cultural milestones unique to the history of the United States,” according to a release from the Postal Service. The Postal Service receives about 30,000 suggestions annually for stamp ideas. The Citizens’ Stamp Advisory Committee, made up of experts in fields such as history, science and art, review the suggestions and pare down a list for the Postmaster General. Priority mail delivers a package anywhere in the United States in one to three days.\n\nUtah\n\nSalt Lake City: Utah is about to start requiring nonresidents to get a new type of permit for using an off-highway vehicle in state parks or on public lands. KSL-TV reports that the $30 permit good for 12 months is a result of Utah dropping its recognition of off-highway vehicle registrations from Nevada or any other state. The new requirement takes effect Wednesday. Utah State Parks officials said revenue from permit sales will support recreational areas. Program coordinator Chris Haller said that fewer and fewer states have honored each other’s permits and that only 13 had reciprocity with Utah at the beginning of 2019.\n\nVermont\n\nLewis: The Department of Fish and Wildlife is celebrating eight years of improving trout habitat in northeastern Vermont rivers and streams. Trout thrive in streams that offer places to hide, such as under trees that have fallen into the streams. Fallen trees also create a mix of pools and shallow areas that are used by trout for feeding, reproducing, avoiding high flows and hiding from predators. The Caledonian Record reported that more than 27 miles of brook trout streams have been improved by the placement of large trees in strategic locations. A six-year study in the East Branch Nulhegan River watershed found that on average brook trout abundance tripled in just three years at sites with added trees. The fallen trees store sediment and organic material, helping to reduce the flow downstream of sediment, nutrients and slow runoff, reducing downstream flooding. The work has been done by a variety of organizations including Vermont Fish and Wildlife Department, Trout Unlimited on lands owned by Weyerhaeuser and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.\n\nVirginia\n\nFalls Church: One of the largest school districts in the United States has announced that it will allow students one excused absence per school year to participate civic activities such as protests. Fairfax County Public Schools in Virginia plans to start allowing the absences on Jan. 27, news outlets reported. The district is the largest school system in the state. Students in seventh through 12th grades can use the day for “civic engagement activities” such as attending marches or meeting with lawmakers, according to district spokeswoman Lucy Caldwell. The new policy was introduced by Fairfax School Board member Ryan McElveen, according to The Washington Post. He said the rule might be the first of its kind in the U.S. Students must give at least two days notice before the absence, school officials said. A parent or guardian has to give permission and students must fill out a form to explain the reason they’re missing school, McElveen said. To address worries about accreditation, the student must stop by their school campus at least once on the day of their excused absence, McElveen said.\n\nWashington\n\nTacoma: A memorial service has been scheduled for a western Washington sheriff’s deputy who died in a car crash while rushing to assist other officers. Pierce County Sheriff’s Deputy Cooper Dyson, 25, will be honored with a public service at 1 p.m. Monday at the Tacoma Dome. The street procession will begin at 11 a.m. at Joint Base Lewis-McChord. Dyson died on Dec. 21 after his patrol car crashed into a commercial building while he was on his way to back up two fellow officers dispatched to a house in Parkland for an urgent domestic violence call. Dyson had been with the department since 2018. He is survived by his 2-year-old child and his pregnant wife. It was the first motor vehicle collision death of a Pierce County Sheriff’s deputy since 1941.\n\nWest Virginia\n\nHuntington: West Virginia Secretary of State Mac Warner announced the formation of a committee to plan events commemorating the passage of the 19th Amendment in 1920, which gave women the right to vote. Kat Williams, a professor of U.S. women’s history at Marshall University, is helping with the planning. “There will be marches; there will be speeches; and there will be a number of different, exciting events,” she told The Herald-Dispatch. One of the committee’s main goals is to raise awareness of the milestone and its importance, she said. Williams is teaching a special class in the spring 2020 semester that will discuss the history of U.S. women since the passage of the amendment. Helen Gibbins, president of the League of Women Voters of the Huntington Area, said her group is helping to plan local and statewide events. They include a parade on Women’s Equality Day in August, which will begin on Marshall’s campus. A “Right to Vote” Reader’s Theater that the League has performed in years prior will have a special focus on women’s suffrage in 2020, Gibbons said. A complete list of events statewide will be released by the Secretary of State’s Office at the start of the new year.\n\nWisconsin\n\nMilwaukee:A water main break flooded streets just south of Interstate 94 in Milwaukee on Saturday. The water main ruptured Saturday morning in the area of Hawley Road and Main Street. Law enforcement rerouted traffic and closed off-ramps on the interstate at Hawley Road. Numerous vehicles were partially submerged. Twitter users posted videos showing water gushing down roads into yards and parking lots, and drivers walking in thigh-high water to reach their vehicles and move them to higher ground, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported. The cause of the break was not immediately reported.\n\nWyoming\n\nCheyenne: Landowners have raised concerns about health risks after a potential drilling project was announced near city limits. Samson Energy Company has announced plans to drill 10 to 15 oil wells east of Cheyenne, The Wyoming Tribune Eagle reported. The drilling spacing units run from Iron Mountain Road in the north to Interstate 80 in the south and were approved by the Wyoming Oil and Gas Conservation Commission, company officials said. The project would remain 1,000 feet from any occupied structure and cannot even cover the entire area, company officials said. Application for the drilling permit will narrow where the drilling will occur, officials said. Part of the proposed 12-square-mile zone falls within city limits, landowners and residents said. An October report from the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment found people living within 2,000 feet of fracking sites could face an elevated risk of short-term health issues like nosebleeds, headaches, breathing trouble and dizziness, said Wayne Lax, vice president of the landowners coalition. Drilling could begin next summer if permits are approved, company officials said.", "authors": [], "publish_date": "2019/12/29"}]}
{"question_id": "20230120_25", "search_time": "2023/01/20/16:38", "search_result": [{"url": "https://www.cnn.com/2022/06/06/energy/record-gas-prices-causes/index.html", "title": "Why US gas prices are at a record and why they'll stay high for a ...", "text": "New York CNN Business —\n\nRussia’s invasion of Ukraine is a major reason that US drivers are paying record prices for gasoline. But it’s not the only reason.\n\nNumerous factors are combining to push gas prices up to a record. Gas hit $4.25 for a gallon of regular gas, according to AAA’s survey Wednesday.\n\nGas prices were already expected to breach the $4 a gallon mark for the first time since 2008, with or without shots fired or economic sanctions imposed in Eastern Europe.\n\n“I think we reach $5 somewhere between this weekend and Juneteenth/Father’s Day weekend,” he said.\n\nIt was back in March that prices first broke the record of $4.11 a gallon, which had stood since 2008. That now seems like the good old days: The national average has been rising steadily for the past month, setting 27 records in the last 28 days.\n\nMore than one out of every five gas stations nationwide is now charging more than $5 a gallon for regular, and just more than half are charging $4.75.\n\nThere are 10 states, plus Washington, DC, where the average price is already at $5 or more: Alaska, Arizona, California, Hawaii, Indiana, Michigan, Illinois, Nevada, Oregon and Washington. Several more are within a penny of $5, so those states’ prices are likely only a day or two at most from crossing the mark.\n\nThat’s because there’s a number of reasons beside the disruption of Russian oil exports driving prices higher according to Tom Kloza, global head of energy analysis for the OPIS, which tracks gas prices for AAA. And making predictions about where prices will go has proved difficult. Wednesday’s record is already higher than Kloza a few weeks ago expected prices would reach. As school let out and summer travel picks up, so will gasoline demand and price, he said.\n\n“Anything goes from June 20 to Labor Day,” Kloza said.\n\nHere’s what’s behind the record price surge:\n\nRussia’s invasion of Ukraine\n\nRussia is one of the largest oil exporters on the planet. In December it sent nearly 8 million barrels of oil and other petroleum products to global markets, 5 million of them as crude oil.\n\nVery little of that went to the United States. Europe got 60% of the oil and 20% went to China in 2021. But oil is priced on global commodity markets, so the loss of Russian oil affects oil prices around the globe, no matter where it is used.\n\nThe concerns about disrupting global markets led western nations to initially exempt Russian oil and natural gas from the sanctions they put in place to protest the invasion.\n\nOn Tuesday the United States announced a formal ban on all Russian energy imports. The UK government said it, too, will phase out Russian oil imports by the end of 2022 and explore ways of ending natural gas imports.\n\nChina lockdowns ending\n\nOne factor keeping oil prices somewhat in check has been the surge of Covid cases, and strict lockdown rules in much of the country. That was a major drag on demand for oil.\n\nBut as the Covid surge has started to retreat, the lockdowns are being lifted in major cities such as Shanghai. And more demand without increased supply can only drive up prices.\n\nVideo Ad Feedback This is what determines the price of gas 01:57 - Source: CNN\n\nLess oil and gasoline from other sources\n\nWhen pandemic-related stay-at-home orders around the world crushed demand for oil in the spring of 2020, oil plunged, briefly trading at negative prices. OPEC and its allies, including Russia, agreed to slash production as a way to support prices. Even when demand returned sooner than expected, they kept production targets low.\n\nUS oil companies don’t follow those types of nationally mandated production targets. But they have been reluctant or unable to resume producing oil at pre-pandemic levels amid concerns about the prospect of tougher environmental rules that could cut future demand. Many of those tougher rules have been scaled back or failed to become law.\n\n“The Biden administration is suddenly interested in more drilling, not less,” said Robert McNally, president of consulting firm Rapidan Energy Group. “People are more worried about high oil prices than anything else.”\n\nIt takes time to scale up production, particularly when oil companies are facing the same supply chain and hiring challenges as thousands of other US businesses.\n\n“They can’t find people, and can’t find equipment,” McNally added. “It’s not like they’re available at a premium price. They’re just not available.”\n\nOil stocks have generally lagged the broader market over the last two years, at least until the recent run-up in prices. Oil company executives wanted to redirect cash to buying back stock and other ways to help their share price rather than increase production.\n\n“Oil and gas companies do not want to drill more,” said Pavel Molchanov, an analyst at Raymond James. “They are under pressure from the financial community to pay more dividends, to do more share buybacks instead of the proverbial ‘drill baby drill,’ which is the way they would have done things 10 years ago. Corporate strategy has fundamentally changed.”\n\nOne of the starkest examples: ExxonMobil (XOM) last month announced first quarter profits of $8.8 billion, more than triple the level of a year ago when excluding special items. It also announced a $30 billion share repurchase plan, far more than the $21 billion to $24 billion it expects to spend on all capital investment, including searching for new oil.\n\nNot only is oil production lagging behind pre-pandemic levels, there’s also less US refining capacity. Today, about 1 million fewer barrels of oil a day are available to be broken into gasoline, diesel, jet fuel and other petroleum-based products.\n\nState and federal environmental rules are prompting some refineries to switch from oil to lower carbon renewable fuels. And some companies are closing older refineries rather than invest the money it would cost to retool to keep them operating, especially with massive new refineries set to open overseas in Asia, the Middle East and Africa in 2023.\n\nAnd major US refineries have yet to return to full operation after two were damaged by hurricanes last year and another by an explosion.\n\n“Economics mandate you make more jet and diesel fuel to the detriment of gasoline,” said Kloza.\n\nAnd with prices in Europe even higher than in the United States, both Canadian and US oil producers have increased exports of oil and gasoline to the continent. That has also limited the US supply.\n\nStrong demand for gasoline\n\nRecord job gains in 2021, and the strongest economic growth since 1984, have combined to fuel the rebound in driving, as did pent-up demand for travel after the first year of the pandemic.\n\nVideo Ad Feedback How to save money on gas by being more fuel efficient 01:40 - Source: CNN\n\nThe US economy had record job growth in 2021, and while those gains have slowed, they remain historically strong. Demand is getting another boost as the many employees who have been working from home for much of the last two years return to the office.\n\nThe start of the summer travel season on Memorial Day weekend is likely to spark the typical annual increases in demand for gas and jet fuel. US airlines all report very strong bookings for summer travel, even with airfares climbing above pre-pandemic levels.\n\nThe end of the Omicron surge and the removal of many Covid restrictions is encouraging people to get out of the house for more shopping, entertainment and travel well. US trips in passenger vehicles have increased 25% since the beginning of this year, according to the mobility research firm Inrix.\n\n“Come hell or high gas prices, people are going to take vacations,” said Kloza.\n\nThere may not be quite as much commuting as before the pandemic. Many who plan to return to the office will be there only three or four days a week, rather than five. The total number of jobs is still slightly below 2019 levels.\n\n“Even before Ukraine, I was expecting to break the record,” Kloza said. “Now it’s a question of how much we break the record by.”", "authors": ["Chris Isidore"], "publish_date": "2022/06/06"}, {"url": "https://www.cnn.com/2022/09/27/economy/uk-mortgage-rate-increase/index.html", "title": "UK mortgage borrowers are in for a nasty shock from soaring rates ...", "text": "London CNN Business —\n\nMillions of mortgage borrowers in the United Kingdom are bracing themselves for huge hikes to their monthly payments as a consequence of the run on the pound.\n\nMarkets have been in turmoil since UK finance minister Kwasi Kwarteng announced the biggest tax cuts in 50 years on Friday, together with a big rise in government borrowing, sending the pound falling to a record low against the US dollar.\n\nSome analysts now expect the Bank of England to hike the cost of borrowing to 6% next year, up from 2.25%, to shore up the currency and convince markets that it’s committed to getting inflation under control.\n\n“It is hard not to draw the conclusion that [recent events] will require a significant monetary policy response,” Huw Pill, the central bank’s chief economist told the Barclay’s-CEPR International Monetary Policy Forum on Tuesday, according to a Reuters report.\n\nMarkets had already been expecting the central bank to raise interest rates to 4.75% by next spring. That would have added £201 ($217) to a typical homeowner’s monthly payment on an outstanding fixed-rate mortgage of £146,000 ($157,000), Laura Suter, head of personal finance at investment firm AJ Bell, told CNN Business. Now borrowers face an even bigger cliff edge.\n\nThere are 9 million outstanding residential mortgages in the United Kingdom, according to UK Finance, an association of banks and financial services firms. About 20% of those loans are tracker, or variable rate products, that typically become more expensive when the central bank hikes rates. The rest are fixed-rate loans.\n\nBut as many as 1.8 million borrowers will have to refinance next year, according to the Resolution Foundation. Neal Hudson, a housing market analyst at research firm BuiltPlace, estimates that about 300,000 fixed-rate deals will come to an end between October and December. Those borrowers face a sudden increase in their monthly payments should they refinance.\n\nIf the base rate rises to 6%, a person refinancing a 20-year fixed-rate mortgage of £146,000 ($157,000) will have to pay an extra £309 ($333) per month, according to Suter. That’s £108 ($116) more than estimated before the pound’s crash.\n\nMany borrowers won’t be able to cope. Samuel Tombs, chief economist at Pantheon Macroeconomics, said in a Tuesday report that a 6% mortgage rate would “lead to a sharp rise in mortgage defaults.”\n\nHe calculates that the average household refinancing a 2-year fixed rate mortgage in the first half of next year would see its monthly repayment jump by a whopping 73% to £1,490 ($1,607), an increase equivalent to about 14% of disposable income.\n\n“Mortgage arrears and default would rise just as house prices likely would be tumbling, placing huge strain on banks’ balance sheets,” he said in the report.\n\nSome mortgages have been withdrawn and rates are already rising\n\nBanks are already becoming more risk-averse as they struggle to reprice their mortgages in such volatile markets.\n\nSince Friday, lenders have withdrawn more than 350 mortgage products in response to the turmoil, according to Moneyfacts, a financial product comparison website.\n\nHalifax, owned by Lloyds Bank (LLDTF), removed some of its mortgage products, while Virgin Money stopped taking mortgage applications from new customers until later this week.\n\nOn Tuesday, Santander (SAN) said it would remove mortgages worth 60% and 85% of a property’s value for new UK customers, and increase rates for “new and existing customers from 10 p.m. this evening.”\n\n“Customers who have already applied by this time will not be impacted,” a company spokesperson told CNN Business in a statement.\n\nBorrowers are worried. Online searches for “remortgage” more than doubled in the United Kingdom on Monday, according to analysis of Google search data by Loan Corp, a mortgage broker.\n\nSome may now struggle to find any deals at all.\n\n“Those with smaller deposits or who are trying to borrow at their maximum affordability might find it harder to get a mortgage deal or that they are paying even higher rates to do so,” Suter said.\n\n— Julia Horowitz contributed reporting.", "authors": ["Anna Cooban"], "publish_date": "2022/09/27"}, {"url": "https://www.cnn.com/2022/10/07/asia/north-korea-missile-testing-frequency-explainer-intl-hnk/index.html", "title": "Why is North Korea firing so many missiles -- and should the West ...", "text": "Seoul, South Korea CNN —\n\nTensions are running high in the Korean Peninsula, as the United States and its allies respond to North Korea’s flurry of recent missile tests – including one that flew over neighboring Japan without warning.\n\nNorth Korea has tested ballistic missiles seven times since September 25 – a prolific number, even in a year that has seen the highest number of launches since leader Kim Jong Un took power in 2011.\n\nThe aggressive acceleration in weapons testing has sparked alarm in the region, with the US, South Korea and Japan responding with missile launches and joint military exercises this week. The US has also redeployed an aircraft carrier into waters near the peninsula, a move South Korean authorities called “very unusual.”\n\nA US aircraft carrier and submarine, and South Korean and Japan warships, seen during a joint exercise on September 30. Handout/Getty Images\n\nInternational leaders are now watching for signs of a further escalation such as a potential nuclear test, which would be the hermit nation’s first in nearly five years – a move that would present US President Joe Biden with a new potential foreign policy crisis.\n\nHere’s what you need to know about North Korea’s rush toward nuclear weapons and intercontinental missiles, why they’re ramping up now – and what, if anything, the US can do to counter Kim Jong Un.\n\nFirst, some context\n\nThe testing itself isn’t new – North Korea’s weapons development program has been ongoing for years.\n\nTensions reached near-crisis levels in 2017 when North Korea launched 23 missiles throughout the year, including two over Japan, as well as conducting a nuclear test. The tests showcased weapons with enough power to put most of the world in range, including the country’s first intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM).\n\nRelations thawed in 2018, when then-US President Donald Trump held a landmark summit with Kim. The two leaders “fell in love,” Trump said; in return, Kim praised their “special” relationship. North Korea pledged to freeze missile launches and appeared to destroy several facilities at the nuclear test site, while the US suspended large-scale military exercises with South Korea and other regional allies.\n\nBut the talks ultimately fell apart, and hopes for a deal that would see the North curtail its nuclear ambitions dwindled by the end of Trump’s term.\n\nThen the Covid-19 pandemic hit, pushing North Korea further into isolation. The already-impoverished country sealed its borders entirely, with foreign diplomats and aid workers fleeing en masse. During this time, the number of missile launches also remained low – just four in 2020 and eight in 2021.\n\nVideo Ad Feedback How should the Biden administration handle the rising tensions with North Korea? 04:33 - Source: CNN\n\nSo why are they ramping up now?\n\nExperts say there are a few reasons North Korea is accelerating its testing so rapidly now.\n\nFirst, it could simply be the right time after the events of the last few years, with Kim declaring victory against Covid in August, and a new US administration in place that has focused on shows of unity with South Korea.\n\n“They’ve been unable to test for quite a few years due to political considerations, so I’d expect North Korean engineers and generals to be very eager to make sure their toys are going to work well,” said Andrei Lankov, a professor at South Korea’s Kookmin University.\n\nJeffrey Lewis, a weapons expert and professor at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies, said it’s also normal for North Korea to pause testing during the stormy summer and resume once weather improved in the fall.\n\nA television screen at Seoul Station in South Korea shows news of North Korea firing ballistic missiles on October 6. Kyodo News/Sipa USA\n\nBut, several experts said, Kim could also be sending a message by deliberately showcasing North Korea’s arsenal during a period of heightened global conflict.\n\n“They want to remind the world that they should not be ignored, that they exist and their engineers are working around the clock to develop both nuclear weapons and delivery systems,” said Lankov.\n\nCarl Schuster, a former director of operations at the US Pacific Command’s Joint Intelligence Center in Hawaii, echoed this sentiment. Kim “launches missiles to generate attention towards himself, but also to create pressure for Japan and the United States to engage him,” he said.\n\nHe added that North Korea might also feel emboldened to act now while the West is distracted with the war in Ukraine.\n\nA worker observes the launch of an F/A-18E Super Hornet aboard a US aircraft carrier in the Sea of Japan on October 5. Communication Specialist Seaman Natasha Chevalier Losada/US Navy\n\n“(The missile tests) started in January, which is about the time we were beginning to report on what Russian President Vladimir Putin was doing opposite Ukraine,” said Schuster. “Kim Jong Un is doing what he thinks he can get away with – he’s not expecting any kind of strong US reaction.”\n\nLankov said that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine may have also boosted Kim’s confidence because “it demonstrated that if you have nuclear weapons, you can have almost impunity. And if you don’t have nuclear weapons, you’re in trouble.”\n\nWhat can the US and its allies do to stop North Korea?\n\nDespite the US and its allies’ quick military response this past week, experts say there’s little they can do to stop or prepare for North Korea’s weapons tests.\n\n“The Americans sent the Ronald Reagan aircraft carrier. South Koreans are launching these missiles, which are not necessarily working well,” said Lankov, referring to a South Korean missile on Wednesday that crashed right after launch. “What is the impact of all these American aircraft carriers cruising around Korea? Pretty much nothing.”\n\nSouth Korean and US fighter jets fly over the Korean Peninsula in response to North Korea's missile launch on October 4 at an undisclosed location. , 2022 at an undisclosed location. South Korean Defense Ministry/Getty Images\n\nThough these shows of force might serve to deter North Korea from “starting a war” – which likely isn’t Kim’s plan, anyway – it does little to prevent further weapons development or missile testing,” he said.\n\n“It’ll probably make some people in the US and (South Korea) a bit happier, but it’ll have zero impact on North Korea’s behavior and decision making.”\n\nA lack of hard intelligence also means the US is largely left in the dark when it comes to Kim’s plans.\n\nThe North lacks the widespread use of technology that not only facilitates economic and societal advances, but also provides critical windows and opportunities to glean information for the intelligence services of the US and its allies.\n\n“Since so much of what North Korea does is driven by the leader himself, you really have to get inside his head, and that’s a hard intelligence problem,” said Chris Johnstone, a senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.\n\nAnd on the international stage, the US’ efforts to punish North Korea have faltered due to pushback from Moscow and Beijing.\n\nIn May, Russia and China vetoed a US-drafted UN resolution to strengthen sanctions on North Korea for its weapons testing – the first time either country had blocked a sanction vote against the North since 2006.\n\nWhat is North Korea trying to achieve?\n\nKim has spearheaded an aggressive weapons development program that far outstripped efforts by his father and grandfather, both former North Korean leaders – and experts say the country’s nuclear program is at the heart of Kim’s ambitions.\n\nIn September, North Korea passed a law declaring itself a nuclear weapons state, with Kim vowing to “never give up” nuclear weapons.\n\nThe law also demonstrated North Korea’s hopes of strengthening its ties with China and Russia, said Yang Moo-jin, a professor at the University of North Korean Studies in Seoul.\n\nAn Army Tactical Missile System is fired during a joint training session between the United States and South Korea, on October 5 at an undisclosed location. South Korean Defense Ministry/Getty Images\n\nAfter China and Russia’s open opposition to new sanctions against North Korea, Kim “knows he has their backing,” said Schuster.\n\nHe added that Kim’s weapons testing serves a dual purpose: apart from making a statement to the international community, it also boosts his own image domestically and cements the regime’s power.\n\n“It’s a very paranoid regime – (Kim) is as worried about the people under him as he is worried about regime change from the outside,” said Schuster. With the tests, Kim, is telling his own senior people, “We can deal with whatever the threat the West, the US and South Korea can come up with,” he said.\n\nHowever, in terms of wider public perception, KCNA, North Korea’s state-run media, has made no mention of missile launches for months – since its last report of a launch in March.\n\nLewis, the expert at the Middlebury Institute, added that North Korea will likely continue developing weapons such as ICBMs and submarine-launched ballistic missile until “they get to a point where they’re satisfied with that – then I think they’ll probably express an interest in talking again.”\n\nIs a nuclear test coming?\n\nThe concern in the short-term is whether North Korea will launch a nuclear test, which Lewis said could come “anytime.”\n\nHowever, Schuster and Lankov both said that given the friendly relationship between North Korea and China, Kim might wait until after China holds its high-profile Communist Party Congress later this month – if it happens at all.\n\nThe meeting of the party elite is the most significant event on the Chinese political calendar – especially so this year, with Chinese leader Xi Jinping expected to be appointed to a third term in power, further cementing his status as the most powerful Chinese leader in decades.\n\nKim “depends too much on Chinese aid to keep his country afloat,” meaning he can’t afford to “do anything to detract from the Party Congress,” said Schuster. “So although China can’t dictate to him what he must do … he will not cause them problems.”\n\nAfter October, however, the runway is clear for any more significant weapons tests, said Lankov.\n\nSouth Korean and US officials have been warning since May that North Korea may be preparing for a nuclear test, with satellite imagery showing activity at its underground nuclear test site.\n\nThis story has been updated to accurately reflect the number of missile launches since September 25.", "authors": ["Jessie Yeung Paula Hancocks Yoonjung Seo", "Jessie Yeung", "Paula Hancocks", "Yoonjung Seo"], "publish_date": "2022/10/07"}, {"url": "https://www.cnn.com/2022/05/03/politics/visas-for-highly-educated-russian/index.html", "title": "Biden asked Congress to loosen visa restrictions on highly educated ...", "text": "CNN —\n\nPresident Joe Biden has asked Congress to amend the Immigration and Nationality Act to make it easier for highly educated Russians to obtain visas to work in the United States, according to a section of the White House’s Ukraine supplemental budget request submitted to lawmakers last week and reviewed by CNN.\n\nThe request, if enacted, would allow Russians with a masters or doctoral degree in the fields of science, technology, engineering or math to apply for a visa without first obtaining an employer sponsor in the US.\n\nThe amendment would also require the Department of Homeland Security “to expedite consideration of such applications,” the document says, “as appropriate” and with the necessary vetting.\n\nThe administration explained in the document that the authority “would help the US attract and retain Russian STEM talent and undercut Russia’s innovative potential, benefiting US national security.” The authority would expire four years after the date that it is enacted, according to the document.\n\n“We want to seize on this opportunity to provide top Russian scientists with a clear pathway to leave Russia for good and come to the United States, robbing Putin of his best innovators and his best brains,” a White House official told CNN. “We believe this will advance our own national security and bolster our economy by adding highly skilled individuals to our workforce, and that it will also weaken Russia’s innovation base while simultaneously strengthening our own.”\n\nThe official noted that there is precedent for this request, most recently the Soviet Scientists Immigration Act of 1992 that also provided top Soviet scientists with a pathway to immigrate to the United States without a sponsoring employer. That proposal allowed about 450 Russian scientists to emigrate to the US, the official said, and the administration believes the number this time around will be “much higher given the current political climate.”\n\nTens of thousands of highly educated Russians have reportedly fled Russia since Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered an invasion of Ukraine just over two months ago. The Biden administration is hoping to take advantage of that brain drain and lure some of those workers to the US, officials said.\n\nThe document says the visa changes would apply to Russians with degrees in fields including, but not limited to: hypersonics, advanced nuclear energy technologies, advanced missile propulsion technologies, directed energy, artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, and space technologies and systems.\n\nThe US has already sought to curtail Russia’s ability to remain technologically competitive by imposing severe export restrictions on materials like semiconductors that are found in thousands of electronic products.\n\nBloomberg first reported that the administration was weighing loosening the visa restrictions.\n\nThis is a breaking story and will be updated.", "authors": ["Natasha Bertrand"], "publish_date": "2022/05/03"}, {"url": "https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/personalfinance/2016/01/01/winning-the-lottery-quick-riches/78083134/", "title": "12 things not to do if you win the lottery", "text": "Jon C. Ogg\n\n24/7 Wall St.\n\nIs the lottery the new American dream? Imagine becoming vastly wealthy overnight. Being a winner of a multimillion dollar lottery certainly will be a life-changing event for almost every single lottery winner. But what about when the prize is an astronomical sum of $100 million, $200 million or $300 million? Various Powerball and state lotteries have reached vast sums, and lotteries elsewhere have as well.\n\nFuture Powerball and state lottery ticket winners will become incredibly wealthy in an instant. Imagine being Joe Somebody and turning into Sir Joe the Magnificent overnight. Now imagine the unthinkable, where Sir Joe becomes Joe the Village Idiot in a very short time. Supposedly most lottery winners end up broke again. That just doesn't seem right at all.\n\n24/7 Wall St. wants its readers, particularly those few who are lucky enough to win the lottery, to avoid some of the simple and complex mistakes that have taken other lottery winners into bankruptcy. Some lottery winners have even died.\n\nThe Best and Worst Run States in America: A Survey of All 50\n\n24/7 Wall St. has decided to offer 12 important things not to do if you are a lottery winner. We have looked around at many research papers and other articles on the matter about those who land in instant riches against all odds. Doesn't it seem cruel to imagine that many lottery winners become losers? There is a saying that newly wealthy people need to commit to memory: you should only have to get rich once. The reality is that some people just cannot help themselves in avoiding the pitfalls of instant wealth.\n\n2015 may not have broken the record books on the highest lottery winnings in America. Still, there was a $310 million winner from the Powerball lottery in Michigan. In February of 2015, the Powerball drawing with a $564.1 million jackpot there were three different winners who got to split this top prize. New York's March lottery drawing brought a jackpot worth $136 million. There have been other U.S. lotteries in years past with jackpots north of $500 million, and as mentioned a year-end lottery is up for grabs with a Powerball jackpot of $300 million and a Mega Millions jackpot of $117 million.\n\nWhile many lists explain what you should do if you win, it is surprising how few actual warnings are out there that can be used a scare-tactic guide that makes lottery winners do the right thing. Did you know that you might become a marked target if you are a lotto winner? Some people find instant enemies, and some people become their own worst enemy. It might have been very hard to spend $30 million in 30 days in \"Brewster's Millions\" during the mid-1980s, but spending $10 million, $50 million or even $100 million can now be done faster than you can imagine. Some people now could even manage to spend that much just in a single day or two.\n\nSome points about what to do, or not do, may overlap or seem redundant. The problem is that there are many pitfalls that snag lottery winners who become vastly wealthy overnight or those who find themselves incredibly wealthy in a very short period. This list of tasks also has many lessons for those who win big legal judgments, who unexpectedly inherit millions of dollars and who get sudden windfalls of cash from a business deal or a business sale.\n\n25 Best Countries to Live in the World\n\nHere are 12 things not to do if you win the lottery … or 13 things if the runner-up counts!\n\nForget to sign a ticket, or forget to report it to the state.\n\nAfter doing some research, we find this is apparently the simplest and easiest error to make. Can you imagine losing a lottery ticket? Then imagine what can happen if someone else snags your ticket and shows up to collect the prize. Fighting over this is no simple task, and disputes have arisen over who owns what ticket. In a way, lottery tickets are almost considered the last form of bearer bonds that anyone can collect on if they show up with the coupons and bonds. Lottery tickets expire at different times from state to state, but they generally expire in 90 days to one year.\n\nTell everyone you know.\n\nIf you win millions of dollars, chances are pretty high that you will to want to brag about it and share some of your new joy. How could you not? The problem is that telling everyone you know before you collect your winning puts you in danger, and in more ways that just one. Everyone who has ever done anything for you now may come with their hands out asking for something, or worse. You probably have heard of kidnap and ransom insurance before. One lottery winner was even murdered. If you can manage it, and if your state allows it, try to remain anonymous for as long as humanly possible. How you became vastly wealthy will be found out in time anyway, but there is no need to alert everyone.\n\nAutomatically decide to take the up-front cash instead of the annuity.\n\nGetting tens of millions of dollars at once probably sounds better than getting a paycheck for the next 30 years or so. Now consider that close to 70% of lottery winners end up broke, many within a couple or few years. Let's say that you can choose to get $172 million up front, or you can choose to receive a payout of $300 million slowly over the course of a lifetime. Most people choose the lump sum rather than the annuity payment as it is instant empire-making money. Go see a reputable and visible tax professional and a reputable investment advisor at a top money management firm with a widely recognized company name and a long corporate history. This theme of \"reputable and visible\" will echo throughout. Do this before you make the decision about a lump-sum or annuity option.\n\nCities With the Shortest Life Expectancy in Every State\n\nThink that you are the smartest person to manage your money and finances.\n\nIf you go from living paycheck to paycheck, does it sound right that you will know the best things to invest in and the best tax and asset protection strategies? There are many ways to invest and protect that fortune, and that might not include just buying some stocks and bonds and letting it ride. Your drinking buddy might also not be the best choice as an advisor and expert. Having a solid and respectable team of advisors and managers in place will act as your buffer that protects your assets now and in the future. Also, don't think that this money is a tax-free payment as you probably will have to pay the top tax bracket to the IRS and the highest state and local income taxes. Do you know how to protect your assets against all threats and know exactly how to protect your estate in case you die or become incapacitated? Here is a hint: If you answered yes, you probably did not bother playing the lottery.\n\nLet your debts remain in place.\n\nIf you get the \"I'm rich and don't have to pay anymore\" bug, you might be dooming yourself. One lottery winner in California was strapped with debt from property purchases and what seemed to be excessive insurance policies. Whether you take the lump-sum or the annuity option, if you have a single penny of debt in the immediate future and distant future, then something is seriously wrong. For that matter, you should not have a single debt ever again. If you manage to go broke down the road and still have a mortgage, car payments, student loans, credit card debt and personal bills, you will have lost the right to be mad when all of your friends and family members ridicule you every day for the rest of your life.\n\nBecome the excessive high-roller, living the Big Life.\n\nIf you go from living a simple life to instantly being able to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars (or more) per week, what do you think happens to your expectations in life ahead? Chances are high that you will want more of the same. If you start gambling in Las Vegas and are not happy until you are gambling with hundreds of thousands of dollars (or more) per play, you are dooming yourself. Wait until the real con men find you. Taking you and your favorite 50 people on a luxury cruise around the world can become very expensive, very fast. Having an entourage generally only works for people who keep making more money, and entourages have bankrupted many musicians and athletes.\n\nBuy everything for everyone, or even for yourself.\n\nDo not go out and buy dozens of cars, followed by houses and whatever else, for you and your friends and family members. This will start you on a bad path, and you could easily become the next friends and family personal welfare department. If you start buying everything for everyone, chances are high that they might expect that to last forever. The other end of the story is that you do not have to be a cheapskate either. Still, after hearing a real life personal story of one lucky winner buying more than 30 cars and multiple houses in three months, it is just crazy.\n\nSay to hell with a budget.\n\nMaybe it sounds crazy that you have to live within means when you get empire-making money. After all, most lottery winners are instantly wealthier than everyone they know combined. This also goes back to having advisors and being prudent, but at the end of the day you do still have a finite sum of money. Chances are very high that you will make some serious purchases and your lifestyle will be changed forever. Without setting limits for yourself and for what you do with others is a recipe for disaster. Again, many lottery winners go broke. If they went broke in a very short period, what do you think the reflection about wishing for a proper budget would be?\n\nBecome the business backer for all your friends and family.\n\nOne common theme that has come up with lottery winners (and judgment winners) who suddenly get vast sums of cash is that their friends and family start pitching them on endless business ideas. Sure, some will sound great and some will sound crazy. If someone has no knowledge of a particular business and does not know what it takes to actually run a business, will that person do better because a lottery winner who lucked into vast wealth provided money to start it? If your answer is yes, you seriously need to protect yourself (from yourself).\n\nGive away the whole enchilada.\n\nThis is probably not the case for most lottery players, but some people might want to give away just about all their money to a charity or to a religious institution. You can be more than generous without doing the unthinkable. Imagine what you will feel like down the road when a serious crisis arises in your life or your family's life, knowing that you no longer had the means to change it. Should you be charitable? Absolutely! Should you give it all away just because a church or a charitable group does good things? Absolutely not, at least not while you are alive! If you insist on giving it all away, structure your will and estate to give it all away upon your death.\n\nGet celebrity and athlete envy.\n\nKeeping up with the Jonses is bad enough, but definitely do not try to keep up with the Kardashians or other celebrities. It may seem cool to own a 200-foot yacht. It may seem practical that certain celebrities have an entourage, or to have a film crew following you around. It may seem cool owning castles in Europe. Owning an original Picasso painting sure sounds impressive. Having a big new private jet makes sense for a lot of people. Trying to dodge taxes might even sound appealing to misguided people. Now go add up the price tags of these things, plus the cool cars and houses and the rest of it. You can go broke real quick. Just ask people like Nicolas Cage, Wesley Snipes, M.C. Hammer, Evander Holyfield and many other famous people who had it all and ended up broke or close to broke how they feel about things.\n\nThink that laws and decency standards no longer apply.\n\nIt is true that the wealthier you get, the better attorneys and legal defense you can afford. That being said, living a reckless life without concerns about the laws of the land will not keep you from going to prison (or worse). You still have to live under the \"good citizen\" laws and you still likely will have to pay taxes. A good sports coach will tell any star athletes upfront that chances are high they will have to be human for far longer than they are going to stars. Movies often glamorize scoundrels, but what good does it do you if you are incredibly wealthy and such a pariah that no one will associate with you? Remember, you don't get to take any of your wealth with you. And how fun will it be to be paying out all of your winnings to attorneys fighting to keep you out of jail or fighting civil suits looking to take your new wealth away?\n\nIs there a thirteenth runner-up thing not to do?\n\nForget to wonder if the lottery you are playing is solvent and financially sound.\n\nThe State of Illinois did not have a budget resolution for much of 2015. The state's finances have been challenged for years, and the state did not have the funds legally in place to pay out its top lottery winners. Imagine getting the winning numbers, only to receive a state voucher. It gets pretty hard to change your life in this manner on a state voucher that is nothing more than an IOU.\n\nAgain, 24/7 Wall St. would not want anyone who wins the lottery to end up without a penny to their name (or worse). Following a list of things to do or not do sounds easy enough. Unfortunately, life's temptations can get in the way of logic.\n\n24/7 Wall St. is a USA TODAY content partner offering financial news and commentary. Its content is produced independently of USA TODAY.", "authors": [], "publish_date": "2016/01/01"}, {"url": "https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2018/07/11/50-worst-product-flops-of-all-time/36734837/", "title": "Product launch blunders: 50 worst flops of all time", "text": "Michael B. Sauter, Evan Comen, Thomas C. Frohlich and Samuel Stebbins\n\n24/7 Wall Street\n\nSome product launches can be spectacular failures, and Google Glass, an eyeglasses shaped head-mounted device with smartphone capabilities, failed in such a manner several years ago. It was meant to be the first piece of technology to connect the typical consumer to augmented reality.\n\nGoogle continues to attempt to find a place for the product, but its original launch was a definitive failure. In 2017, the internet giant announced the relaunch of the device to target to businesses rather than the general public, but whatever happens, it will be adopted by a meaningfully narrower audience.\n\nJust like success, failure is part of doing business. Entrepreneurs and large companies often take big risks, hoping for success but not always achieving it.\n\nThese failures take many different forms. When a product doesn’t sell, when it is recalled or discontinued, or when it otherwise does not come close to meeting a company’s expectations or plans, it can be marked as a failure. While failures are expected, some can be so catastrophic they can lead to permanent damage to a company’s reputation, layoffs, and even complete financial ruin.\n\nSometimes, it can take years, or even decades for a product flop to disappear from the market. This was the case with Betamax a video format which Sony introduced, expecting it to replace VHS. Despite being technologically superior to VHS, Betamax lost market share until it eventually vanished.\n\n24/7 Wall Street reviewed some of the greatest product launch blunders throughout history. Today, these product flops exist as case studies companies use to avoid future failure. They range from Ford’s Edsel in 1958 to 2016’s Galaxy Note 7. Many of these products led to losses in the hundreds of millions, and sometimes billions. In tech, film, the internet, the pharmaceutical industry, and more, these are the biggest product flops of all time.\n\nMore: Population migration patterns: US cities Americans are abandoning\n\n1. Google Glass\n\nCompany: Google\n\nGoogle Year introduced: 2013\n\n2013 What it was: Wearable technology\n\nGoogle first announced Google Glass -- an eyeglasses shaped head-mounted display with smartphone capabilities -- to the public in 2012. The announcement began with a statement of principle: “We think technology should work for you -- to be there when you need it and get out of your way when you don’t.” After two years of disappointing sales, it was clear consumers did not need Google Glass. Google stuck to its principle, and in 2015 discontinued the product’s development. Privacy concerns, reported bugs, low battery life, bans from public spaces, and an inability to live up to the hype all stymied public adoption of the technology.\n\n2. The Newton\n\nCompany: Apple\n\nApple Year introduced: 1993\n\n1993 What it was: Personal digital assistant\n\nWhile the personal digital assistant would become a popular consumer electronics product in the late 1990s, the first PDA was one of the biggest product flops of all time. One year after Apple CEO John Sculley coined the term “PDA” in 1992, the company released the Newton MessagePad. While the device incorporated innovative technology such as a pen-based touch screen and the ability to sync with software on a personal computer, Apple sold only 50,000 units of the product in its first four months on the market. The Newton product line was discontinued in 1998.\n\nMore: Budweiser, Coors Light, Bud Light top list of best-selling beers in America\n\n3. E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial\n\nCompany: Atari\n\nAtari Year introduced: 1982\n\n1982 What it was: Video game\n\nSeveral video games have failed over the years, but arguably none as spectacularly as E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial. The video game was created/developed shortly after the release of Steven Spielberg’s classic film. With only five weeks spent in development -- games typically take months, if not years, to program -- the game was notoriously difficult and sold miserably. Atari spent $21 million to purchase the rights to the franchise and $5 million on promotion of the game. The company made 4 million copies of the game, but sold only 1.5 million. Atari buried the leftover copies in a landfill.\n\n4. Satisfries\n\nCompany: Burger King\n\nBurger King Year introduced: 2013\n\n2013 What it was: French fries\n\nIn 2013, Burger King introduced a new menu item advertised as a healthy alternative to their traditional french fries. Satisfries used a less porous batter, which caused the fry to absorb less oil than regular fries during cooking. While Satisfries were made with a healthier recipe, Burger King failed to convey the difference to customers. The fries were also more expensive than Burger King’s regular french fries, and failed to gain traction with consumers. The company discontinued the fries in 2014, less than a year after they were introduced.\n\n5. Premier smokeless cigarettes\n\nCompany: RJ Reynolds\n\nRJ Reynolds Year introduced: 1988\n\n1988 What it was: Cigarette\n\nR.J. Reynolds, the second largest U.S. tobacco company, began marketing in 1988 a smokeless tobacco product that was intended to be a safer way to use a cigarette. In addition to concerns over the product's actual safety, smokers missed the familiar elements of traditional cigarettes -- the smoke, the burn, and the flick. Another issue was the widely-reported unpleasant chemical taste, which one user described as resembling “burning plastic.” Reynolds sunk close to $1 billion into the product before pulling it off the market within a year.\n\n6. Cheetos Lip Balm\n\nCompany: Frito-Lay\n\nFrito-Lay Year introduced: 2005\n\n2005 What it was: Lip balm\n\nPopular lip balm brands such as Chapstick, Blistex, and Burt’s Bees, have successfully sold their products to Americans for decades. Many prefer such flavored varieties as cherry, mint, and vanilla bean. Not every popular flavor can be successfully turned into a lip balm, however, a lesson PepsiCo subsidiary Frito-Lay learned the hard way in 2005. While Cheetos has been a popular snack for more than six decades, Cheetos-flavored lip balm failed to catch on with consumers.\n\n7. Terra Nova\n\nCompany: Fox\n\nFox Year introduced: 2011\n\n2011 What it was: TV show\n\nEvery year, TV shows are cancelled before the end of their first season. While Terra Nova, which aired for one 13-episode season, is not unusual in this regard, it may go down as the most costly cancelled television show of all time. Documenting the time-traveling adventures of a 22nd century family fleeing a dystopian society for a prehistoric past, the pilot of the show alone cost Fox between $16 and $20 million to make. Terra Nova encountered numerous production mishaps while filming in Australia, including a flood that nearly killed a crew member. Ratings failed to meet expectations, and the show was not renewed for a second season. Fox is estimated to have spent more than $50 million on the failed show, not including marketing costs.\n\n8. Touch of Yogurt shampoo\n\nCompany: Clairol\n\nClairol Year introduced: 1979\n\n1979 What it was: Shampoo\n\nIn keeping with the 1970s trend of incorporating natural food ingredients like lemon, herbs, and honey into beauty and hygiene products, Clairol -- at the time a subsidiary of Bristol-Myers Squibb -- thought a yogurt shampoo was just what the American consumer wanted. It turned out the company had grossly miscalculated. Many consumers were apparently confused as to what they had bought, as there were reported cases of people eating the shampoo.\n\nMore: Jeep, Disney, Coca-Cola top survey list of America’s most patriotic brands\n\n9. New Coke\n\nCompany: Coca-Cola\n\nCoca-Cola Year introduced: 1985\n\n1985 What it was: Soft drink\n\nOver the 15 years leading up to 1985, Coca-Cola’s flagship cola drink had been losing market share to Pepsi Cola. To compete, the company changed the drink’s formula for the first time in 99 years -- but the move today is considered one of the greatest flops of all time. New Coke was met with public outrage and lasted only a few months. The company reintroduced its older formula, rebranded as Coca-Cola Classic.\n\n10. Windows Vista\n\nCompany: Microsoft\n\nMicrosoft Year introduced: 2007\n\n2007 What it was: Operating system\n\nIntroduced in 2007 as a follow-up to Windows XP, the Windows Vista operating system was everything its popular predecessor was not -- in all the wrong ways. Panned by customers and IT professionals alike, Vista reduced PC performance and caused a number of internet problems for users. As a result, Dell began offering Windows XP again on new laptops a few short months after Vista was introduced. Windows announced this month that it would no longer provide support for Vista, driving the final nail into the operating system’s coffin.\n\n11. Kitchen Entrees\n\nCompany: Colgate\n\nColgate Year introduced: 1982\n\n1982 What it was: Frozen meal\n\nMany of the worst product flops in recent memory were caused by otherwise popular brands wandering too far outside of their area of expertise. Colgate Kitchen Entrees may be the best example of such a product failure. When it came to pre-prepared frozen meals, Americans had plenty of options in the 1980s. Perhaps because consumers naturally associated the Colgate name with toothpaste, there was never much of an appetite for pre-made meals bearing the Colgate logo.\n\n12. Coors Rocky Mountain Sparkling Water\n\nCompany: Coors\n\nCoors Year introduced: 1990\n\n1990 What it was: Sparkling water\n\nCoors and Coors Light are two of the most popular beers in the United States. Introducing Coors Rocky Mountain Sparkling Water to the public in 1990, the Coors Brewing Company also sought to capitalize on the fast-growing bottled water segment in the United States. The water was Coors' first non-alcoholic product since Prohibition. The Coors brand name did not help to sell the product, however, as the beer-name branding may have confused or even frightened consumers. Coors let its trademark of Rocky Mountain Sparkling Water expire in 1997.\n\n13. Harley Davidson perfume\n\nCompany: Harley Davidson\n\nHarley Davidson Year released: 1994\n\n1994 What it was: Perfume\n\nHarley Davidson is one of the most iconic and valuable brands in the world. It is also one of the most masculine brands. The company has not deviated considerably from this manly personality, although it has tried. The company released Legendary Harley-Davidson, a cologne for men, among several other varieties, starting in 1994. Another perfume, Black Fire, hit the market as recently as 2005. All are now discontinued. In the 1990s, the company released a number of other products, including wine coolers and aftershave, which after failing miserably have also become classic cases of brand overextension.\n\n14. Persil Power\n\nHolding company: Unilever\n\nUnilever Year released: 1994\n\n1994 What it was: Stain remover\n\nUnilever introduced Persil Power detergent to the market in 1994. The product utilized a newly patented stain removal formula called Accelerator. The company was so confident in the Accelerator catalyst that it carried out its $300 million introduction of Persil Power without any formal test marketing. Over time, it became clear the detergent was damaging clothes at high temperatures. After nine months on the shelves, the company replaced Persil Power with Persil New Generation, a detergent without the Accelerator compound.\n\n15. Cosmopolitan yogurt\n\nCompany: Cosmopolitan\n\nCosmopolitan Year introduced: 1999\n\n1999 What it was: Yogurt\n\nCosmopolitan is a popular women’s magazine, full of fashion advice, dating tips, celebrity gossip, and horoscopes. What the magazine’s leadership was thinking when they expanded the brand’s reach from the magazine aisle to the dairy aisle remains a mystery. Few will likely remember the 1999 debut of Cosmopolitan’s yogurt line, as the short-lived product was only available for 18 months. Like many other products on this list, Cosmopolitan yogurt was a case of a brand reaching too far beyond its area of expertise.\n\n16. DH 106 Comet\n\nCompany: De Havilland\n\nDe Havilland Year introduced: 1949\n\n1949 What it was: Airplane\n\nWe now take jet travel for granted, but the development of a commercially viable jetliner involved a great deal of trial, error, and some utter failures. De Havilland, a British aircraft manufacturer, developed the Comet, the first commercial jet airliner. Unfortunately, within a few years of its 1949 debut, the Comet encountered several unexplained fatal crashes, including planes overrunning the runway and one exploding in midair. The Comet's reputation plummeted, and while De Havilland scrambled to redesign the plane, American companies Douglas and Boeing took over the industry.\n\nMore: Which manufacturers are bringing the most jobs back to America?\n\n17. DeLorean DMC-12\n\nCompany: Delorean Motor Company\n\nDelorean Motor Company Year introduced: 1981\n\n1981 What it was: Sports car\n\nIn 1973, auto executive John DeLorean left General Motors to form the DeLorean Motor Company. After years of production delays, the DeLorean DMC-12 was released in January 1981. The car’s unique design was poorly received, however, and by 1982 less than half of the 7,000 DeLorean units produced had been sold. The DeLorean is widely recognized due to its use as a converted time machine in the “Back to the Future” series. However, the first of these films was released in 1985, far too late to save the ill-fated brand. DeLorean filed for bankruptcy in 1982.\n\n18. EZ Squirt\n\nCompany: Heinz\n\nHeinz Year released: 2000\n\n2000 Company revenue when released: Ketchup\n\nBefore EZ Squirt, ketchup was always varying shades of red. To cater to kids, who were -- and still are -- among ketchup’s largest groups of consumers, Heinz began producing purple, green, and blue EZ Squirt ketchup in matching, vibrantly colored squeeze bottles. At first, the colorful ketchup was a huge success. The novelty wore off quickly, however, and not long after its introduction, sales of EZ Squirt began to decline. In January 2006, less than six years after its debut, Heinz halted production of the product.\n\n19. United States Football League\n\nCompany: USFL\n\nUSFL Year introduced: 1982\n\n1982 What it was: Sports league\n\nConceived as a way to satiate America's appetite for football in the spring and summer months, the United States Football League was introduced in 1982. The league originally consisted of 12 teams, one of which, the New Jersey Generals, was owned by President Donald Trump. The league was beset with problems, not the least of which was finding stadiums to play in. Ultimately, over half a dozen teams folded when the league’s brain trust decided to compete directly with the NFL by scheduling games in the fall. By 1985, the league was finished.\n\n20. Home\n\nCompany: Facebook\n\nFacebook Year introduced: 2013\n\n2013 What it was: Mobile phone app\n\nWith rising mobile phone use and social media engagement, Facebook in 2013 decided to launch a family of apps that combine these trends. Facebook Home converts the home screen of a smartphone into the Facebook news feed. While most of Facebook’s over 1 billion users log in to their accounts on a smartphone, the social media giant’s new product never caught on. Early users cited clunky operation, the inability to toggle between Facebook Home and the original phone interface, and lack of options for customization, among other snags.\n\n21. Edsel\n\nCompany: Ford\n\nFord Year introduced: 1957\n\n1957 What it was: Car\n\nFord spent a year aggressively marketing the Edsel -- named after Henry Ford’s son -- ahead of its 1957 release. It was to be the “car of the future,” made available on dealership lots on what Ford dubbed “E-Day.\" Despite the hype, the car was a commercial disaster. It was considerably overpriced, disappointingly not futuristic, and generally ugly. Ford ceased the car's production after only two years, losing an estimated $350 million.\n\n22. Friendster\n\nCompany: Friendster\n\nFriendster Year introduced: 2002\n\n2002 What it was: Social media site\n\nSocial media site Facebook is one of the biggest corporate success stories in recent memory. Unfortunately, when it comes to social media, for every success story there is at least one flop -- as in the case of Friendster. The site’s users suffered through slow page loading times and the company’s developers failed to scale up when the number of subscribers spiked. Ultimately, competitors such as Facebook provided a much better user experience. Introduced in 2002, Friendster discontinued its services in mid-2015.\n\n23. WOW! Chips\n\nCompany: Frito-Lay\n\nFrito-Lay Year introduced: 1998\n\n1998 What it was: Snack\n\nPepsiCo subsidiary Frito-Lay introduced its line of WOW! Chips in 1998. The chips, which were made with the fat substitute olestra, were marketed as a healthy snacking alternative. While WOW! Chips were an initial success with $347 million in sales in their first year -- the most of any new product in 1998 -- sales slowed when the unpleasant side effects of olestra, such as diarrhea and cramps, became better known. To add to the product’s problems, the Food and Drug Administration instituted labeling requirements for all products containing olestra to carry warnings of “abdominal cramping and loose stools,\" and by 2000, sales of WOW! Chips were roughly 60% of what they were in the year of their release.\n\nMore: Per capita government spending: How much does your state spend on you?\n\n24. Zune\n\nCompany: Microsoft\n\nMicrosoft Year introduced: 2006\n\n2006 What it was: MP3 player\n\nIn an attempt to compete with Apple's dominant iPod MP3 player, Microsoft released the Zune in 2006. As of November 15, 2015, Microsoft discontinued all streaming, downloading, and other music services for the Zune. In the fourth quarter of fiscal 2009, Microsoft recorded a 42% decline in revenue in its non-gaming devices segment -- a decline largely attributable to the Zune’s poor performance. While the device might have been a reasonable choice for consumers, a number of reported bugs did not help sales. On December 31, 2008, most if not all 30GB Zunes stopped functioning simply because the underlying code had failed to account for the extra day in leap years.\n\n25. Relenza\n\nCompany: GlaxoSmithKline\n\nGlaxoSmithKline Year introduced: 1999\n\n1999 What it was: Influenza pandemic drug\n\nIn 1999, a flu pandemic fear caused by the spread of avian flu created demand for antiviral medications. The FDA approved two flu drugs during the pandemic -- Tamiflu and Relenza. The former went on to report massive sales, while the latter became one of the worst product flops in the pharmaceutical industry. The powder form of the drug caused respiratory problems in some patients and was only approved as a treatment for influenza rather than a preventative measure. GlaxoSmithKline sold just $13 million worth of the drug in the first quarter of 2006. By comparison, Roche reported $770 million in Tamiflu sales in the first half of the year.\n\n26. Google+\n\nCompany: Google\n\nGoogle Year introduced: 2011\n\n2011 What it was: Social media site\n\nNo all product flops are necessarily discontinued. Sometimes, despite failing to live up to company expectations, they linger. Such is the case with Google+, the social media platform the Silicon Valley giant launched in 2011 to compete with Facebook. However, even with a monumental marketing campaign, Google+ failed to distinguish itself from Facebook and never took off in the same manner. While the site experienced an initial surge in subscribers, by April 2015, Google+ had experienced a 98% decline in user engagement. Today, Google+ has some active user groups and is often used to share photos.\n\n27. HP Touchpad\n\nCompany: Hewlett-Packard\n\nHewlett-Packard Year introduced: 2011\n\n2011 What it was: Tablet computer\n\nThe TouchPad was Hewlett Packard’s attempt to compete with Apple’s wildly successful iPad. Hewlett Packard unveiled the device in the middle of 2011 with an extremely costly advertising campaign. The rollout incorporated numerous celebrity contracts. By late summer, however, box stores such as Best Buy were sitting on excess inventory, and HP began offering steep discounts. Many discounted TouchPads were sold at a loss, and it is estimated the company lost hundreds of millions on the product in all.\n\n28. Kellogg's Breakfast Mates\n\nCompany: Kellogg's\n\nKellogg's Year introduced: 1998\n\n1998 What it was: Breakfast food\n\nIn 1998, Kellogg’s introduced Breakfast Mates, an all-in-one package containing a serving of cereal, a small carton of milk, and a plastic spoon. The product was designed as a time saver that would appeal busy families with two working parents. The stated convenience of the all-in-one packaging did little to save time, largely because traditional cereal is already relatively convenient to consume. In a controlled test reported by The New York Times, preparing a bowl of cereal the traditional way took only one second longer than preparing a bowl of Breakfast Mates. To make matters worse, the product’s $30 million ad campaign sent a mixed message, depicting a family eating the supposedly portable cereal around the kitchen table. In August 1999, Kellogg’s announced Breakfast Mates would be discontinued due to low sales.\n\n29. Maxwell House Brewed Coffee\n\nCompany: Maxwell House\n\nMaxwell House Year introduced: 1990\n\n1990 What it was: Coffee\n\nMaxwell House Brewed Coffee was pre-brewed coffee sold in a carton with a picture of a hot mug of coffee on the packaging, a misleading visual cue for a product meant to be stored in the refrigerator. Adding to the product’s issues, the carton was lined with foil and could not be microwaved. For a product marketed for its convenience, this was an especially problematic feature for consumers. The product was discontinued shortly after it was released.\n\n30. Arch Deluxe\n\nCompany: McDonald's\n\nMcDonald's Year introduced: 1996\n\n1996 What it was: Hamburger\n\nMcDonald’s introduced several failed products throughout its 60-year history, but none so monumental as the Arch Deluxe. Introduced in 1996, the Arch Deluxe was marketed as a more gastronomic hamburger with “a grown-up taste.\" One commercial featured a child unable to enjoy the sophisticated burger, stripping its toppings to satisfy his unrefined palate. The Arch Deluxe’s advertising budget was an estimated $200 million, the most of any fast food product at the time. However, the approach failed and sales of the Arch Deluxe missed the $1 billion expectation set for its first year. The Arch Deluxe was eventually discontinued.\n\nMore: Wage potential: Highest paying jobs you can get without a college degree\n\n31. HD DVD\n\nCompany: Toshiba\n\nToshiba Year introduced: 2006\n\n2006 What it was: Media storage/playback device\n\nBlu-ray’s succession of the DVD was not preordained. Before Blu-ray was the dominant medium for video playback, it was competing with Toshiba’s HD DVD. Essentially the same product, HD DVD was effectively taken out to pasture when in January 2008, Warner Bros. announced it would only support Sony’s Blu-ray format. Toshiba was not the only loser in the battle against Blu-ray. Millions of Americans found themselves stuck with HD DVD players and laptops after the dust settled.\n\n32. Microsoft Bob\n\nCompany: Microsoft\n\nMicrosoft Year introduced: 1995\n\n1995 What it was: User interface\n\nMicrosoft released Microsoft Bob in March 1995. Intended as a simple, easy-to-use OS interface at the time, Bob presented the desktop as a house, with familiar objects corresponding with different computer applications. Clicking on the stationary lying on a desk, for example, opened the word processor. Despite its simple appearance, Bob required more processing power than most home computers had in 1995. Bob was also considered too expensive and poorly designed, and was overshadowed by the release of Windows 95 later that year. Bob was discontinued roughly a year after its release.\n\n33. 47 Ronin\n\nCompany: Universal Pictures\n\nUniversal Pictures Year introduced: 2013\n\n2013 What it was: Movie\n\nThe 2013 fantasy action film “47 Ronin”, starring Keanu Reeves, is now notorious as one of the biggest box office flops of all time. The movie lost nearly $150 million on a $225 million budget and left Universal Pictures in the red for the fiscal year. Insiders point to multiple rewrites of the screenplay as well as several post-production changes that were made as filmmakers and studio executives attempted to find creative balance while appeasing moviegoers. In the end, the film failed to strike a chord with audiences and critics alike.\n\n34. Qwikster\n\nCompany: Netflix\n\nNetflix Year introduced: 2011\n\n2011 What it was: DVD rental service\n\nBefore Netflix became the media streaming giant we know today, it was exclusively a deliver-by-mail DVD rental service. In an ill conceived of strategy, CEO Reed Hastings announced in September 2011 the company's plan to spin off its DVD rental service into a separate company, known as Qwikster. The move, which was meant to allow Netflix to focus more on its streaming services, would have cost consumers about 60% more if they wished to continue to have access to both services. Unpopular with customers and widely criticized, Hastings scrapped the plan less than a month after it was announced.\n\n35. Virtual Boy\n\nCompany: Nintendo\n\nNintendo Year introduced: 1995\n\n1995 What it was: Portable game console\n\nVirtual Boy was game console maker Nintendo’s early foray into virtual reality technology. However, the company discontinued the portable console less than a year after its 1995 release, selling just 770,000 units globally. It is known as one of the company’s worst failures. To cut costs and reduce battery drain, Nintendo used only black and red shades in Virtual Boy games, which bothered some users. Using the Virtual Boy also caused eye strain in some users, which led Nintendo to include an automatic shutoff mechanism.\n\n36. MeeGo\n\nCompany: Nokia/Intel\n\nNokia/Intel Year introduced: 2010\n\n2010 What it was: Operating system\n\nUnlike Windows Vista, another operating system on this list, smartphone OS MeeGo was not necessarily a flawed product. By most accounts, the MeeGo operating system just came at the wrong time. Not long after its introduction, the operating system was dropped by then Nokia CEO Stephen Elop in favor of Windows Phone 7 operating system. Though it has not been used in years, MeeGo may find a second life as a tablet operating system.\n\n37. Crystal Pepsi\n\nCompany: Pepsi\n\nPepsi Year introduced: 1992\n\n1992 What it was: Soda\n\nCrystal Pepsi was introduced to soda lovers across the United States in 1992. The product tasted like regular cola but was clear and caffeine free in an attempt to convey purity and heath. Crystal Pepsi was heavily promoted, with the company even buying an ad slot during Super Bowl XXVII. Despite strong initial sales, the public’s interest quickly waned and the soda was discontinued less than two years after its release.\n\n38. Hot Wheels and Barbie computers\n\nCompany: Mattel / Patriot Computers\n\nMattel / Patriot Computers Year released: 1999\n\n1999 What it was: Toy computer\n\nIn 1999, Mattel announced that it had entered a licensing agreement to sell Barbie and Hot Wheels computers. The computers would be manufactured and sold by the Patriot Computer Corporation, a privately held company based in Toronto. The move was part of an attempt to reconcile the declining sales of Barbie dolls and growing sales of software and CD-ROMs.\n\nThe computers, however, had many manufacturing flaws, and the resources Patriot devoted to fixing and replacing broken computers drove it out of business. By December the following year, the company had fired its 200 employees and filed for bankruptcy.\n\nMore: How much did a personal computer cost the year you were born?\n\n39. LaserDisc\n\nCompany: Phillips\n\nPhillips Year introduced: 1978\n\n1978 What it was: Media storage/playback device\n\nLaserDisc was effectively a precursor to the DVD, offering consumers a higher quality picture and sound than VHS tapes. The product’s numerous drawbacks, however, outweighed any benefits. Unlike VHS players, LaserDisc players could not record television shows -- an important feature before the days of TiVo. LaserDisc players, as well as LaserDiscs themselves, were also relatively expensive. Introduced in the 1970s, LaserDisc made a brief comeback in the 90s, but ultimately failed to gain traction.\n\n40. Dreamcast\n\nCompany: Sega\n\nSega Year introduced: 1999 (North America)\n\n1999 (North America) What it was: Game console\n\nIn the 1990s, Sega was a dominant player in the consoles and games business. Sega had such success with its Sonic the Hedgehog games and Genesis console, that at one point the company held 60% of the North American market. The Dreamcast launched in 1999 in North America, within a few years of successful predecessors like the Nintendo 64 and Sony Playstation. Many consider the Dreamcast to have been ahead of its time -- it was the first console to introduce worldwide network compatibility -- but the system just never caught on. Dreamcast sold miserably and was discontinued after just over two years, in part due to the success of the PS2, which launched in 2000. While it was not Sega’s only failure, it may have been its most colossal, marking the end of the company’s attempts at game consoles.\n\n41. S&W Mountain Bikes\n\nCompany: Smith & Wesson\n\nSmith & Wesson Year introduced: 2002\n\n2002 What it was: Mountain bike\n\nGun manufacturer Smith & Wesson has been making police bicycles for about 20 years. The company also attempted to sell mountain bikes to the general public in 2002. Like many other products on this list, the company’s consumer bike segment likely failed because bicycles were too far beyond the scope of the Smith & Wesson brand and what most Americans associate with it.\n\n42. Lisa\n\nCompany: Apple\n\nApple Year introduced: 1983\n\n1983 What it was: Personal computer\n\nBefore Apple hit its stride in the 2000s and became the most profitable corporation in history, the company was responsible for some of the worst product flops of all time. Designed as a high-end personal computer with a graphical user interface for business customers, the Apple Lisa took three years and $50 million to develop before its release in 1983. However, the computer’s $9,995 price tag, which is equivalent to roughly $25,000 today, was too high for many consumers. After selling just 100,000 units in two years Apple discontinued the Lisa in 1985.\n\n43. Betamax\n\nCompany: Sony\n\nSony Year introduced: 1975\n\n1975 What it was: Video cassette format\n\nIn the early 1970s, videotapes were still a novel technology, and the VHS tape had yet to become the standard video cassette format. Sony introduced the Betamax format in 1975, one year before JVC introduced the VHS tape. While Betamax tapes had superior resolution and sound quality, Sony refrained from licensing its technology to other manufacturers, in turn limiting the variety of movies available on the format. Meanwhile, JVC licensed its VHS technology to any interested manufacturer. The Betamax’s share of the VCR market fell from 100% in 1975 to 10% in 1988, and continued to dwindle in the following years.\n\n44. Too Human\n\nCompany: Silicon Knights\n\nSilicon Knights Year introduced: 2008\n\n2008 What it was: Video game\n\nReleased in 2008 after years of costly development delays, “Too Human” failed to live up to expectation and became one of the worst flops in video game history. A legal ruling eventually removed the game from the marketplace and pushed Silicon Knights, the game’s developer, into bankruptcy. The game’s production budget skyrocketed to an estimated $100 million after the game engine developer, Epic Games, failed to deliver the engine on time, forcing Silicon Knights to build it own game engine. When Silicon Knights sued Epic Games for missing the deadline, the latter counter-sued, which resulted in a court order forcing the developer to destroy all unsold copies of the game.\n\nMore: Are these the worst cities to live in? Study looks at quality of life across the U.S.\n\n45. Mobile ESPN\n\nCompany: ESPN\n\nESPN Year introduced: 2006\n\n2006 What it was: Mobile phone service\n\nIn 2006, ESPN attempted to capitalize on the desire of sports fan to have access to sports stats, scores, and video on the go. Mobile ESPN required users to buy a specific phone, which would include access to ESPN content as part of the subscription. However, the only phone Mobile ESPN offered, a Sanyo, cost $400, and the service was $40 per month, too rich for many sports fans. The service shut down within a year. Disney, ESPN’s parent company, spent $150 million on the failed venture.\n\n46. Life Savers soda\n\nCompany: Life Savers\n\nLife Savers Year introduced: 1995\n\n1995 What it was: Soft drink\n\nThough Life Savers soda tested well in focus groups, it failed to gain traction with the broader consumer market. Many attribute the soft drink’s failure to the prevailing perception that it was liquid candy. The soda was available in some of the candy’s popular fruit flavors, including pineapple, orange punch, grape punch, and lime punch. Life Savers did not release a mint flavored soda, however.\n\n47. Mars Needs Moms\n\nCompany: Walt Disney Motion\n\nWalt Disney Motion Year introduced: 2011\n\n2011 What it was: Studio film\n\nReleased in March 2011, Disney’s “Mars Needs Moms” grossed just $6.9 million in its opening weekend. Produced with a $150 million budget, “Mars Needs Moms” was one of the worst flops in cinema history. Film critics partially blame animation studio ImageMovers Digital for the film’s box office failure. The movie was animated using an expensive motion-capture process, a technology still in its infancy. According to one viewer, “The movie looked downright creepy.” ImageMovers Digital was closed after the studio wrapped production on the film.\n\n48. EONS\n\nCompany: Eons.com\n\nEons.com Year introduced: 2006\n\n2006 What it was: Social media site\n\nIn July 2006, Monster.com founder Jeff Taylor launched Eons.com -- a social network for baby boomers and other internet users over the age of 50. According to surveys conducted by Pew Research Center, an estimated 32% of seniors over the age of 65 used the internet at the time of the website’s launch compared to 86% of young adults aged 18 to 29. While the share of seniors on the internet has doubled over the past decade, Eons failed to gain traction and was sold to Crew Media in 2011.\n\n49. Supertrain\n\nCompany: NBC\n\nNBC Year introduced: 1979\n\n1979 What it was: TV show\n\nWhen NBC’s “Supertrain” premiered in 1979, it was the most expensive TV series ever aired. Set aboard a nuclear-powered train that travels between New York City and Los Angeles at speeds nearing 200 miles an hour, the show’s production required a model train set that cost around $3 million in today’s dollars. The model crashed during its first demonstration, and the show as a whole soon followed. Debuting to poor ratings and negative reviews, “Supertrain” was cancelled after just nine episodes.\n\n50. Galaxy Note 7\n\nCompany: Samsung\n\nSamsung Year introduced: 2016\n\n2016 What it was: Tablet phone\n\nSamsung, which has overtaken Apple in the smartphone market last year, also had one of (the larger and--optional) more recent product flops. The Note S7, a phablet that launched in August 2016, was initially well received. However, it had a serious flaw. A problem with the battery software resulted in the phones catching fire on several occasions, including once on a SouthWest Airlines flight, which had to be evacuated. Soon, the Department of Transportation made it illegal to bring a Note 7 on a commercial flight. By October, after an extremely expensive recall, Samsung suspended worldwide production of the Note 7. The company lost what is estimated to be over $3 billion due to the debacle, and Apple once again took the lead in the global smartphone market earlier this year.\n\nMore: Can you afford that new vehicle? 25 most expensive car models to insure\n\nDetailed findings and methodology\n\nHindsight is 20/20, and while many of these gaffes might not have been predictable at the time, the reasons for their failure are often much clearer today. The reasons for the failures often fall into one of a several categories: overpricing, timing, bad advertising, product flaws, and reaching beyond what consumers of a brand are willing to accept.\n\nSometimes products are sold at a premium because they offer features competitors do not, either perceived or actual. When customers do not feel a product is superior to another -- rightly so or not -- they will not pay the premium price. While Apple is able to sell computers at a premium today because of its brand perception, the Lisa, introduced in 1983, failed largely as a result of its nearly $10,000 price tag.\n\nMany of the products on this list could have been perfectly viable, possibly even a hit, if they had been introduced at a different time. Sega’s Dreamcast was the first major console to introduce global network connectivity, but this was before every home had a stable connection fast enough to make the Dreamcast viable at the time.\n\nFor some flops on this list, it appears poor market research doomed these products. McDonald’s Arch Deluxe was marketed as a burger for those with refined palates, turning away kids, as well as many adults, from the ill-fated item. Coca-Cola completely misjudged the desire of its customers when it changed its classic flavor and introduced New Coke.\n\nSometimes, brands overextend their reach, introducing products that clash with their image and target demographics. One does not need to dig too deep to understand why Colgate, a brand associated with toothpaste, failed to make its line of frozen dinner products a success. The same can be said for Cosmopolitan’s brand of yogurt, Smith & Wesson’s mountain bike line, or Harley Davidson’s perfume.\n\nOf course, many of the products on this list were simply poorly designed or faulty -- at times downright dangerous. Such was the case with Mattel’s line of seriously flawed Hot Wheels and Barbie computers, or the Galaxy Note 7, plagued by battery fires that caused the phone to be banned on airplanes, recalled, and eventually discontinued.\n\nDespite their disappointing launches, some of these products still exist today. Google’s Glass and Google+ each became the butt of jokes after failing to live up to lofty promises. One day, we may see one of these flops become the product it was meant to be.\n\n24/7 Wall Street is a USA TODAY content partner offering financial news and commentary. Its content is produced independently of USA TODAY.", "authors": [], "publish_date": "2018/07/11"}, {"url": "https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/50-states/2021/06/21/slavery-reckonings-radio-citys-return-marijuana-movements-news-around-states/117129826/", "title": "Slavery reckonings, Radio City's return: News from around our 50 ...", "text": "From USA TODAY Network and wire reports\n\nAlabama\n\nMobile: Descendants of the white Alabama businessman who financed the voyage of the last slave ship to land in the United States more than 160 years ago have agreed to sell a building that will become a hub for Africatown USA, the community settled by the freed Africans after the Civil War. A long-closed credit union building owned by relatives of Timothy Meaher will open within weeks as a food bank and as home of the Africatown Redevelopment Corp., officials told a news conference Thursday. The family sold the brick building to the city for $50,000, well below its appraised value of $300,000. The family, which tax records show owns millions of dollars’ worth of land around Mobile, issued a statement that described selling the building as a way “to give back to the community.” Mayor Sandy Stimpson said he contacted a representative of the family about acquiring the property in Africatown, located just a few miles north of downtown Mobile. Large parts of the once-vibrant community are blighted, but the area has received new attention since the wreckage of the slave ship, Clotilda, was found in 2018. Community leaders are now trying to revitalize the area with a museum and other attractions that could bring visitors and an infusion of money into the area.\n\nAlaska\n\nJuneau: A special legislative session limped toward a bitter end Friday, with the threat of a partial government shutdown looming and Gov. Mike Dunleavy and House majority leaders sharply disagreeing over the adequacy of the budget passed by lawmakers last week. Dunleavy called the budget “defective,” pointing in particular to the House’s failure to get the two-thirds support for a procedural effective-date vote. His office said notices were sent to thousands of state workers warning of possible layoffs with the new fiscal year beginning July 1. He called another special session, set to begin Wednesday and again focus on the budget, shortly after the House held a brief floor session for which attendance was not mandatory Friday afternoon. House majority leaders were among those who criticized Dunleavy’s stance on the budget. House Speaker Louise Stutes characterized it as a needless choice and said Dunleavy has tools available to prevent shutting down parts of the government, including asking minority Republicans to change their votes to support the effective-date clause. Minority Republicans, who say they have felt marginalized and want to be included in talks on what pieces should be considered as part of a broader fiscal plan, take responsibility for their votes, House Minority Leader Cathy Tilton told reporters Friday.\n\nArizona\n\nTucson: Researchers at the University of Arizona will be launching a study of how prone Hispanic children are to asthma in Tucson compared with their peers on the other side of the U.S.-Mexico border in Nogales, Sonora. The study will follow 500 pregnant women of Mexican descent in both cities and their newborns for the next five years to see how prevalent asthma is. Dr. Fernando Martinez, a principal investigator of the project and director of the University of Arizona Health Sciences Asthma and Airway Disease Research Center, said there is four times less asthma in Nogales, Sonora, than in Tucson, which is about an hour’s drive away. A study of teenagers in Nogales, Arizona, showed 16% had asthma compared with 4% to 6% of teens in the same age range just across the border in Nogales, Sonora. Mexicans who come to the United States also have less asthma than Mexican Americans, researchers have found. The Arizona Daily Star reports the University of Arizona study will look into how the risk of asthma is affected by the “hygiene hypothesis,” which suggests that a child’s reduced exposure to germs stunts the immune system’s ability to fight infectious organisms. The study was delayed due to COVID-19, but researchers plan to begin enrolling pregnant women in August and finish by August 2023.\n\nArkansas\n\nLittle Rock: A federal judge Friday refused to allow a man arrested after he was photographed sitting at a desk in House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s office during the Jan. 6 U.S. Capitol riot to travel for a classic-car swap meet. U.S. District Judge Christopher R. Cooper rejected the request by Richard Barnett to loosen the 50-mile restriction on how far he can travel from his residence while he’s on home detention awaiting trial. Barnett’s attorney said the Gravette, Arkansas, man needed to be able to travel to make a living buying and selling classic cars. Petit Jean Mountain, where the car show was being held over the weekend, is 200 miles from Gravette. “The Court is not persuaded that the defendant cannot pursue gainful employment within a 50-mile radius of his home as permitted by the current conditions,” Cooper’s order said. Barnett, 61, was among supporters of President Donald Trump who stormed the Capitol as lawmakers assembled to certify Joe Biden’s victory over Trump. Prosecutors say Barnett was carrying a stun gun when he entered the building. Federal prosecutors opposed Barnett’s request and said his conduct while awaiting trial – including an interview with Russian State Television – indicated more conditions, not fewer, were needed.\n\nCalifornia\n\nLos Angeles: Attorney General Rob Bonta launched new anti-human trafficking teams to apprehend perpetrators and support survivors Friday amid an alarming increase in labor and sexual exploitation statewide amid the coronavirus pandemic. California’s lockdown exacerbated problems with human trafficking, officials said Friday, and made it much harder for victims to escape and find housing and other services. Kay Buck, the chief executive officer for Los Angeles-based nonprofit Coalition to Abolish Slavery and Trafficking, called it “the most unforgettable and heart-wrenching year” as advocates saw a huge demand in services combined with a shortage of resources. In LA alone, the nonprofit saw a spike of 185% in urgent human trafficking cases during the pandemic, Buck said. Advocates in LA County see victims – many who come from Mexico and the Philippines – who were duped into thinking they would have a job in the U.S. but are instead sold into “modern-day slavery.” Actors and activists Mira Sorvino and Alyssa Milano; state Assemblyman Miguel Santiago; and Angela Guanzon, who escaped her trafficker and aided law enforcement in their prosecution, joined Bonta on Friday to implore Newsom and lawmakers to approve another $30 million in new grants over the next three years, doubling the funding level for the efforts.\n\nColorado\n\nDenver: U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra visited a mobile vaccine clinic near the city Friday to promote COVID-19 shots among underserved communities of color that have some of the nation’s lowest vaccination rates. He also met with Democratic Gov. Jared Polis, getting briefly interrupted by the governor’s dog, Gia, and another dog dashing through their closed-door session, giving the two a laugh. They discussed the state’s pandemic response and a new law creating a state-administered health insurance plan designed to reduce premiums and costs of care as well as get more people covered. Later, Becerra, the agency’s first Latino leader, and Democratic members of Colorado’s congressional delegation toured a mobile vaccine clinic focused on underserved communities in the Denver suburb of Aurora, which is nearly 30% Hispanic. It’s one of nine mobile units made from converted buses. While Hispanic people make up 20% of Colorado’s population, less than 10% have been vaccinated, according to the state’s vaccine dashboard. Democratic U.S. Rep. Jason Crow said many minorities and immigrants have trouble finding the time to get vaccinated while working multiple jobs, highlighting the need for the mobile resources. “Where you are, we will go. Donde tú estás, iremos nosotros,” Becerra said.\n\nConnecticut\n\nHartford: The state has become the first in the nation to make all prison phone calls free, addressing one of the biggest emotional and financial burdens faced by incarcerated men and women and their families as they try to stay in touch. The state has a prison contract with phone vendor Securus Technologies, which charges up to $5 for a 15-minute call – some of the highest phone rates in the country. Gov. Ned Lamont signed a bill into law Wednesday that allows incarcerated men, women and juveniles a minimum of 90 minutes a day of free calls. Supports said the change could go into effect as early as next month. “We’re on the right side of history,” said Democratic state Rep. Josh Elliott, one of the legislation’s supporters. “Corporations can no longer be allowed to exploit the love between incarcerated people and their families – not in our state, not on our watch.” Several more local jurisdictions in the U.S. have also taken steps to make prison and jail phone calls free, including New York City, San Francisco, San Diego and Los Angeles. “This historic legislation will change lives,” said Bianca Tylek, executive director of Worth Rises, which has been working with local advocates to slash prison phone costs. “It will keep food on the table for struggling families, children in contact with their parents, and our communities safer.”\n\nDelaware\n\nWilmington: President Joe Biden announced Saturday that Champ, the older of the family’s two dogs, had died “peacefully at home.” The German shepherd was 13. “He was our constant, cherished companion during the last 13 years and was adored by the entire Biden family,” Biden and first lady Jill Biden said in a statement posted to the president’s official Twitter account. The Bidens, who were spending the weekend at their home in Wilmington, got Champ from a breeder after Joe Biden was elected vice president in 2008. Champ was a fixture both at the vice president’s residence at the Naval Observatory and at the White House. In their statement, the Bidens said when Champ was young, “he was happiest chasing golf balls on the front lawn of the Naval Observatory,” and more recently he enjoyed “joining us as a comforting presence in meetings or sunning himself in the White House garden.” “In our most joyful moments and in our most grief-stricken days, he was there with us, sensitive to our every unspoken feeling and emotion,” the Bidens said. Champ’s passing leaves the Bidens with their younger German shepherd, Major, whom the family adopted from the Delaware Humane Society in 2018.\n\nDistrict of Columbia\n\nWashington: Residents getting their first dose of COVID-19 vaccine at select sites through the end of July will receive $51 gift cards and be entered for a chance to win free flights and other incentives, WUSA-TV reports. Mayor Muriel Bowser said Washington has reached 70% of adults having received at least one dose. While anyone can get a COVID-19 shot at district vaccination sites, the gift cards are only available to D.C. residents. Those between the ages of 12 and 17 must be accompanied by a guardian. Residents will receive the gift card after getting their shot. Additionally, Washingtonians getting their shots at Anacostia High School, Ron Brown High School or RISE Demonstration Center will be entered to win two round-trip American Airlines tickets to anywhere the airline flies, including international locations. Other prizes offered in a series of drawings starting Saturday include a new car, a year’s worth of groceries, and a one-year Metro pass. More information about the giveaways can be found at coronavirus.dc.gov/incentives. A full schedule of the days and hours of the current walk-up sites can be found at taketheshotdc.com.\n\nFlorida\n\nSt. Petersburg: A federal judge on Friday ruled for the state in a lawsuit challenging a U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention order making it difficult for cruise ships to resume sailing due to the coronavirus pandemic. U.S. District Judge Steven Merryday wrote in a 124-page decision that Florida would be harmed if the CDC order, which the state said effectively blocked most cruises, were to continue. The Tampa-based judge granted a preliminary injunction that prevents the CDC from enforcing the order pending further legal action on a broader lawsuit. “This order finds that Florida is highly likely to prevail on the merits of the claim that CDC’s conditional sailing order and the implementing orders exceed the authority delegated to the CDC,” Merryday wrote. Florida Attorney General Ashley Moody praised the decision in a statement. “Today’s ruling is a victory for the hardworking Floridians whose livelihoods depend on the cruise industry,” said Moody, a Republican. “The federal government does not, nor should it ever, have the authority to single out and lock down an entire industry indefinitely.” While the CDC could appeal, Merryday ordered both sides to return to mediation to attempt to work out a full solution – a previous attempt failed – and said the CDC could fashion a modification in which it would retain some public health authority.\n\nGeorgia\n\nAtlanta: Georgia’s secretary of state is making public a list of nearly 102,000 voters who will be removed from the rolls unless they act to preserve their registration. Republican Brad Raffensperger announced the list Friday, part of an every-other-year bid to remove voters who may have died or moved away. The state has about 7.8 million voters, and his office said the removals include about 67,000 voters who submitted a change-of-address form to the U.S. Postal Service, plus about 34,000 voters who had election mail returned. Voter purges in Georgia became a hot-button issue during the 2018 governor’s race between Democrat Stacey Abrams and Republican Brian Kemp. As secretary of state before being elected governor, Kemp oversaw aggressive voter purges during his tenure. More than 1.4 million voter registrations were canceled in Georgia between 2012 and 2018. In the current purge, election officials said, cancellation notices will be mailed, and those who respond within 40 days will have their registration switched back to active. Anyone who is removed could register again. On a monthly basis, the secretary of state been removing voters who were convicted of felonies or who died.\n\nHawaii\n\nHonolulu: Civil rights activist the Rev. Al Sharpton is condemning the Honolulu Police Department for the fatal shooting of a Black man as various versions of what led to the death continue to emerge. “Lindani Myeni’s killing is yet another sensational racialization and criminalization of an innocent, unarmed black man at the hands of police not following the law and proper police procedures,” Sharpton said in a statement Thursday. Interim Honolulu Police Chief Rade Vanic said the police department is committed to public service, and these “are challenging times for police departments everywhere.” Sharpton weighed in on the April 14 shooting of Myeni after lawyers representing his widow in a wrongful-death lawsuit made public last week a doorbell video showing the 29-year-old arriving at a house, taking off his shoes and quickly leaving after his presence confused the occupants. Myeni repeatedly apologized to the couple. The lawsuit said he likely mistook the home for a temple next door that’s open to the public. Police responding to a 911 call shot him a short time later outside the house, with body camera footage showing an officer fired several gunshots before saying, “Police!” An attorney representing the homeowner and the tourists who were staying in the house said Myeni’s presence wasn’t as innocuous as lawyers for his wife portrayed.\n\nIdaho\n\nBoise: The Northwestern Band of the Shoshone Nation is suing Gov. Brad Little and state wildlife officials in federal court, contending Idaho has wrongly denied the tribe hunting rights guaranteed by the 1868 Treaty of Fort Bridger. The lawsuit, filed in Idaho’s U.S. District Court last week, asks a judge to declare that the Northwestern Band is protected under the treaty. On its surface, the legal case could come down to whether one of the Native American leaders who signed the treaty was representing the Northwestern Band along with other bands of the Shoshone Nation and whether the Northwestern Band itself has remained a cohesive unit in the time since. But at the heart of the dispute is a dilemma faced by many Native American governments across the U.S. who sometimes find themselves at odds with game wardens, mining companies, water users or other groups as they try to preserve their use of the land they were promised in treaties signed centuries ago. Some Northwestern Band tribal members have faced criminal convictions after Idaho game wardens said they were hunting without tags. In 1997, two brothers were found guilty for hunting out of season in Idaho, though they had hunting tags issued by the Northwestern Band. Shane and Wayde Warner appealed their convictions, claiming rights under the Fort Bridger treaty.\n\nIllinois\n\nChicago: The state is dangling millions of dollars in cash prizes and scholarships to encourage residents to get vaccinated, Gov. J.B. Pritzker announced Thursday. Illinois will offer $7 million in cash prizes and $3 million in scholarships through a new lottery open to all residents who have received at least one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine. Pritzker made the announcement at a community health center in Chicago’s Back of Yards neighborhood. Prizes will range from $100,000 to $1 million, and children can win a college savings plan worth $150,000. Names in Illinois’ vaccination database will be automatically eligible for the lottery. Participants will be required to have a shot by July 1. Weekly drawings will begin July 8. “ ‘All In For The Win’ is yet another way we’re working to ensure every single resident is protected from COVID-19,” Pritzker said. Nearly 67% of Illinois’ residents have received at least one vaccination dose, and a little over 50% have received two doses of a COVID-19 vaccine.\n\nIndiana\n\nBristol: A grain mill that opened more than 180 years ago in northern Indiana saw a sales boom during the pandemic after it opened a drive-thru for customers eager to buy freshly milled grains. The historic Bonneyville Mill was closed to visitors during the COVID-19 pandemic, like many Indiana businesses. But staff at the 1830s mill converted its original horse and wagon bay that farmers once used to deliver freshly harvested grain into a drive-thru for automobiles, which helped the mill along the Little Elkhart River rack up its most profitable year on record for grain sales, said Ronda DeCaire, director of the Elkhart County Parks system. “This was one of the few places in the Midwest where you could still buy flour and other freshly milled grains,” she told The Elkhart Truth. To prevent spreading the coronavirus, the mill’s staff used a pole with a bucket on its end to accept payments from drive-thru customers. Packages of flour and other milled grains were then handed to those customers through their car windows. “For the first time in over a hundred years, that wagon bay was busy again,” said Courtney Franke, the mill’s manager. DeCaire said the Bonneyville Mill is the oldest continuously operating grist mill in Indiana. It’s located just south of the Michigan border about 25 miles east of South Bend.\n\nIowa\n\nIowa City: A divided state Supreme Court on Friday banned police from searching people’s uncollected trash without a warrant, outlawing an investigative technique that had been used for decades. The court ruled 4-3 that officers commit an unreasonable search and seizure under the Iowa Constitution when they look for evidence of crimes in trash left for collection outside homes. The tactic amounts to an unconstitutional trespass on private property and violates citizens’ expectations of privacy, especially in cities that have ordinances barring residents from accessing others’ trash, Justice Christopher McDonald wrote for the majority. “We do not question the utility of warrantless trash grabs for the purposes of law enforcement, but the utility of warrantless activity is not the issue under our constitution,” he wrote, adding that “garbage contains intimate and private details of life.” The ruling overturned Iowa courts’ long adherence to a 1988 U.S. Supreme Court decision that found the U.S. Constitution’s Fourth Amendment does not prohibit the search of garbage outside one’s home. Just a small number of other states have limited trash searches by holding that their state constitutions provide greater protections than the U.S. Constitution against warrantless searches.\n\nKansas\n\nShawnee: A judge is beginning to evict tenants who are behind on rent in advance of the expiration of a federal moratorium that some experts predict will bring a tide of people being forced from homes nationwide. Johnson County Magistrate Judge Daniel Vokins said during a Zoom eviction hearing last week that he doesn’t think the moratorium, which was issued last year by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and expires at the end of the month, is enforceable. Eric Dunn, director of litigation for the National Housing Law Project, said he has heard of judges elsewhere – including in Florida, Georgia and North Carolina – ignoring the CDC moratorium but couldn’t say whether it’s been a widespread practice. The federal moratorium has kept many tenants owing back rent housed. More than 4 million people nationally say they fear being evicted or foreclosed upon in the months following its expiration, census data shows. Making matters worse, the tens of billions of dollars in federal emergency rental assistance that was supposed to solve the problem has not reached most tenants. “We thought 2021 was going to be better, and it is turning out to be just as bad,” said Denise Wall, 31, of the Kansas City suburb of Shawnee, who applied for rental aid in March but is still trying to find out whether she qualifies.\n\nKentucky\n\nLouisville: With tourists flocking to distilleries, concerns about a pandemic hangover for the state’s world-famous bourbon industry are quickly evaporating. A $19 million tourist center that Heaven Hill Distillery opened just days ago in the heart of the state’s bourbon country is already overflowing, with reservations filling up quickly to learn about whiskey-making and sample its spirits, including its flagship Evan Williams whiskey. It’s a similar story for the numerous other distilleries in the region that last spring were temporarily closed to visitors because of the COVID-19 pandemic. More than a year later, the businesses are facing such overwhelming demand for tours that one industry official has started encouraging people to call ahead or check tour availability online before pulling off the highway. Starting last summer, some distilleries began allowing limited numbers of visitors in accordance with coronavirus restrictions. With capacity limits now lifted, the attractions are gearing up for a full resurgence of guests, many from outside Kentucky. “We saw it coming, but I don’t think we saw it coming this quick,” said Kentucky Distillers’ Association President Eric Gregory, who predicted bourbon tourism will quickly rebound to pre-pandemic levels.\n\nLouisiana\n\nBaton Rouge: The iconic bald cypress trees will be protected on state-owned property, after Gov. John Bel Edwards signed a new law banning the trees’ harvesting on more than 1million acres of state land. Rep. Neil Riser said he sponsored the bill – which won unanimous passage in the state House and Senate – to give nature time to reestablish dense stands of cypress that once covered vast tracts of land. “The cypress tree symbolizes Louisiana and the Mississippi Delta,” said Riser, R-Columbia. “I hope this new law will help people have a true appreciation of these trees’ majesty.” The new law doesn’t apply to cypress trees growing on privately owned land. Cypress trees grow throughout Louisiana’s swamps and can have lifespans of more than 1,000 years. The bald cypress was named the official Louisiana state tree in 1963. Riser said the forests will return on state-owned lands with protection, though it will take almost a century for the slow-growth trees to mature. “They will come back with Mother Nature as the manager and forester,” he said. In a twist, Riser was involved in harvesting the trees as a teenage logger in the 1970s when forests were being cleared for farmland. “I remember my dad telling me, ‘Take a look at this forest; one day it will all be gone,’ and it was,” he said.\n\nMaine\n\nAugusta: The Legislature has approved an initial proposal that would allow four Native American tribes to build gambling businesses on their lands, in a reversal from years of resistance and laws that opposed Native ownership of casinos in the state. Breaking years of opposition against the bill, the House and Senate approved it with an overwhelming majority Thursday, the Portland Press Herald reports. Rep. Rena Newell, a nonvoting member of the Legislature who represents the Passamaquoddy Tribe, gave a speech following the approval of the bill, which she had pushed legislators to advance. The bill was only a small part of what the state could do for the tribes in Maine, she said. “Our ancestors watched from inside the bounds of our reservation as nontribal members got rich from cutting down our trees on our land, leaving us with little,” Newell said. The gambling legislation is one part of a series of changes the Legislature wants to amend the 1980 Maine Indian Claims Settlement Act. If these amendments are enacted, the revisions would restore some of the sovereignty that tribal leaders say they lost years ago, according to the Press Herald. Maine voters have rejected tribes’ past proposals but approved referendum questions that led to the establishment of two corporate-owned casinos.\n\nMaryland\n\nAnnapolis: The state is awarding $10million to entertainment venues that struggled during the pandemic, including the Delmarva Shorebirds, the Maryland Theatre and the Maryland Symphony Orchestra, among others. The money will help stabilize businesses that had to shut down or drastically reduce their capacity as COVID-19 surged. As the state begins to emerge from the pandemic, the money will also help venues prepare for the busier fall arts season, said Nicholas Cohen, the executive director of Maryland Citizens for the Arts. “The arts season is a little quiet in the summer. It comes back in the fall,” Cohen said. “What this does is it helps float these venues until then, to really be like, ‘Here we are; we’re back; we’re maybe close to full capacity.’ ” The additional $10 million in state grants will go to more than 60 venues and organizations. For the nearly century-old Potomac Playmakers, the money will help maintain the nonprofit’s new home, which volunteer grant writer Greg Berezuk said the group moved into just before the pandemic shut everything down. “We got in there just before COVID. It’s a wonderful facility for an audience to enjoy a live performance, and we couldn’t use it,” Berezuk said. Fixed costs, such as the mortgage and utilities, had to be paid even without shows, he said.\n\nMassachusetts\n\nBoston: A union that represents about 800 city employees who have been working remotely during the pandemic has filed an unfair labor practices claim against acting Mayor Kim Janey’s administration for unilaterally ordering them back to the office. The Service Employees International Union Local 888 filed the complaint with the state Thursday, the Boston Herald reports. “The City refused in good faith to bargain about health and safety issues, family and childcare issues (especially single and low wage employees), and productivity issues (as the evidence will show that many of the job tasks have been accomplished at a higher rate due to the use of virtual meetings and technology),” the union wrote in the complaint. Janey this month ordered remote workers back in phases in late June and early July. “The city did not explain why the return to physical work locations was necessitated on the dates picked for reopening other than they have the right to do it,” the SEIU wrote. In response to the complaint, a city spokesperson said in a statement: “Mayor Janey remains committed to flexibility, as we fully restore vital services to Boston residents. We do not have further comment at this time on the pending litigation.”\n\nMichigan\n\nLansing: People with a disability or a positive HIV test could not be discriminated against during the organ transplant process under legislation passed by the state House. Though the federal Americans with Disabilities Act bans discrimination on the basis of disability during the organ transplant process, organizations such as the National Down Syndrome Society say certain disability designations affect where a person sits on a transplant list, if they even get on a list at all. One bill passed by the House puts Michigan on the same path several states have taken, outlawing the denial of a transplant or lowering a person’s place on an organ waiting list because of their disability. However, no penalty for discrimination is listed in the bill. The other bill would allow patients with HIV to donate their organs to HIV-positive recipients. Both bills must be passed by the state Senate and signed by the governor in order to become law. Nationally, in 2013 the HIV Organ Policy Equity Act lifted a decades­long ban on transplanting HIV-infected organs into recipients. Current state law doesn’t allow Michigan residents to receive organs from individuals who test positive for HIV, so organs that test positive get shipped off to out-of-state recipients.\n\nMinnesota\n\nSt. Paul: Staunch conservatives and advocates of legal marijuana have formed an unlikely alliance to pressure the Legislature to allow medical cannabis patients to own guns. The more than 35,000 patients in Minnesota’s program can’t own guns as the law now stands because the federal government classifies marijuana as an illicit drug, on par with heroin, and prohibits anyone who uses an “unlawful” substance from purchasing a firearm. So some gun-rights supporters and pro-legalization groups and legislators are lobbying during the special session to allow the Minnesota Department of Health to petition the federal government for an exemption. The change is being debated as part of the state’s public safety and health and human services budget bills. If their effort is successful, the Star Tribune of Minneapolis reports, Minnesota would be the first of 36 states that allow medical marijuana in some form to appeal directly to the federal government on behalf of its enrollees. The ranks of the state’s medical marijuana patients are expected to triple or quadruple over the next few years under a new law that liberalizes the state’s restrictive program to allow smokable marijuana instead of more expensive pills or liquid extracts.\n\nMississippi\n\nNatchez: The National Park Service on Friday accepted the city’s donation of land at a site that was once one of the largest slave markets in the United States. The federal agency eventually will develop exhibits that tell the history of Forks of the Road, where Black people were sold to work in slavery in Southern plantations from 1833 to 1863. The site in Natchez has had a sign and a small monument made of concrete and shackles. Officials have been working since 2005 on proposals to create a detailed memorial. More than 100 people watched Friday as the city donated nearly 3 acres to the park service in a ceremony that took place a day after President Joe Biden signed legislation to create a federal holiday for Juneteenth, which commemorates the end of slavery in the U.S. on the date when enslaved people in Texas got word of the Emancipation Proclamation. “As we commemorate the celebration of liberty, Juneteenth, and we gather to remember the system of enslavement and the oppression the proceeded this freedom, we acknowledge the tragic story of what happened here at Forks of the Road and within the city of Natchez,” said Lance Hatten, deputy regional director for the National Park Service. “When that truth is told and heard, the journey to healing and unity begins.”\n\nMissouri\n\nSpringfield: Frustrated health officials in the area are imploring residents to get COVID-19 vaccinations as the faster-spreading delta variant of the coronavirus pushes case numbers and hospitalizations higher. Random testing of virus samples has determined that the delta variant, which is more infectious and potentially more deadly than other strains, has become dominant around Springfield and in much of southwest Missouri, said Kendra Findley, administrator of community health and epidemiology with Greene County. Administrators at the two largest hospitals serving the state’s southwestern region – Mercy and CoxHealth – are pleading with residents to get inoculated because COVID-19 patient loads are increasing at a rate they have not previously seen during the pandemic, The St. Louis Post-Dispatch reports. In Greene County, 36% of the population has begun the vaccination process. In most surrounding counties, the figure is below 30%. Erik Frederick, chief administrative officer at Mercy Hospital Springfield, said hospitalizations averaged in the teens a month ago but reached 72 by Thursday. CoxHealth has seen similar numbers. Many of the new patients are young, healthy adults and pregnant women, he said. The delta variant “has become prevalent” across Missouri, state health officials said last week.\n\nMontana\n\nBozeman: Wildlife officials are seeking feedback on a proposal to expand fishing restrictions to protect declining brown trout populations. Biologists with Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks and the U.S. Geological Survey have tracked declining numbers of juvenile brown trout in southwest Montana rivers, including the Big Hole, Ruby, Boulder, Beaverhead, upper Yellowstone and upper Stillwater rivers, the Bozeman Daily Chronicle reports. Eric Roberts, fish management bureau chief with Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks, said the trend is concerning because low numbers of younger fish indicate that older fish are not being replaced. Biologists are now gathering public comments on the proposed changes, which include seasonal fishing closures from September to May, catch-and-release requirements, and evening fishing restrictions from 2 p.m. to midnight daily. The changes could also apply to the rivers’ tributaries. Residents can submit comment online, by mail or by attending public meetings Tuesday and Wednesday. Department officials will then develop proposals to be considered in August. Roberts attributed the trout population decline, in part, to changing water temperatures and habitat alterations. He said there are long-term plans in place to address stream flows and enhance habitat.\n\nNebraska\n\nLincoln: Amtrak trains are once again rumbling through the state capital on a daily basis. The California Zephyr, which runs from Chicago to San Francisco, has resumed its pre-pandemic schedule of one eastbound and one westbound train stopping in Lincoln in the early hours of each day. ProRail Nebraska, a group of citizens that supports the continuation of passenger train service in the state, met the westbound train at the Lincoln Amtrak station on the first day of resumed daily service, May 24. According to ProRail’s District 1 director, Richard Schmeling, ProRail opposed the pause in daily service, lobbying Nebraska’s federal representatives to support Amtrak through the pandemic. Amtrak spokesman Marc Magliari said daily service was halted on many routes after the Senate declined to pass funding for the service during the pandemic. Now that legislation providing the funding has been passed and signed by the president, he said, Amtrak has resumed service at full capacity. “It enables us to be a better service in the 500 places we serve,” he told the Lincoln Journal Star. It also enabled Amtrak to recall more than 2,000 workers nationally that it put on furlough while service was decreased, Magliari said, including conductors, engineers and service people.\n\nNevada\n\nLas Vegas: A new kind of jackpot is coming to the Silver State, Gov. Steve Sisolak said Thursday, but only for residents who’ve gotten a COVID-19 shot. The Democratic governor announced a broad effort to encourage reluctant or forgetful residents to get shots, adding his state to a growing list offering unconventional incentives to revive flatlining vaccination programs amid waning demand. Sisolak didn’t call it a lottery, instead terming the “Vax Nevada Days” prize program a raffle because entrants aren’t paying to participate, and vaccines are free. The program makes all residents who have received at least one dose of vaccine since December – along with military members and their dependents – automatically eligible to receive part of $5 million in prize money. Winners will be announced every Thursday for eight weeks beginning July 8. Students ages 12 to 17 can get college tuition credits worth $5,000 to $50,000. People 18 and up are eligible for prizes from $1,000 to $250,000. Among almost 2,000 winners, a $1 million grand prize winner will be announced Aug. 26. “If people are looking for reasons not to get vaccinated, they’re going to come up with one. I’m trying to give people 5 million reasons to get vaccinated,” Sisolak said, referencing the total cash prizes being offered.\n\nNew Hampshire\n\nHanover: Dartmouth College is providing up to $1 million to encourage students to move off campus to ease a housing crunch this fall. Students can opt to have their names included in a one-time lottery for $5,000 to encourage as many as 200 returning students to live off campus, Mike Wooten, associate dean of residential life, said in an email to students who are on a housing waitlist. Dartmouth is shifting some of its larger doubles to triples and converting lounges to student rooms where possible, but that isn’t enough to alleviate the housing crunch, Wooten said in the email. “As expected, demand has exceeded our capacity,” he wrote. “Although this has been the case in prior years, interest in living on campus has understandably surged following the easing of COVID-19 restrictions.” Some students said the school should be trying harder to house them – or at least better communicate why it can’t. “It hasn’t been made clear of what actions they’ve taken to mitigate this other than the lottery,” David Millman, a sophomore, told WMUR-TV.\n\nNew Jersey\n\nPaterson: Landlords won’t be able to inquire about potential renters’ criminal histories under a new law Gov. Phil Murphy signed Friday. The Democratic governor signed the Fair Chance in Housing Act on what was the state’s first official celebration of Juneteenth as a paid holiday for state workers. “We must commit to both remembering the past and continuing to take action to ensure communities of color, especially Black Americans, achieve the full equity they deserve,” Murphy said in a statement. He also signed legislation making the third Friday in June a state holiday. June 19 – or Juneteenth – commemorates when word reached enslaved people in Galveston, Texas, that slavery had been abolished. President Joe Biden signed similar nationwide legislation Thursday. The new housing measure aims to eliminate housing instability that contributes to recidivism, according to the governor. The new law won’t apply in cases where federal law permits landlords to ask about certain criminal convictions.\n\nNew Mexico\n\nAlbuquerque: Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham said Friday that all remaining pandemic-related public health restrictions on commercial and day-to-day activity in the state will be lifted July 1, clearing the way for restaurants and other venues to operate without any capacity limits and for cities to plan in-person Fourth of July celebrations and other summer festivals. The Democratic governor made the declaration as state health officials continued to crunch the vaccination numbers following a push that included a multimillion-dollar sweepstakes, other cash incentives and offers that included free child care for those who needed it in order to get their shot. Lujan Grisham wanted at least 60% of residents 16 and up to be vaccinated two weeks ahead of the reopening. Her office said that vaccinations stood at 59.4% on Thursday but that health officials were waiting for more federal data to come in that would push the state closer to its goal. Still, the governor said in a statement that she had hoped the numbers would be higher by now. “The variants across the globe and in the U.S. present very serious risks to unvaccinated people, even young people,” she said. “We all, each of us, have the power to stop the serious illnesses and deaths: Get your shot. It’s safe. It works. It’s that simple.”\n\nNew York\n\nNew York: Fifteen months after shuttering for the pandemic, Radio City Music Hall reopened its doors Saturday for the Tribeca Festival premiere of a new Dave Chappelle documentary for a full-capacity, fully vaccinated audience. The debut of “Dave Chappelle: This Time This Place,” which chronicles Chappelle’s pandemic stand-up series held in rural Ohio cornfields, marked the first time the hallowed hall was packed since closing in March 2020. The premiere Saturday evening, the closing night gala for the 20th Tribeca Festival, was seen as a symbolic reawakening of the arts in New York, where many of the world’s most famous stages – Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, Broadway theaters – remain dark. On Sunday, Madison Square Garden hosted its first full-capacity concert with the Foo Fighters. “Springsteen on Broadway” is set to resume performances June 26. After the Tribeca screening, Chappelle took the stage and paused for a moment to apologize for those who lost someone during the pandemic before signaling a note of revival. “But, man, let’s get up,” he said, before introducing a New York feast of hip-hop acts who performed according to their native borough, including Q-Tip, Talib Kweli, Fat Joe, A$AP Ferg, Redman, Ghostface Killah and De La Soul.\n\nNorth Carolina\n\nRaleigh: Gov. Roy Cooper vetoed gun-rights legislation Friday that would allow parishioners at more churches to be armed, marking the second year in a row that he’s blocked the idea. The legislation affirms that people going to religious services at a location where private schools or some charter schools also meet can carry handguns in full view or under clothing if they have a concealed weapons permit. There would be other limits. The Democratic governor said the measure, which cleared the Legislature this month, would endanger educators and children. State law otherwise prohibits guns on educational property for nearly everyone. “For the safety of students and teachers, North Carolina should keep guns off school grounds,” Cooper wrote in his veto message. The bill’s supporters contend these houses of worship where K-12 schools also are located are at a security disadvantage for their congregants compared to stand-alone churches. There are no such blanket prohibitions in these churches on carrying a pistol, provided the person has a purchase permit or concealed weapons permit. The bill also contains another provision that allows additional law enforcement employees – such as a civilian front desk worker at a police station – to carry a concealed weapon on the job if the police chief or sheriff allows.\n\nNorth Dakota\n\nBismarck: State regulators have again extended a deadline for Meridian Energy Group to begin construction on its $1 billion oil refinery near Theodore Roosevelt National Park or risk losing its permit. Meridian’s permit from the state Department of Environmental Quality was set to expire June 12 unless construction had begun on the Davis Refinery. Earlier this month the company asked for an extension on that deadline, citing delays related to the coronavirus pandemic and litigation. Recent lawsuits against Meridian have called into question the company’s ability to pay workers, the Bismarck Tribune reports. Regulators granted an extension until Sept. 12 to start construction, a month short of what Meridian had requested. “The reasons seemed to make sense, and we thought, ‘We’ll give you guys the summer to hopefully work out your stuff and then start construction,’ ” state Environmental Engineer David Stroh said. “We requested an update from them in a little over a month so we could get a better feel for how things are progressing out there, knowing there’s a lot of attention to this facility.” Refinery opponents are concerned in part about its proximity to the national park. The North Dakota Supreme Court issued a pair of rulings last year clearing the way for the refinery to move forward.\n\nOhio\n\nCleveland: Some casinos and racinos could be left with losing tickets if the state Senate’s sports betting legislation giving professional teams priority for obtaining brick-and mortar sports book licenses is ultimately enacted. A bill approved Wednesday by the Senate and sent to the House for consideration assigns the 30 total sports books to counties based on population. If professional sports teams in Cleveland, Columbus and Cincinnati all decided to apply for licenses, casinos and racinos in Cuyahoga, Franklin and Hamilton counties would be shut out at the sports betting window of opportunity in the Senate’s bill. Cuyahoga County, which includes Cleveland, for example, has three professional sports teams as well as a downtown casino and a racino in the suburbs. Dan Reinhard, a senior vice president for the JACK Cleveland casino and a spokesperson for the casino and racino group Get Gaming Right Ohio, said Friday that the Senate bill “disrespects” casino employees. “An artificial cap that locks out gaming companies in the biggest, most populous counties doesn’t make a lot of sense,” he said. “We know how to do this. This is the business we’re in. We’re going to work with all parties to make sure this cap is dealt with.” The original Senate bill introduced in May excluded casinos and racinos altogether.\n\nOklahoma\n\nPryor: Electric vehicle company Canoo announced Thursday it has selected Pryor for its U.S. manufacturing facility, which is expected to employ 2,000 people. The Los Angeles-based company plans to build its factory on a 400-acre campus at the MidAmerica Industrial Park near Tulsa. It will include a paint and body shop, along with a general assembly plant, and is targeted to open in 2023. “Oklahoma has always been a pioneer in the energy industry, and this partnership with Canoo shows that our state is an innovation leader in electric vehicle technology,” Gov. Kevin Stitt said in a statement. “We are thrilled to partner with Canoo and Chairman and CEO Tony Aquila to provide high-paying jobs for Oklahomans and position America as the global leader for vehicle manufacturing for decades to come.” Aquila cited Oklahoma’s strategic location and business-friendly policies as reasons Oklahoma was selected. Tulsa was in the running last year for a Tesla electric vehicle manufacturing facility that ultimately went to Austin, Texas.\n\nOregon\n\nSalem: A second Republican in the state Senate is facing a recall effort after showing up to oppose a gun-control bill earlier this year. Oregon Public Broadcasting reports a Mount Vernon resident named Patrick Kopke-Hales has initiated a petition process that, if successful, could force a recall election against state Sen. Lynn Findley, R-Vale. Findley was one of six Republicans to attend a March 25 floor session, granting quorum to supermajority Democrats against the wishes of many gun-rights supporters. Though Findley spoke forcefully against Senate Bill 554 that day, Democrats passed the proposal to create new gun storage laws, ban guns in the Capitol and Portland International Airport, and allow Oregon schools and universities to implement their own bans. Senate Majority Leader Fred Girod is also facing a prospective recall because of SB 554’s passage, reflecting increasing pressure on Republicans to flee the Capitol over controversial bills after doing so to block climate change legislation in 2019 and 2020. The gun-control bill is currently the subject of a referendum effort that could give voters a final say on the law in November 2022. Findley said in a statement that “fighting for conservative values in Salem is my priority, not playing political games.”\n\nPennsylvania\n\nPhiladelphia: Consuewella Dotson Africa, a longtime member of the Black organization MOVE and mother of two children killed in the 1985 bombing of the group’s home, has died at age 67. A member of the MOVE family, Janine Africa, said Consuewella Africa had tested positive for the coronavirus when she went to a hospital around the beginning of the month but had largely recovered when doctors said last week that she was not getting enough oxygen. “Through the stress with everything that was happening, her body just could not fight to get the air in her lungs because she was too burnt out and tore down from the stress,” Janine Africa said. Africa’s death follows painful revelations in the past few months about the treatment of the remains of her two daughters who were killed in the police bombing of the organization’s Philadelphia home, where 11 members – including five children – were killed, and more than 60 homes were burnt to the ground. Her daughters, 14-year-old Katricia “Tree” and 12-year-old Zanetta “Netta,” died in the bombing while Consuewella Africa was in prison serving a 16-year-sentence for simple assault related to the city’s 1978 attempt to evict the group during which a police officer was killed. Consuewella Africa held the title “Minister of Confrontation” for MOVE, which identifies as both a family and an organization.\n\nRhode Island\n\nBristol: A town that was a center of the trans-Atlantic slave trade commemorated Juneteenth by unveiling a new marker recognizing its role in slavery. Officials on Saturday placed the first of two planned slavery markers in town at the Linden Place Museum, a mansion built in the 1800s by General George DeWolf, a prominent merchant and slave trader. Another medallion will be placed later this month at DeWolf Tavern. The markers are being installed at sites around the state connected to the trans-Atlantic slave trade by the Rhode Island Slave History Medallion project. They’ve been placed at Smith’s Castle in North Kingstown, Bowen’s Wharf in Newport, and Patriot’s Park in Portsmouth, according to organizers. Students and faculty from Roger Williams University planned to discuss their original research into the town’s slavery legacy. University officials say the work includes new information about the town’s lesser-known slave-trading families, as well as stories of enslaved Africans who lived and worked in town, such as Bristol Finney, a 19-year-old enslaved African who ran away from his owners. Saturday’s ceremony featured music and dance from a local African performance group, and the museum offered tours.\n\nSouth Carolina\n\nDarlington: Historians are trying to shed light on five forgotten cemeteries in the state’s Pee Dee region. WMBF-TV reports the Darlington County Historical Commission and Clemson Professor Jim Frederick located the five graveyards near Dargan’s Pond on current Clemson property. The experts identified two African American cemeteries, two Native American burial grounds and a graveyard that dates back to the Revolutionary War. One of the sites is the cemetery of Cpt. William Standard, who was deeded land in Darlington County for his heroic service during the Revolutionary War. The pair of Native American burial grounds could date back more than 500 years. And one of the African American cemeteries is linked to one of the county’s oldest African American church congregations, the historians said. It started shortly after emancipation and was connected to the Pleasant Grove Baptist Church, where it was active until the church moved locations in the 1950s. “It relates to an African American congregation that is one of the oldest congregations in Darlington County,” he said. “They lost their connection in a very unique way, and I believe there’s three factors to that.” The historians say they are now working to identify individuals in the old church cemetery.\n\nSouth Dakota\n\nSioux Falls: The union representing workers at a Smithfield Foods plant said Friday that its members have voted in favor of a new contract. Union leaders say the deal sends a message to the meatpacking industry that companies need to recognize the sacrifices its employees made during the coronavirus pandemic. The Smithfield plant was the nation’s most active hot spot for COVID-19 cases in the early weeks of the pandemic. Nearly 1,300 workers at the Sioux Falls pork processing plant tested positive for the virus, and four workers died. B.J. Motley, president of the Union Food and Commercial Workers Local 304A, said in a statement that the new contract includes fair pay, benefits and safety protections that workers have earned and deserve. “Ensuring these jobs continue to provide the good pay and benefits working families need is the best way for us to honor our country’s essential workers,” Motley said. The contract includes a base rate of $18.75 an hour, up from $17, and a $520 bonus. The union had voted earlier this month to authorize a strike after Motley said that Smithfield wanted the workers to pay more for health care and refused to increase pay to comparable rates of other meatpacking plants in the region.\n\nTennessee\n\nMemphis: A development that organizers say “is poised to become the second-largest Black-owned film studio in the United States” moved one step closer to fruition this month when the Land Use Control Board approved the zoning adjustments necessary to build BLP Film Studios, an 85-acre production facility in the Whitehaven neighborhood. “Our goal is to make Memphis the international epicenter for producing films and projects led by Black and brown creators on the production and directing side of those projects,” said Jason A. Farmer, 52, a former Marine and business executive who for the past few several years has been working to launch BLP, which he said would be eclipsed only by Tyler Perry’s facilities in Atlanta. Farmer said he believes BLP – the name is an acronym for Black Lens Productions – will attract investors as film and TV companies work to address the “diversity, equality and inclusion” concerns that have sparked debate within the entertainment industry. “Black and brown consumers are becoming more savvy,” he said, “and we find ourselves with none of the legacy production companies” that produce most of the high-profile content that brings customers to move theaters, cable channels and streaming service. He said groundbreaking is scheduled to begin in the fall.\n\nTexas\n\nAustin: Gov. Greg Abbott followed through on a threat Friday and vetoed the new state budget’s line item providing for legislative staff pay. The Republican governor had threatened the veto after a walkout by House Democrats in the final hours of the regular legislative session. The walkout denied a House quorum to vote on controversial voting restrictions that Abbott had prioritized. “Texans don’t run from a legislative fight, and they don’t walk away from unfinished business,” Abbott said in Friday’s veto message. “Funding should not be provided for those who quit their job early, leaving their state with unfinished business and exposing taxpayers to higher costs for an additional legislative session.” However, a summer special session already was expected so that the Legislature can redraw district lines for congressional, legislative and other government offices. The budget is to take effect Sept. 1. Abbott is expected to push the voting-restrictions bill again during the summer special session. Rep. Chris Turner, who chairs the House Democratic Caucus, engineered the walkout. In a statement Friday, he called Abbott’s veto “tyrannical” and the latest indication the Republican governor “is out of control.” The caucus is considering all of its options, Turner said, “including immediate legal options.”\n\nUtah\n\nSalt Lake City: Home prices around the capital city jumped a staggering 31% over the past year in the latest sign of Utah’s housing crisis. Wasatch Front real estate agents have decried the dire lack of homes on the market as prices climb and sales bog down, the Salt Lake Tribune reports. Salt Lake County’s median price on a single-family home inched past the eye-catching $500,000 mark sometime in March and then reached $535,000 last month, new data shows. Average new home listings now draw 30 to 40 offers and sell in five days, the Salt Lake Board of Realtors said. The group said more construction is desperately needed to fill the gap. Nationwide, there’s a housing deficit of roughly 5.5 million units, according to an industry study that calls for ramping up the rate of U.S. homebuilding to add 2 million homes yearly over the next decade, compared with last year’s 1.3 million units built. In Utah, the shortfall is between 45,000 and 50,000 single-family homes, apartments and other housing types, with an especially serious need for more affordable homes accessible to residents making average wages.\n\nVermont\n\nBurlington: The University of Vermont Food Systems Research Center is getting $11 million in federal funding to support its work researching the regional food system, from production agriculture to food security, UVM and U.S. Sen. Patrick Leahy announced Friday. The center is a collaboration between the university and the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Agricultural Research Service, officials said. Vermonters turned to their local farms for food security when the pandemic struck, Leahy said in a statement. “Farms are an economic driver for our rural communities and local food is a defining feature of Vermont,” Leahy said. “We must continue to cultivate our food systems so our state can thrive and weather future emergencies.” USDA scientists are now being picked to work on campus with university researchers. “This is the first and only ARS research unit designed specifically to study diversified food systems and the smaller farms that contribute to those systems,” said UVM College of Agriculture and Life Sciences Dean Leslie Parise. “We are proud to be leading this work at UVM and believe there is much the rest of the world can learn from the successful small- and medium-sized farms that characterize Vermont agriculture.”\n\nVirginia\n\nRichmond: After twists and turns on the road to legalizing simple possession of marijuana, advocacy groups have been flooded with calls from people trying to understand exactly what will be allowed under state law as of July 1. Legislators initially voted in February to legalize possession of up to an ounce of cannabis for adult recreational use – but not until 2024, when retail sales would begin. An outcry ensued over the three-year wait before ending pot possession penalties, so in April the Legislature voted to move up legalization to this July 1. Adding to the confusion: Lawmakers included a “reenactment clause,” which means the General Assembly will have to vote again next year on major portions of the law, mainly to establish a regulatory framework for the legal pot marketplace. The process has resulted in some contradictions that may not get resolved until years after legalization begins. Sen. Adam Ebbin, one of the lead sponsors, said people “still need to be careful.” Possession of up to one ounce with no intent to distribute will become legal for those 21 and older. Adults will also be allowed to grow up to four plants per household. But not much else will change. Buying and selling marijuana will remain illegal until 2024, when retail sales are expected to begin. Smoking marijuana in public also remains against the law.\n\nWashington\n\nMount Vernon: The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has proposed listing a bird found in the North Cascades as threatened under the Endangered Species Act due to the likelihood that climate change will shrink its high-elevation habitat throughout the state. The Mount Rainier white-tailed ptarmigan is found in the Cascade Mountains from southern British Columbia to southern Washington, the Skagit Valley Herald reports. It is one of few animals that spend their entire lives on mountaintops. White-tailed ptarmigans move seasonally between snow-covered habitat and summer alpine meadows. As temperatures continue to warm, the region’s snowpack will decline. Alpine meadows may also be at risk as conditions move tree lines to higher elevations. “As the iconic alpine meadows of Washington diminish with climate change, this alpine bird … will be pushed out of the home it is specially adapted to,” U.S. Fish and Wildlife spokesperson Andrew LaValle said. The state Department of Fish & Wildlife lists the Mount Rainier white-tailed ptarmigan as a species of greatest concern and as highly vulnerable to climate change. The Fish and Wildlife Service proposal includes rules to protect the birds from types of intentional and unintentional harm and says a species recovery plan will be written after the listing becomes official.\n\nWest Virginia\n\nCharleston: Gov. Jim Justice declared an end to the state’s indoor mask requirement Sunday as a $1 million winner was revealed in a drawing for residents who have received COVID-19 vaccines. Karen Foley of Mineral Wells won the top prize announced on a sweltering Father’s Day at the Capitol Complex during a celebration of the state’s 158th birthday. “Now we’re going to probably change somebody’s life in lots of ways,” Justice said before Foley’s name was announced. Prizes in separate drawings also held Sunday included custom pickup trucks, state park weekend trips, lifetime hunting and fishing licenses, and hunting rifles and shotguns. Two younger vaccinated residents won college scholarships, including tuition, room and board, and books. Justice announced a series of random drawings May 27. The deadline for Sunday’s drawing was last Wednesday, and the winners were drawn Thursday. More than 246,000 West Virginians had registered. The names of entrants who don’t win will be carried over week to week. Residents can still sign up for six other drawings, which will be held on Wednesdays from June 30 to Aug. 4. The final drawing will include a $1.588 million grand prize and a $588,000 second prize.\n\nWisconsin\n\nMilwaukee: Republican U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson joined in a Juneteenth Day celebration in his home state only to see his speech drowned out by a chorus of boos. Johnson made an appearance Saturday at a Republican Party booth in Milwaukee, where he drew a growing crowd once people recognized him. Some people swore at him and said: “We don’t want you here.” Last year Johnson blocked legislation to make Juneteenth a national holiday. Last week he relented while saying that “it still seems strange” that taxpayers should fund time off for federal employees to celebrate the end of slavery. The bill was quickly passed and signed by President Joe Biden. When asked what he thought of the boos Saturday, Johnson said: “This is unusual for Wisconsin. Most people in Wisconsin say, ‘You are in our prayers; we are praying for you.’ … But you got some people here that are just sort of nasty at some points.” One attendee, Robert Agnew, said he thought the reason for the taunting was that “Ron Johnson’s politics are not for us.”\n\nWyoming\n\nCheyenne: Supporters of two new marijuana ballot petitions say they’re optimistic about getting pot questions before voters next year, especially with growing support from conservatives in the deep-red state. Even so, they face daunting odds because of the difficulty of getting such initiatives on the ballot and failing to do so four years ago. The Legislature legalized hemp and hemp oil in 2019, but Wyoming is among a dwindling number of states that haven’t approved marijuana in some form. Thirty-six states now allow medical marijuana, and 17 have approved recreational marijuana, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. This time around, some Republicans are finding common cause with Democrats and others on marijuana. “It’s well past due,” state Rep. Mark Baker said. “If they’re successful in reaching the ballot and putting the question to the people, I do think it is going to be successful.” Baker, R-Green River, stepped down as director of the state chapter of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws after being elected last year. Other outspoken supporters include a state representative who last year became the first Libertarian Party candidate elected to a U.S. statehouse in 20 years. One petition would seek to legalize marijuana for medical use. The other would decriminalize it.\n\nFrom USA TODAY Network and wire reports", "authors": [], "publish_date": "2021/06/21"}, {"url": "https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/50-states/2021/09/21/acadia-boom-robot-servers-larry-bird-news-around-states/118876540/", "title": "Acadia boom, robot servers: News from around our 50 states", "text": "From USA TODAY Network and wire reports\n\nAlabama\n\nMontgomery: Gov. Kay Ivey is calling lawmakers into special session this month to vote on a prison construction plan that would use part of the state’s coronavirus relief funds to jump-start the building of three new lockups. In a letter to lawmakers announcing the special session, Ivey painted the construction project as a partial solution to the state’s long-standing prison woes, which have included a U.S. Department of Justice lawsuit over violence and a separate federal court order to improve mental health treatment behind bars. “Failure to timely resolve these issues outlined in federal lawsuits could result in detrimental consequences for our state,” Ivey wrote to lawmakers. “Achieving an Alabama solution to these problems – rather than a federal court-ordered solution – is paramount.” While proponents said the construction would be a partial solution, one lawmaker said it would put “old problems in new buildings” unless the state made additional reforms. “Just building prisons without engaging in some sort of comprehensive criminal justice reform is the definition of kicking the can down the road,” said Rep. Chris England, D-Tuscaloosa. On the use of federal pandemic funds on the project, England said there are “obviously better uses of the money.” Ivey said the special session would begin Sept. 27.\n\nAlaska\n\nAnchorage: Dozens of Afghan refugees will be resettled in the state over the next six months, according to a resettlement organization. Between 50 and 100 refugees will come to Alaska starting in September, Catholic Social Services Refugee Assistance and Immigration Services said in a statement. Resettlement will continue through March. Catholic Social Services Alaska CEO Lisa Aquino told the Associated Press it wasn’t known when the first refugees would arrive in Alaska, but the organization will be ready for them. The refugees were described as being in vulnerable populations, such as children, women and the elderly. Many worked for the U.S. government or the military in Afghanistan in positions like translators. Thousands of Afghanis were evacuated after American forces left Afghanistan last month. They were first sent to military bases in the Lower 48 for screening and preparing to be sent to destinations around the U.S. The refugees, including individuals and families, will work with program staff in several areas like employment and English-language skills after arriving in Anchorage. Aquino said it wasn’t known how many would settle in other parts of the state, but it’s expected a majority would remain in Anchorage.\n\nArizona\n\nTucson: As the state’s biggest hospitals fill up with COVID-19 patients – most unvaccinated – physicians in some smaller, more rural communities say their patients who need specialty care are paying the ultimate price. The inability to find a bed has left smaller facilities such as Santa Cruz Valley Regional Hospital in Green Valley frustrated. A Tucson gastroenterologist drove to Green Valley last week to operate on a patient who couldn’t be transferred anywhere in the state to get the surgery. The hospital has filed a complaint with the Arizona Department of Health Services about the inability to transfer, the Arizona Daily Star reports. The patient lived “only because this doctor was nice enough, was human enough to save his life,” said Stephen Harris, the hospital’s CEO. In Cochise County, Dr. Cristian Laguillo, a senior physician with Copper Queen Community Hospital in Bisbee, said he has never felt this helpless trying to assist patients – even while serving a tour in Afghanistan as a combat medic. A surge line was created in April 2020 by the state Department of Health Services to facilitate transfers of COVID-19 patients across the state. But it’s meant to be used to track down beds for COVID-19 patients. Laguillo said he thinks the state surge line has to change to be for all patients in critical need, not just virus patients.\n\nArkansas\n\nLonoke: A former sheriff’s deputy charged with manslaughter for fatally shooting a white teenager whose death has drawn the attention of civil rights activists was released Monday on $15,000 bond. Michael Davis, a former sergeant with the Lonoke County sheriff’s office, is set to appear again in court Nov. 15, Little Rock television station KTHV reports. Davis was charged Friday with felony manslaughter in the death of 17-year-old Hunter Brittain. Davis, who is also white, shot Brittain during a June 23 traffic stop. Lonoke County Sheriff John Staley fired Davis in July, saying the former deputy did not turn on his body camera until after the shooting. Investigators have said Brittain was holding a container at the time of the shooting, and they did not find any firearms in or around the teen’s truck. Davis’ attorney has said the former deputy plans to plead not guilty. Brittain was eulogized by the Rev. Al Sharpton and two attorneys who represented George Floyd’s family. They said the teen’s death highlighted the need for interracial support for changes in policing. Brittain’s family and friends have regularly demonstrated outside the Lonoke County sheriff’s office, demanding more details on the shooting.\n\nCalifornia\n\nSacramento: Gov. Gavin Newsom has approved two measures to slice through local zoning ordinances as the most populous state struggles with soaring home prices, an affordable housing shortage and stubborn homelessness. He signed the most prominent legislation despite nearly 250 cities objecting that it will, by design, undermine local planning and control. The outcome marks the latest battle between what’s come to be thought of as “NIMBY vs. YIMBY.” While most agree there is an affordable housing shortage, proposed construction often runs into “not in my backyard” opposition. “The housing affordability crisis is undermining the California Dream for families across the state, and threatens our long-term growth and prosperity,” Newsom said in announcing his approval Thursday. He also announced the state will put $1.75 billion into what his administration is calling a new California Housing Accelerator, which he said will speed building 6,500 affordable multifamily units that had been stalled for lack of tax-exempt bonds and low-income housing tax credits. It’s part of $22 billion that the state plans to spend to spur new housing and ease homelessness along with the new laws. The bill by Senate leader Toni Atkins would require cities to approve up to four housing units on what was a single-family lot.\n\nColorado\n\nDenver: A state panel has recommended that a mountain peak west of Denver be renamed in honor of a Native American woman who acted as a translator for tribes and white settlers in the 19th century. Thursday’s recommendation comes amid national efforts to address a history of colonialism and oppression against Native Americans and other people of color after last summer’s protests calling for racial justice reform. It is the first of several name changes being considered by the state panel. The Colorado Geographic Naming Advisory Board recommended changing the name of Squaw Mountain, located in Clear Creek County about 30 miles miles west of Denver, to Mestaa’ehehe Mountain, which is pronounced “mess-taw-hay.” The name honors an influential Cheyenne translator known as Owl Woman who facilitated relations between white settlers and Native American tribes in the early 1800s, The Colorado Sun reports. The word “squaw,” derived from the Algonquin language, may once have simply meant “woman.” But over generations, the word morphed into a misogynist and racist term to disparage Indigenous women, according to experts.\n\nConnecticut\n\nNew London: One restaurant is taking an unorthodox approach to addressing staff shortages: robot servers to serve meals. The operator of the New London location of the Shaking Crab told The Day the ocean-themed restaurant will use regular waiters and waitresses to explain the menu and take orders, but the robots will deliver the meals to the tables. Gulshan Soni told the newspaper the robots can be summoned with a bell. The innovation is partly for showmanship and to draw in customers with something unique, he said, and partly to address staffing shortages being experienced across the industry. The four robots cost between $6,000 and $22,000, Soni said. The restaurant is scheduled to open to the public in early October. The Shaking Crab has more than two dozen locations in the northeastern U.S. and China, according to its website.\n\nDelaware\n\nWilmington: In uplifting news for environmentalists, Delawareans can no longer release balloons into the sky, thanks to a law Gov. John Carney signed Friday. The bill that lawmakers passed in June makes it illegal to intentionally release balloons in the First State. Releasing up to four balloons is considered littering and can mean a fine of $25 or more. Releasing five or more balloons brings a fine of $250 and up to eight hours of community service for the first offense. Maryland and Virginia passed similar laws earlier this year. While Carney has dedicated much of his tenure to a litter-reduction campaign, the bill isn’t just intended to prevent residents from suffering the sight of latex balloon remnants scattered across the state. The new law is also meant to protect wildlife, according to environmentalists. “Balloons have long polluted shorelines of Delaware, Maryland, and Virginia, adding to the plastic pollution that threatens both marine life and the roughly 225,000 jobs in the three states that depend on a clean coast,” Oceana field campaigns manager Caroline Wood said in a statement. Delawareans can still throw water balloons as long as they pick up the trash after they pop. People planning celebrations or mourning events can visit preventballoonlitter.org to find other ideas in lieu of balloon releases.\n\nDistrict of Columbia\n\nWashington: After showing signs of coughing, sneezing and a lack of appetite, nine big cats at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Zoo tested positive for the coronavirus. The Smithsonian said Friday that six African lions, a Sumatran tiger and two Amur tigers exhibited symptoms and tested presumptive positive for the virus that causes COVID-19. The final results are expected in the coming days, the Smithsonian said on its website. “All lions and tigers are being treated with anti-inflammatories and anti-nausea medication to address discomfort and decreased appetite,” the zoo said on its website. “In addition, all are being treated with antibiotics for presumptive secondary bacterial pneumonia. They remain under close observation.” Due to the social distance between visitors and animals, the public is at no risk for the coronavirus. The zoo confirmed no other animals were exhibiting symptoms as of Friday. Zookeepers conducted an investigation of all staff and animals, and the source of the outbreak wasn’t found, according to the website. The first round of the COVID-19 vaccine made for zoo animals by Zoetis has been authorized for use by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The National Zoo has said it will disburse the first round of vaccines among “susceptible species” in the coming months.\n\nFlorida\n\nOcala: A woman floating on a paddleboard in the Silver River used her paddle to push away a large alligator that swam directly toward her in a frightful, up-close encounter captured in startling videos and photographs. The alligator came within inches of Vicki Baker, 60, of Ocala. She estimated the reptile to be nearly as long as her 10-foot paddleboard. It hissed loudly at her. She said at one point it opened its mouth, revealing large teeth and its powerful jaw as it floated on the surface. “What are you doing? Get away from me! Get away from me!” she yelled at the alligator as it swam inches from her paddleboard. “No! Oh, my God, I had to push him away with my paddle!” Nearby, off camera in the video, an employee at Silver Springs State Park can be heard on a speaker advising her: “Ma’am, I’m going to suggest backing up considering you just made him pretty mad.” Baker said she remains puzzled over the encounter. She said she presumed someone else on the water had been feeding the alligator, desensitizing it to humans and helping it associate paddlers on the river with food. “I was afraid,” she said. “I’ve seen them my whole life and have never been afraid.” The encounter happened near Silver Springs, where deep springs feed the Silver River, and the water is so stunningly clear that tourists board glass-bottom boats.\n\nGeorgia\n\nMarietta: The Cobb County district attorney’s office is offering warm, furry support to crime victims and staff. District Attorney Flynn Broady announced Friday that Rose, a 3-year-old black Labrador retriever, is joining the office. The victim witness unit has been working to bring Rose on board, according to a news release from the office. “The level of stress and anxiety that victims of domestic violence experience is drastically reduced with the introduction of assistance animals,” unit director Kimberly McCoy said. “It’s been a long process, but we are excited.” The Forsyth County Sheriff’s Office partnered with the Pups with a Purpose program to donate the dog. Pups with a Purpose matches people held in the Forsyth County jail with volunteer citizen dog trainers and Forsyth County Animal Shelter dogs. Rose received specialized training from Rucker Dog Training to prepare her to help crime victims in court, the release said. “Child victims will have the opportunity to have Rose there to calm them down and assure them that they are in a safe place so they can tell their story and not feel afraid of what happens if they tell it,” Broady said.\n\nHawaii\n\nHonolulu: The state Board of Education has approved changing Central Middle School’s name to honor the Hawaiian princess who once owned the downtown Honolulu property. At a meeting Thursday, the board approved naming the campus Princess Ruth Ke’elikolani Middle School. School and community leaders have been trying since 2019 to rename the school. The princess’ home, Keoua Hale, once stood on the grounds of the current campus, and when she died in 1883, her property was bequeathed to Princess Bernice Pauahi Bishop, according to documents supporting the name change. After Pauahi’s death in 1885, the board of education purchased the property for what became Honolulu High School in 1895, the Honolulu Star-Advertiser reports. It later became Central Grammar School before it was changed briefly to Ke’elikolani School. It became Central Junior High School in 1928, then Central Intermediate School in 1932 and Central Middle School in 1997, the newspaper reports. “In the 1930s, because people couldn’t pronounce the name, they changed it back to Central,” said the school’s principal, Joseph Passantino, Hawaii News Now reports. “So the significance is huge, especially for the staff who’s dedicated over two years to give her that duty and honor.”\n\nIdaho\n\nCaldwell: The principal at a southwestern Idaho public charter school has died due to COVID-19, the school’s board said. The school board at Heritage Community Charter School in Caldwell announced the death of Javier Castaneda in a letter to parents. The school’s website links to a GoFundMe page created Friday that said Castaneda died unexpectedly Wednesday as a result of becoming ill with COVID-19. He is survived by his wife and seven children. The school board said in the letter first reported by KTVB-TV that the school will provide counseling resources and other support for children. The school has some restrictions in place due to COVID-19. It made face masks optional. The school said on its website that it focuses on a classical liberal arts education and uses a dual Spanish-language immersion program to provide a strong foreign language emphasis.\n\nIllinois\n\nSpringfield: All 18 of the state’s job centers offering services for people searching for work are accepting in-person appointments after shifting to remote operations due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the Illinois Department of Employment Security announced. In-person appointments began Monday at five offices in Burbank, Chicago, Joliet and North Aurora. Other centers began accepting appointments in August and in early September. Officials encouraged people to use the agency’s website to apply for unemployment benefits, search for work and use other services. Appointments, have to be made at least 24 hours in advance by calling the agency’s hotline, at (217) 558-0401, and last 20 minutes. Anyone entering an office must wear a mask and should reschedule their appointment if they feel sick or have been exposed to COVID-19. Help will still be available over the phone as the job centers reopen for in-person services.\n\nIndiana\n\nTerre Haute: Organizers of a planned museum about basketball great Larry Bird are starting to assemble thousands of items ahead of its expected opening next year. The museum will be part of the new Terre Haute Convention Center, which remains under construction with an anticipated completion date of March 2022. It will include items donated by Bird and others from his career with the Boston Celtics, Indiana State University and the U.S. Olympic team. The site for work on cataloging the memorabilia is being modified for security and should be ready within weeks, the Tribune-Star reports. “As other items are collected, they can be housed in one location,” memorabilia consultant Shelly Keen said. “It’s just going to make things move a little more swiftly than what it was before.” Bird grew up in the southern Indiana town of French Lick. He created excitement during his days at Indiana State in Terre Haute when he led the school to the NCAA title game in 1979, although the Sycamores lost to Magic Johnson’s Michigan State team. When the Celtics won the 1984 NBA Championship, Bird dedicated the win to Terre Haute. He was the Indiana Pacers coach and a top team executive after his playing career.\n\nIowa\n\nWaterloo: The city’s first Black police chief is facing intense opposition from some current and former officers as he works with local leaders to reform the department, including the removal of its longtime insignia that resembles a Ku Klux Klan dragon. Joel Fitzgerald said his 16-month tenure in Waterloo, a city of 67,000 with a history of racial divisions, is a “case study” for what Black police chiefs face as they seek to build community trust and hold officers to higher standards. In an interview with the Associated Press, he said the attacks were driven by misinformation and racism toward him and his boss, the city’s first Black mayor. “I don’t think there’s been any police chief in America in a small- or medium-sized department that have endured this for the reasons I have endured it, and I think the reasons have to do with race,” said Fitzgerald, who previously served as the chief of larger departments in Fort Worth, Texas, and Allentown, Pennsylvania. “This is my fourth job being the first Black police chief. I’ve dealt with pushback in other places but never so overt. Never so nonfactual.” The backlash has intensified since last fall, when the City Council began pushing to remove the department’s emblem – a winged creature known as a griffin that had adorned patches on officers’ uniforms since the 1960s. After a messy process, the council voted 5-2 last week to order the department to remove the symbol from its uniforms by the end of September.\n\nKansas\n\nLansing: A nurse who texted a co-worker a picture of a dementia patient slumped over in a wheelchair and then suggested she was responsible and deserved thanks has pleaded guilty to intentionally administering the wrong medication. The Kansas City Star reports 37-year-old Jennifer Lynn Reavis, of Atchison, is free on bond as she awaits sentencing on charges of endangerment, unlawful administration of a controlled substance and battery. She pleaded guilty to the charges Friday in Leavenworth County District Court. In May 2019, administrators with Twin Oaks Rehab Center in Lansing contacted police after discovering a patient had been getting evening medications along with the anti-anxiety drug Ativan and Benadryl when she was not supposed to receive them. “Your (sic) welcome! I hope she is asleep most of the day tomorrow,” prosecutors said Reaves wrote to an oncoming night nurse in a text that included the photograph of the victim apparently sleeping in a wheelchair. “Hint hint.” The medication caused the patient to become lethargic and be hospitalized, prosecutors say. Reavis admitted to police giving the medicine to the woman, saying she tried to wander away from the nursing home.\n\nKentucky\n\nLouisville: On the first Saturday after a new “safety zone” law went into effect at the state’s only abortion clinic, some protesters ignored the 10-foot-wide restricted area at the entrance as they followed patients to the door, shouting and berating them. No police were present to enforce the zone meant to ensure safe access to EMW Women’s Surgical Center, where patients often must pass through shouting, jostling anti-abortion protesters waving graphic signs of fetuses. “Repent, murderer!” self-proclaimed sidewalk preacher Jesse Morrell shouted as he and others stepped inside the restricted area to follow a young woman to the door of the clinic. The city’s police department put out a statement Sunday saying it had more urgent priorities than trying to enforce the new city ordinance, which requires officers to witness a violation before they can issue a citation. Morrell, a regular protester outside EMW, said he doesn’t feel constrained by the restricted area. “The thing about these buffer zones is that if you don’t test them, they just get bigger,” he said. “Eventually the whole street will be a buffer zone if we don’t stand up for our rights.” The protests Saturday grew increasingly chaotic as more protesters arrived, swarming vehicles that pulled up to the curb to drop off patients, shouting and admonishing them as they exited.\n\nLouisiana\n\nBaton Rouge: A Louisiana-based research organization and a professor at the University of Southern Mississippi are joining forces in a research project aimed at restoring and protecting the Chandeleur Islands in the northern Gulf of Mexico. In a news release announcing the effort, USM noted that the islands provide habitat for gulf fish and wildlife and offer storm protection for coastal Louisiana. Led by Dr. Kelly Darnell, an assistant research professor at USM, the project is one of 20 awarded a combined $2.3 million to find ways of best managing natural resources in the Gulf, including marine mammals, shorebirds, barrier islands, seagrass and fisheries. The projects, slated to begin this month, are funded by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration RESTORE Science Program. The Water Institute of the Gulf, based in Baton Rouge, will be among those working with Darnell. Others include the University of Florida, Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and Gulf of Mexico Alliance. Darnell’s project, which relates to seagrass ecosystems along the Chandeleur Islands, was given $127,065. The project will provide usable data for restoration and long-term management of the islands.\n\nMaine\n\nBar Harbor: Acadia National Park is on track for a record year, as park officials see no signs of visitation slowing down this fall. The park’s busiest year on record was 2018, when there were 3.54 million visits. This year, the number could top 4 million, Kevin Schneider, park superintendent, told the Acadia Advisory Commission. Things have taken off since 2020, which was an off year because of the COVID-19 pandemic. The 2.67 million visits Acadia recorded in 2020 amounted to the lowest annual count the park has had since 2014, the Bangor Daily News reports. But visitation picked up significantly last fall. Since October 2020, “every single month has been a record month” for visitation, according to Adam Gibson, a social scientist for Acadia. The past 11 months have had on average 22% more visitors than the same period from the year before, he said. The park had roughly 800,000 visits last month, and Acadia has welcomed an estimated 2.75 million visitors so far in 2021. The volume of people in the park has resulted in more rescues, said Therese Picard, the park’s chief ranger. The park typically handles two dozen rescues through August of each year, she said, but there have been 50 rescues so far this year. Most of the rescues involve leg injuries of some sort.\n\nMaryland\n\nAnnapolis: BP has inked a 15-year agreement with Annapolis-based CleanBay Renewables to turn poultry litter into natural gas. The partnership involves mixing poultry litter with water in a closed system known as an anaerobic digester. One of the end products is biogas, which includes methane. The biogas can be processed into renewable natural gas and used to fuel vehicles. “We have a portfolio of projects and a corporate strategy to develop 30 (facilities) across the U.S.,” said Thomas Spangler, CleanBay Renewables’ executive chairman. Among the first locations slated to receive such a facility is Westover, in Somerset County, with a groundbreaking scheduled for early in the first quarter of 2022. That is expected to be fully operational by mid-2024. Usually, such facilities employ 26 full-time employees over three shifts a day running 24 hours a day, all year. Completing a two-year construction period could also create an additional 250 jobs. According to Spangler, the initial process behind green-lighting projects started with reaching out to Somerset Economic Development Commission and county planning and zoning officials. At the state level, the company approached the Maryland Department of Commerce, state workforce agencies, and area community colleges and universities.\n\nMassachusetts\n\nPlymouth: A museum dedicated to the English colony of Plymouth and local Indigenous tribes is opening a new exhibit to mark the 400th anniversary of Thanksgiving. The Plimoth Patuxet Museums said the exhibit, entitled “We Gather Together: Thanksgiving, Gratitude, and the Making of an American Holiday,” will open Saturday. The exhibit will explore the relationship between Native Americans and English colonists to “better understand the events that led to the first Thanksgiving,” said the museum, which features a replica colonial village and reenactors in Plymouth. It will feature rarely seen artifacts from the museum’s collection, as well as art from across the centuries tracing how the New England tradition grew and emerged as a national holiday in the 19th century, the museum said. “Patuxet/Plymouth is the place where ancient traditions of gratitude in both Indigenous and European cultures merged,” the museum said in a statement. “ ‘We Gather Together’ will explore the ancient and deeply human expression of gratitude that is the bedrock of this national holiday.” The Pokanoket tribe and their sachem Massasoit shared in three days of feasting and entertainment with English colonists in the autumn of 1621, helping to inspire the holiday of gathering and giving thanks, according to the museum.\n\nMichigan\n\nYpsilanti: A “Black Lives Matter” street mural painted this summer in southeastern Michigan has been defaced by vandals who covered part of it with white paint. The weekend attack in Ypsilanti left the 260-foot mural’s words “Black Lives” drenched in white paint, while the word “Matter” was untouched. Trische Duckworth, executive director of the community organization Survivors Speak, was joined Sunday by city officials and others who expressed outrage over the vandalism in the city about 35 miles southwest of Detroit. “It was an ugly display of hatred,” Duckworth said. She said that no matter who defaced the mural, the act shows that racism and white supremacy “are not a thing of the past. It’s alive and active.” City manager Frances McMullan said law enforcement is investigating the vandalism. She said in a statement that the city was “sickened by this horrible act of destruction” but that the mural would be restored. The vandals left behind the painted name of a group identified by the Southern Poverty Law Center as a white nationalist hate group. The Ypsilanti City Council approved the mural at the entrance of a city park in February. Volunteers painted the mural and a second one in June using donated paint. Duckworth said the council is expected to discuss the defaced mural this week.\n\nMinnesota\n\nSt. Paul: Agriculture officials in the state say they are seeing an increase in inquiries about mental health. “We are seeing a lot of despair right now, a lot of fear, a lot of anxiety,” said Meg Moynihan, who works for the Minnesota Department of Agriculture with a focus on the human side of farming. Moynihan recently put an ad on Facebook with a link to mental health help. The response caught her attention: nearly 2,500 clicks in 18 days, Minnesota Public Radio reports. “So they’re not just looking at, ‘Oh, there’s the phone number in the ad I could call,’ but they’re clicking through for more information,” Moynihan said. “And I’m hoping that’s some people who want that kind of help and support for themselves. But I’m also hoping it’s for people who might be concerned about somebody they know.” Commissioner of Agriculture Thom Petersen recently surveyed conditions in northwestern Minnesota, where the drought is taking its biggest toll on the state. “I thought I was in Arizona,” he said. “I just looked at this bare church with no grass and the graves, you know, looked like a ghost town. And I kept going, and the pastures were the worst I’ve ever seen in my life.” Peterson said he also met an 80-year-old farmer who’d just sold off all his sheep who said the situation was the worst he’s seen in his lifetime.\n\nMississippi\n\nClarksdale: The Mississippi Writers Trail has unveiled a marker for Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist and short story writer Richard Ford. The marker for Ford, a Jackson native, was placed recently at the Clarksdale Carnegie Public Library. Ford won acclaim with his first two novels, “A Piece of My Heart” and “The Ultimate Good Luck.” “Our library here in little Clarksdale, Mississippi, is just so pleased to pay tribute and to honor one of the most well-known greatest writers of all times, a native Mississippian, a novelist, a short story writer, and a Pulitzer Prize Winner,” Mary Caradine, interim director of the Carnegie Public Library of Clarksdale and Coahoma County, said in a press release. “Mr. Ford’s achievements are known far and wide.” Ford’s novel “The Sportsman” was named one of TIME Magazine’s Top 100 novels published since the magazine’s inception. Ford wrote “The Sportswriter” while living in rural Coahoma County, and he used the book’s protagonist in future novels, including “Independence Day,” for which he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize and PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction in 1996. “Richard Ford is a true international author and cultural essayist who brings a rich view of the Southern experience to his readers,” Visit Mississippi Director Craig Ray said.\n\nMissouri\n\nKansas City: A federal investigation is underway after arson damaged a historic church that now serves a congregation predominantly made up of people from South Sudan. John Ham of the Kansas City office of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives told the Kansas City Star that authorities have determined the blaze was intentionally set, making it a federal crime. The fire was discovered about 9:15 a.m. Saturday at the building known as Harlem Baptist Church on the city’s north side. Arriving firefighters discovered the front of the building and an area of stairs going to the basement were fully engulfed in flames and determined that’s where the fire started. One firefighter had to be rescued after the stairway collapsed but was not injured. The church suffered heavy fire damage to the front and smoke and water damage elsewhere. The church, founded in 1907 as the Harlem Tabernacle Church, is the last remaining original building of a non-incorporated community known as Harlem. It now serves as a gathering place for the United Christian Fellowship. Pastor Gabriel Riak said the congregation has Black and white members, including Sudanese and Americans. He said he was grateful no one was in the building, KMBC reports. Members plan to restore the church, which sustained about $90,000 in damage, he said.\n\nMontana\n\nHelena: Health officials are begging residents to wear masks indoors and get vaccinated against COVID-19 as hospitals face increasing strain in the absence of any statewide health mandates. Officials in Bozeman and Missoula lamented their inability to implement public health restrictions to limit the spread of the coronavirus after the Legislature passed several laws earlier this year curtailing the power of local health officers to implement rules such as mask requirements and limits on gathering sizes. “Now is the time when we would have mandates in place,” said D’Shane Barnett, Missoula County health officer. “Unfortunately, we have anti-health state legislators who went out of their way to make that not possible.” Lori Christensen, public health officer for Gallatin County, said the legislative changes have “complicated the scene” in terms of immediate action she can take. She said she trying to navigate “the complexity of the law,” but a mask mandate is not on the horizon. In Missoula, officials have requested 24 National Guard soldiers to assist the county in addressing its COVID-19 surge at health care facilities and in The Sleepy Inn, a facility used to quarantine unhoused people who are diagnosed with the virus or identified as close contacts. Bozeman Health has also put in a request for National Guard assistance.\n\nNebraska\n\nLincoln: The state is one of the few in the nation that haven’t legalized cannabis use in some form, but the industry has already launched a lobbying group to help influence the rules that will regulate the industry. John Cartier, president of the Nebraska Cannabis Association, said the organization expects some form of marijuana legalization to be approved in the state in coming years, so it makes sense to be prepared, according to the Lincoln Journal Star. “It is not unreasonable to predict that some form of legalization will happen before this decade is done, and with several ballot initiatives planned for 2022, it could come as early as January 2023,” he said. Two ballot initiatives working in tandem to legalize medical marijuana were filed with the Nebraska Secretary of State’s Office, and a petition to legalize all uses of marijuana remains on file. Both are seeking to put the question of legalization before voters next year.\n\nNevada\n\nLas Vegas: A death row inmate convicted in the 1980 robbery-killing of a man for $2 is no longer eligible for capital punishment and must be resentenced, the Nevada Supreme Court said. The justices ruled Thursday that a New York court’s recent erasure of Samuel Howard’s lone conviction for a violent crime took the death penalty off the table for his Nevada murder conviction, the Las Vegas Review-Journal reports. Howard, 73, has been on death row for nearly 40 years after being sentenced in the fatal 1980 shooting of Las Vegas dentist George Monahan during a robbery. According to the Nevada high court, the vacating of Howard’s New York conviction eliminated the one remaining aggravating circumstance making him eligible for a possible death sentence. Under a new penalty hearing for Howard, a jury would decide between on whether his sentence of life in prison would come with or without the possibility of parole. The last person executed by Nevada was Daryl Mack, in 2006 for the 1988 murder of Betty Jane May, of Reno.\n\nNew Hampshire\n\nLebanon: Dartmouth-Hitchcock is starting a dermatology clinic to meet the unique skin care needs of people with Down syndrome. The clinic is opening Tuesday in Manchester. There are many associated skin conditions with Down syndrome, including dry skin, excessive dandruff, rashes around the mouth, acne in the groin and armpits, patchy hair loss, vitiligo, and toenail and foot fungus, Dartmouth-Hitchcock said in a news release. Down syndrome is also linked with other medical conditions such as congenital heart disease, celiac disease, chronic ear infections and thyroid disease. The clinic will consider how treatment plans will affect other medical conditions common with Down syndrome. “Since before the COVID-19 pandemic, it has been my dream to have a dermatology clinic specifically for people with Down syndrome – to really take our time to educate and empower. We are excited to get started,” dermatologist Jillian Rork said in a news release.\n\nNew Jersey\n\nJersey City: An officer safely caught a 1-month-old baby dropped off a second-floor balcony over the weekend, police said. The Hudson County prosecutor’s office said Officer Eduardo Matute was among those called to the Jersey City residence Saturday morning after reports that a man was threatening the baby. He and several officers were positioned below the second-floor balcony as the child was dangled over the balcony railing. Officials said the man dropped the infant after a lengthy standoff, and Matute caught the child. City spokesperson Kimberly Wallace-Scalcione said the child was taken to the hospital as a precaution. Mayor Steve Fulop later posted a photo on social media of the officer holding the child, who was wrapped in a white blanket. “Thankfully the baby wasn’t harmed physically,” Fulop said. Wallace-Scalcione said the man who dropped the baby was immediately arrested, and charges are pending. “Kudos to the (Jersey City Police Department) and all the officers involved for their heroics and for bringing a safe conclusion to this dangerous situation,” Prosecutor Esther Suarez said in a Twitter post.\n\nNew Mexico\n\nAlbuquerque: Amid debate over the state’s system of releasing felony defendants, University of New Mexico research indicates that just under 5% of Albuquerque-area defendants awaiting trial commit violent crimes while free from jail. Findings from the university’s Institute for Social Research’s analysis of more than 10,000 felony cases in Bernalillo County also included that less than 1% of people on pretrial release were arrested for a first-degree felony while on pretrial release, the Albuquerque Journal reports. A senior state courts official said the research indicates that the vast majority of defendants don’t commit new crimes pending trial, but the top prosecutor for Bernalillo County and Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham said its still troubling that some defendants commit crimes while free. Administrative Office of the Courts Director Artie Pepin said the research “validates the pretrial justice improvements underway in New Mexico.” District Attorney Raul Torrez said through spokeswoman Laura Rodriguez that the few violent crimes committed by people on pretrial release are “an unacceptable price for our community to pay.” Lujan Grisham spokesman Tripp Stelnicki said it “can still be utterly devastating to a family or a community” when 5% of felony defendants commit a violent crime.\n\nNew York\n\nAlbany: The state is taking steps to address a mounting shortage of school bus drivers. Gov. Kathy Hochul on Sunday announced several short-term and long-term initiatives, including opening up new testing sites for commercial driver’s license applicants, expediting the testing and permitting process, and conducting outreach to law enforcement, firefighters, military and other organizations that already have trained drivers. A study by the New York Association for Pupil Transportation two years ago found that 8 in 10 school transportation directors considered driver shortages a major concern, and the COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated the problem. A lack of drivers can lead to delayed departures and arrivals and the cancellation of field trips and other extracurricular activities. “Our schools and public health officials have moved mountains to ensure our children receive an in-person education this year, and we are leaving no stone unturned to make sure schools have adequate bus service to bring students to school and back,” Hochul said in a statement. The state is reaching out to more than half a million existing commercial driver’s license holders in the state, including those who are currently unemployed, Hochul said.\n\nNorth Carolina\n\nMonroe: Union County’s school board voted Monday to modify the district’s quarantine protocols to comply with state law and let the county health department lead contact tracing efforts. The move comes after the North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services threatened to sue the district for overhauling contact tracing procedures and allowing most of its 7,000 quarantined students back into the classroom so long as they are not symptomatic or known to be infected with the coronavirus. “UCPS will recognize quarantines in accordance with state law of students and staff who are considered close contacts with a COVID-19-positive case,” said Kathy Heintel, a member of the board. Because it is one of a handful of districts not compelling students or staff to wear masks and does not have an online learning option, some Union County parents say the quarantines have amounted to 14 days of near-total learning loss. Roughly one-sixth of the district’s 39,000 enrolled pupils were stuck at home the week before the district substantially changed its COVID-19 protocols. Fewer than 1,700 kids were quarantined last week after the changes, a 77% weekly drop.\n\nNorth Dakota\n\nBismarck: Regulators say the state has officially lost its status as the nation’s second-biggest oil producer. North Dakota produced just over 1 million barrels of oil per day in July, the most recent month for which data is available from the state Oil and Gas Division. The July production marks a 56,000-barrel-per-day or 5% drop from June, the Bismarck Tribune reports. Texas continues to lead the nation in oil production. The Permian Basin spans parts of New Mexico and Texas, and it’s arguably the biggest competition for North Dakota’s Bakken oil patch. The southern oil-producing region is closer to major refineries and export terminals, and it attracts significant drilling and investment within the oil and gas industry. North Dakota ranked second, behind Texas, in oil production for nine years. It lost that status to New Mexico in July. The two states had been neck and neck for several months. New Mexico had 82 rigs drilling Friday, far more than the 27 operating in North Dakota. Aside from bragging rights, a state’s position holds other implications. Rankings can affect an oil company’s ability to find investors to fund a project in a state, North Dakota regulators have said. North Dakota had surpassed Alaska to take second place in oil production in 2012.\n\nOhio\n\nColumbus: The State Medical Board of Ohio has renewed the medical license of a doctor who drew nationwide attention and derision for claiming COVID-19 vaccines were magnetizing recipients and had a connection to 5G wireless towers. Dr. Sherri Tenpenny, a state-licensed doctor of osteopathic medicine, first received her license in 1984, and it had been set to expire Oct. 1, on its regular two-year basis. Tenpenny spoke to the Ohio House Health Committee in June about her false vaccine claims. She is among the 12 most prolific disseminators of COVID-19 misinformation on social media, according to research from the Center for Countering Digital Hate. An anti-vaccine activist since the 2000s, Tenpenny has called vaccines a “method of mass destruction” and “depopulation”; charges $623 for her “boot camp” to train people how to convince others to refrain from vaccination; and sells her book “Saying No to Vaccines” for $578 on Amazon. State law allows the medical board, with the votes of at least six of its 12 members, to refuse renewal of any physician for “making a false, fraudulent, deceptive, or misleading statement” in relation to the practice of medicine.\n\nOklahoma\n\nOklahoma City: The state on Monday scheduled its first executions since it put lethal injections on hold six years ago following a series of mishaps. Included on the list of seven executions is Julius Jones, whose case has drawn national attention. The Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals scheduled Jones to die Nov. 18 by lethal injection for the 1999 slaying of Edmond businessman Paul Howell, who was shot in front of his family during a carjacking. The court set the date despite a Sept. 13 recommendation by the Oklahoma Pardon and Parole Board that Jones’ death sentence be commuted to life imprisonment without parole. The recommendation has received no decision by Republican Gov. Kevin Stitt, who must make the final decision. Jones’ case was featured in 2018 on the ABC television documentary series “The Last Defense.” That drew the attention of reality television star Kim Kardashian West and numerous professional athletes with ties to Oklahoma, who appealed for clemency. Jones, 41, has consistently maintained that he is innocent of the killing. Oklahoma once had one of the busiest death chambers in the nation, but executions were put on hold following a botched lethal injection in 2014 that left an inmate writhing on the gurney and drug mix-ups in 2015.\n\nOregon\n\nDallas: The Oregon Medical Board has revoked the license of a doctor west of Salem for refusing to follow COVID-19 guidelines in his office, spreading misinformation about masks and overprescribing opioids. According to medical board documents, the board also fined Steven Arthur LaTulippe $10,000 on Sept. 2, The Oregonian/OregonLive reports. LaTulippe sued the medical board in January after his license was suspended for placing patients in danger by disregarding COVID-19 mandates and asking patients to remove their masks. LaTulippe’s family practice, South View Medical Arts in Dallas, did not properly screen patients and relied on the receptionist’s ability to visually gauge whether visitors were sick, according to the medical board documents. At least 95% of patients did not use masks at the clinic between March and December 2020, LaTulippe told medical board officials. LaTulippe made bogus claims to patients that masks were ineffective against COVID-19 and could cause carbon dioxide poisoning, according to the medical board. LaTulippe also made anti-mask comments during a pro-Trump rally in Salem on Nov. 7, 2020. The Multnomah County Republican Party posted footage of his comments to YouTube, which removed the video for violating its community guidelines.\n\nPennsylvania\n\nPhiladelphia: Supporters of a plan to open supervised injection sites to try to reduce overdose deaths urged the U.S. Supreme Court on Friday to review a court decision that bans the practice. The test case centers on a nonprofit group’s Safehouse project in Philadelphia, though officials in other states are watching closely as they debate similar programs. Nationally, more than 93,000 people died last year from drug overdoses, a sharp spike from just a year earlier. A divided U.S. appeals court had rejected the Safehouse plan in January, although Philadelphia’s Democratic mayor and top prosecutor endorse it. The city itself lost 1,200 people to overdoses last year. The nonprofit group’s plan to open a site was thwarted when former U.S. Attorney William McSwain, a Trump appointee now running for governor, argued that it violated a 1980s-era drug law aimed at “crackhouses.” The district judge rejected McSwain’s argument, but the appeals court agreed with him in a 2-1 decision that nonetheless called the goal of harm reduction “admirable.” Safehouse last month asked the U.S. Supreme Court to review that decision. The amicus brief filed Friday said Congress never intended the crackhouse statute to encompass harm reduction efforts offered by medical personnel.\n\nRhode Island\n\nProvidence: The state is offering $4 million in grants to help communities build and expand recreation facilities. Democratic Gov. Dan McKee and the Department of Environmental Management announced Friday that the outdoor recreation matching grants would be available to local municipalities and Native American tribes seeking to acquire, develop or renovate outdoor recreational facilities in their communities. Grant applications are due by Dec. 17. The money is provided through a clean water and green bond approved by voters. McKee said the state’s network of bikeways, open spaces and other recreational assets help attract people and businesses to Rhode Island. “Access to green space and clean, functional recreation facilities improves health, promotes stronger social ties, and enhances neighborhood satisfaction and pride,” McKee said in a statement. Applicants can apply for smaller recreation development grants or larger acquisition grants, capped at $400,000.\n\nSouth Carolina\n\nLexington: A school board will consider asking the Legislature to drop what amounts to a ban on school mask mandates to prevent the spread of COVID-19. The State newspaper reports the Lexington County School District 1 board surveyed parents recently and found more than two-thirds supported a mask mandate. A similar percentage of district employees also backed a mandate. At its Tuesday board meeting, Lexington 1 board will consider asking lawmakers to repeal a part of the state budget that effectively bans school mask mandates by denying districts the funds to enforce them. “For months, we have heard from a small and vocal group of parents and staff on both sides of the mask debate,” school board chair Anne Marie Green said in an email to parents. “We wanted to know how our entire community truly felt about masking.” Green told The State she isn’t sure if the board would adopt a mask mandate immediately “because our numbers are going in the right direction.” However, she said the local school board is better positioned to respond to sudden changes than the Legislature, which won’t hold a regular session until early next year. The S.C. Department of Health and Environmental Control reported 2,357 new confirmed COVID-19 cases and 17 coronavirus-related deaths Monday, according to the paper.\n\nSouth Dakota\n\nSioux Falls: Musicals scheduled in the state’s two largest cities have been postponed or scrapped due to the pandemic. A show that was set to run this past weekend at the Orpheum Theater in Sioux Falls was postponed to Sept.29-30 after two cast members tested positive for the coronavirus. The production of “Lost in Vegas,” held by local theater company Lights Up, held its opening run last weekend in front of about 200 people each day. After one cast member had tested positive for the virus this past week, the show went on Thursday after officials blocked the first two rows and warned the 150 people in the audience about the results, director Brent Grosvenor said. “We did the right thing. We talked to the cast. The cast made an informed decision still to perform,” Grosvenor said. “We had understudies replacing sick actors, and that’s how the real world works.” After another cast member tested positive for the virus Friday, theater officials called off the rest of the weekend shows. In Rapid City, the Black Hills Community Theatre announced Friday that it had canceled all planned performances of “Matilda” following the increased spread of COVID-19 infections in the region. Theater officials told the Rapid City Journal many younger participants in the show are not yet eligible for vaccinations.\n\nTennessee\n\nMemphis: State officials say donors have added 144 acres to a state park known for being the first east of the Mississippi River to be open to African Americans. The Tennessee Department of Environment and Conservation said the expansion of T.O. Fuller State Park is the result of a donation by philanthropists Hugh and Margaret Jones Fraser and the Carrington Jones family of Memphis. Nonprofits groups The Land Trust for Tennessee and Wolf River Conservancy helped with the acquisition. The park, opened in 1938, was also only the second state park nationwide that was open to African Americans. In 1942 the park was named after Thomas O. Fuller, a prominent African American educator, pastor, politician, civic leader and author. The park includes 8 miles of trails, four shelters, 35 picnic tables, basketball courts, an interpretive center, and diverse landscapes with more than 200 plant species.\n\nTexas\n\nSan Antonio: A doctor who said he performed an abortion in defiance of a new state law has all but dared supporters of the near-total ban on the procedure to try making an early example of him by filing a lawsuit – the only way the restrictions can be enforced. The state’s largest anti-abortion group said Monday that it’s looking into the matter after Dr. Alan Braid in a weekend Washington Post opinion column became the first Texas abortion provider to publicly reveal he violated the law that took effect Sept. 1. The law prohibits abortions once medical professionals can detect cardiac activity, which is usually around six weeks and before many women even know they are pregnant. Prosecutors cannot take criminal action against Braid, because the law explicitly forbids that. The only way the ban can be enforced is through lawsuits brought by private citizens, who are entitled to claim at least $10,000 in damages if successful. Legal experts say Braid’s admission is likely to set up another test of whether the law can stand after the Supreme Court allowed it to take effect. Braid wrote that on Sept. 6 he provided an abortion to a woman who was still in her first trimester but beyond the state’s new limit. “I fully understood that there could be legal consequences – but I wanted to make sure that Texas didn’t get away with its bid to prevent this blatantly unconstitutional law from being tested,” he wrote.\n\nUtah\n\nSalt Lake City: The state’s newest license plate option features an outline of Utah and five hands of different colors holding it into place. The words “many stories, one Utah” are printed underneath, the Deseret News reports. Gov. Spencer Cox said he hopes someone will see it and think about what it represents. “I hope and believe because of the incredible artwork that it will inspire conversations,” Cox said. The new license plate unveiled at the state Capitol on Thursday honors the life and work of Martin Luther King Jr. While there are no direct links to his image or likeness – as a result of legal reasons from the King estate – the design itself is inspired by him and his work as a civil rights activist before he was assassinated in 1968. Utah’s work toward an MLK-themed license plate dates back to 2012, according to Simba Maponga, chairman of the state’s Martin Luther King Jr. Human Rights Commission. A 2020 bill led by Rep. Sandra Hollins, D-Salt Lake City, and Sen. Luz Escamilla, D-Salt Lake City, then paved the way for a license plate to recognize King’s work and life, with money from the plates going toward scholarships for “underrepresented or underserved” students. The winning design was submitted by Eleanor Smith, a former Timpview High School and current BYU student.\n\nVermont\n\nSt. Albans: The city’s hospital is seeking approval to build a $7.5 million expansion of its emergency department. The Northwestern Medical Center has been considering an upgrade to its emergency department, which was built around 1989, since before the start of the coronavirus pandemic, said Jonathan Billings, the hospital’s vice president of community relations. COVID-19 has clearly exacerbated the need, Billing’s told the St. Albans Messenger earlier this month. The emergency room currently has curtained treatment bays to separate patients. “If you have someone with active COVID-19, you can’t put them in a curtained treatment bay,” he said. The expansion would eliminate such use by updating those areas to increase patient privacy and safety and to better limit the spread of infectious airborne diseases, such as the coronavirus, through additional air quality-controlled rooms, Billings told the newspaper. The expansion would add six emergency department treatment stations, bringing the total to 20. About 2,400 square feet would be added, and 6,800 square feet of existing space would be renovated.\n\nVirginia\n\nNorfolk: A Republican candidate for the House of Delegates has apologized after tweeting a derogatory comment about the appearance of House Speaker Eileen Filler-Corn that some Democrats said was an antisemitic attack. The Washington Post reports that Hahns Copeland, who is running to represent the Norfolk-based 89th District, on Friday tweeted a response to a tweet by House Democrats that featured a video of Filler-Corn, who is Jewish, talking about a child care subsidy program. “I was surprised to see a pair of eyes and a mouth with that NOSE,” Copeland tweeted. He apologized in another tweet late Friday, calling the earlier tweet “immature and impulsive.” “It was never intended to be anti-Semitic or reference her ethnicity or religion,” Copeland’s tweet said. He conceded his earlier tweet was “inappropriate and insensitive.” Democrats said it was an antisemitic attack on Filler-Corn. The speaker’s staff said Friday that she had not heard directly from Copeland. “These types of hateful comments are unfortunately far too common today, and they are too often invoked instead of solutions to the real issues Virginians face,” Filler-Corn said in a statement. “I hope this candidate and his supporters choose to do what is right and acknowledge that words from those in office or seeking it have an impact.”\n\nWashington\n\nSpokane: This has been a record-breaking year of drought in much of Eastern Washington, state officials say. In April, a huge volume of snow in the Cascade Range measured in at 132% of normal statewide, raising hopes of an abundant water year, the state Department of Ecology said in a blog post last week. But now 16 Washington counties, including 13 in Eastern Washington, are drier than they’ve ever been since record-keeping began in 1895, the blog said. According to the National Weather Service, from March to August the state saw just 6.90 inches of precipitation. Normal during that time is 13.03 inches. To end the current drought in the lower Columbia River area, Ecology Drought Coordinator Jeff Marti said the state would need 11 inches of rain by next April. The odds of that kind of rebound are low. “The question is, will we have a full recovery before next spring?” Marti said. “The odds for significant improvement of conditions are pretty good for Western Washington. But I’m less optimistic about the east side. Based on historic climatology, the odds for significantly ameliorating current conditions is about 1 in 5 across Eastern Washington. For a full recovery in Eastern Washington, the odds are about 1 in 20,” Marti said.\n\nWest Virginia\n\nCharleston: A grassroots group is using newspaper advertisements to further push Sen. Joe Manchin to support issues it considers important to low-income West Virginians. The Poor People’s Campaign took out the full-page ads Sunday in the Charleston Gazette-Mail, The Herald-Dispatch in Huntington, The Parkersburg News and Sentinel and The Journal of Martinsburg. The group has repeatedly pressed the influential moderate Democratic senator in an effort that includes conducting a rally at the state Capitol in Charleston last month. Manchin has opposed a $15 federal minimum wage and an elections bill that he said he couldn’t support because it lacked bipartisan support. Senate Democrats unveiled a pared-back elections bill last week. The Poor People’s Campaign also had a news conference scheduled Monday to urge Manchin to help change Senate filibuster rules that have blocked passage of legislation. Scheduled participants include state organizers as well as the group’s national co-chairs. Manchin long has defended the filibuster as many of his Senate colleagues have shifted on the issue.\n\nWisconsin\n\nMadison: The retired conservative Wisconsin Supreme Court justice leading a Republican-ordered investigation into the 2020 presidential election released a video Monday threatening to subpoena election officials who don’t comply and saying the intent was not to overturn President Joe Biden’s relatively narrow victory in the battleground state. The unusual 6-minute video from Michael Gableman comes after election clerks were confused by an email his office sent last week that was flagged in at multiple counties as junk or a possible security risk and was not broadly forwarded to municipal clerks as he wanted. Gableman said Monday that if the state’s 1,900-plus municipal and county election officials did not cooperate with his investigation, he would “compel” them to comply. Republican Assembly Speaker Robin Vos has said he would sign subpoenas requested by Gableman as part of the investigation. Vos hired Gableman at a cost of nearly $680,000 in taxpayer money to conduct the investigation. Vos declined to sign subpoenas sought by Rep. Janel Bandtjen, chair of the Assembly elections committee, seeking ballots, voting machines and other data in Milwaukee and Brown counties. Gableman said local clerks who run elections in Wisconsin will be required to prove that voting was done legally.\n\nWyoming\n\nCasper: The city is considering offering employees a $250 incentive for getting fully vaccinated against COVID-19, the Casper Star-Tribune reports. City workers could also get $100 for dependents or spouses who get their inoculations, as well as $50 for booster shots, and the employees themselves would be eligible retroactively if they’ve already gotten their shots, according to the paper. The proposal is set to be considered at a City Council meeting Tuesday.\n\nFrom USA TODAY Network and wire reports", "authors": [], "publish_date": "2021/09/21"}, {"url": "https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/arizona/2020/10/28/trump-and-harris-arizona-live-updates-campaign-trail/3750791001/", "title": "Trump and Harris in Arizona: Campaign trail heats up before ...", "text": "Arizona Republic\n\nBoth presidential campaigns will travel to Arizona on Wednesday to make another pitch to voters in the new swing state less than a week out from Election Day. President Donald Trump and U.S. Sen. Kamala Harris, the Democratic vice presidential candidate, separately will hold events in the state on Wednesday.\n\nHighlights:\n\nAt the Bullhead City rally, a U.S. fighter jet intercepted a plane flying in restricted airspace near the Trump rally in an overhead event that briefly distracted the President and the crowd.\n\nTrump rallied thousands of supporters from Arizona, Nevada and California in the northwest Arizona city, repeating his typical talking points, followed by a very similar speech with a large crowd in Goodyear.\n\nHarris held socially distanced events in Tucson, including a meeting of Latina business owners and a drive-in rally at Pima Community College, and Phoenix, where she is holding events with Black leaders and singer Alicia Keys.\n\nFollow along throughout the day with Arizona Republic reporters as they document both campaign visits.\n\n5:45 p.m.: Kamala Harris wraps up Arizona visit with Alicia Keys\n\nSen. Kamala Harris took the stage with Alicia Keys at Phoenix Municipal Stadium around 5 p.m., the song “Girl on Fire” blaring and supporters honking their horns.\n\nIn a race when so many voters are simply fatigued by politics and just about everything else, the two tried to hit an energizing tone in the election’s last days.\n\n“Get all up in your feelings of civic pride,” Keys told the crowd.\n\nThe event did not involve Keys, a singer, singing.\n\nArizona, which has embraced voting by mail over the past few decades, has seen a particularly strong turnout this year. Turnout in Maricopa County, which includes Phoenix, surpassed early voting in 2016 on Tuesday.\n\nHarris told the Arizona audience she would, “in the spirit of the late, great John McCain” offer some “straight talk.”\n\nShe attacked President Donald Trump for his response to COVID-19, calling it “the greatest failure of any presidential administration we have ever witnessed as a country.”\n\n“The president of the United States said it was a hoax,” she said.\n\nHarris added: “It did not have to be this bad.”\n\nThe senator spoke for about a half-hour before departing for Sky Harbor International Airport, with plans to depart around 6 p.m.\n\n— Andrew Oxford\n\n5:30 p.m.: Alicia Keys campaigns with Harris\n\nU.S. Sen. Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominee for vice president, is now at her fourth event in Arizona for the day.\n\nThe final event of the day is a drive-in rally in a large parking lot in the shadow of the iconic rock formations of Papago Park.\n\nThe campaign says there are 104 cars here.\n\nThe line-up:\n\nCongressional candidate Hiral Tipirneni\n\nCongressman Tom O’Halleran (AZ-1)\n\nCongressman Ruben Gallego (AZ-7)\n\nCongressman Greg Stanton (AZ-9)\n\nPhoenix Mayor Kate Gallego\n\nFinishing it off, Alicia Keys is taking the stage with Kamala Harris.\n\n— Andrew Oxford\n\n4:45 p.m.: Jeff Flake voting for Biden\n\nAs President Donald Trump rallied supporters at two locations in Arizona, one of his old foes surfaced to support Democratic candidate Joe Biden.\n\nFormer U.S. Sen. Jeff Flake, a Republican and opponent of Trump, appeared in an ad touting Biden and criticizing Trump.\n\nFlake decided not to seek reelection in 2018 after repeated clashes with the Trump wing of the Republican Party.\n\nIn the ad, Flake talks about his conservative values and long record as a Republican. He urges Arizonans to vote for Biden.\n\n“Please don’t let anyone tell you that by casting your vote for Joe Biden, you are somehow not being conservative,” Flake says in one ad. “This year the most conservative thing you can do is to put country over party. That’s what I’m doing. I hope you will join me.”\n\nFlake isn’t the only prominent Arizona Republican to throw his support behind Biden publicly.\n\nCindy McCain, the wife of the late Republican Sen. John McCain, endorsed Biden in September.\n\n— Rachel Leingang\n\n4:25 p.m.: Trump departs Arizona\n\nAfter two rallies with largely the same appeals and talking points to voters in Bullhead City and Goodyear, President Donald Trump has departed Arizona via Air Force One.\n\nThe rallies marked the president’s 7th visit to Arizona this year.\n\n4 p.m.: Nigel Farage is here?\n\nAt his Goodyear rally, President Donald Trump invited a cadre of U.S. senators and U.S. House of Representatives Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., on stage to speak. After they left the stage, Trump introduced British politician Nigel Farage and brought him up to speak.\n\n“He beat the pollsters, he beat the media, he beat all the predictions. And here’s the worst bit — they’ve never forgiven him for it,” Farage said. “Four years of a false impeachment … this is the single most resilient and bravest person I have ever met in my life.”\n\nIt wasn't Farage's first political event in Arizona this week. On Tuesday, state Rep. Kelly Townsend, R-Mesa, posted a photo of herself with Farage on Twitter at an event that day.\n\nAmerican politicians praised Trump’s leadership and how his platform aligns with their values.\n\n“We are ground zero to save the country,” Sen. Martha McSally said. “Everything is on the line and my race is about the Senate majority. ... My race will decide the direction of the country.”\n\nAfter McSally left the stage, Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., took the stage, urging independents, libertarians and Black people to vote for Trump. He alleged that the Obama administration jailed an oversized amount of Black Americans and said that Trump is responsible for shortening their sentences.\n\nSen. Mike Lee took the stage after Paul, saying that the U.S. has had “four years of prosperity and peace” under Trump.\n\n“Quatro años mas,” Lee shouted multiple times on stage as the crowd rolled into another chant of “four more years.”\n\n“If you asked me the one state that determines our future, it’s Arizona,” McCarthy said before praising Trump’s leadership. “I’ve never seen a man fight harder and he’s never asked anything, but to make America first.”\n\n— Joshua Bowling\n\n3:30 p.m.: Harris meets with Black leaders\n\nU.S. Sen. Kamala Harris’ first stop in Phoenix on Wednesday was a meeting with Black community leaders.\n\nAs soon as she stepped off her flight from Tucson, the Democratic vice presidential nominee was asked about protests against police brutality and particularly the killing of Walter Wallace in Philadelphia.\n\n“Part of the reason that people are marching in the streets is that there has not been the level of attention, especially recently over the last few years, that is necessary from the president of the United States. And Joe’s committed to that,” she told reporters.\n\nHarris went on to call for creating a national registry of police officers who break the law so they don’t get fired in one community and move on to another. She also called for national standards on the use of force, decriminalizing marijuana and expunging the records of people convicted of marijuana offenses.\n\nThe senator made the same argument to a socially distanced gathering of a few dozen supporters inside The Van Buren event venue in downtown Phoenix.\n\nBut she also threw open the floor to a range of issues, from access to capital in communities of color to COVID-19.\n\nHarris noted that people of color are more likely to be hospitalized with COVID-19 and to die from it and businesses owned by people of color affected by the economic recession the pandemic has wrought are more likely to face barriers accessing capital.\n\nThe country’s recovery won’t be “like flipping a light switch,” she warned.\n\nHarris said, however, that it must be “taking, again, into account racial disparities, understanding we have to do this in a way that’s equitable.”\n\n— Andrew Oxford\n\n3:20 p.m.: F-16 escorted plane in restricted airspace in Bullhead City\n\nA U.S. fighter jet intercepted a plane flying in restricted airspace near President Donald Trump's rally in Bullhead City on Wednesday in an overhead event that briefly distracted the president and the crowd.\n\nThe North American Aerospace Defense Command posted on Twitter that it sent an F-16 to investigate \"a general aviation aircraft that was not in communication\" with air-traffic controllers as it neared Bullhead City.\n\n\"The violating aircraft was non-responsive to initial intercept procedures, but established radio communications after NORAD aircraft deployed signal flares,\" the agency noted. \"The aircraft was escorted out of the restricted area by the NORAD aircraft without further incident.\"\n\nAs many in the crowd saw the flares and air traffic nearby, Trump joked about the military craft trying to impress him.\n\n\"Wow. That plane is about four days old. We have all brand new equipment, F-35s, everything. We're the envy of the world,\" he said to cheers. \"You know what? We are the envy — do you know about that Dan? Look at that sucker. He's trying to show off to the president. Yeah, that's one of ours.\"\n\nAs noted by NORAD, the jet was an F-16, not an F-35.\n\n— Ronald J. Hansen\n\n3 p.m.: Trump praises Ducey\n\nPresident Donald Trump took the stage in Goodyear as Lee Greenwood’s “God Bless the USA” faded out on the sound system.\n\nTrump told the crowd that “we will win Arizona” and warned that a vote for Joe Biden would mean “shredding the Second Amendment,” continuing school closures, implementing the “biggest tax hike in history” and bringing “a Socialist nightmare.”\n\n“A vote for Joe Biden, sleepy Joe, is a vote for the biggest tax hike in history,” Trump said before the crowd started chanting, “Lock him up.”\n\nHe said 2021 will be the greatest economic year in U.S. history and said 2020 would have been if not for the COVID-19 pandemic and the economic fallout that followed. While the pandemic has taken a toll on the economy, Trump praised Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey for being quick to reopen Arizona businesses over the summer.\n\n“Your state is nice and open. The governor did a good job. I don’t know if you appreciated it, but he did a good job,” Trump said. “He may be here, I may get lucky and introduce him.”\n\nTrump's second speech of the day hit on the same major themes as his visit to Bullhead City: media bias, Biden's record, his handling of the pandemic, \"the swamp,\" a refrain that voting for Biden would mean families couldn't celebrate the holidays together.\n\n“You get the last word on Nov. 3,” Trump said. “It’s up to you. This is your country. And you have to save and create a great beautiful pathway for your country. .... What the hell do you have to lose? Vote for Trump.”\n\nHe also spent time attacking the “Anonymous” book after its author, Miles Taylor, revealed his identity.\n\n“Turned out to be a low-level staffer, a sleazebag, who’s never worked in the White House,” Trump said. “I thought it might have been Hope Hicks, right next to me. I thought it might have been Jared (Kushner),” adding Sen. Rand Paul and Sen. Mike Lee to the list to the crowd’s laughter.\n\nPaul and Lee are at the Goodyear event.\n\n— Joshua Bowling\n\n2:45 p.m.: Harris, Trump arrive in Phoenix area\n\nU.S. Sen. Kamala Harris, D-Calif., landed at Sky Harbor International Airport around 2:30 pm on Wednesday, beginning the second leg of a daylong trip around Arizona.\n\nAfter visiting Tucson, Harris is meeting with Black community leaders in Phoenix and holding an event with Alicia Keys. She is expected to depart the state in the evening.\n\nAir Force One, carrying President Donald Trump and some guests, including U.S. Sen. Martha McSally, touched down in Goodyear not long after.\n\nAs Air Force One touched down, the crowd turned into a sea of smartphones to capture the moment as Phil Collins’ “In the Air Tonight” played over the sound system.\n\n— Andrew Oxford and Joshua Bowling\n\n2:30 p.m.: Trump supporters don't see swing state\n\nWhile the dueling visits and frequency of stops from the Trump campaign lend credence to the state's status as a swing state this election, people who attended Trump's rally in one of the state's reddest areas don't think Arizona could really turn blue.\n\nRon Hines, a Bullhead City resident, made a prediction for Trump's success.\n\n\"We have the whole population of Bullhead here. If all these people vote, he'll win for sure,\" he said.\n\nPolls have shown the presidential race favoring Biden, which would be the first time Arizona went to a Democrat for president since 1996, when the state voted for President Bill Clinton's second term.\n\nSix days before his first election as an Arizona resident, Gary Tucker is convinced Trump can’t lose. He places no faith in the polls that show a change in Arizona.\n\n“Do you believe the polls? I don’t,” he said. “It’s going to be a landslide.”\n\nHe waved a hand across the crowd of supporters, most of whom were making their way for the exits. “Look at the crowds,” he said.\n\nTucker said he wouldn’t believe any results that showed Biden winning here. The only way that could happen, he insisted, was if the Democrats cheated.\n\nApple Connors and Jeff Connors ambled toward the exit after most of the crowd had dispersed. They had never seen anything like this near their home of Bullhead City.\n\n“That was awesome,” Apple Connors said through a MAGA mask. “It’s like once in a lifetime. You don’t see a president come to your little hometown.”\n\nJeff Connors said he believed Trump will be able to win what is looking to be a tight election in Arizona.\n\n“Look at the turnout he gets!” he said, gesturing at the tarmac around him where thousands had been gathered moments before.\n\n— Alden Woods, Emily Wilder and Rachel Leingang\n\n1:45 p.m.: Trump, Harris head to Phoenix area\n\nBoth Trump and Harris will now head to metro Pheonix.\n\nTrump concluded his remarks at a large rally in Bullhead City. Harris finished a drive-in car event in Tucson.\n\nTrump's next stop is in Goodyear in the southwest Valley for another large rally. Harris has two small events in Phoenix on her schedule.\n\n— Rachel Leingang\n\n1:30 p.m.: Trump attacks Biden, Harris in Bullhead City remarks\n\nTrump railed against his Democratic opponent, Joe Biden, and Democratic vice presidential running mate Sen. Kamala Harris. He questioned Biden’s energy levels, insinuating they were too low to serve as president, and highlighted Harris’ more liberal politics. With the Democratic ticket, Trump said, the nation will devolve into socialism.\n\nTrump said the election was a choice between economic prosperity and recovery from the pandemic or economic devastation and lockdowns.\n\n“Under lockdowns, countless Americans will die from suicides, drugs,” he said. “The cure cannot be worse than the problem itself. And Arizona, you’re opened up. But Nevada, get your governor to open up your state, please.”\n\nHe defended his management of the pandemic and warned what a Biden administration could bring: “With Sleepy Joe, there’d be no graduations, no weddings, no Thanksgivings — they’re already talking about no Thanksgiving.”\n\nPublic health officials are advising families and friends to avoid large gatherings to avoid spread of the coronavirus.\n\nTrump cast himself as the savior of conservatives, law enforcement and people of faith. This election, he said, he is “running against the left-wing mob and the left-wing media, the big-tech giants and RINOs,” short-hand for Republicans In Name Only. The term is typically used derisively about moderate Republicans.\n\n“A RINO may be the lowest form of human life,” Trump said.\n\nTrump showed a video of Democratic governors praising the federal response to the pandemic in interviews and clips purportedly showing Biden having memory lapses.\n\nThe Intercept has reported that the Trump campaign in recent days has created blatantly misleading videos of Biden to make him appear incoherent.\n\nHe also pledged to make the treatments he received after testing positive for COVID-19 available to all Americans, for free.\n\nNear the one-hour mark of the speech, Trump praised Gov. Doug Ducey, who spoke earlier in the event. Also in attendance are U.S. Sen. Martha McSally, U.S. Rep. Paul Gosar and Arizona Republican Party chair Kelli Ward.\n\n— Yvonne Wingett Sanchez and Alden Woods\n\n1:30 p.m.: Harris attacks Trump's record\n\nBy the time Harris took the outdoor stage Wednesday at Pima Community College West, about 100 cars had gathered for the pandemic-friendly drive-in rally.\n\nThe U.S. Senator pulled no punches, beginning her speech with a takedown of President Donald Trump’s handling of COVID-19 to date.\n\n“Donald Trump failed. He failed us,” Harris said, criticizing Trump’s decision to downplay the seriousness of the virus earlier this year and railing against his administration’s attempts to get the Affordable Care Act repealed. “He failed the American people.”\n\nHarris contrasted Trump’s health care philosophy with Biden’s, working to paint the Democratic Party as a guardian of health care access for Americans with low earnings and preexisting conditions.\n\nAt one point, she asked attendees to honk if they knew anyone with such a condition, rattling off a few examples such as diabetes and breast cancer. The honking was deafening.\n\nHarris also contrasted Trump and Biden’s economic strategies: While Biden evaluates the economy by looking at how the average American is doing, she said, Trump looks to the stock market.\n\nShe repeated Biden’s vows to repeal a Trump-sanctioned tax cut for the wealthy and invest the funds in infrastructure.\n\nHarris devoted the final portion of her remarks to the importance of voting, highlighting America’s “long history of powerful folks trying to make it difficult for other folks to vote.”\n\n“They know that when we vote, things change,” she said of historically marginalized groups. “Our democracy is always going to be as strong as our willingness to fight for it … and that means every one of us voting.”\n\n— Rafael Carranza and Maria Polletta\n\n1 p.m.: In Goodyear, warmup starts\n\nShortly before 1 p.m., speakers started warming up the crowd ahead of Trump’s arrival.\n\nThe crowd cheered as Phoenix native and Arizona House of Representatives candidate Tatiana Peña sang the final notes of the national anthem.\n\nRep. Debbie Lesko, R-Ariz., took the stage after, overpowered by jubilant cheers and applause when she asked the audience “What do you think, is Arizona going to reelect President Donald J. Trump?”\n\n“I think so, too,” she added after the applause died down.\n\nShe referred to undocumented immigrants as “illegals” when touting the Trump administration’s priorities for funding police departments and warned that a vote for Democratic nominee Joe Biden could turn Arizona “into California.”\n\n“We are at a crossroads in our country,” she said. “That’s why I do this job and I think that’s why you’re here. We need to save this country,” adding that she wants everyone here to vote for U.S. Sen. Martha McSally and “keep America America.”\n\nLesko urged the crowd to stay politically active even in the final days leading up to Election Day.\n\n“We have six days left, so if you want to save our nation like I do — and I know you do — get out there, knock on doors, make phone calls,” she said.\n\n— Joshua Bowling\n\n12:30 p.m.: Trump talks COVID-19, says 'normal life will fully resume'\n\nIn Bullhead City, Trump took the stage, asking the crowd how many of them were from Arizona and how many were from Nevada. The crowd screamed jubilantly and raised their hands.\n\nThe president said, “Six days from now we are going to win Arizona, we are going to win Nevada and we are going to win four more years.” The crowd chanted “Four more years!” Trump then ridiculed the media, calling them dishonest and fake.\n\nHe promised the crowd: “Normal life will fully resume. That’s what we want, right? Normal life. And next year will be the greatest economic year in the history of our country.”\n\nHe said a vaccine to COVID-19 would come shortly, without providing evidence.\n\nTrump bemoaned the windy conditions, saying he should have worn a hat. He asked the red-capped crowd, “Should I put on a hat?” They cheered.\n\nHe appeared to get a hat from someone in the crowd, asking who had worn it before.\n\n“It’s pretty nasty,” he said. “Am I allowed to do it?”\n\nHe slid the Make America Great Again red hat on his head, as the crowd cheered.\n\nIn what will likely be his last day of campaigning in Arizona, Trump attempted to appeal directly to Hispanic voters, claiming that his poll numbers among Hispanics are the highest of any Republican candidate in history.\n\n\"They're finally beginning to understand me,\" Trump said.\n\n\"For the last four years I've been delivering the Hispanic-Americans a message like they've never heard before,\" Trump said.\n\nHe emphasized school choice, safe neighborhoods and Hispanic-owned small businesses. Then he aimed for a more specific demographic.\n\n\"We love our incredible Hispanic-American members of law enforcement,\" he said.\n\n— Yvonne Wingett Sanchez and Alden Woods\n\n12:30 p.m.: Harris holds drive-in event\n\nIn a contrast to Trump’s large rally, Harris is holding a car-based event at the same time in Tucson.\n\nApproximately 100 cars gathered for a drive-in rally that Harris will hold at Pima Community College West. The program kicked off at noon with U.S. Rep. Raúl Grijalva who represents the area in Congress.\n\nGrijalva made the case against Trump, accusing him of inciting hate and racism in the country.\n\n“Diversity is not a liability, it is a strength for this country of ours,” he said.\n\nHe praised Harris' selection as a vice-presidential candidate, and highlighted the importance of this election to future generations.\n\n“Senator Harris doesn’t just represent our party, she represents our nation,” he said.\n\n— Rafael Carranza\n\n12:15 p.m.: Trump supporters arrive in Goodyear\n\nBefore Trump even took the stage in Bullhead City, supporters have arrived for the second event in Goodyear.\n\nA steady stream of supporters trickled into the Phoenix Goodyear Airport shortly after 11 a.m. to see Trump speak later in the afternoon.\n\nOverlooking the airport runways, dozens of rows of empty white folding chairs filled up with a sea of red: people clad in T-shirts with slogans like “Jesus is my savior, Trump is my president,” hooded sweatshirts that bore the all-caps message to “MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN” and camouflage Trump 2020 baseball caps.\n\nAttendees, many without face coverings, lined up for the small grouping of food carts in the airport’s open hangars, waiting for an order of fries, a slice of pizza or a root beer float. One cart, Casa Reynoso, had a menu boasting that the business is “Keeping Mexican food great in America.”\n\nMichael Harman, a 49-year-old resident in Goodyear’s Estrella master-planned community, came to Wednesday’s rally with a Trump 2020 flag draped across his shoulders like a cape.\n\n“When’s the next time I’m going to be able to sit 40 feet from a sitting president?” Harman said, adding that he supports the Trump ticket because he doesn’t like traditional politicians or the conversations of systemic racism in America.\n\nHe said he knows there are racist people in the U.S., but doesn’t the country is systemically racist.\n\n— Joshua Bowling\n\n12:06 p.m.: Trump arrives in Arizona\n\nTrump has arrived at the Bullhead City rally, where he traveled after leaving the airport in Las Vegas.\n\nThe Laughlin/Bullhead International Airport where the rally is taking place is in Arizona.\n\nAir Force One arrived to a crowd of cameraphones and the first beats of “Eye of the Tiger.” The plane parked behind the flag-draped stage, completing a backdrop of jagged mountains and tall white casinos.\n\nAt the Bullhead City event, ahead of Trump’s arrival, U.S. Rep. Paul Gosar, R-Ariz., told the crowd that if they didn’t vote for Republicans, they were voting for “anarchy.”\n\nTurning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk and Arizona Republican Party chairperson Kelli Ward all were on hand in Bullhead City.\n\nMeanwhile, Harris talked to Latina business owners at La Chaiteria, a Mexican restaurant in Tucson.\n\n— Rachel Leingang and Alden Woods\n\n12 p.m.: Road closures near Goodyear\n\nRoads near the airport in Goodyear were scheduled to close Wednesday morning in anticipation of Trump’s visit, according to social media posts from Goodyear Police Department.\n\nBullard Avenue will close between Estrella Parkway and Yuma Road. Yuma Road also will close between Bullard Avenue and Camino Oro Drive.\n\nThe closures will remain in effect until 6 p.m., but may are subject to change.\n\nA free speech zone is on the east side of Litchfield Road just north of Goodyear Parkway, the department said.\n\nBuses will shuttle people from the parking area at Litchfield Road and Wigwam Boulevard. No vehicle traffic will be allowed onto airport property.\n\nFor those using rideshare apps, there is no designated drop off spot near the airport. Uber and Lyft users can go to the shuttle area at Litchfield Road and Wigwam Boulevard or find a safe location in the area of Litchfield and Yuma roads.\n\n— Chelsea Curtis\n\n11:50 a.m.: Harris visits with Latina business owners\n\nHarris arrived to La Chaiteria, a Mexican food restaurant located in Menlo Park, one of Tucson’s historic Latino neighborhoods. She met briefly with Latina business owners.\n\nAccording to the Biden campaign, participants included:\n\nWendy Garcia, owner, La Chaiteria.\n\nMarisol Flores-Aguirre, owner, Chulas.\n\nFrances Erunez & Sandra Otero Erunez, owners, Los Jarritos.\n\nVanessa Gallego, owner, Recyco, Inc..\n\nAs she arrived, Harris admired a mural painted by local artist Alejandra Trujillo on the side of the restaurant.\n\nThe mural features civil rights icon Martin Luther King and Mexican painter Frida Kahlo holding hands and raising them up. The mural also features a famed quote by Benito Juárez, Mexico’s first indigenous president.\n\nAfter she landed at the Tucson airport, Harris was asked by reporters about Trump’s planned, in person rallies in the state.\n\n“Joe and I have been clear from the beginning, we are gonna talk with voters, but do it in a way that we don’t risk their safety and their health. And so I would caution anyone who is trying to talk to folks to think about the health and well-being of the people their speaking with.”\n\n— Rafael Carranza\n\n11 a.m.: Trump’s rally is in AZ because of Nevada COVID-19 restrictions\n\nTrump wanted to hold today's rally in Nevada, but the state’s COVID-19 restrictions made it too difficult, the Las Vegas Review-Journal reported.\n\nInstead, he came to Bullhead City, which is near enough to Nevada to allow that state's voters to attend, but in Arizona, where the Nevada restrictions don’t apply.\n\nNevada’s restrictions prevent events larger than 250 people. Arizona has allowed political events to continue throughout the pandemic, with Gov. Doug Ducey saying he did not want to restrict First Amendment rights.\n\nThe Review-Journal reported that Nevada Gov. Steve Sisolak said Monday that guests to Nevada must follow the state’s protocols. The state GOP chairman, Michael McDonald, told the Review-Journal that the Trump campaign wanted a rally in Nevada but was prevented from doing so because of the state’s restrictions.\n\nArizona's COVID-19 cases rose by 1,158 and 16 new known deaths were reported on Tuesday as new cases continue upward trends, though measures remain far below levels from the summer peak.\n\nThe past several weeks have seen relatively higher daily case reports as the virus spreads at its fastest rate in Arizona since June.\n\n— Rachel Leingang and Stephanie Innes\n\n10:50 a.m.: Kamala Harris lands in AZ\n\nU.S. Sen. Kamala Harris, the Democratic candidate for vice president, touched down at Tucson International Airport just before 10:50 a.m. Wednesday.\n\nHarris is expected to meet with Latina business owners about 11:30 a.m. before hosting a drive-in \"voter mobilization\" event in Tucson. She will then head to Phoenix for a meeting with Black community leaders and another drive-in rally.\n\nThis is Harris’ second visit to Arizona this election season. Unlike the Republican ticket, Harris and Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden have shied away from large, in-person events in battleground states like Arizona, given the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.\n\n— Maria Polletta\n\n10:45 a.m.: These people really don’t like each other, do they?\n\nAs if visits from the Republican and Democratic tickets on the same day weren’t enough to convince voters that both sides are in an all-out battle for Arizonans’ votes, both campaigns released statements bagging on the other this morning.\n\nAnd the Democratic National Committee launched digital ads in local newspapers where Trump is set to visit today.\n\nDemocratic U.S. Reps. Ruben Gallego of Arizona and Dina Titus of Nevada released a statement supporting the Biden campaign, calling Trump’s campaigns in Arizona and Nevada “sinking.”\n\nThe representatives dinged Trump for his positions on health care, the pandemic and helping small businesses and working families economically.\n\n“Arizona and Nevada families deserve leaders who will fight for them and help them build back better. The only way we will recover from Trump’s failed leadership is to vote early for Joe Biden and Kamala Harris,” the representatives wrote.\n\nIn a statement from Trump Victory spokesperson Emma Hall, the Trump campaign said Biden had plenty of time to help Arizona families during his lengthy political career.\n\n“Arizonans aren't fooled by corrupt politicians or Kamala Harris' last-ditch effort to save Biden's flailing campaign. In less than a week, Arizona voters will reject the Democrats' radical agenda in favor of four more years of President Trump and his proven record of success for every American,” Hall said.\n\n— Rachel Leingang\n\n10:30 a.m.: Trump, Harris event details\n\nHere are the details of both Trump and Harris’ visits on Wednesday:\n\nTrump will arrive in Las Vegas then travel to Bullhead City for an event at the Laughlin/Bullhead International Airport.\n\nAfter that rally, he will travel to Goodyear for another rally at the Phoenix Goodyear Airport in the afternoon.\n\nHe will leave Arizona and head to Florida.\n\nHarris’ schedule includes smaller events.\n\nShe will first meet with Latina business owners in Tucson, then take part in a get-out-the-vote event.\n\nIn the afternoon, she will head to Phoenix for a meeting with Black leaders.\n\nAfter that, she will hold an event with singer Alicia Keys designed to get out the early vote.\n\n— Rachel Leingang\n\n10:15 a.m.: Trump supporters arrive in Bullhead City\n\nTrump wouldn’t arrive for hours, and already all roads in Bullhead City led toward the rally. A line of cars slowed traffic. Orange cones and flashing lights narrowed the highway. A casino’s massive sign welcomed the president and his supporters to town.\n\nMost people arrived by shuttle, cramming into charter buses that dropped them off at the front gates. But there were more people than seats. So a stream of people parked across the river, in Nevada, and walked toward the Arizona airport.\n\nThey came from everywhere. Among the crowd were Raiders fans from Las Vegas, cowboys from Kingman and a small contingent of bleary-eyed Angelenos. Those who hailed from Bullhead City still had trouble believing what had come to their small town.\n\n“I never thought I’d see it in 20 years,” said Jason Sack, a white-haired man from nearby Fort Mohave.\n\nSack works the graveyard shift at a casino across the river. All weekend he noticed excitement in the air. Around 5 a.m. Wednesday, he pointed one of the casino’s cameras toward the street, and the screen filled with a mass of cars. He’d never seen that many in Bullhead.\n\n“It’s historic,” he said.\n\nWade Hall and Colleen Hall, residents of Laughlin, wore MAGA hats and waited for their friends outside the rally.\n\n“It’s really exciting that he would actually come here,” Wade Hall said. “I feel really lucky — I guess it was because Vegas had a lot of restrictions.”\n\nIf it had been in Las Vegas, the couple said they wouldn’t be able to make it. This is the first time in their memory a presidential candidate made a stop in the area on their campaign trail.\n\nThe main issue bringing Hall out was the Second Amendment.\n\nConnie Maurl and Esther Richard came by coach bus from Needles, California, a small town near the state border. They had waited in line for the bus in Needles for three hours earlier Wednesday morning.\n\nThis was the first time a president has visited the area, said Richard, who was born in Needles and has lived there for 77 years. She remembered that Sarah Palin had visited nearby Searchlight, Nevada, during her campaign in 2010, but Richard had not attended.\n\nBoth Maurl and Richard had already voted via absentee ballot, but came to see in person the man they have only seen on Fox News. Maurl said health care is the issue she cares about most, while Richard said the economy is most important to her.\n\n— Emily Wilder and Alden Woods\n\n10 a.m.: Will Trump event strand attendees like in Omaha and Prescott?\n\nLast night, Trump held a rally in Omaha. Afterward, hundreds of attendees stood with the temperature in the 30s, waiting for buses to take them back to their cars from the airfield where the event took place.\n\nAn Omaha Herald reporter on the scene said there were enough buses, but they struggled to navigate two-lane roads near the airfield.\n\nA similar scenario happened in Prescott when Trump visited the airport there earlier this month, though people waited in the heat instead of the cold.\n\nAfter the Prescott rally, journalists on scene said hundreds waited for shuttles from the Prescott Regional Airport back to their cars, some requiring medical attention. Some walked back to their cars, about two miles away.\n\nEarlier this year, at an August event in Yuma, people waited in 104-degree heat for buses heading to a Trump speech. Paramedics treated some people.\n\n— Rachel Leingang\n\n9:30 a.m.: Democrats speak against Trump before visit\n\nAhead of Trump’s visit to Bullhead City, Arizona Democrats highlighted the suffering by Arizonans and Nevadans on the public-health and economic fronts.\n\n“Arizona and Nevada families are still suffering the consequences of his failed presidency,” said Tyler Cherry, spokesman for Arizona Democrats.\n\n“From his ineffective pandemic response, which has cost workers and small business owners their lives and livelihoods, to his attacks on the Affordable Care Act, which leaves coverage for hundreds of thousands of families hanging in the balance.”\n\nSigna Oliver, a U.S. Army veteran from Goodyear, said veterans, in particular, are bearing the brunt of Trump’s “lack of leadership” compared to previous presidents. Her appeal to veterans came after The Atlantic, citing unnamed sources, reported that Trump disparaged service members, saying those who were killed or wounded in action were “losers” and “suckers. Trump has denied the report.\n\nAn estimated 600,000 veterans live in Arizona and are a crucial voting bloc that both Republicans and Democrats are vying for. Oliver called on them to make a plan to vote.\n\n“All people that have served, we have a duty and an honor and a responsibility to save our nation,” she said. “He has taken apart every norm that we’ve ever had. We didn’t even have to codify a lot of things because presidents are usually people of integrity.”\n\nWith the surge in COVID-19 cases nationally, Oliver said Trump should not be headlining campaign rallies that draw hundreds of people to one place: “His complete ineptitude in handling this virus that is just ravaging this country is unthinkable.”\n\n— Yvonne Wingett Sanchez\n\n8 a.m.: Huge early voting numbers\n\nThe final play for voters comes as nearly 2 million Arizonans have already voted, according to figures from the Arizona Secretary of State's Office.\n\nThe early turnout, still six days out from Election Day, is nearly equal to the entire early vote in the 2016 election.\n\nRepublicans are making a major play to shore up support in rural Arizona, which could help them make up potential deficits in the suburbs of Phoenix and Tucson, as well as for Latinos and suburban voters.\n\nVoters have shown early enthusiasm this year. Democrats have turned out early in larger numbers than Republicans so far, and in larger numbers than they did in 2016 in early voting. Some experts expect Republicans to turn out more on Election Day, particularly amid unfounded claims by Trump about the insecurity of voting by mail.\n\nTuesday was the last day officials recommended to mail in early ballots. From now on, officials recommend dropping off early ballots in person at dropboxes or polling sites.\n\nMore than 3 million ballots were sent out across the state to people who are on the Permanent Early Voting List, representing about 75% of voters who are registered.\n\n— Rachel Leingang, Yvonne Wingett Sanchez and Rob O'Dell\n\n7 a.m.: Harris visits Phoenix, Tucson\n\nWhile President Trump visits Bullhead City and the western suburbs of Maricopa County, Sen. Kamala Harris will visit Phoenix and Tucson, the two most populous cities in the state.\n\nThe trip marks Harris' second visit to the crucial battleground state this month. Unlike the Republican ticket, Harris and Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden have shied away from large, in-person events this election season, given the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.\n\nDuring their first visit to Phoenix, on Oct. 8, Harris and Biden hosted small, socially distanced events at the Heard Museum, Barrio Cafe, a union hall, and a Tempe fashion incubator that produces reusable gowns for health care workers.\n\nThis time, Harris will begin in Tucson, meeting with Latina businesswomen before heading to Phoenix to meet with Black community leaders. She will host drive-in voter mobilization events in both cities.\n\n— Maria Polletta\n\n6 a.m.: Trump visits for 7th time\n\nWednesday marks President Donald Trump's seventh visit to Arizona this year.\n\nTrump’s swing through ruby-red Bullhead City in Mohave County and then south to Goodyear represents a final push by Republicans to hold Arizona in the red column, even as the state’s electorate appears to be favoring the Democratic ticket of former Vice President Joe Biden and Sen. Kamala Harris, of California.\n\nTrump will headline a Make America Great Again campaign appearance at the Laughlin/Bullhead International Airport at noon, with doors opening at 9 a.m. The president will then head to the Phoenix Goodyear Airport for a second rally, which begins around 2:30 p.m. Doors open for that event at 11:30 a.m.\n\nTrump won the state in 2016 by just 3.5 percentage points. Polls suggest his presidency — particularly in the era of the COVID-19 pandemic — may have accelerated a shift away from him, toward Biden.\n\n— Yvonne Wingett Sanchez\n\nReach reporter Rachel Leingang by email at rachel.leingang@gannett.com or by phone at 602-444-8157, or find her on Twitter and Facebook. Reach reporter Rob O'Dell at rob.odell@arizonarepublic.com or find him on Twitter. Reach reporter Maria Polletta at maria.polletta@arizonarepublic.com or 602-653-6807, or find her on Twitter. Reach reporter Yvonne Wingett Sanchez by email at yvonne.wingett@arizonarepublic.com or by phone at 602-444-4712, or find her on Twitter and Facebook.\n\nSupport local journalism. Subscribe to azcentral.com today.", "authors": [], "publish_date": "2020/10/28"}, {"url": "https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/50-states/2021/01/20/propane-problems-st-pats-sept-fishing-upside-news-around-states/115334814/", "title": "Propane problems, St. Pat's in Sept.: News from around our 50 states", "text": "From USA TODAY Network and wire reports\n\nAlabama\n\nMontgomery: Thousands of people showed up at sites from the coast to the Tennessee Valley as Alabama began vaccinating senior citizens against COVID-19. People spent the night in cars waiting for shots in Baldwin County, where health workers began immunizing people early Tuesday. County health workers in Huntsville vaccinated 500 people Monday, although only 300 people had appointments. Other sites opened in cities ranging in size from Birmingham to Rainsville. The state is offering vaccines to people 75 and older after limiting the initial doses to health workers. Alabama is among the Southern states trailing the nation in the rate of vaccinations. In Limestone County, Pat White showed up to get her first of two doses of the Moderna vaccine Monday. She said she misses going to church and has done little other than buy groceries as she tries to keep from catching the coronavirus. “We’ve lost many friends to COVID, and we’re older, so that made me think it was probably the right thing to do,” White told WAAY-TV. More than 700,000 people are currently eligible for vaccinations in Alabama, including 325,000 health care workers and 350,000 people who are 75 or older.\n\nAlaska\n\nAnchorage: The state’s coronavirus contact tracing effort is rebounding after several months of hiring and several weeks of decreased daily cases, officials said. State officials said great improvements have been made since November, when the contact tracing corps was overwhelmed, and people testing positive were asked to reach out on their own to those they may have infected, Anchorage Daily News reports. Tim Struna, chief of Public Health Nursing for the Alaska Division of Public Health, said contact tracers can now investigate reports within a day after receiving notice of new virus infections. “It’s a profound change,” Struna said. Contact tracers call people infected with COVID-19 to learn who was close to them and then reach out to those contacts. Public health experts have said the process is a crucial part of controlling the spread of the virus before vaccines become widely available. During the state’s infection surge in the fall, a week or more could pass before people with positive results heard from a contact tracer, if at all, officials said. “In my mind it sort of shifted towards damage control,” Anchorage public health nurse and contact tracer Jordan Loewe said.\n\nArizona\n\nYuma: Exhausted nurses in this rural area regularly send COVID-19 patients on a long helicopter ride to Phoenix when they don’t have enough staff. The so-called winter lettuce capital of the U.S. also has lagged on coronavirus testing in heavily Hispanic neighborhoods and just ran out of vaccines. But some support is coming from military nurses and a new wave of free tests for farmworkers and the elderly in Yuma County – the hardest-hit county in one of the hardest-hit states. Almost everyone in Yuma County, near the borders of Mexico and California, seems to know somebody who has tested positive for the coronavirus, with about 33,000 cases reported since last spring – a rate of about 14,000 per 100,000 people. Maricopa County, home to Phoenix, has a rate of about 9,000 cases per 100,000 people. Tests in Yuma County are 20% positive, compared with about 14% for Arizona at large. Officials at Yuma Regional Medical Center say it’s been a struggle to maintain staffing of 900 to 1,000 nurses while competing for medical workers in an overwhelmed national health care system. Forty Army Reserve nurses arrived this month to help at the Yuma hospital for at least a month through a Department of Defense COVID-19 support operation.\n\nArkansas\n\nLittle Rock: A lawmaker tested positive for the coronavirus, a state House spokeswoman said, making him the second to be infected since the Legislature began its session last week. Rep. Keith Slape told the House speaker Tuesday that he had tested positive for the virus, House spokeswoman Cecillea Pond-Mayo said. She said Slape, R-Compton, was at home with mild symptoms. Slape is at least the 23rd Arkansas state legislator to test positive for the virus since the pandemic began. The state has had the second-largest outbreak among legislatures nationwide, according to figures compiled by the Associated Press. The House and Senate convened last week with safety measures intended to prevent the virus’s spread, including limits on seating, plastic barriers in both chambers and rules allowing remote voting. Both chambers have also passed rules requiring lawmakers, staff and visitors to wear masks. The Legislature has not been in session since Thursday. Also Tuesday, Gov. Asa Hutchinson said he was cautiously optimistic to see a decrease in the daily number of new virus cases. Arkansas reported 1,331 new cases Tuesday and 43 more deaths.\n\nCalifornia\n\nLos Angeles: The state on Monday became the first to record more than 3 million known coronavirus infections. California only reached 2 million reported cases Dec. 24, as tallied by Johns Hopkins University. The state is placing its hopes on mass vaccinations to reduce the number of infections, but there have been snags in the immunization drive. On Sunday, Dr. Erica S. Pan, the state epidemiologist, urged that providers stop using one lot of a Moderna vaccine because some people needed medical treatment for possible severe allergic reactions. More than 330,000 doses from lot 41L20A arrived in California between Jan. 5 and Jan. 12 and were distributed to 287 providers, she said. Fewer than 10 people, who all received the vaccine at the same community site, needed medical attention over a 24-hour period, Pan said. No other similar clusters were found. Meanwhile, in the Los Angeles area, the South Coast Air Quality Management District suspended some pollution-control limits on the number of cremations for at least 10 days Sunday in order to deal with a backlog of bodies at hospitals and funeral homes. “The current rate of death is more than double that of pre-pandemic years,” the agency said.\n\nColorado\n\nFort Collins: With COVID-19 restrictions forcing bars and restaurants to seat customers outside in the dead of winter, many are scrambling to nab erratic supplies of propane that fuel space heaters on which they’re relying more than ever to keep people comfortable in the cold. It’s one of many new headaches – but a crucial one – that go with setting up tables and tents on sidewalks, streets and patios to comply with public health restrictions. “You’re in the middle of service and having staff run up and say, ‘We’re out of propane!’ ” said Melinda Maddox, manager of The Reserve by Old Elk Distillery tasting room in downtown Fort Collins. The standard-size tanks, which contain pressurized liquid propane that turns to gas as it’s released, are usually readily available from gas stations, grocery stores or home improvement stores. But that’s not always the case lately as high demand leads to sometimes erratic supplies. “I spent one day driving an hour around town,” Maddox said. Local propane tank shortages result not just from higher demand but also from household hoarding similar to the pandemic run on toilet paper and other goods. One national tank supplier reported a 38% sales increase this winter, said Tom Clark, executive director of the Rocky Mountain Propane Association.\n\nConnecticut\n\nHartford: Hundreds of schoolteachers were able to sign up for vaccine appointments before they were actually eligible, due to confusion over the rollout rules, The Hartford Courant reports. State Health Department spokesperson Maura Fitzgerald said the issue arose after some school districts mistakenly put their entire staff rosters into a registration system when the state actually had asked only for lists of school nurses. “A good amount” of Cromwell Public Schools’ 300 staffers have signed up for vaccination appointments, Superintendent Enza Macri said. Glastonbury Public Schools also broadly registered its staff, but Superintendent Alan Bookman said officials quickly realized the mistake, told ineligible staffers not to book appointments and retracted the erroneous registrations. Berlin Public Schools told all staffers by email to sign up for vaccine appointments, only to instruct the staff to cancel the appointments after recognizing they weren’t eligible, Superintendent Brian Benigni said. Then, in another turn, the state advised that those who have made appointments should keep them, although no one else who’s ineligible should make one. Fitzgerald said the state’s “overarching goal is: No doses go wasted.”\n\nDelaware\n\nDover: Democrats John Carney and Bethany Hall-Long took the oaths of office for their second terms as governor and lieutenant governor Tuesday in a livestreamed online ceremony. Carney was sworn in by Chief Justice Collins Seitz Jr. in the hallway outside the governor’s office in Legislative Hall, which remains closed to the public because of the coronavirus. “I’m prepared to take the oath, and I’m smiling,” Carney said, his face covered by a black mask. Hall-Long was sworn in by Supreme Court Justice James Vaughn Jr. Forgoing the traditional inaugural speeches, Carney and Hall-Long made remarks in a prerecorded video that were interspersed with photos and videos of Delaware and remarks by several business owners, educators and health care workers. The video focused heavily on the pandemic and the Carney administration’s response to it. “This year has been a balancing act,” Carney said. “We’ve tried to protect public health, while protecting our economy.”\n\nDistrict of Columbia\n\nWashington: As local data shows disparities between COVID-19 case concentrations and vaccine administration, the United Medical Center nurse who vaccinated Vice President-elect Kamala Harris hopes to encourage her patients to get the vaccine, WUSA-TV reports. United Medical Center primarily serves wards seven and eight in the District of Columbia, which have seen some of the highest numbers of coronavirus cases throughout the pandemic. “Most of the people who live there are poverty-stricken,” UMC nurse manager and Walden Masters of Nursing student Patricia Cummings said. “They do not indulge in primary prevention, so by the time they come to us, they are extremely sick.” Cummings said it’s a community that can feel overlooked, so to have the vice president-elect choose to get vaccinated at UMC sent her patients a clear message. “It was extremely significant and helpful in encouraging the southeast D.C. community to embrace the vaccine,” Cummings said. She said multiple people told her Harris’ visit – as well as her own advocacy – convinced them to sign up for an appointment.\n\nFlorida\n\nJupiter: Some 700,000 senior citizens have received at least one dose of the COVID-19 vaccine, Gov. Ron DeSantis said Tuesday. The governor also said all 67 Publix pharmacies in Palm Beach County will begin offering appointments for anyone age 65 or older to receive the vaccine. There are 181 Publix pharmacies across 15 counties providing vaccines to senior citizens, the governor said. Palm Beach County is the largest so far to offer vaccines at Publix, DeSantis said. He said about 25% of county’s residents are 65 or older. County officials told the governor that about 90% of seniors live within a mile and half of at least one Publix. “Not every senior is going to want to drive halfway across town to go to a drive-thru site,” DeSantis said. Meanwhile, in Tallahassee, the Florida Capitol was to be illuminated amber Tuesday as part of the Biden-Harris inauguration’s national moment of unity and remembrance for the more than 397,000 American lives lost to COVID-19. More than 24,136 Floridians have died from the disease caused by the coronavirus since the pandemic began in March.\n\nGeorgia\n\nAtlanta: After a slow start to its vaccine rollout, Georgia is reporting progress in getting people injected, though it is still behind the best-performing states in the country. The state, meanwhile, may be past the current peak of new coronavirus infections and hospitalizations. The number of newly reported cases, the total number of COVID-19 patients in hospitals and the share of viral tests coming back positive are all declining. Gov. Brian Kemp said Tuesday that for the second straight week, Georgia more than doubled its number of reported COVID-19 vaccinations. More than 423,000 people had received the vaccine as of Monday, according to state health officials. That’s just under 4% of the state’s population and 46% of doses of the two vaccines it has received. Some states have administered a first dose to more than 5% of their populations, according to federal data. Kemp said in a statement that Georgia had “a long way to go,” but the latest figures show “encouraging progress” amid a limited supply of vaccine.\n\nHawaii\n\nHonolulu: An increase in the number of anglers plying the state’s shores has provided much-needed food and recreation while helping keep supply shops afloat during the coronavirus pandemic. Fishing supply store personnel said noncommercial fishing in Hawaii has boomed since the outbreak of COVID-19, Honolulu Star-Advertiser reports. Brent Young, owner of Brian’s Fishing Supply in Honolulu, said customers include new fishers who want to learn and older residents who have not fished in decades but now have more time to drop a line. “There’s no sports; there’s nothing to watch; there’s nothing to do. So they come back, and they just want to fish,” Young said. Many others have lost jobs during the pandemic and turned to fishing to supplement their food supply. Customers “come in to say they catch the food because they’re not working, and they’ve been very thankful that we’ve been open,” Young said. Matthew Uza, fishing manager at West Marine on Oahu, said the business had a $200,000 increase in sales in 2020 over 2019. Uza said some customers tell him they can no longer afford groceries. “They are literally having to catch food to survive,” Uza said.\n\nIdaho\n\nBoise: A state Senate committee on Tuesday approved legislation seeking to end Republican Gov. Brad Little’s coronavirus emergency declaration and restrictions, despite being told Idaho could lose millions of dollars in federal aid. The Senate State Affairs Committee voted 7-2 to send the concurrent resolution to the full Senate despite testimony from Idaho Office of Emergency Management Director Brad Richy that at least $20 million would be in jeopardy. Republicans supported the measure, while both Democrats voted against it. “That funding would be shifted to the individual communities,” Richy told the committee. He said additional money would come from residents across the state to replace the federal aid. Emergency declarations are needed to trigger and keep federal money coming, typically from the Federal Emergency Management Agency. The concurrent resolution contains a clause saying federal money would not stop despite the Legislature ending the COVID-19 emergency declaration. Republican Sen. Steve Vick, who sponsored the resolution, didn’t explain how that would work.\n\nIllinois\n\nSpringfield: State public health officials reported 3,385 fresh cases of coronavirus Monday and 50 more deaths as Gov. J.B. Pritzker’s administration eased social interaction restrictions in most parts of Illinois. Daily diagnoses of new cases of COVID-19 remain well below totals counted in November, the worst month for infections since the virus picked up speed in Illinois in February. The state has dodged expected surges in cases following holiday time travel and family celebrations. Nonetheless, the entire state had been under so-called Tier 3 mitigation rules until late last week. The Illinois Department of Public Health on Monday announced statewide health care contracting to supplement existing hospital staff. That enabled IDPH to loosen restrictions in most areas of the state, significantly to at least a level that allows indoor dining to resume. During the initial onslaught of the virus last spring, authorities readied supplemental bed space. That proved unnecessary as health professionals realized that staff further limited a hospital’s capacity. The Pritzker administration is using the state’s large-scale buying power to contract with vendors for health care workers to bolster Illinois’ workforce.\n\nIndiana\n\nIndianapolis: Health officials reported fewer new coronavirus cases and related hospitalizations Tuesday as the state’s downward trend that began late last year continued into 2021. Indiana recorded 2,756 new cases of COVID-19, the second straight day health officials have reported fewer than 3,000 cases, the Indiana State Department of Health said Tuesday. That brings the number of Hoosiers known to have had the coronavirus to 595,436. The state agency also reported that 2,332 Indiana residents were hospitalized with COVID-19 on Monday – the fewest since early November, after the state saw a steep increase beginning in September for coronavirus deaths, hospitalizations and new infections. Of those being treated, 525 were in intensive care, marking a nine-week low. State health officials also added 126 more COVID-19 deaths, raising Indiana’s pandemic toll to 9,466, including both confirmed and presumed infections. Deaths are reported based on when data is received by the state and occurred over multiple days. Indiana reported 32% fewer cases of the virus in the week ending Sunday than it did in the previous week, according to state health department data.\n\nIowa\n\nDes Moines: The state’s three regents universities will extend the cancellation of study-abroad programs at least through Aug.1 as a consequence of the COVID-19 pandemic. Last spring, the University of Iowa, Iowa State University and the University of Northern Iowa were all forced to temporarily cancel study-abroad programs in which hundreds of students take part each year in light of coronavirus health and safety precautions. Since then, the schools have incrementally announced further cancellations. Iowa’s Board of Regents put a 30-day rolling ban on international travel last March that has yet to expire. In the 2018-19 school year, more than 1,316 students at the University of Iowa studied abroad across 69 different countries. At Iowa State, 1,817 students studied outside the U.S. between the summer of 2018 and spring of 2019. “Given the development of the vaccine, we are confident that travel will start to become more common in the latter part of 2021,” said a Wednesday announcement from Russell Ganim, associate provost and dean of international programs at the University of Iowa.\n\nKansas\n\nTopeka: Mayor Michelle De La Isla was diagnosed with COVID-19 last week and will be out of the office while she recovers from her illness, her office said Tuesday. “Community spread in Topeka is high and my diagnosis proves that no matter how careful you are you can still get this virus,” De La Isla said in a news release. “I encourage everyone to be careful and follow all the safety protocols so that you can keep your friends and family safe.” The mayor said she came in contact with the virus through a family member who is an essential worker. Deputy Mayor Tony Emerson will run Tuesday night’s City Council meeting until a new deputy mayor is elected.\n\nKentucky\n\nLouisville: Mayor Greg Fischer and his top health official, Dr. Sarah Moyer, pleaded for patience Tuesday as local health officials try to adjust to supplies of COVID-19 vaccine that vary from week to week. “Our ability to give the vaccine is more than the supply,” Fischer said at a news briefing. After Louisville’s three hospitals began offering vaccine appointments to people over 70 on Friday, they were overwhelmed with requests for appointments and had to stop accepting new ones until more vaccine comes in. Moyer estimated Tuesday that it will take about 10 weeks to vaccinate all of the about 100,000 people in the metro area 70 or older who are eligible for the vaccine. University of Louisville Health, Baptist Health and Norton Healthcare reported they were flooded with requests online and by telephone after announcing they would begin offering vaccines to people 70 or over, as prescribed under current state guidelines for dispensing limited quantities. Dr. Steven Hester, chief medical officer at Norton, said Tuesday that Norton filled 14,000 appointments by Monday before it had to stop accepting new ones.\n\nLouisiana\n\nBaton Rouge: The state’s chief public health officer warned hospitals, pharmacies and clinics Tuesday that they should not be steering their COVID-19 vaccine doses solely to their own patients, saying the state has received reports of such favoritism. Dr. Joe Kanter, with the Louisiana Department of Health, sent a memo to vaccine providers that cautioned any found to be discriminating in favor of their patients – and denying vaccine appointments to nonpatients – could face penalties. The providers could face financial penalties, limits on future vaccine allocations, legal actions or other response if found continuing to discriminate in distribution, said health department spokesperson Aly Neel. The Pfizer and Moderna vaccines in Louisiana are available to health care employees, EMS workers, firefighters, people with kidney failure, anyone age 70 and older, people with disabilities over the age of 16 who receive community- or home-based services and their providers, and people who live and work at nursing homes and other long-term care facilities. About 850,000 people out of Louisiana’s 4.6 million residents fall into the current eligibility categories, according to Edwards administration estimates.\n\nMaine\n\nAugusta: Users of state parks shattered records for attendance last year as they sought outside adventures amid the coronavirus pandemic. The Maine Department of Agriculture, Conservation and Forestry’s Bureau of Parks and Lands said state park attendance topped 3 million in 2020 for the first time. The record came despite closures in the spring and capacity limitations throughout the year. The state parks had nearly 2.8 million day-use visitors, up 3% from 2019. There were also 8% more camping visitors than the previous year, state officials said. State park users consistently “arrived at the parks prepared with face coverings and hand sanitizer and all the other requisite supplies for getting outside safely during the pandemic,” said Maine Bureau of Parks and Lands director Andy Cutko.\n\nMaryland\n\nAnnapolis: A top lawmaker announced Monday that he is forming an oversight panel to monitor the state’s COVID-19 vaccine rollout, after criticizing “unacceptable” levels of confusion about vaccine access, administration and distribution. Maryland Senate President Bill Ferguson, D-Baltimore, said the Senate would consider not confirming Gov. Larry Hogan’s nominee to lead the state health department, based on the current performance of the state’s vaccine rollout. Hogan nominated Dennis Schrader to the position last week. Ferguson said Maryland has global leaders in public health and should be doing better in making the vaccine available. “We should have the infrastructure stood up that is the best in the world. That’s not where we are, and I don’t think it would be fair to confirm the acting secretary with where we are with the vaccination program,” Ferguson said. Michael Ricci, the Republican governor’s spokesman, said Maryland has administered more doses than 32 other states, but the numbers depend on the state’s supply. “This is going to take some time,” Ricci said.\n\nMassachusetts\n\nBoston: Organizers of the Boston Marathon – postponed indefinitely because of the coronavirus pandemic – have launched a virtual Athletes’ Village to reproduce at least some of the camaraderie of the real thing. The Boston Athletic Association says it’s an attempt to keep runners connected as the group works out a date for the 125th running of the planet’s most storied footrace. Last April’s race was canceled and tentatively rescheduled to sometime this autumn, but because of a surge in COVID-19 cases in hard-hit Massachusetts, officials still can’t say when in-person racing for the masses can safely resume. The virtual village, launched Jan. 5, is a far cry from the bucket-list magic and mystique of the real Athletes’ Village in a schoolyard near the start line in Hopkinton, where runners gather giddily beneath tents to hydrate, stretch, meditate, bond and chat before pounding the pavement to Boston. But the BAA hopes participants will use the village as a digital hub to share training tips, seek out coaching, compete against one another in monthly challenges and just generally party like Boston Marathoners have done since 1897. “It’s been great. Runners are so freaking friendly,” Karen Bruynell said.\n\nMichigan\n\nDetroit: The city has received 6,000 COVID-19 vaccine doses this week – far short of what was expected – due to shortfalls from the federal government, according to Mayor Mike Duggan. Detroit had been expecting 9,000 to 10,000 doses in its allotment from the state, Duggan said Tuesday. “We can work with 6,000, but it is not what we had hoped to try to keep expanding eligibility,” he said. Some governors have accused the Trump administration of deceiving states about the amount of COVID-19 vaccine they can expect to receive as states ramp up vaccinations for senior citizens and others. The government has attributed the anger to confusion and misguided expectations on the part of states. Detroit has opened free vaccinations at the downtown TCF center for people 70 and older, as well as people 65 and older who drive them there. “We’re using these vaccines probably within 72 hours of receiving them,” Duggan said. “The day the Biden administration tells us we can count on 10,000 (vaccine doses) a week, we are going to bring the age down to 65. We are going to do this as fast as we can, but we’re also not going to raise expectations that we can’t meet.”\n\nMinnesota\n\nMinneapolis: Many schools welcomed back some of their youngest students for in-person instruction Tuesday, with more elementary schools expected to follow in the coming weeks as some virus restrictions are relaxed. Some districts, including the state’s largest in Anoka-Hennepin, opened for kindergarten, first and second grade students and plan to bring back older elementary students next month. Others, including the Minneapolis and St. Paul districts, will begin their reopening process later this month or next month. Precautions schools are required to take include teachers wearing both masks and face shields, along with plexiglass barriers in classrooms. Schools will give coronavirus tests to teachers and staff every two weeks. Gov. Tim Walz told districts last month that they could reopen elementary schools this week regardless of case growth in their communities based on data that showed elementary schools present less risk. He announced a vaccine pilot program Monday that will establish nine sites to administer doses to a group that includes teachers, school staff and child care workers, though a very limited number of doses will be available.\n\nMississippi\n\nJackson: More than 100,000 residents have received their first dose of the COVID-19 vaccine, and officials are taking further steps to administer the state’s supply of shots more efficiently, Gov. Tate Reeves said Monday. “There is no higher priority, and we’re acting accordingly,” Reeves told a news conference. “We’re not where we need to be, and we’ve got a long way to go.” Inoculation rates in Mississippi have lagged far behind most of the U.S., according to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. But Reeves insisted Monday that health officials are making changes to speed things along. The state’s website for making vaccine appointments has been upgraded to handle increased traffic, and more people are answering calls from those booking by phone, he said. Meanwhile, state officials are working to free up more shots for the general population aged 65 and older by getting several thousand doses from nursing homes that received more than they need, Reeves said. If individual providers don’t use at least 65% of their weekly dose allocation, their share of the following week’s supply will go to others in the state.\n\nMissouri\n\nJefferson City: Another state lawmaker said she has tested positive for the coronavirus, as the Missouri House called off its session to try to stem an outbreak of the virus in the Capitol building. The House, which normally would be in session Tuesday, canceled its work for the entire week after learning of cases among lawmakers and others in the Capitol. The Senate continued to meet. State Rep. Kimberly-Ann Collins, D-St. Louis, said in a Facebook post Monday that she tested positive for the virus and is in isolation. The House Journal indicates she had been present for session last Thursday. Her case comes after Rep. Wes Rogers, D-Kansas City, tested positive last week, and other lawmakers entered quarantine. At least 13 Missouri lawmakers have confirmed they came down with COVID-19 over the past year, according to a tally by the Associated Press.\n\nMontana\n\nBillings: Tribes participated in a national moment of unity and memorial for COVID-19 victims Tuesday afternoon by illuminating a tepee on Sacrifice Cliff in Billings. The national memorial, which kicked off in Washington, D.C., as part of President-elect Joe Biden’s inauguration festivities, featured the lighting of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool and the illumination of buildings in cities nationwide. The ceremony aimed to honor those lost to COVID-19 while serving as a symbol of hope for the future. “We want to make sure people get healed and look forward to the new resources the Biden-Harris administration will put towards the pandemic to end it,” said Bill Snell, executive director of Rocky Mountain Tribal Leaders Council. Native American tribes have been disproportionately affected by COVID-19. A Department of Public Health and Human Services report found that between March and October, Native Americans accounted for 19% of Montana’s coronavirus cases and 32% of deaths from COVID-19. Native Americans comprise 6.7% of the state’s population. According to the report, mortality rates among Native American residents were 11.6 times higher than those of non-Hispanic white residents.\n\nNebraska\n\nOmaha: Teachers and meatpacking workers worry it will take longer for essential workers like them to get the COVID-19 vaccine now that the next group of people to be vaccinated has been expanded to include everyone 65 and older in the state. The expansion of the next phase in the vaccination campaign, slated to start statewide next month, was announced last week. State health officials haven’t said how people will be prioritized within that new, larger group, but the Douglas County Health Department in Nebraska’s largest city said Tuesday that people 65 and older will get the vaccine first in Omaha ahead of essential workers. Tim Royers, president of the Millard Education Association, said teachers in his district were disappointed to hear that they now aren’t likely to get their shots until March at the earliest. Previously, they had been told they would start getting the vaccine either at the end of January or in early February. “We’re already seeing the impact, and it’s having a demoralizing effect on teachers,” Royers told the Omaha World-Herald. Millard, like many districts in the state, has been holding classes in person all year.\n\nNevada\n\nCarson City: The economic consequences of the coronavirus pandemic have hit Nevada particularly hard, complicating budget planning in a place that levies no state income tax on residents and relies on tourism and hospitality industry revenue. Gov. Steve Sisolak released a budget Monday that includes no new taxes and $187 million less in state spending than it proposed before the start of the last two-year cycle in 2019. The budget proposes cuts to both K-12 and higher education and increases funding for health care as the pandemic surges and more laid-off workers enroll in Medicaid. It outlines $8.7 billion in state spending from 2021 to 2023 and projects the state will collect $4.2 billion and $4.5 billion in the upcoming two budget years, respectively. That’s less than $9 billion in general fund revenue the state initially projected for the 2019-2021 biennium but more than the $7.7 billion projected in June 2020 amid the pandemic. The spending plan is based on projections issued by a five-member panel that in December projected it could take until 2023 for tax revenue to rebound to pre-pandemic levels.\n\nNew Hampshire\n\nConcord: The state Department of Health and Human Services has updated its instructions to health care providers about registering medically vulnerable patients for the COVID-19 vaccine. Vaccination under Phase 1b begins Jan. 26, with registration starting Friday, for residents age 65 and older, those with certain medical conditions, residents and staff of facilities for people with developmental disabilities, corrections officers, and health care workers not previously vaccinated. Residents age 65 and older should register to be vaccinated at one of the state’s fixed site clinics by visiting vaccines.nh.gov or calling 2-1-1. There are different processes for those with medical conditions, according to a health alert message issued Sunday. Providers who plan to vaccinate their own patients will register and schedule eligible patients and report data to the state’s immunization information system. Those that do not have access to the vaccine or plan to refer patients to fixed sites will enter patient information into the state’s vaccine management system, which will generate an email invitation to the patient to schedule an appointment.\n\nNew Jersey\n\nTrenton: The state has the infrastructure set up to start vaccinating more people against COVID-19 but doesn’t have the supply of shots to meet demand, Gov. Phil Murphy said Tuesday. Murphy, a Democrat, said the state has opened two-thirds of the mass vaccination sites across New Jersey, with more set up at CVS and Walgreens under a federal partnership, but the number of vaccine doses coming in each week is just over 100,000. That’s short of the 470,000 needed to meet demand, according to Health Commissioner Judy Persichilli. So far, New Jersey has administered about 388,000 doses of the vaccine. That amounts to about 3.9% of the state’s population. “All we are missing are the vaccine doses we need,” Murphy said. He predicted supply would be short “for some time” and didn’t specify when or how it would increase. Persichilli said Monday that a state hotline to answer questions about the vaccine and help people with appointments was operational, though with automated responses. Beginning next week, callers will be able to talk to a person for help when they call, she said. The number is 855-568-0545.\n\nNew Mexico\n\nSanta Fe: Lawmakers confronted daunting challenges as they began a 60-day session Tuesday amid an unrelenting coronavirus pandemic and concerns of violence at a Statehouse guarded by troops and encircled by fencing, barricades and mobile security cameras. Proposals aimed at reviving the economy and rebooting classroom learning are at the top of the agenda for lawmakers in the Democratic-led Legislature. Democratic Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham is pushing for a budget deal that would increase state spending on pandemic relief, education and health care. Leading House Republicans said their priority will be proposals that allow students to return to classrooms immediately by providing greater autonomy to school boards, teachers and families. The House came into session with calls in English and Spanish of “present on the floor” and “presente.” Most Democrats tuned in via videoconference from their offices, and most Republicans stood on the House floor. In the Senate, legislators in face masks exchanged elbow bumps and sat down between plexiglass barriers meant to reduce the risk of spreading the virus.\n\nNew York\n\nNew York: Gov. Andrew Cuomo warned Tuesday that his state will pursue legal action if Congress doesn’t send $15 billion in unrestricted emergency pandemic aid. Meanwhile, New York City will run out of first doses of COVID-19 vaccines sometime Thursday without fresh supplies, Mayor Bill de Blasio said. Cuomo, who didn’t specify who or what the state would sue, introduced two different budget proposals: one if Congress provides New York with $6 billion and another if New York receives $15 billion. The state is facing a dramatic loss in sales and income tax revenue in the wake of sweeping COVID-19 restrictions that jettisoned last February’s budget projections. The Democratic governor blamed President Donald Trump’s administration for allowing COVID-19 to hit New York and the rest of the nation by failing to ban travel from Europe until mid-March. New York has now recorded nearly 42,000 deaths of people with COVID-19, according to data compiled by John Hopkins University. “What happened to New York was no fault of New Yorkers,” Cuomo said in his annual budget address, which was delivered virtually. “It was because the federal government lost track of coronavirus, literally.”\n\nNorth Carolina\n\nRaleigh: Two state legislators who announced this week that they had tested positive for the coronavirus participated in the same duck-hunting trip with other elected officials last week. Senate Rules Committee Chairman Bill Rabon, R-Brunswick County, announced his results Tuesday, one day after Rep. Brian Turner, D-Buncombe County. Rabon, a 69-year-old veterinarian who joined the Senate in 2011, had no symptoms Tuesday after earlier experienced mild, cold-like symptoms, and he was isolating at his home and speaking to those with whom he had close contact, his news release said. Turner said in a Facebook post that he was also contacting people who might have been exposed. Both men were among several legislators and others who participated in a duck-hunting trip last Friday, according to Rep. Jason Saine, R-Lincoln County, and another participant. It’s unclear whether they contracted the virus during the event. Other participants included first-term U.S. Rep. Madison Cawthorn, R-N.C., Saine said. Saine said Tuesday he’s been working to follow safety precautions to discourage the potential for contracting the virus.\n\nNorth Dakota\n\nBismarck: State Sen. Terry Wanzek says he has contracted the contravirus. The 63-year-old Republican from Jamestown said he took a rapid test Monday and immediately left the Capitol after finding out about the positive results. Wanzek said he doesn’t believe he has any close contacts in the Legislature and has been wearing his mask. The senator shared the news remotely during the Senate Appropriations Committee meeting. Wanzek will isolate at home for 10 days, KQDJ reports. North Dakota lawmakers are required to wear face coverings in the House and Senate chambers and other shared spaces. But some lawmakers regularly eat lunch together in the Capitol cafeteria without masks. Grand Forks Republican Sen. Ray Holmberg tested positive for the virus following the Legislature’s three-day organizational session in December, which he called a “petri dish” for infection. He has fully recovered.\n\nOhio\n\nColumbus: Nearly all school districts have told the state they plan to return to in-person learning in some form as of March 1, meaning efforts to vaccinate thousands of school employees will begin Feb. 1, Gov. Mike DeWine said Tuesday. He said 96% of districts indicated they’d follow either hybrid models – home some days, in school others – or full-time in-person classes. School districts will work either with pharmacies or with local health departments for vaccinations, which could happen at schools or some other centrally located place. Local Educational Service Centers will confirm plans with districts this week. The Ohio Federation of Teachers supports the goal of returning to school March 1 but said it shouldn’t be a condition for vaccination. The union said it’s not confident employees could receive the first vaccine by then, let alone both required doses. “We are concerned that the mandate will still pressure some districts into reopening before they are ready,” the union said in a statement Tuesday.\n\nOklahoma\n\nOklahoma City: The state on Tuesday surpassed 3,000 total deaths due to COVID-19 since the coronavirus pandemic began, and the health department reported 1,558 additional cases of the virus. There were 43 more deaths for a total of 3,037 who have died due to the illness caused by the virus and 358,374 total cases, up from 2,994 deaths and 356,816 cases reported Monday. The seven-day rolling average of deaths in Oklahoma has increased during the past two weeks from 24.14 per day on Jan. 4 to 31.29, according to data from Johns Hopkins University. The rolling average of new cases declined from 3,454.86 per day to 3,081.29, and the positivity rate fell from 23.29% to 17.59% during the same time period. Oklahoma had the fourth-highest number of new cases per capita in the nation with 1,269.19 per 100,000 residents during the past two weeks, according to the Johns Hopkins data.\n\nOregon\n\nSalem: The state is expecting to receive federal stimulus money this week to help pay for its COVID-19 vaccination program. Congress approved $3 billion for states to use for vaccine activities under the supplemental pandemic stimulus bill that went into law in late December. Oregon Public Broadcasting reports the state’s share of those funds is $38.1 million, although only a portion of that is expected to be distributed this week. The money can be used to promote and track as well as to distribute and administer the vaccines. The latter is where Oregon’s vaccination program has bogged down. The state has struggled to vaccinate large numbers of people, although by late last week it was able to hit the 12,000 doses-per-day vaccination target put forth by Gov. Kate Brown. Oregon Health Authority Chief Medical Officer Dana Hargunani cited challenges with vaccine distribution as well as navigating scheduling, physical distancing at vaccination sites and the observation period required immediately after the vaccine is administered.\n\nPennsylvania\n\nHarrisburg: The state is expanding eligibility for the COVID-19 vaccine in the initial phase of the rollout to include people age 65 and over as well as younger people with serious health conditions that put them at higher risk, state health officials announced Tuesday. The Health Department said its updated vaccine plan tracks recommendations from the federal government, but it was uncertain how the expanded rollout would work given the slow pace of vaccinations so far and limitations on supplies. Some 3.5 million Pennsylvanians are now eligible to get the vaccine; the state has vaccinated about 409,000. “We must have patience as the amount of vaccine available in Pennsylvania and throughout the nation remains limited,” Cindy Findley, a deputy health secretary who leads the state’s vaccine task force, said at a media briefing. “We are well aware we don’t have enough vaccine to meet the demand at this point.” Tuesday’s announcement adds to the initial rollout people age 65 and older and those between the ages of 16 and 64 with a range of health conditions, including cancer and diabetes, as well as pregnant women, smokers and clinically obese people.\n\nRhode Island\n\nNewport: Organizers of the city’s St. Patrick’s Day parade are looking at postponing this year’s event until September because it looks increasingly unlikely it can go on in March. Dennis Sullivan, chair of the Newport St. Patrick’s Day Parade Committee, said the committee submitted a letter to the city Tuesday suggesting a September date for the annual festivities. “Whatever they say, we’re going to abide by,” he said of the City Council. The parade is traditionally held the Saturday before St. Patrick’s Day in March. “I just don’t believe there’s any way that we could do this safely,” Mayor Jeanne Marie Napolitano said of holding the event in March. “We’re not going to have approvals for anything like this until the vaccination program is safe.” Last year’s parade was supposed to be the 64th annual before it was canceled because of the coronavirus pandemic.\n\nSouth Carolina\n\nMyrtle Beach: A former mayor has died of complications from COVID-19, the city reported. The city’s website says John Rhodes died Saturday night. Rhodes served as mayor from January 2006 through December 2017. The Post and Courier reports that record numbers of new cases were added in South Carolina in the first two weeks of January. The S.C. Department of Health and Environmental Control resolved a systems issue Saturday that had kept data incomplete over the past week, and officials belatedly reported that on Jan. 8, the state set a daily record of 6,924 new COVID-19 cases, a substantial increase from previous records.\n\nSouth Dakota\n\nSioux Falls: The state’s daily COVID-19 update Tuesday showed no new deaths due to the coronavirus, a day after data compiled by Johns Hopkins University researchers listed the state’s fatality count as the fifth-highest per capita in the nation. Researchers have confirmed 189 deaths per 100,000 people since the start of the pandemic. The total number of fatalities stands at 1,667. The update showed that 126 of the 461 COVID-19 tests processed in the past day came back positive, lifting the cumulative number of confirmed cases to 94,764. The state’s dashboard listed an additional 11,022 probable cases. Hospitalizations fell by three, to 200, with 35 patients being treated in intensive care units. There were 355 COVID-19 vaccines administered Monday, officials said, noting that 47,647 people have received at least one dose of the vaccine, and 9,829 residents have received both shots.\n\nTennessee\n\nNashville: Gov. Bill Lee and the General Assembly have a narrow focus this week: quickly passing bills aimed at helping schools navigate the coronavirus pandemic and allowing them to prepare for the next academic year following 10 months of significant learning disruptions. Lee on Tuesday opened the special legislative session he called with an address to House and Senate members seeking to convey the long-term consequences of students falling behind – and subtly rebuking the state’s two largest districts that have remained largely closed throughout the pandemic. “Here’s the bottom line,” Lee said. “You can’t say ‘follow the science’ and keep schools closed. You can’t say ‘I believe in public education’ and keep schools closed.” The governor cited virtual learning’s particularly negative impact on students of color. While most districts across the state have brought students back for in-person learning at some point this school year, Shelby County Schools has remained virtual all year, while middle and high school students in Davidson County have yet to return to the classroom.\n\nTexas\n\nDallas: The state reported more than 10,000 new cases of COVID-19 on Monday and 46 more deaths from the disease caused by the novel coronavirus. The number of Texans hospitalized with COVID-19 rose from Sunday to 13,858 on Monday. Coronavirus hospitalizations remain near their record high, and intensive care units in several regions are at or near capacity, according to the Texas Department of State Health Services. Over the past week, more than 17% of coronavirus tests have come back positive in Texas, according to data from Johns Hopkins University. The state has recorded more than 2 million cases of the virus and more than 32,000 fatalities. More than 1 million Texans have received a dose of a COVID-19 vaccine, and more than 166,000 are fully vaccinated, according to health officials.\n\nUtah\n\nSalt Lake City: The Legislature’s 2021 session opened Tuesday with words of hope and heightened security measures against a backdrop of possibly violent protests and the coronavirus pandemic. The Capitol, which is usually buzzing with activity as lobbyists, advocates and others walk the halls, was largely empty on the first day of the session aside from lawmakers and several National Guard troops. Social distancing, masks and a handshake ban were enforced throughout the Capitol, and lawmakers in the House were separated by plexiglass barricades. The building is temporarily closed to the public. But there are also technological upgrades aimed at making it easier for people to weigh in virtually on lawmakers’ proposals. Republican House Speaker Brad Wilson lauded how Utah residents have dealt with the pandemic and called on lawmakers to help bolster the state’s economy and education system. He said the House would increase public education funding by at least $400 million to help students further develop critical thinking skills and prepare them for education after high school.\n\nVermont\n\nRutland: A hospital is developing a plan that would allow COVID-19 patients to recover at homes, rather than in the hospital. Kathleen Boyd of the Rutland Regional Medical Center is working with other providers to develop the system as part of discharge planning for patients who are willing and have support at home. Boyd told the Rutland Herald the program is national but being developed for local use. “We wanted to make sure that people who are being admitted to the hospital (are the ones who) require care that can only be delivered at a hospital,” Boyd said. Dr. Rick Hildebrant, chief medical information officer at the hospital, said that typically 2% to 5% of all COVID-19 patients will require hospitalization. About a quarter of those could be eligible for the home care program. “These are people who are pretty sick,” Hildebrant said Tuesday. As important as the clinical criteria in determining who would be eligible is the social component. Patients need to have support at home. But if the hospital gets hit hard by COVID-19 admissions, the program could help free up space in the hospital, he said. It’s expected the program will begin within the next few weeks.\n\nVirginia\n\nRichmond: The Virginia Department of Health announced Tuesday that it has launched a COVID-19 Outbreaks in Virginia Higher Education dashboard that includes confirmed outbreaks reported to VDH among public and private colleges and universities since Aug. 1. The only outbreak currently in progress, according to the dashboard, is at Marymount University in Arlington, which has 62 cases. Several schools have outbreaks that are pending closure, according to the health department, including the University of Virginia and Virginia Commonwealth University. Only distinct confirmed COVID-19 outbreaks investigated by VDH local health departments, along with the associated cases and deaths related to an outbreak, are included. The release defined a confirmed COVID-19 outbreak as two or more confirmed COVID-19 cases associated with a particular setting. The dashboard does not include the total number of cases at the college or university. Some colleges or universities separately track and report the number of cases associated with their school or community and may use different methods than VDH, the release said.\n\nWashington\n\nOlympia: Gov. Jay Inslee on Monday announced a plan to set up vaccination sites statewide with help from the National Guard and others as part of an overall goal to vaccinate 45,000 people a day. Inslee said while the goal is higher than the current allotment of vaccine the state is receiving from the federal government – 100,000 doses a week – the state is working to get the infrastructure in place now for that amount once doses increase. The state has been vaccinating between 13,000 and 15,000 people a day, he said. Starting next week, vaccination sites will be set up at the Spokane Arena, the Benton County Fairgrounds in Kennewick, Town Toyota Center in Wenatchee and the Clark County Fairgrounds in Ridgefield. The state’s allocation for next week will be divided among the new sites, pharmacies and local clinics, along with existing vaccination sites in Pierce, King and Snohomish counties. The governor also announced a public-private partnership with business, health care and labor entities – led by the state Department of Health – on areas ranging from coordination of volunteer vaccinators to communications support.\n\nWest Virginia\n\nPickens: A maple syrup festival has been canceled for the second straight year because of the coronavirus pandemic. Organizers of the West Virginia Maple Syrup Festival in Pickens announced the cancellation Monday. The festival was scheduled to be held in late March. The festival said on its Facebook page that vendors and crafters who had secured spots for last year’s event will be given priority applications for next year. Part of the decision to cancel was based on the fact that the event is held primarily indoors. “Well, here we are again faced with a decision in which no matter what decision we make, many people will not agree with the decision,” festival organizers said.\n\nWisconsin\n\nMadison: A pharmacist accused of trying to defrost and spoil dozens of vials of COVID-19 vaccine was charged Tuesday with attempted misdemeanor property damage, and prosecutors warned more serious charges could follow if tests show the doses were ruined. Police arrested 46-year-old Steven Brandenburg on Dec. 31 as part of an investigation into how 57 vials of the Moderna vaccine were left for hours outside a refrigerator at Advocate Aurora Health in Grafton, a Milwaukee suburb. The vials contained enough vaccine to inoculate more than 500 people. Detectives wrote in court documents that Brandenburg is an admitted conspiracy theorist who believed the vaccine would mutate recipients’ DNA. Experts have said there’s no truth to the claims that COVID-19 vaccines can genetically modify humans. Brandenburg faces up to nine months in jail and a $10,000 fine if convicted. His attorney, Jason Baltz, entered a not guilty plea on his behalf during his initial court appearance Tuesday. Brandenburg spoke only once, replying “yes sir” when Judge Paul Malloy warned him to continue to abide by his bail conditions, which include not working as a pharmacist, not dispensing medication and having no contact with Aurora employees.\n\nWyoming\n\nGillette: Sometimes simple everyday gestures, like a wave or the honk of a horn, take on a world of importance. On a recent Wednesday morning, roughly 70 members of the Campbell County School District transportation department spread across more than 40 buses and district vehicles paraded past Vicki Wood’s house to tell her they love her. Wood, 71, a longtime district transportation employee who retired in 2018, had gotten home the day before from spending 54 days in a hospital with COVID-19 after being airlifted to Billings, Montana, on Nov. 7, the Gillette News Record reports. The departmental effort was a secret up until the moment Wood’s family decked her out in her winter gear and insisted on some fresh air. When the first buses rolled into view and made the sweeping left turn onto her street, Wood was overwhelmed. “Oh my God,” she cried, burying her face in her gloved hands. Then she waved like a reigning queen as her subjects came to pay their respects. There were signs pinned to the buses and their horns blared. Some drivers opened their doors to shout their well wishes, and others had people hanging from windows to wave and shout.\n\nFrom USA TODAY Network and wire reports", "authors": [], "publish_date": "2021/01/20"}]}
{"question_id": "20230120_26", "search_time": "2023/01/20/16:38", "search_result": [{"url": "https://www.theweek.co.uk/news/959265/ten-things-you-need-to-know-today-16-january-2023", "title": "Ten Things You Need to Know Today: 16 January 2023 | The Week ...", "text": "Energy bills ‘will stay high’\n\nAn energy boss has said he does not expect gas and electricity bills to return to the levels they were before the Covid pandemic. Anders Opedal, the boss of Norwegian energy giant Equinor, told the BBC that there is “a kind of re-wiring of the whole energy system in Europe particularly after the gas from Russia was taken away” and “this will require a lot of investment and these investments need to be paid for, so I would assume that the energy bills may slightly be higher than in the past but not as volatile and high as we have today”.", "authors": [], "publish_date": "2023/01/16"}, {"url": "https://www.cnn.com/2022/08/11/health/polio-cdc-rockland-county/index.html", "title": "'Silent' spread of polio in New York drives CDC to consider ...", "text": "CNN —\n\nA polio case identified in New York last month is “just the very, very tip of the iceberg” and an indication there “must be several hundred cases in the community circulating,” a senior official with the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention told CNN on Wednesday.\n\nThe case was found In Rockland County, which has a stunningly low polio vaccination rate. Dr. José Romero, director of the CDC’s National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, noted that the majority of people with polio don’t have symptoms and so can spread the virus without knowing it.\n\n“There are a number of individuals in the community that have been infected with poliovirus. They are shedding the virus,” he said. “The spread is always a possibility because the spread is going to be silent.”\n\nA team of CDC disease detectives traveled last week from agency headquarters in Atlanta to Rockland County, and they are “quite nervous” that polio “could mushroom out of control very quickly and we could have a crisis on our hands,” said a community health leader who has met with the team.\n\n“They are – what is the opposite of cautiously optimistic?” said another community leader, an expert in vaccine education, who has also met with the CDC team in Rockland County. Both leaders requested anonymity because they are not authorized to speak publicly.\n\nPolio can cause incurable paralysis and death, but most people in the US are protected, thanks to vaccination. Others, however, may be vulnerable to the virus for a variety of reasons.\n\nUnvaccinated and undervaccinated people are vulnerable, and polio vaccination rates in Rockland County and neighboring Orange County, just north of New York City, are about 60%, compared with 93% nationwide, by age 2. Immune-compromised people can be vulnerable even if they are fully vaccinated.\n\nRomero said the CDC is considering a variety of options to protect people from polio, including offering children in the area an extra shot of the vaccine, as UK health authorities are doing now in London, or recommending extra doses to certain groups of adults.\n\n“We’re looking into all aspects of how to deal with this. At this point, we don’t have a definitive answer,” he said.\n\nA ‘silent killer’\n\nThe Rockland County polio case is the first identified in the United States in nearly a decade.\n\nThe virus has also been detected in sewage in Rockland County and neighboring Orange County. The positive samples were genetically linked to the individual case, but no other cases in the US have been reported.\n\nAbout 3 in 4 people infected with polio don’t have symptoms, but they’re still capable of spreading the virus to others, according to the CDC. Among the rest, most have symptoms such as a sore throat or headache that could easily be overlooked or confused with other illnesses. Only a relatively small number, about 1 in 200 infected people, become paralyzed. A few of those who are paralyzed die because they can’t breathe.\n\nIn the late 1940s, polio outbreaks disabled an average of more than 35,000 people a year in the US. A vaccination campaign started in 1955, and cases quickly plummeted. Today, a full round of childhood polio vaccinations – four doses between 2 months old and 6 years old – is at least 99% effective, according to the CDC.\n\nBut in recent decades, some small groups have not vaccinated their children against the virus. One of them is within the ultraorthodox Jewish community in New York, including in Rockland County.\n\nMuch of the rest of the religious Jewish community in Rockland County has rallied around efforts to educate the “outliers” who refuse to vaccinate, the community health leader said.\n\n“This is a silent killer, like carbon monoxide, and we don’t know when it will hit us,” she said.\n\n‘A press release is not going to cut it’\n\nThe vaccine educator said the CDC team has been intent on learning the best ways to communicate with members of this community, who tend not to use the internet and instead get a lot of their information from the messaging platform WhatsApp as well as community newspapers.\n\nThis week, Rockland County and local health-care providers distributed an infographic in several languages, including Yiddish, that announced, “Polio is spreading in Rockland County.”\n\nThe vaccine educator in Rockland County said that at the meetings with the CDC team, “we spoke about the need for messaging that resonates, and a press release is not going to cut it.”\n\nDr. Mary Leahy, CEO of the largest health-care provider in Rockland County, Bon Secours Charity Health System, a member of WMCHealth, has attended meetings with the CDC and said that to get people who are not vaccinating their children against polio to understand the severity of the disease, “I turn to the grandparents and the great-grandparents who actually lived through the days of polio in the ’40s and ‘50s.”\n\nGet CNN Health's weekly newsletter Sign up here to get The Results Are In with Dr. Sanjay Gupta every Tuesday from the CNN Health team.\n\nThat makes sense to Romero.\n\n“I grew up in Mexico. I saw this disease, the complications,” he said. “I went to school with children that had braces.”\n\nHe said many Americans don’t recognize the “devastating” effects of “lifelong paralysis” from polio.\n\n“I think most of the American public has never seen a case of polio. People have lost that fear, if you will, of the disease.”", "authors": ["Elizabeth Cohen"], "publish_date": "2022/08/11"}, {"url": "https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2021/09/27/fact-check-false-claim-cancer-rise-since-vaccine-rollout/8348140002/", "title": "Fact check: False claim that cancer has spiked as a result of COVID ...", "text": "The claim: Cancer increased twentyfold among COVID-19 vaccinated due to suppressed T cells\n\nAs health systems across the country begin offering COVID-19 booster shots to those eligible under the CDC's Sept. 24 recommendation, an article circulating on social media claims the life-saving vaccines are creating more disease than they're fighting.\n\n\"Idaho doctor reports a '20 times increase' of cancer in vaccinated patients,\" reads the headline of the Sept. 13 article published by LifeSiteNews, a faith-themed website whose Facebook page was banned by Facebook in May for repeatedly violating the platform's COVID-19 policies concerning misinformation.\n\nThe Idaho doctor, Dr. Ryan Cole, says he observed a \"20 times increase of endometrial cancers\" since Jan. 1 over what he's seen on an annual basis, according to an Aug. 25 video shared to Twitter, which the LifeSiteNews article is based on. He also reported seeing a rash of \"invasive melanomas in younger patients... skyrocketing in the last month or two\" and an uptick in various autoimmune diseases.\n\nCole asserts the culprits behind this slew of health problems are none other than the COVID-19 vaccines, which he claims are instigating a \"drop in your killer T cells,\" a type of immune cell.\n\nThe Sept. 13 article has been shared across Facebook and amassed nearly 10,000 likes, shares and comments within a week, according to CrowdTangle, a social media insights tool.\n\nBut it's nonsense.\n\nThe claim that the COVID-19 vaccines can cause autoimmune disease has been previously debunked by USA TODAY. Similarly, experts say Cole's claim of COVID-19 vaccines suppressing killer T cells has no basis in reality. And there's no evidence of a cancer surge since the vaccine rollout.\n\nFact check:FDA never said unvaccinated people are more educated than vaccinated\n\nCole, owner and operator of his own medical laboratory chain, gained prominence this summer for his vocal opposition to COVID-19 vaccines – calling them \"fake\" and \"needle rape.\" He also convinced Idaho school officials to scrap a mask mandate.\n\nCole did not reply to USA TODAY's request for comment. USA TODAY reached out to LifeSiteNews for comment.\n\nT cells coordinate immune defense\n\nAntibodies, immune molecules made in response to a foreign invader, have been well-publicized for their role in vaccine-induced immunity. But these Y-shaped proteins aren't the only ace up our immune system's sleeve.\n\nT cells – the immune cells Cole mentions – are a type of white blood cell with many different functions but of two major types: helper T cells that coordinate an immune attack, and killer T cells that do the killing.\n\nTypically during an immune response to a virus, helper T cells interact with and activate B cells – the white blood cell antibody makers – and killer T cells. Activated killer T cells go off hunting for any infected cells, killing them by triggering a self-destruct sequence programmed into all cells of the human body.\n\nFact check:Inhaling hydrogen peroxide for COVID-19 is dangerous, experts warn\n\nT cell- and B cell-based defense appears a vital element in determining whether a patient survives COVID-19 infection, said Kristen Cohen, a senior staff scientist in the Vaccine and Infectious Disease Division at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, Wash.\n\n\"(Studies show) you did better in the context of severe disease in terms of survival if you had both arms of the immune system fending off the infection,\" she told USA TODAY.\n\nHowever, with COVID-19, Cohen said it was unclear how much killer T cells specifically contribute to the cause.\n\n\"We know they're induced and we know they're highly functional... but we don't have clear, sort of causal data ... that they contribute to clearing the infection,\" she said.\n\nCOVID-19 vaccines encourage T cells\n\nCole's claim about a drop in killer T cells is exactly wrong, said E. John Wherry, director of the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine's Institute for Immunology.\n\n\"There are dozens of studies at this point showing that these vaccines induce potent virus-specific T cells and that the rest of the T cell compartment is left essentially normal, essentially untouched,\" he told USA TODAY. \"There's no logical way that (Cole's claim of killer T cells being affected) makes any sense.\"\n\nIn a recent study published in the journal Immunity, Wherry and colleagues found that in healthy people with no prior COVID-19 infection, helper T cells rose after the first dose and killer T cell counts rose after the second dose of either the Moderna or Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine.\n\nVaccination appeared to boost a T cell immunity already present in previously infected, fully vaccinated people, although only after the first dose and not by that much.\n\nFact check:COVID-19 vaccination has no effect on blood color\n\n\"In these cases, that the people who got COVID-19 first and then got their vaccination, the vaccination basically acted a little bit like you might predict a boost to do if we give people a (vaccine) boost,\" Wherry said.\n\nOnce the vaccines cajole these T cells into existence, both Cohen and Wherry said they can remain in our bodies for a pretty long time, likely up to six or seven months, much like some studies estimate for antibodies.\n\nNo recent spike in cancers\n\nAs for an uptick in cancer, there's no nationwide data available to know whether incidence rates have indeed increased since the COVID-19 vaccine rollout. But an increase in cancer treatment was expected in the wake of the pandemic.\n\nWherry said a rising incidence of cancer was more likely associated with delays in medical care during the pandemic than with the COVID-19 vaccines. One Harvard research study found one in five U.S. adults delayed or did not get medical care at all.\n\n\"The American Association of Cancer Research actually published some commentaries and white papers on this last year and early this year, sort of pointing out that we now clearly expect to see a rising incidence of cancer because of the delayed care that was delivered for the past year,\" he said. \"And that rising incidence is probably going to last for several years.\"\n\nFact check:False claim that COVID-19 vaccine ingredients and formulas have changed since rollout\n\nAnd such a quick increase in cancer wouldn't be realistic anyhow given the nature of the disease, said Dr. Laura Makaroff, senior vice president of prevention and early detection for The American Cancer Society.\n\n\"This story from Dr. Ryan Cole appears to be based on data from a single laboratory. Additional laboratory and population-based data would be necessary to confirm the finding,\" she wrote in an email to USA TODAY. \"However, any increase in cancer incidence during this short time period since (the) COVID-19 vaccine rollout defies the natural history of cancer and years of epidemiological study, where we see over a decade between exposure and cancer occurrence.\"\n\nA twenty-fold increase in any cancer was highly unlikely within this short timeframe, Makaroff said.\n\nOur rating: False\n\nBased on our research, we rate FALSE the claim that cancer increased twentyfold among the COVID-19 vaccinated due to suppressed T cells. Studies have shown COVID-19 vaccines encourage, not suppress, T cells, including killer T cells. And there's no evidence for an increased incidence of cancer since the vaccine rollout. A rise in cancer is more likely associated with delays in medical care due to the pandemic.\n\nOur fact-check sources:\n\nThank you for supporting our journalism. You can subscribe to our print edition, ad-free app or electronic newspaper replica here.\n\nOur fact-check work is supported in part by a grant from Facebook.", "authors": [], "publish_date": "2021/09/27"}, {"url": "https://www.cnn.com/2022/02/13/europe/ukraine-russia-disinformation-us-uk-intelligence-cmd-gbr-intl/index.html", "title": "Ukraine Russia crisis: The West is a player in the Ukraine ...", "text": "CNN —\n\nCorpses strewn through wrecked buildings in the aftermath of an apparently deadly explosion. Distraught mourners, grieving for lost loved ones. And amid the smoldering ruins, evidence of Western military equipment.\n\nIn a world all too familiar with graphic images of one disaster after another, it’s easy to imagine the grim footage.\n\nAnd the United States says that’s exactly what this is: make-believe violence. It says Russia is plotting to stage a fake attack, and shoot a gory propaganda video of it, as a pretext for an invasion of Ukraine. The clip would frame the Ukrainian military – and by extension, their NATO allies – for an attack on Russian-speaking people.\n\nBut while the US government declassified the information about the alleged plot last week, it didn’t share any of its underlying evidence with the public. In a heated briefing room exchange last week, journalists demanded proof to support the claim, with one reporter accusing the State Department of veering into “Alex Jones territory.”\n\nState Department spokesperson Ned Price responded that the government was confident in the information but would not say if the US had seen any such video.\n\n“We are trying to deter the Russians from moving forward with this type of activity. That is why we are making it public,” Price said, before adding: “If you doubt the credibility of the US government, of the British government, of other governments, and want to find solace in information that the Russians are putting out, that is for you to do. “\n\nThe US claim came days after the British government warned of a Russian plot to install a pro-Kremlin leader in Ukraine, citing intelligence that it also declined to release publicly. Analysts said the developments showed the West was becoming more determined to take on Russia in the information war, a sphere in which the Kremlin has often had the upper hand in recent years.\n\nBut that is not without its risks.\n\nIt is one thing to try to deter potential disinformation campaigns, which are designed to give plausible deniability to leaders like Russian President Vladimir Putin. But it becomes another when a liberal democracy relies on unpublished intelligence to convince an already skeptical public of a looming threat.\n\nNews of the alleged false flag attack comes at a time of historically low levels of public trust in the US and British governments. As a result, there is more pressure for officials to lift the veil on their intelligence.\n\n“During the Cold War, most people knew about the Soviet threat, and we did not need to provide evidence to show that was an issue,” said Dan Lomas, an intelligence and security studies lecturer at London’s Brunel University, explaining that in a “bipolar world the threat was pretty real to more people.”\n\nWestern intelligence agencies during the Cold War would “collect, analyze information, and then provide that to governments who will then use that to shape policy responses,” he said. That process is less straightforward in our current multipolar world. “Now we are getting into a world of multiple threats, the water has been muddied, and often evidence needs to be cited to justify policy actions taken” by liberal democracies, Lomas said.\n\nState Department spokesman Ned Price speaks during a briefing in Washington, DC, on February 1, 2022. Susan Walsh/AFP/Getty Images\n\nDespite last Thursday’s heated briefing room exchange, four disinformation analysts CNN spoke to were adamant that declassifying intelligence of this sort was unprecedented for the US.\n\nThey said it also showed that democracies were finally taking pre-emptive action against the Kremlin’s disinformation playbook – which primed Russians for the 2014 invasion of Crimea and caught out NATO and its allies.\n\nRussian Ambassador to the European Union Vladimir Chizhov told CNN last week that Moscow was not planning any false flag operations as a pretext to invade Ukraine.\n\nBut Russia is no stranger to such tactics. “In 2014, an actress claimed that a little boy had been crucified in the Donbas, and that was completely false,” said Nina Jankowicz, a disinformation expert and fellow at the Wilson Center, a non-partisan think tank. “It was debunked, but this story ran on Russian media and, to my knowledge, they still run with that story.”\n\nJankowicz told CNN that Russia had “handily misattributed footage from the Balkan wars that they claimed to be from South Ossetia and Abkhazia” during its five-day war with Georgia in 2008. She said “prebuttals” to Russian disinformation were a vital deterrent in an information war in which the West has largely been on the back foot.\n\nPatchy record\n\nA satellite image shows deployment of troop housing area and military vehicles in Rechitsa, Belarus on February 9. Russia has repeatedly denied it is planning to attack Ukraine, despite its massive troop buildup in the region. Maxar Technologies/Reuters\n\nBut there are credible reasons for not revealing intelligence: doing so risks unmasking sources and divulging the methodologies employed to gather it.\n\nLomas said that in 1927 the British government read out diplomatic signals intelligence in Parliament to justify a raid on a Soviet trade delegation in London. “The Russians then knew that their communications were being read by the British government,” he explained. As a result, Russia changed its messaging system, impacting Britain’s ability to intercept Russian communications for years.\n\nYet journalists are understandably wary of reporting messages they are unable to verify independently – especially when the official narrative hasn’t always proved accurate.\n\nLast August, when a Hellfire missile fired by a US drone struck a car in a Kabul compound, the Pentagon insisted that the dead were terrorists. An investigation later revealed that all those killed were civilians, among them seven children.\n\nPast intelligence failures, like the “weapons of mass destruction” given as the rationale for the 2003 invasion of Iraq, continue to haunt public opinion of American and British interventions.\n\nIn 2013, the British government lost a parliamentary vote on joining US-led airstrikes in Syria despite intelligence linking Syrian government forces to a chemical weapons attack in Damascus. Polling at the time showed the majority of the British public opposed airstrikes. Ahead of the vote, then-Prime Minister David Cameron said: “One thing is indisputable: The well of public opinion was well and truly poisoned by the Iraq episode, and we need to understand the public skepticism.”\n\nNevertheless, there are ways to fix the credibility problem. Lomas suggests finding a better messenger.\n\nWhen the British government alleged in January that Russia was looking to install a pro-Russian leader in Kyiv, the revelation came just as Prime Minister Boris Johnson was embroiled in a political crisis over alleged parties in Downing Street while the UK was under Covid-19 restrictions.\n\nThis meant that Britain’s release of sensitive intelligence was greeted with skepticism by some commentators, who wondered whether the hawkish tone was part of a strategy designed to help keep Johnson in power.\n\nLomas said the news might have landed better if it had been announced by Britain’s intelligence agencies, since “polling consistently tells us that intelligence agencies and … civil servants are trusted far more than politicians in delivering key messages.”\n\nInformation wars\n\nThe debate over how to handle intelligence-based claims presented without evidence shows just how uneven the playing field is when dealing with autocracies such as Russia – which has long used the information space as an active front in its conflicts.\n\nMost recently, Russia accused the search and rescue volunteer organization, the “White Helmets” group, in 2018 of chemical attacks linked to the Syrian regime – a Moscow ally. The group, celebrated internationally for their live-saving work in Syria, was a frequent target of pro-Kremlin disinformation sites, which sought to delegitimize their work by claiming they were terrorists or stooges of Western intelligence.\n\n“All we have on our side is the truth,” said Jankowicz. “Russia is willing to create troll accounts and other false amplifiers, and play with the facts, and manipulate images.” “It is not fighting fire with fire in that regard,” she explained. “We’re always going to be a little bit less equipped to deal with this stuff.”\n\nMembers of the Syrian civil defence, known as the White Helmets, pull out a child from under the rubble following a reported Russian air strike on Maaret al-Numan in Syria's Idlib province in 2019. Abdulaziz Ketaz/AFP/Getty Images\n\nSince 2014, when pro-Russian rebels began seizing territory in eastern Ukraine, there has been a constant stream of disinformation about Ukraine.\n\nNone of the analysts CNN spoke to have seen evidence of the alleged Russian false flag operation revealed by the US last week – but none of them doubt the intelligence.\n\n“What’s interesting is, starting in December, the Russians were the ones promoting the idea that this war would be started by a Ukrainian false flag,” Bret Schafer, a senior fellow at the German Marshall Fund’s Alliance for Securing Democracy, told CNN.\n\nSchafer points to a statement made last December by Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu who claimed that US mercenaries were helping Ukrainian special forces “for active hostilities” in eastern Ukraine.\n\nAccording to a transcript shared on the government’s website, Shoigu alleged that supplies of an “unidentified chemical component” had been delivered to the region “to carry out provocations.” The US has denied the claim.\n\nShafer said Russian media sites ran with the claim, echoing a narrative already being pumped out on pro-Russian websites. “What is interesting is the Russians were the ones promoting the idea that the war would be started by a Ukrainian/US-NATO false flag,” he said. “It has been a sort of a back and forth of the two sides accusing the other of a false flag [operation].”\n\nIn recent years, the crackdown by social media companies on Russian bots has led to higher profile voices, such as news sites and personalities like Shoigu, playing a major role in the Kremlin’s drumbeat.\n\nAnalysis from Schafer’s team found that since November last year, Russian propagandists and news sites have claimed that: Ukraine is a failed state; Ukrainian politicians are neo-Nazis; US and NATO are to blame for the increasing likelihood of war and that – despite amassing more than 100,000 Russian troops near Ukraine’s borders – Russia is not the aggressor.\n\nThe UK-based Centre for Information Resilience, where Jankowicz is a senior adviser, has seen a 200% increase in posts claiming Ukraine is the aggressor against Russia compared to this time in 2021. Online narratives around Ukrainian neo-Nazis and NATO aggression have also seen a “huge spike in the past week,” she said.\n\nAnd American media personalities have helped launder some of these talking points. In December, Fox News host Tucker Carlson reported that a “NATO takeover of Ukraine would compromise Russia’s access to its Sevastopol Naval Base.”\n\nJankowicz said the US is badly disadvantaged “because the issue of Russian disinformation [became] so polarized” in the Trump era, she said. “People hear the word Russia, and there’s a huge dose of distrust that comes along with that for certain parts of the political spectrum on … the far left and the far right.”\n\nAccording to the State Department, the US government has taken an active role in debunking allegations on Ukraine as it tries to stop the Kremlin from shaping the information ecosystem to fit its policy goals.\n\nNovichok poisoning suspects Alexander Petrov and Ruslan Boshirov are shown on security camera footage at Salisbury train station on March 3, 2018, images that were released in September 2018. Metropolitan Police/Getty Images\n\nDeclassifying information as a weapon in the fight against disinformation worked in 2018 when the British government responded to the poisoning of Sergei and Yulia Skripal in Salisbury with the nerve agent Novichok. The then-Prime Minister Theresa May declassified evidence “extremely quickly while the situation was still unfolding, in order to push back against the Russian narrative,” Jankowicz said.\n\nThe details she released helped open source investigators like Bellingcat make bruising revelations about the poisoning suspects; they also cut through the hubris of the Russian government, Lomas said. The men accused of carrying out the attack were ridiculed abroad for claiming ​in an interview with the Kremlin-backed RT network that they had made the long journey from Moscow to Salisbury for a sightseeing day trip.\n\nIn the case of Russia’s alleged video plot, “there are plenty of reasons for the US public to be skeptical of US intelligence,” Schafer said.\n\nUS officials could try and mitigate that by pulling from the Salisbury playbook and releasing evidence later, he said. Alternatively, they could be frank that not providing proof “may not be good enough for a lot of people,” but explain that that they were unable to reveal any more.\n\nBut with the fog of war arguably thicker than ever in the digital age, cutting through may be hard to do.", "authors": ["Tara John"], "publish_date": "2022/02/13"}, {"url": "https://www.cnn.com/2022/03/30/business/weddings-comeback-2022/index.html", "title": "Get ready for a wedding boom in 2022 | CNN Business", "text": "New York CNNBusiness —\n\nTwo years of pandemic uncertainty forced many couples to postpone or even cancel their nuptial celebrations. But weddings are coming back with gusto.\n\nThis year’s wedding boom is projected to be big, according to a new report from wedding planning site The Knot. It anticipates as many as 2.6 million weddings to take place in 2022, up from 2.2 million in 2019, prior to the pandemic. The big events will also be much bigger — and likely more expensive amid record levels of consumer price inflation.\n\n“This year will not only be the year with the most weddings in recent history, but also starts to welcome the next generation of couples — Gen Zers — getting married,” Lauren Kay, executive editor of The Knot, said in a statement.\n\nA banner year for weddings will be welcome relief not just for brides and grooms, but for the entire wedding industry. The nightmare year of 2020 forced the majority of weddings to be canceled or pushed back, and scores of businesses that rely on them for revenue were left struggling to survive.\n\nWeddings are comign back in full force in 2022, according to The Knot. Marlena Sloss for The Washington Post/Getty Images\n\nAs the Covid-19 vaccination rollout gained momentum, weddings staged somewhat of a comeback in 2021. Couples shifted to smaller, outdoor ceremonies, Zoom weddings and even elopements.\n\nThis year, it’s full steam ahead.\n\nBack to pre-pandemic fervor\n\nThe Knot report said that 98% of couples who are set to tie the knot this year are confident their wedding will take place as scheduled. That compares to 45% who made changes to their wedding plans — such as a different venue — in 2021.\n\nWedding receptions are also gaining a few more guests — the average guest count is expected to hit 129 this year, up from 110 in 2021. The Knot report said guest list size has bounced back to 80% of 2019 levels.\n\nCouples want to go all out on their weddings and aren’t too focused on reining in costs, Tim Chi, CEO of The Knot Worldwide, told CNNBusiness’ Markets Now on Wednesday.\n\nOn average, couples in 2021 spent a total of $34,000 on their wedding, including the ceremony, reception, engagement and wedding rings, The Knot report said. The site said it does not yet have a cost estimate for 2022, but expects “it’ll be at least 2021 levels.”\n\nBut Chi said inflation and continuing problems with supply chains will also contribute to higher wedding-related costs.\n\nFall in fashion\n\nFor those still in the process of setting a wedding date in 2022, The Knot found that October has emerged as the most popular month, and October 22 the most popular date.\n\nSafety remains a top priority, however. Chi said many couples are incorporating hand sanitizing stations and other precautions or holding the festivities outdoors to promote social distancing.\n\nAzazie, a large online seller of bridal and wedding party dresses and accessories, said it has seen a 200% growth in sales already this year.\n\n“We are seeing two years’ worth of weddings happening in one year,” said Ranu Coleman, chief marketing officer of Azazie. “Some of these are weddings that were postponed due to Covid and [also] people having second weddings because the first one was smaller and more intimate and now they want to celebrate in a bigger way.”\n\nIn terms of the types of weddings its customers are planning this year, Coleman said a rustic-themed celebration featuring greenery, dried flowers and vintage decor has emerged as a top trend.", "authors": ["Parija Kavilanz"], "publish_date": "2022/03/30"}, {"url": "https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/50-states/2022/04/12/fearless-girl-lizard-invasion-superman-building-news-around-states/50062795/", "title": "Fearless Girl, lizard invasion: News from around our 50 states", "text": "From USA TODAY Network and wire reports\n\nAlabama\n\nMontgomery: Two families with transgender teens and two physicians sued the state Monday to overturn a law that makes it a crime for doctors to treat trans youth under 19 with puberty blockers or hormones to help affirm their gender identity. The lawsuit was filed in federal court three days after Republican Gov. Kay Ivey signed the measure into law. Ivey is running for reelection this year and faces challengers in next month’s GOP primary. “By signing SB 184 Governor Ivey has told kind, loving, and loyal Alabama families that they cannot stay here without denying their children the basic medical care they need,” Dr. Morissa Ladinsky, one of the plaintiffs, said in a statement. “She has undermined the health and well-being of Alabama children and put doctors like me in the horrifying position of choosing between ignoring the medical needs of our patients or risking being sent to prison.” The parents of a 13-year-old transgender girl in Jefferson County and a 17-year-old transgender boy in Shelby County are participating in the lawsuit. The plaintiffs are known as Roe and Doe in the court filing to protect the children’s identities. The Southern Poverty Law Center; the Human Rights Campaign, a national advocacy group for the LGBTQ community; and other groups are representing the plaintiffs.\n\nAlaska\n\nJuneau: The Legislature is not on track to finish its work within a voter-approved session limit. The 90-day mark will be reached Sunday. The voter-approved limit took effect in 2008, but lawmakers face no penalty for failing to meet the deadline and can continue working beyond it. The state constitution permits regular sessions of up to 121 days, with an option to extend another 10 days. Lawmakers last finished within the 90-day limit in 2013, according to statistics from the Legislative Affairs Agency. The state House over the weekend passed its version of a state operating budget, which the Senate still must consider. Senate President Peter Micciche did not have an immediate update on when the operating budget would reach the Senate floor. Differences between the versions that pass the House and Senate usually are worked out by a conference committee. The House version called for a $1,300 “energy relief” payment to Alaskans and a dividend of about $1,250. A long-standing formula for calculating the annual dividend was last used in 2015. While many lawmakers see that formula as unsustainable, agreement has yet to be reached on an alternative. The dividend amount in the meantime generally has been set by lawmakers.\n\nArizona\n\nPhoenix: The state House voted Monday to delay the effective date for legislation signed last month requiring voters to provide evidence of their citizenship, which has already prompted two lawsuits amid fears by voting rights advocates that it could cancel the registrations of thousands of people. If approved by the Senate and Republican Gov. Doug Ducey, the citizenship requirement would take effect after the 2022 election, a concession demanded by a GOP lawmaker who provided the final vote to pass the bill out of the Senate. As it stands now, that requirement and others in a bill signed March 30 will take effect 90 days after the legislative session ends, which is likely to fall between the primary and general election. Monday’s update also would make a technical change that appears aimed at addressing concerns the bill could require hundreds of thousands of people who registered before 2005 to provide proof of citizenship. Arizona is the only state that requires documentary proof of citizenship when registering to vote. A 2013 Supreme Court decision on Arizona’s law said anyone who registers using a federal voter registration form, which does not require documentation of citizenship, must be allowed to vote in federal elections. The controversial new law seeks to block those voters from voting for president or by mail.\n\nArkansas\n\nLittle Rock: A medical marijuana producer is opening a retail location in the city’s suburbs. Good Day Farm, which has operations across the South, on Tuesday unveiled Berner’s By Good Day Farm. Occupying 4,034 square feet of prime retail space in the Little Rock suburb of Chenal, the retail collaboration marks the Cookies brand’s entry into the Arkansas medical cannabis market and will provide the state’s patients with an expanded assortment of curated cannabis products and exclusive merchandise. “I never imagined our first store in the South being in Arkansas; I actually never pictured opening a store in the South in general,” said Berner, founder and CEO of Cookies, who goes by one name. “We are extremely excited about our partnership with Good Day Farm and look forward to providing real menus and a curated customer journey for those in Arkansas, especially those who have never experienced cannabis before. The last time I was in Little Rock, I was on a tour with Snoop (Dogg), and we had a blast. I look forward to setting the tone with Good Day Farm and giving Arkansas a taste of California.” A grand opening event will be held Friday.\n\nCalifornia\n\nSantee: A judge has ordered the Southern California city to throw out approval of a long-planned housing project, ruling that developers hadn’t adequately considered how new homes could affect potential wildfire evacuations. The Santee City Council in late 2020 approved the Fanita Ranch project, giving the green light to 3,000 new homes in hills northeast of San Diego. In her decision, Superior Court Judge Katherine Bacal wrote that eight resolutions and ordinances giving approval must be overturned, the San Diego Union-Tribune reports. The newspaper said the judge expressed concern that the plan didn’t fully address whether thousands of new residents would have time to flee during an emergency like a wildfire. The project, overseen by HomeFed Fanita Rancho, is not dead, and developers said they would revise the environmental impact report to address the judge’s concerns. Messages left by the Union-Tribune with the city’s manager and attorney were not immediately returned. The decision was celebrated by environmental groups that sued to stop the project, arguing that building more homes would only increase the risk of fire.\n\nColorado\n\nDenver: An advisory board has begun the process of removing the disparaging word “squaw” from 28 of the state’s peaks, valleys, passes and creeks. The Colorado Geographic Naming Advisory Board met for three hours Sunday and considered task force recommendations and suggestions from local communities, The Colorado Sun reports. The board approved new names for nearly two dozen features but deferred a handful of name changes to a federal task force and steered clear of suggestions for naming features after people. The board also said all of its recommendations should take a back seat if Indigenous tribes suggest a better replacement. The word “squaw,” derived from the Algonquin language, may once have simply meant “woman.” But over generations, it morphed into a misogynist and racist term to disparage Indigenous women. Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland in November created a committee to strip the name from federal maps. The Derogatory Geographic Names Task Force in February identified 660 features on federal land with the name, including 28 in Colorado.\n\nConnecticut\n\nHartford: A bill that would allow terminally ill adults in the state to request medication to help them die was suddenly derailed Monday by an unusual parliamentary procedure during a committee vote. Advocates had expressed optimism this would finally be the year, after roughly a decade of emotional debate, the legislation would get a vote in the full House of Representatives and Senate and be signed into law by Democratic Gov. Ned Lamont. However, Rep. Craig Fishbein, R-Wallingford, the top House member on the General Assembly’s Judiciary Committee, made a motion to “divide the committee.” That meant only senators on the panel could vote on the legislation. In Connecticut, both House and Senate members comprise committees. Ultimately, the senators defeated the bill on a 5-4 vote. Democratic Sen. Mae Flexer of Windham voted with the four Republicans in opposing the measure. “It says a lot about support for medical aid in dying, both inside and outside the Capitol, that opponents had to resort to a rarely used parliamentary maneuver to defeat the legislation,” said Tim Appleton, campaign director for the advocacy group Compassion & Choices, arguing there’s strong support among Connecticut residents for the bill. He predicted the vote will mean “immeasurable suffering” for people who are already terminally ill.\n\nDelaware\n\nDover: A high-ranking state medical official who is also a former legislator has opted for a bench trial instead of a jury trial on charges of official misconduct and falsifying business records. The trial of Rebecca D. Walker began Tuesday afternoon in New Castle County Superior Court. Walker is the director of nursing in the state Division of Public Health and a former state House representative. She is accused of submitting phony records regarding employee alcohol and drug testing over a period of almost five years while she served as deputy director of the state Division of Forensic Science. Walker was placed on paid administrative leave from her nursing post after being indicted in April 2021 but was allowed to return to work less than three weeks later. As Democratic vice-chair of the House Health and Human Development, Walker co-sponsored and helped pass a bill in 2014 that created the forensic science division. Months later, without a public job posting, she was hired as deputy director of the division at a salary of more than $92,000. The indictment alleges that between May 2015 and February 2020, Walker, “with the intent to defraud,” falsified employee substance abuse testing records, indicating that employees had passed tests they never received.\n\nDistrict of Columbia\n\nWashington: The U.S. House Oversight Committee sent a letter to the Federal Trade Commission saying it found evidence the NFL’s Washington Commanders engaged in unlawful financial conduct. In the letter obtained by the Associated Press, the committee said the team withheld ticket revenue from visiting teams and refundable ticket deposits from season ticketholders. The committee said emails, documents and statements made by former employees indicate team executives and owner Dan Snyder engaged in “a troubling, long-running, and potentially unlawful pattern of financial conduct.” The committee is sharing documents with the FTC while requesting the commission take any action necessary to make sure the money is returned to its rightful owners. Congress launched an investigation into the team’s workplace misconduct after the league did not release a report detailing the findings of an independent probe into the matter. After testimony from former employees, that investigation expanded to the organization’s finances. Lawyers Lisa Banks and Debra Katz, who represent more than 40 former employees, including some who testified, called the letter “damning.” “It’s clear that the team’s misconduct goes well beyond the sexual harassment and abuse of employees already documented,” they said in a statement.\n\nFlorida\n\nTallahassee: The state will create new grant programs to help fathers become more engaged with their own children and with children whose fathers aren’t in their homes under a bill signed by Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis on Monday. The Department of Children and Families will manage the grant program and work with nonprofit organizations to promote the importance of fathers being a part of their children’s lives. It will also create a mentor program to help children who don’t have a father in their lives. “This has huge ramifications for someone’s ability to be able to realize their God-given potential,” DeSantis said. “Any dad who may not be engaged, we want to be able to support. We’ve got programs, we’ve got community groups, we’ve got nonprofits. … You’re not a man by leaving your kids hung out to dry. You need to be there.” DeSantis signed the bill at the Tampa Bay Buccaneers practice facility and was joined by former coach Tony Dungy.\n\nGeorgia\n\nSocial Circle: The state’s wildlife agency is asking residents to report sightings of an invasive lizard that can pose a threat to native species. The state Department of Natural Resources is trying to locate and remove South American tegus from Georgia before the lizards can thrive in greater numbers. So far, the state’s only known wild population has been found in Toombs and Tattnall counties in southeast Georgia. Wildlife officials hope to stop the black-and-white lizards from spreading further. They can grow up to 4 feet long and weigh up to 10 pounds, and the reptiles have a wide-ranging appetite that favors eggs of turtles, alligators and ground-nesting birds. “They can live almost anywhere and eat almost anything,” Daniel Sollenberger, a DNR wildlife biologist, said in a news release. “We are focusing our efforts to accomplish two goals: document the extent of where tegus occur in the wilds of southeast Georgia and remove those animals as soon as we can after they are detected.” Officials aren’t sure how tegus got introduced into the wild in Georgia, but they are commonly kept as pets. Last year the DNR removed a single tegu that was spotted on a game camera and later captured in a trap. Seven were collected in 2020. Wildlife officials warn if tegus become established in the wild, they will be nearly impossible to eradicate.\n\nHawaii\n\nHonolulu: The governor said Monday that he is not currently considering reinstating a mask requirement for public indoor spaces. Hawaii was the last state in the nation to lift its indoor mask mandate at the end of March. “I don’t anticipate reinstating the mask mandate at this point,” said Ige in an email. The state has seen an uptick in new coronavirus cases since the rules were lifted. “We did expect a slight increase in case numbers after spring break, and we have seen that in the last week or so,” Ige said. “However, we are not seeing the kind of surges that are currently happening on the mainland. Hospitalizations continue to be low here, and we are in a good place.” Philadelphia reinstated its mask mandate Monday amid a surge in COVID-19 cases, and other cities across the country are seeing a rise in cases. Ige said if the conditions warranted it, he might consider requiring masks again in the future. “If there is a big spike, we may have to revisit masks,” he said. “However, I noticed over the weekend that many people continue to wear their masks indoors. We know that masks work, and they make a difference in keeping our communities safe.” Public schools in Hawaii still require children to wear masks indoors, a measure the governor said he continues to support.\n\nIdaho\n\nBoise: A judge ruled Monday that a mother accused of conspiring to kill her children, her estranged husband and a lover’s wife is now mentally competent to stand trial on some of the charges in Idaho. Daybell and her new husband, Chad Daybell, face numerous charges in the complicated case involving allegations of bizarre spiritual beliefs involving “zombies” and doomsday predictions. Prosecutors have said Lori and Chad Daybell espoused the religious beliefs in an effort to encourage or justify the murders. The case against her had been hold for months after Judge Steven Boyce ordered her committed to a mental facility so she could undergo treatment in an effort to make her mentally fit enough to assist in her own defense. Boyce’s new order said Lori Vallow Daybell “is restored to competency and is fit to proceed” in the Idaho murder case. He did not provide other details about her treatment or mental condition. She is scheduled to be formally arraigned in court next week, and both Lori and Chad Daybell are set to stand trial together early next year. They are charged with conspiracy to commit murder and first-degree murder in connection with the deaths of Lori Daybell’s children, 7-year-old Joshua “JJ” Vallow and 16-year-old Tylee Ryan, as well as Chad Daybell’s first wife, Tammy Daybell.\n\nIllinois\n\nChicago: A convicted felon who pleaded guilty to charges that he opened fire on police in 2020, wounding three officers, was sentenced Monday to 31 years in prison. The sentence comes two months after Lovelle Jordan, 27, pleaded guilty to one count of attempted murder and five counts of aggravated battery to a peace officer, the Chicago Tribune reports. The charges stem from a July 2020 shooting that came shortly after Jordan was arrested in connection with a carjacking in downtown Chicago. Police had driven him to a station on the city’s Northwest Side. Officers patted him down, but while they found he was carrying drugs in his pockets, according to authorities, they did not see that he was carrying a small loaded pistol. Jordan was handcuffed behind his back. At the time of the shooting, Chief of Detectives Brendan Deenihan said that officers had searched Jordan before he was transported, but he apparently had the gun “extremely secreted, probably very close to his private area” and was able to retrieve the weapon during the ride to the station. Jordan was somehow able to move his cuffed hands from behind his back, grabbed the gun and opened fire when an officer opened the door for him at the station. Dozens of shots were fired in a shootout between Jordan and three officers were shot. Jordan was also shot and was left paralyzed.\n\nIndiana\n\nEvansville: State officials have chosen the preferred route of a proposed highway that would run from the Ohio River to Interstate 69, linking small southern Indiana communities to I-69. The Indiana Department of Transportation announced its selection of the “Alternative P” route over several other options for the Mid-States Corridor in a public notice published Monday. The route would start in Spencer County and use existing U.S. 231 until it links with Interstate 64. A new, 54-mile portion of the road would then branch off and run parallel to U.S. 231 before linking with I-69 just north of the Crane Naval Surface Warfare Center in Martin County. That route would mostly bypass “developed” parts of towns along the path, including Jasper and Loogootee, the notice said. Mid-States Corridor Project spokeswoman Mindy Peterson declined to provide specifics – including why INDOT chose “alternative P” – until an environmental impact statement is released Friday. Public hearings on the preferred route are set for April 26 at WestGate Academy in Odon and April 28 at the Jasper Arts Center on Vincennes University’s Jasper campus. INDOT and the project’s supporters say it will improve southern Indiana’s highway connections. Opponents have argued that building a new highway would damage the region’s forests and caves.\n\nIowa\n\nOxford: Iowa Farm Sanctuary has become the first in the state to be accredited by the Global Federation of Animal Sanctuaries, joining the ranks of more than 150 GFAS-accredited and -verified sanctuaries, rescues and rehabilitation centers worldwide. “It’s a huge accomplishment, and there’s so much buildup to it. We were confident that we are accreditation-worthy, but it was just all the work that we put into it,” said Katie Valentine, assistant director of operations at the Iowa Farm Sanctuary. The Iowa Farm Sanctuary was founded by Shawn and Jered Camp in 2016. The nonprofit focuses on helping animals with special needs like Ellie, a cow who was born blind. Not all residents at the farm sanctuary have special needs. Many come from dangerous situations, like Kathy the goat, rescued from a hoarder. Accreditation from GFAS vouches for organizations with stakeholders such as donors or a foundation. An organization must meet the GFAS Standards of Excellence, which contain guidelines for housing, veterinary care, well-being and handling, financial stability and more. “In Iowa, which is a state known for having a lot of animal agriculture, Iowa Farm Sanctuary really stands out because unlike (in animal agriculture), they are providing individualized care to their residents,” said Jessica Harris, program director of farmed animals at GFAS.\n\nKansas\n\nTopeka: Gov. Laura Kelly on Monday signed a bill pushed by Republicans to overturn three communities’ policies that could help immigrants stay in the state illegally. The bill was filed after Wyandotte County passed a “sanctuary” ordinance in February that would provide local identification cards for immigrants and other residents and would prevent local law enforcement from helping the federal government enforce immigration laws unless public safety is threatened. Lawrence and Roeland Park have similar ordinances. The Democratic governor said in a statement announcing that she would sign the bill that immigration policy is a federal responsibility and can’t be resolved at the local level. “Both Republicans and Democrats in Washington have failed to address immigration issues for decades,” Kelly said. “We need a national solution, and we need it now.” The Kansas House and Senate passed the bill in recent weeks, and supporters had the two-thirds majorities necessary in both chambers to override a Kelly veto. The bill nullifies the three existing ordinances and bans future ones that restrict cooperation with federal immigration enforcement. The bill also says a local ID isn’t valid for voting.\n\nKentucky\n\nFrankfort: A bill allowing lawyers to carry concealed weapons anywhere in the state, including courtrooms, drew a veto Monday from Gov. Andy Beshear, who said it could spark dangerous situations. The Democratic governor said he was contacted by judges, prosecutors and the state Fraternal Order of Police requesting that he veto the measure. The proposal was attached as an amendment to an unrelated bill by the Senate before it cleared the Republican-led Legislature in the final hectic days before lawmakers took their “veto period’” break to allow Beshear to review stacks of passed bills. The gun-carrying allowance would apply to lawyers arguing cases as well as attorneys personally involved in cases, including domestic disputes or divorces, Beshear’s veto message said. The bill is one of a raft of measures vetoed recently by the governor. Lawmakers will be able to take up veto override efforts when they reconvene Wednesday for the final two days of this year’s session. The governor said he supports Second Amendment rights to bear arms, but his veto message raised potentially dangerous scenarios in courtrooms if the measure becomes law. “Courtrooms are venues of often volatile disputes that can be filled with emotion and tension,” wrote Beshear, a former state attorney general.\n\nLouisiana\n\nNew Orleans: The group Red Hot Chili Peppers has been added to the lineup of the 2022 New Orleans Jazz Fest. The rock band’s appearance is set for Sunday, May 1, and will be its first at the event since 2016. The group has sold 80 million albums, collected six Grammy Awards and been inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. Their 12th studio album, “Unlimited Love,” was released April 1. Last month, the festival announced plans to find a replacement for the Foo Fighters, which canceled all upcoming concert dates after the death of the band’s drummer, Taylor Hawkins. Their scheduled time slot has now been filled by the Chili Peppers. The 2022 festival will run April 29-May 1 and May 5-8 at the Fair Grounds Race Course in New Orleans. The Who, Stevie Nicks, Lionel Richie, Luke Combs, Willie Nelson, Trombone Shorty & Orleans Avenue, Charlie Wilson and Erykah Badu are among the headliners for this year’s festival. Started in 1970, Jazz Fest annually celebrates the unique culture and heritage of New Orleans and Louisiana, alongside performances by nationally and internationally renowned guest artists. It is returning after a two-year hiatus brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic.\n\nMaine\n\nPortland: The lawyer for the former mayor made the case in court Tuesday that his client was served an eviction notice in retaliation for organizing on behalf of tenants. Ethan Strimling, the mayor of Portland from 2015 to 2019, appeared in court after he was served with the eviction notice last year and refused to leave. Strimling’s case has gone to court because his landlord, Geoffrey Rice, started legal proceedings to make him leave. Strimling’s attorney, Scott Dolan, said during opening statements in the case that the eviction was “a clear case of retaliation” for organizing the tenants’ union, the Bangor Daily News reports. Rice’s attorney, David Chamberlain, said during his own opening statement that the eviction was about economics. Rice offered an example that Strimling violated a section of his lease by leaving his window open in April. That presented a potential cost for Rice, who paid the heating bill. Portland voters passed a rent control ordinance in November 2020. That ordinance encouraged residents to organize.\n\nMaryland\n\nBaltimore: A former police detective was found guilty of several federal crimes Monday, including providing a gun that he knew would be planted on a suspect. A federal jury convicted Robert Hankard of corruption and conspiracy charges, including allegations that he conspired with others to plant a BB gun on a suspect whom another officer had run over and later lied about it to a grand jury, news outlets reports. Hankard was also convicted of falsifying an application for a search warrant and an arrest report in another incident where drugs were planted on a suspect and of falsely testifying to a federal grand jury. The prosecution was part of the fallout from the rogue Gun Trace Task Force, which was supposed to take illegal guns off the streets, but instead members robbed drug dealers, planted drugs and guns on innocent people, and assaulted seemingly random civilians. Hankard didn’t testify and remains out of custody until his sentencing hearing, which has yet to be scheduled.\n\nMassachusetts\n\nBoston: A bill passed by the state Senate aims to assist members of communities disproportionately harmed by the enforcement of past marijuana laws in participating in the growing cannabis market. The legislation would create a new fund that supporters say will increase equity in the cannabis industry in part by addressing the lack of access to capital that has kept many would-be entrepreneurs from taking part in the new industry. Opening an average cannabis retail shop can require more than $1 million, backers of the legislation said, with the numbers even higher for manufacturing facilities – as much as $5 million. Another hurdle is federal cannabis law preventing businesses from accessing traditional bank loans, leaving many entrepreneurs vulnerable to predatory financial deals and damaging equity partnerships. The bill would create a social equity fund to facilitate new access to capital by making grants and loans, including forgivable and no-interest loans. The fund would receive 10% of annual revenue collected from the marijuana excise tax, an estimated $18 million for the 2023 fiscal year. If approved, the state would join a handful of other states in pioneering the program. The bill now heads to the Massachusetts House.\n\nMichigan\n\nDetroit: PFAS compounds, the emerging contaminant “forever chemicals” raising public health and environmental alarms, are found in greater quantities in the treated water leaving the state’s wastewater treatment plants – the water returning to streams, rivers and lakes – than in the not-yet-treated water entering the plant, a new Western Michigan University study found. The study highlights the complex cycling of PFAS, which have been tied to cancer and other health problems, through the environment and through human attempts to address it. When PFAS are removed from a contaminated site – either physically excavated or through charcoal filtration – the removed contaminants typically end up in a landfill. When that landfill leaches liquids, they are typically captured and either piped or trucked to a wastewater treatment facility. But such facilities aren’t required to treat for PFAS. The increase in PFAS detection in wastewater treatment plant’s outflow doesn’t mean the plants are introducing more chemicals. Rather, it appears that PFAS chemicals that scientists cannot readily detect in the wastewater entering plants are being transformed into detectable PFAS compounds during the treatment process, said Matt Reeves, lead author of the study, hydrogeologist and associate professor at Western Michigan, who specializes in the fate and transport of contaminants in the environment.\n\nMinnesota\n\nMinneapolis: Prosecutors revealed in a hearing Monday evening that they offered plea deals to three former police officers charged with aiding and abetting the murder of George Floyd, but the defendants rejected them. Hennepin County Judge Peter Cahill held the hearing mostly to consider whether he has the authority to allow live video coverage of the upcoming trial set to begin in June for former Officers Tou Thao, Thomas Lane and J. Alexander Kueng. They’re charged with aiding and abetting both manslaughter and murder when former Officer Derek Chauvin used his knee to pin Floyd, a Black man, to the pavement for 91/ 2 minutes on May 25, 2020. Kueng knelt on Floyd’s back, Lane held his legs, and Thao kept bystanders back. Lead prosecutor Matthew Frank did not disclose details of the plea offers in open court but said they were identical and were made March 22 after a jury convicted the three in a separate trial in February on federal civil rights charges stemming from Floyd’s death, according to pool reports from inside the courtroom. Lane’s attorney, Earl Gray, said it was hard for the defense to negotiate when the three still don’t know what their federal sentences will be. The judge in that case has not set a sentencing date, and all three remain free on bail.\n\nMississippi\n\nJackson: A death row inmate has told a judge under oath that he wants to continue appealing his case, months after saying he wanted to give up his appeals and request an execution date. George County Circuit Court Judge Kathy King Jackson issued an order Monday noting the current wishes of the inmate, Blayde Nathaniel Grayson, who appeared before Jackson on Thursday and said he wants to continue his appeal in federal court. Grayson, 46, was convicted of capital murder in 1997 for the stabbing death the previous year of 78-year-old Minnie Smith during a home burglary in south Mississippi’s George County. He said in a handwritten letter to the state Supreme Court in early December: “I ask to see that my execution should be carried out forthwith.” Grayson also said then that he wanted to end all of his appeals. Grayson’s attorney, David Voisin, submitted a letter days later asking justices to disregard Grayson’s request because Grayson still had an appeal pending in federal court. On Jan. 28, the state Supreme Court ordered that Grayson be put under oath before a circuit judge to say whether he wished to go forward with his request for the state to schedule his lethal injection. That hearing happened Thursday.\n\nMissouri\n\nSt. Louis: Circuit Attorney Kim Gardner has reached an agreement with the Missouri Office of Disciplinary Counsel in which she acknowledges mistakes in her handling of the prosecution of former Gov. Eric Greitens but won’t face severe penalties for those mistakes. The “joint stipulation” agreement was announced Monday at the outset of a disciplinary hearing before a three-person panel. In the agreement, Gardner concedes she failed to produce documents and mistakenly maintained that all documents had been provided to Greitens’ lawyers in the 2018 criminal case. The agreement says Gardner’s conduct “was negligent or perhaps reckless, but not intentional.” It calls for a written reprimand. A more severe punishment – suspension or disbarment – would likely cost Gardner her job because state law requires elected prosecutors to hold active law licenses. The panel would still need to sign off on the agreement and make a recommendation within 30 days to the Missouri Supreme Court, which ultimately decides punishment. It’s unclear when the court might make a final decision. Gardner is St. Louis’ first Black female circuit attorney and one of several progressive prosecutors elected in recent years with a focus on creating more fairness in the criminal justice system. She told the panel Monday that the mistakes were due to the fast-moving nature of the Greitens case.\n\nMontana\n\nBillings: State environmental officials unlawfully approved a large copper mine in central Montana despite worries that mining waste would pollute a river that’s popular among boaters, a state judge ruled. Officials with the Montana Department of Environmental Quality failed to conduct an adequate review of the proposed Black Butte mine north of White Sulphur Springs, Judge Katherine Bidegaray said in Friday’s ruling. Work began last year on the mine along a tributary of the Smith River, a waterway so popular among boaters that the state holds an annual lottery to decide who can float down it. The underground mine sponsored by Vancouver-based Sandfire Resources is on private land and would extract 15.3 million tons of copper-laden rock and waste over 15 years – roughly 440 tons a day. Environmentalists had sued over potential pollution from the mine and asked Bidegaray to reconsider its permit. Her ruling leaves that permit in place for now. She asked the two sides in the case to submit legal briefs within 45 days to address what should happen next. State officials said the mine permit includes requirements that will protect the Smith River. They plan to appeal the ruling, Department of Environmental Quality Director Chris Dorrington said.\n\nNebraska\n\nLincoln: A bill that would have allowed people in a majority of U.S. states to carry concealed handguns without a permit died Monday when Nebraska lawmakers derailed the proposal after hearing concerns from law enforcement officials. The bill would have made Nebraska the 26th state to adopt so-called constitutional carry legislation. Supporters in Nebraska fell two votes short of the 33-vote supermajority needed to overcome a filibuster led by opponents, which prevents lawmakers from advancing it this year. Permitless concealed carry is already allowed in 25 conservative-leaning states. The Nebraska bill won initial approval last month but stalled Monday on the second of three required votes in the waning days of the legislative session. “To say I’m frustrated is an understatement,” said Sen. Tom Brewer, the bill’s sponsor and a leading gun rights advocate in the Legislature. Nebraska already allows gun owners to carry firearms in public view, as long as they aren’t in a place where it’s prohibited and don’t have a criminal record that bars them from possessing one. To legally conceal the gun, they’re required to submit to a Nebraska State Patrol background check, get fingerprinted and take a gun safety course at their own expense.\n\nNevada\n\nLas Vegas: More Nevadans today are pessimistic about financial security and rising inflation than in recent years, a new poll of likely voters found, suggesting a negative shift in public opinion on the Silver State’s economy. The poll conducted last week by Suffolk University for the Reno Gazette Journal shows that Nevadans’ outlook on the economy mirrors how they feel about their elected officials both at the state level and in the White House. Just over 40% said their standard of living is worse now than it was four years ago – before Gov. Steve Sisolak and President Joe Biden assumed their respective offices and replaced Republican incumbents. About half said Nevada is headed down the wrong track. Suffolk surveyed 500 voters across the state, all of whom indicated they will likely vote in the midterm elections later this year. About 43% said their annual household income is less than $75,000, with 13% making less than $20,000 annually. Nevada’s median household income in 2020 was about $62,000, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. More than half of respondents said they disapprove of the job Biden is doing as president, and 47% said they want their vote in November “to change the direction” Biden is leading the nation.\n\nNew Hampshire\n\nConcord: A commission to address domestic violence, sexual assault and stalking will meet again following a ten-year absence, according to an executive order signed Monday by Gov. Chris Sununu. A state task force that examined how the judiciary handles domestic violence cases recommended that the commission be brought back. The original commission was created by Gov. Stephen Merrill and was active from 1993 to 2013. Sununu’s executive order said the state “remains committed to fostering a multidisciplinary approach to both better address the needs of victims of domestic violence, sexual assault and stalking, and promote a consistent response to hold offenders accountable for their actions.” It said that combatting and preventing domestic violence, sexual assault and stalking “remains a priority” for Sununu’s administration, and a commitment to reconvene the commission “is an additional measure to ensure victims remain safe and offenders are held accountable.”\n\nNew Jersey\n\nNorth Haledon: Hundreds of people are signing petitions to keep a 25-foot star shining at High Mountain Park Preserve as the mayor continues to defy an order to take down the solar-powered decoration. Mayor Randy George said Monday that he is prepared to reinforce the public relations onslaught at a special meeting next month at Eastern Christian High School. The agenda, he said, will be to organize more support against The Nature Conservancy, the Virginia-based nonprofit that asked for the star to be permanently removed. “I’m doing everything I can to harass them,” the mayor said. Meanwhile, the borough has backing from an influential source. The township of Wayne is helping the cause, and its mayor said he “does not object” to the star on the mountain. Wayne owns most of the 1,260-acre park, but according to the conservancy, it does not own any portion of the preserve where the star is placed. That part was given directly to the nonprofit by North Haledon in October 2000. Barbara Brummer, the conservancy’s director for New Jersey, wrote in a letter to George that the star is a safety hazard because hikers are climbing on it and visiting the mountain after dark to see it lit up. “Another very important consideration,” she wrote, “is that the star and its accompanying equipment have a negative ecological impact.”\n\nNew Mexico\n\nSanta Fe: Election regulators are resisting efforts by a conservative-backed foundation to post statewide voter registration information on a public website where it can be searched by names or addresses to view whether people voted in past elections and sometimes their party affiliations. The website does not list details of how people voted regarding candidates or initiatives. The Voter Reference Foundation, created by Republican former U.S. Senate candidate Doug Truax of Illinois, announced in December that it would add registered New Mexico voters to its website database VoteRef.com that was established in the wake of the 2020 election and now includes voter rolls from at least 20 states. That move has prompted calls for a state investigation into possible misuse of election records and a preemptive lawsuit by Voter Reference Foundation to ensure its plans to publish the details about New Mexico voters. The foundation has said its goal is to usher in a “new era of American election transparency.” But New Mexico Secretary of State Maggie Toulouse Oliver said in an interview Monday that the foundation’s efforts violate state law that restricts the use of voter registration data to political campaigning or noncommercial government purposes.\n\nNew York\n\nNew York: The 4-foot bronze Fearless Girl statue that was deposited in front of Lower Manhattan’s Charging Bull in 2017 will remain in its current spot opposite the New York Stock Exchange at least until early next year while city officials wrestle with a permanent disposition for the popular symbol of female empowerment, a city board decided Monday. Members of the Public Design Commission granted an 11-month permit extension and said they would spend the next six months exploring a way for New York City to take ownership of the statue, which is currently the subject of litigation between artist Kristen Visbal and State Street Global Advisors, the Boston-based asset-management firm that commissioned it. “We today, the Public Design Commission, cannot make this a permanent piece of art,” commission president Signe Nielsen said. “We can urge that steps be taken to enable this work to be considered for the public collection.” The statue of a spunky young girl was supposed to be a temporary installation when State Street commissioned it in 2017 to urge higher representation of women on corporate boards, but permits to keep it on display were extended several times once it became a major tourist attraction. Fearless Girl was moved to its current location in December 2018 and has continued to draw selfie-taking visitors. Visbal, meanwhile, began selling replicas of the statue around the world. State Street, which had an ownership contract with the artist, sued Visbal, alleging the replica sales violated the agreement, and Visbal countersued, arguing that the company was infringing on her rights. She has urged the city to take ownership of the piece itself.\n\nNorth Carolina\n\nAsheville: City officials have settled a federal discrimination lawsuit with a former firefighter who said she had endured a hostile work environment in which the fire chief and others inflicted emotional distress. John Hunter, the attorney representing former Asheville firefighter Joy Ponder, confirmed Tuesday that his client will get $155,000 in compensatory damages. She also voluntarily dismissed her claim in U.S. District Court, Hunter said. He said it was unusual for a gender discrimination case to survive summary judgment. “The city didn’t come forward with settlement offers until that happened,” he said. A federal judge ruled in March that the discrimination lawsuit filed by Ponder, one of the highest-ranking women in a North Carolina fire department, could proceed based on a claim of “disparate treatment.” Attorneys for the city of Asheville and Fire Chief Scott Burnette had asked U.S. District Court Judge Martin Reidinger for a pretrial summary judgment throwing out all claims by Ponder. Reidinger dismissed claims against Burnette, writing in his order that he could not be held responsible under the 1964 Civil Rights Act’s Title VII against employment discrimination because the U.S. Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals said “supervisors are not liable in their individual capacities for Title VII violations.”\n\nNorth Dakota\n\nBismarck: A group that wants to legalize recreational marijuana in the state submitted paperwork Monday to begin the approval process. If it’s approved by North Dakota’s secretary of state, the group would need to gather 15,582 signatures by July 11 to get the measure on the ballot for the general election in November. The proposed measure would allow any person over the age of 21 to use limited amounts of marijuana and purchase products from registered establishments in North Dakota. The measure would put policies in place to regulate retail stores, cultivators, and other types of marijuana businesses. A similar effort failed in 2020, when the coronavirus pandemic hampered the group’s signature-gathering. Cannabis was a major topic in the Republican-controlled Legislature last year. State representatives brought bills to legalize and tax the drug, but the Senate killed the bills that were passed by the House.\n\nOhio\n\nColumbus: From X-ray body scanners to anti-drone technology, the state is ramping up efforts to keep contraband out of prisons as drugs and other illicit goods flood inside – even when visitation was curbed during the pandemic. The anti-contraband measures are aimed at anyone who enters prisons, whether inmates returning from an outside assignment, visitors or staff members, said Annette Chambers-Smith, director of the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction. “Every time we solve one thing, we have to build a better mousetrap for the next thing,” Chambers-Smith told the Associated Press. The scope of the problem was underscored last month when federal authorities announced the arrest of a South African woman on suspicion of helping to smuggle hundreds of sheets of drug-soaked paper into at least five Ohio prisons. The woman is accused of soaking papers in legal correspondence, which is exempt from normal inspection routines. The state said it conducted about 1,000 drug seizures a month in state prisons from March through September 2020. Numbers slowly decreased through 2021 and now average just under 500 a month, according to state data.\n\nOklahoma\n\nOklahoma City: Gov. Kevin Stitt signed a bill into law Tuesday that makes it a felony to perform an abortion, punishable by up to 10 years in prison. The bill, which takes effect 90 days after the Legislature adjourns next month, makes an exception only for an abortion performed to save the life of the mother. Abortion rights advocates say the bill signed by the GOP governor is certain to face a legal challenge. “We want to outlaw abortion in the state of Oklahoma,” Stitt said during a signing ceremony for the bill, flanked by anti-abortion lawmakers, clergy and students. “I promised Oklahomans that I would sign every pro-life bill that hits my desk, and that’s what we’re doing here today.” Under the bill, anyone convicted of performing an abortion would face up to 10 years in prison and a $100,000 fine. The measure does not authorize criminal charges against a woman for receiving an abortion. Sen. Nathan Dahm, a Broken Arrow Republican now running for Congress who wrote the bill, called it the “strongest pro-life legislation in the country right now, which effectively eliminates abortion in Oklahoma.” There is no enforcement mechanism for women who order abortion medication online from out-of-state suppliers. Oklahoma lawmakers passed a bill last year to prevent such online purchases, but that measure was blocked by the state Supreme Court.\n\nOregon\n\nSalem: A recently released report shows an ice storm in 2021 decimated hundreds of acres of trees in the city. The report from Salem Public Works Department says a citywide analysis found a 17.6% tree canopy loss from August 2020 to May 2021. City staff said about 10 acres of tree canopy was lost to development, but the bulk of the loss – more than 1,000 acres – was because of the Feb. 15, 2021, ice storm. The report to the city says thousands of trees fell, and branches buckled under the weight of ice during the storm. Historic and heritage trees, some hundreds of years old, were downed. “Large Oregon white oaks were particularly hard hit by the ice storm as their large diameter branches accumulated heavy loads of ice, resulting in massive limb breakage and whole trees keeling over,” city staff said in the report. Initial reviews found about 10,000 trees were damaged, and 1,000 trees were removed from city property following the storm. The city spent more than $6.3 million on ice storm-related cleanup. New tree growth and new planting projects have helped offset that loss, the city said.\n\nPennsylvania\n\nHarrisburg: Ex-President Donald Trump slammed GOP gubernatorial candidate Bill McSwain on Tuesday, complaining the former federal prosecutor did “absolutely nothing” to investigate Trump’s false claims of widespread election fraud after Democrat Joe Biden won the state in 2020. McSwain, who spent nearly three years as the top federal prosecutor in Philadelphia under Trump, had been seeking his endorsement, calling the presidential election in Pennsylvania a “partisan disgrace” as he sought to curry favor with the former president. McSwain has often touted his connection to Trump while campaigning for the GOP nod in a crowded primary field. Instead, Trump turned on him. “One person in Pennsylvania who I will not be endorsing is Bill McSwain for Governor. He was the U.S. Attorney who did absolutely nothing on the massive Election Fraud that took place in Philadelphia and throughout the commonwealth,” Trump said in a statement. “Do not vote for Bill McSwain, a coward, who let our Country down. He knew what was happening and let it go.” Trump’s false claims of a stolen election have been debunked by the courts, his own Justice Department and numerous recounts, and no prosecutor, judge or election official in Pennsylvania has raised a concern about widespread fraud.\n\nRhode Island\n\nProvidence: After years of neglect, the most recognizable feature on the city’s skyline, the Superman Building, will be rescued. Gov. Dan McKee announced Tuesday that the building’s owner is planning to turn the vacant landmark into an apartment building with offices and shops, with help from state and city funding. Officially known as the Industrial Trust Building, at roughly 430 feet high, it is the tallest building in Rhode Island. It has been vacant for nearly a decade. McKee said the $220 million redevelopment project will reinvigorate downtown Providence and bring the Superman Building “back to life.” Opened in 1928, it resembles the Daily Planet headquarters in the old “Adventures of Superman” TV show. McKee said $26 million will come from state housing and economic development programs, and $15 million will come from the city through a loan and a direct contribution. Massachusetts-based High Rock Development committed to providing more than $42 million and will take advantage of federal tax credits and seek a tax stabilization agreement from the city, McKee said. High Rock Development bought the building in 2008. In 2013, the sole tenant, Bank of America, moved out. The value of the building dropped, and it fell into disrepair.\n\nSouth Carolina\n\nSpartanburg: A unique gold medal celebrating a battle victory that helped turn the tide in the American Revolution brought a world-record $960,000 at auction. An anonymous buyer of the Daniel Morgan at Cowpens Medal won with a bid of $800,000 on April 4. With the 20% buyer’s premium, the final price was $960,000, according to Stack’s Bowers Galleries in Costa Mesa, California. The medal honors Revolutionary War Gen. Daniel Morgan and his victory at the 1781 Battle of Cowpens in South Carolina. It was struck in 1839 at the Philadelphia Mint. “Everyone’s pretty excited,” said numismatist John Kraljevich of Fort Mill, who specializes in rare, early medals and authenticated the anonymously consigned medal. The front of the medal depicts Morgan leading an infantry charge on horseback against a retreating British cavalry. The back features a Native American woman placing a crown of laurels on Morgan’s head. The original medal was struck in Paris in 1789 and given to Morgan in 1790. After his death in 1802, grandson and heir Morgan Neville owned the medal and stored it in a bank vault in Pittsburgh. It was stolen in 1818 during a robbery. In 1836, Congress authorized the strike of a single replacement, and it remained in the family until about 1885. At one point the medal was acquired by famed financier banker J.P. Morgan, who incorrectly believed he was related to Daniel Morgan, Kraljevich said. The medal then disappeared from view and was thought to have been lost or melted. Only in recent months did it reappear when consigned anonymously to the auction house.\n\nSouth Dakota\n\nPierre: The state House on Tuesday impeached Attorney General Jason Ravnsborg over a 2020 car crash in which he killed a pedestrian but initially said he might have struck a deer or another large animal. Ravnsborg, a Republican, is the first official to be impeached in South Dakota history. He will at least temporarily be removed from office pending the historic Senate trial, where it takes a two-thirds majority to convict on impeachment charges. Ravnsborg pleaded no contest last year to a pair of traffic misdemeanors in the crash, including making an illegal lane change. He has cast Joseph Boever’s death as a tragic accident. In voting 36-31 to impeach Ranvsborg, the Republican-controlled House charged him with committing crimes that caused someone’s death, making “numerous misrepresentations” to law enforcement officers after the crash and using his office to navigate the criminal investigation. “When we’re dealing with the life of one of your citizens, I think that weighed heavily on everyone,” said GOP Rep. Will Mortenson, who introduced the articles of impeachment. A spokesman for Ravnsborg did not reply to a request for comment after the vote. Tim Bormann, the attorney general’s chief of staff, said his staff would “professionally dedicate ourselves” to their work while Ranvsborg is forced to take a leave.\n\nTennessee\n\nNashville: Gov. Bill Lee will soon decide whether to sign off on adding harsh penalties against public schools in his state that allow transgender athletes to participate in girls’ sports. The GOP-controlled Legislature finished advancing the proposal Monday, with Senate Republicans approving the measure 26-5. The House had previously approved the bill last month. Lee, a Republican, hasn’t said publicly whether he supports the legislation. However, he signed a measure last year mandating that student-athletes must prove their sex matches that listed on the student’s “original” birth certificate. If a birth certificate is unavailable, then the parents must provide another form of evidence “indicating the student’s sex at the time of birth.” This year, lawmakers decided to add penalties to that ban, which is in effect even as a lawsuit challenging its constitutionality makes it way through court. A trial has been tentatively set for March 2023. “What this bill does is put teeth in that legislation,” said Republican state Sen. Joey Hensley. Under the legislation headed to Lee’s desk, Tennessee’s Department of Education would withhold a portion of a state funds from local school districts that fail to determine a student’s gender for participation in middle or high school sports.\n\nTexas\n\nAustin: Many of the state’s cattle ranchers are culling herds because of rising costs for feed and fuel, along with the looming prospect that ongoing drought conditions could worsen this summer. Consolidation of the meatpacking industry in recent years also has reduced the market power of ranchers, who sit at the very beginning of a lengthy line of processors, packers, wholesalers and retailers in bringing beef to consumers.“I tell (people) the packers are making all the money,” said Shelby Horn, general manager of Abell Livestock. Cattle prices have been climbing along with increased consumer demand for beef as the broad economy continues recovering from its pandemic-induced downturn. But they haven’t yet risen enough to offset the multiple headwinds facing many ranchers, Horn and other experts say. Texas is by far the largest producer of beef cattle in the country, with a herd that totals about 4.5 million animals – 2.3 million more than Oklahoma, the second-largest producer, according to figures from the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Sales of beef cattle and calves in Texas generate about $8.5 billion annually and constitute the state’s top agricultural commodity. But the Texas herd shrunk 3.5% last year – or by about 160,000 head – outpacing a 2.3% decline in the U.S. beef cattle herd overall.\n\nUtah\n\nSt. George: The state’s increasingly popular national parks will offer free entrance Saturday to kick off National Park Week. The nationwide celebration, lasting through April 24, aims to “boost awareness of the value and availability of recreational areas, encouraging people across the country to spend time in America’s treasured national parks,” according to a U.S. Senate press release. In celebration, entrance into all national parks will be free April 16. That includes Zion, Arches, Bryce Canyon, Canyonlands and Capitol Reef.\n\nVermont\n\nBurlington: The number of opioid-related overdose deaths in the state increased by 33% in 2021 to a record number of 210 fatalities, the Vermont Health Department reported. The report released last week found that fentanyl was involved in 93% of last year’s opioid deaths, while the percentage of deaths that involved heroin dropped from 25% in 2020 to 10% last year. Cocaine was involved in 48% of all opioid-related overdose deaths, according to the report. The study also found that use of methamphetamine and the drug xylazine, a veterinary sedative, were increasingly contributing to opioid-related fatal overdoses among Vermont residents. The 2021 figure of 210 was up from 158 in 2020. The report lists opioid fatalities going back to 2010, when there were 37. Chittenden County had the highest number of opioid-related overdose deaths last year at 38, while Rutland County had the highest rate of opioid deaths per 100,000 residents at 48, according to the report.\n\nVirginia\n\nRichmond: Gov. Glenn Youngkin has proposed substantial changes to a hemp bill aimed at reining in the retail sales of products containing a psychoactive form of THC, including amendments that would create new misdemeanor penalties for marijuana possession. The bill is among more than 100 pieces of legislation the Republican governor is seeking to amend, his office announced late Monday, just ahead of a deadline Youngkin faced to take action on bills sent to his desk. Lawmakers will meet April 27 to consider the governor’s proposed amendments and will also have the chance to override his vetoes. The hemp measure rewrote the definition of marijuana in state code in a way industry players said would have severely curtailed the sale of CBD products that don’t produce a high, in addition to ending the retail sales of delta-8, a chemical cousin of pot’s main intoxicating ingredient, sales of which have proliferated around the country. Youngkin’s amendments would also create a Class 2 misdemeanor offense for possession of more than 2 and less than 6 ounces of marijuana and a Class 1 misdemeanor for possession of more than 6 ounces and less than 1 pound. A 2021 law passed when Democrats were in full control of state government laid out a years­long pathway toward retail sales and legalized the possession of up to an ounce of marijuana. Anyone possessing an amount between an ounce and a pound is currently subject to a small civil fine.\n\nWashington\n\nOlympia: A new law could reshape the way child dependency cases are handled in the state, potentially leading to more children staying with family members without those relatives being required to adopt them. Under the current practice, Washington state forces relatives to adopt children when neither parent can take care of the child. If family members don’t wish to adopt, the Department of Children, Youth and Families removes children from those placements, even if those relatives still want permanent kinship guardianship, and places the child up for adoption. “We’re removing children out of relatives’ homes, loving relatives’ homes, because they’re unwilling to adopt,” said Shrounda Selivanoff, director of public policy for the Children’s Home Society of Washington and a proponent and writer of the legislation. Children’s Home Society said the state currently “prioritizes termination” of parental rights instead of using other options, the News Tribune reports. Termination of parental rights is not required when a dependency case ends, they said. Under the new law, the state won’t be allowed to move children from their relatives’ care if those relatives don’t want to adopt. Financial assistance also has been expanded for relatives who are eligible.\n\nWest Virginia\n\nCharleston: Free tire collection events are scheduled around the state this month. The events are 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. April 23 behind the Go-Mart in the Cabin Creek community in Kanawha County, 8 a.m. to 2 p.m. April 23 at Clay County High School, 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. April 23 at the Old Oak Ridge Trucking Lot in Elkins and 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. April 30 at the HL Wilson Trucking Lot in Moorefield, the West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection said. Each person may dispose of up to 10 tires. The tires must be off the rims. Only car and light truck tires are accepted, the agency said. Ongoing tire collections are held regularly in Boone, Brooke, Calhoun, Fayette, Hancock, Mason, Mercer, Monroe, Pocahontas, Putnam, Tucker, Wayne and Wyoming counties. Upcoming tire collection events are listed on the department’s website.\n\nWisconsin\n\nMadison: New data shows a sharp increase in Type 2 diabetes among children in the state, and doctors think COVID-19 could be a factor. Figures from UW Health Kids shows a nearly 200% increase in the number of cases over the past several years. Dr. Elizabeth Mann, a pediatric endocrinologist and director of the Type 2 Diabetes Program at UW Health Kids, said it’s a trend medical experts have noticed for years, but it’s taken a worrisome turn recently. “Since the beginning of the pandemic, we’ve just seen a sharp increase beyond what we had expected,” Mann said. In 2018, 5.8% of pediatric patients with new onset diabetes at Madison’s American Family Children’s Hospital had Type 2, a disease that primarily affects adults. In 2021, that number grew to 16.4%. And so far in 2022, 1 in 6 pediatric patients at the children’s hospital with new onset diabetes has Type 2, Wisconsin Public Radio reports. “In kids, this Type 2 diabetes just acts a little bit more aggressively,” Mann said. “So it’s not only that we’re seeing Type 2 diabetes at younger ages, but it also seems to be a more severe form where kids are needing more medications and have more significant complications from it.” In Type 2 diabetes, the most prevalent form overall, the pancreas produces insulin, but the body has developed a resistance to it. Mann said it’s a common misconception that Type 2 diabetes is purely a result of diet and activity levels. She said genetics and epigenetics play a big role in making people more susceptible.\n\nWyoming\n\nCheyenne: State wildlife officials have detected avian influenza among wild birds in Wyoming, include Canada geese and great horned owls, the Casper Star-Tribune reports.\n\nFrom USA TODAY Network and wire reports", "authors": [], "publish_date": "2022/04/12"}, {"url": "https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/editorials/2022/09/11/elections-2022-indian-river-county-candidates-answer-questions/7938342001/", "title": "2022 Indian River County General Election: Candidates ...", "text": "Editorial Board\n\nTCPALM/Treasure Coast Newspapers\n\nIn June we began to ask candidates to fill out questionnaires to help you understand your choices on the ballot.\n\nThe following candidate responses were not edited.\n\nOur editorial board planned to interview candidates in September for races that would be decided in the Nov. 8 election. It interviewed candidates earlier this year for the August primary.", "authors": [], "publish_date": "2022/09/11"}]}
{"question_id": "20230120_27", "search_time": "2023/01/20/16:38", "search_result": [{"url": "https://www.theweek.co.uk/news/politics/955416/timeline-downing-street-lockdown-party-scandal", "title": "A timeline of the Downing Street lockdown party allegations | The ...", "text": "A police investigation has been launched into the parties held in Downing Street while the country was under lockdown restrictions.\n\nMetropolitan Police Commissioner Cressida Dick has said the force is looking into “potential breaches of Covid-19 regulations” since 2020 after it received information from the Cabinet Office inquiry, led by Sue Gray.\n\nA spokesman for Boris Johnson said the prime minister did not think he had broken the law.\n\nHe told the Commons he welcomed the investigation, which may delay the publication of Gray’s report into alleged lockdown breaches. Sky News said “a final decision on whether to publish in the coming days has not yet been taken”.\n\n15 May 2020 The first of the alleged restriction breaches took place days after Johnson announced that the country would begin taking the “first careful steps” out of lockdown, the Evening Standard said. At the time, restrictions meant people could not leave home without a reasonable excuse and could only meet one person outside while exercising. An investigation by The Guardian, however, led to the publication of a picture of Johnson, flanked by Carrie Johnson and his then chief adviser Dominic Cummings, drinking wine and eating cheese in the No. 10 garden. That day, the health secretary at the time, Matt Hancock, had urged “people to stick to the rules and not take advantage of the good weather over the May weekend to socialise in groups”.\n\n20 May 2020 One of the most explosive of the alleged lockdown parties was revealed when an email leaked to ITV News showed more than 100 Downing Street staff were invited for drinks in the garden of No. 10 to “make the most of the lovely weather”. Sent by Johnson’s principal private secretary Martin Reynolds, the email invited employees including advisers, speech writers and door staff to come over and “bring your own booze”. The senior civil servant wrote: “After what has been an incredibly busy period we thought it would be nice to make the most of the lovely weather and have some socially distanced drinks in the No. 10 garden this evening.” Johnson admitted during a bruising Prime Minister’s Questions appearance last week that he attended for around “25 minutes” but thought it was a “work event”. Sources later told The Times that he was seen “wandering round glad-handing people” during the event attended by Carrie Johnson and Henry Newman, then an adviser to Michael Gove and now a senior No. 10 figure.\n\n19 June 2020 ITV News this week reported that a birthday party was held in the Cabinet Room for Johnson with up to 30 people. His wife Carrie apparently presented him with a cake and “led staff in a chorus of happy birthday”, said the broadcaster. No. 10 responded saying: “A group of staff working in No 10 that day gathered briefly in the Cabinet Room after a meeting to wish the prime minister a happy birthday. He was there for less than ten minutes.”\n\n5 November 2020 In early November, new lockdown restrictions were introduced to deal with rising Covid-19 infections and hospitalisations. The new rules meant people were forced to stay at home unless doing essential activities. Indoor gatherings were also banned.\n\n13 November 2020 According to allegations laid out by former No. 10 adviser Cummings, a gathering was held eight days after the introduction of new rules on the evening that he was sacked. Cummings tweeted: “Will the [cabinet secretary] also be asked to investigate the *flat* party on Fri 13 Nov, the other flat parties, & the flat’s ‘bubble’ policy…?” His reference to the cabinet secretary came after Johnson instructed Simon Case to investigate claims of a Christmas party in Downing Street, telling MPs that he was “furious” at footage leaked of senior aides joking about the event.\n\n25 November 2020 The Treasury was forced on to the defensive late last year after The Times revealed an “impromptu” party was held in late November 2020 to celebrate Rishi Sunak’s autumn spending review. A spokesperson told The Guardian that a “small number” had remained after work to celebrate at their desks. According to The Times, “about two dozen civil servants” took part in the drinks after “wine and beer were brought into the Treasury”. “They’d all been working really hard,” sources told the paper. “They had to be in the office anyway that day. It wasn’t a formal party but perhaps in hindsight it wasn’t the most sensible thing to do.”\n\n27 November 2020 Two days later, it was alleged that the prime minister attended a leaving event for Cleo Watson, a former Downing Street adviser. A source told The Guardian “that Johnson personally attended and gave a speech”, mentioning how crowded it was in the room before leaving shortly afterwards to continue working.\n\n2 December 2020 The second national lockdown was replaced with the tier system, which sees London placed into “tier two” restrictions. This means a ban on indoor meetings of two or more people.\n\n10 December 2020 Eight days later, the Department for Education held a Christmas party at which two dozen people drank in the department canteen. Susan Acland-Hood, a senior civil servant, said it had been organised at the request of former education secretary Gavin Williamson, The Guardian reported.", "authors": ["The Week Staff"], "publish_date": "2022/01/14"}, {"url": "https://www.theweek.co.uk/news/955358/ten-things-you-need-to-know-today-11-january-2022", "title": "Ten Things You Need to Know Today: 11 January 2022 | The Week ...", "text": "PM attended lockdown party\n\nUp to 100 people were invited to a “bring-your-own-booze” drinks event in the Downing Street garden during the first lockdown, it has emerged. Eyewitnesses told the BBC that Boris Johnson and his wife were among about 30 people who attended the gathering on 20 May 2020. The PM has refused to confirm whether he was present. An email obtained by ITV shows Martin Reynolds, Johnson’s principal private secretary, encouraged staff to “make the most of the lovely weather” and “join us from 6pm” with “your own booze”. At the time, social mixing was banned except with one other person from another household outdoors in a public place. Scotland Yard said that the Metropolitan Police is considering investigating the event.", "authors": [], "publish_date": "2022/01/11"}]}
{"question_id": "20230120_28", "search_time": "2023/01/20/16:39", "search_result": [{"url": "https://www.usatoday.com/story/entertainment/music/2019/03/01/march-concerts-phoenix-tempe-2019/3001028002/", "title": "Phoenix concerts in March: Pink, A Boogie Wit Da Hoodie, Michael ...", "text": "Garth Brooks drew the biggest crowd for a single-day event in Arizona history in a month that also featured three big music festivals and Billy Joel.\n\nAnd it's not over yet.\n\nHere's a look at the remaining highlights of the month in music.\n\n3/26: Rhydian Roberts\n\nIn 2007, this Welsh baritone thrilled British audiences on the U.K. version of \"The X Factor.\" That has led to an impressive career which encompasses theater (\"The Rocky Horror Show,\" \"Grease\") and recordings. His 2008 album \"Rhydian\" went platinum in England; his discs are surprisingly diverse, ranging from Josh Groban-styled pop to operatic standards (\"Nessun Dorma\") and even songs in Welsh.\n\nDetails: 7 p.m. Tuesday, March 26. Happy Trails Resort, 17200 W. Bell Road. Surprise. $32. 623-584-0066, htresort.com.\n\n3/26: State Champs\n\nThe fact that they recruited New Found Glory's Steve Klein to produce \"The Finer Things,\" their first album, should give you a decent idea of what State Champs are all about — infectious pop-punk songcraft delivered with plenty of youthful abandon.\n\nTwo albums later, they're heading to Phoenix in support of \"Living Proof,\" on which their mastery of sugar-coated hooks remains as contagious as ever.\n\nDetails: 6:45 p.m. Tuesday, March 26. The Van Buren, 401 W. Van Buren St., Phoenix. $25-$28. 866-468-3399, thevanburenphx.com.\n\n3/26: Queensryche\n\nThese progressive-metal veterans scored an unexpected mainstream breakthrough in the pre-Nirvana '90s with an orchestrated power ballad called \"Silent Lucidity.\" With that single, \"Jet City Woman\" and \"Another Rainy Night (Without You)\" driving interest, 1990's triple-platinum \"Empire\" became their biggest-selling effort. They’ve since parted ways with the voice of those records, Geoff Tate, but the new guy, Todd La Torre, has been earning raves for his performances.\n\nDetails: 6:15 Tuesday, March 26. Marquee Theatre, 730 N. Mill Ave., Tempe. $30-$60. 480-829-0607, luckymanonline.com.\n\n3/26: Her's\n\nI hear the Beach Boys at their most eccentric filtered through Magnetic Fields. Q Magazine hears them \"fusing Scritti Politti's twinkling, slinky grooves with the luminous lugubriousness of Orange Juice to create something that feels distinctly theirs.\" The weird thing is we're both right, which may be how these Liverpool rockers have managed a sound that feels distinctly theirs on the aptly titled debut, \"Invitation to Her's.\" Their quirky charms are so contagious, they should've been called the OffBeatles.\n\nDetails: 8 p.m. Tuesday, March 26. Rebel Lounge, 2303 E. Indian School Road, Phoenix. $18; $16 in advance. 602-296-7013, therebellounge.com.\n\n3/28: Whitney Rose\n\nThere's no mistaking what it was that led this young Canadian to move to Texas if you happen to listen to \"South Texas Suite,\" an EP steeped in the spirit and sounds of her adopted home, or the full-length followup, \"Rule 62.\" Paste said of the album, \"What’s particularly striking here is how Rose matches credence with confidence. Her voice, a gentle and unassuming croon, gives her material a quiet caress, making them effortlessly engaging each time out.\"\n\nDetails: 8 p.m. Thursday, March 28. Rhythm Room, 1019 E. Indian School Road, Phoenix. $12. 602-265-4842, rhythmroom.com.\n\n3/29: Michael Buble\n\nThe Canadian crooner hit the mainstream with \"It's Time,\" a triple-platinum smash that topped the Billboard year-end jazz charts for 2005 and 2006 while spinning off his breakthrough single, \"Home.\" He's also quite the showman. As the Sydney Morning Herald says, “This is a man who holds the audience in the palm of his hand. His soaring vocals absolutely knock it out of the park.”\n\nDetails: 8 p.m. Friday, March 29. Talking Stick Resort Arena, 201 E. Jefferson St., Phoenix. Resale prices vary. 602-379-7800, talkingstickresortarena.com.\n\n3/29: A Boogie Wit da Hoodie\n\nThis 23-year-old Bronx rapper spent two weeks at No. 1 on Billboard's album chart in January with a second album titled \"Hoodie SZN.\" And you pronounce that title \"Hoodie Season,\" which this would appear to be.He may be best known at the moment for the triple-platinum Kodak Black-assisted \"Drowning\" from his previous release, \"The Bigger Artist,\" but his current hit, \"Look Back At It,\" is well along the way to changing that. He's joined by Don Q and Trap Manny.\n\nDetails: 8 p.m. Friday, March 29. The Van Buren, 401 W. Van Buren St., Phoenix. $65-$99. 866-468-3399, thevanburenphx.com.\n\n3/30: Pink\n\nPink launched the Beautiful Trauma Tour in this same venue in March of 2018.\n\n\"The whole thing was brilliantly staged, with bright colors, interpretive dancing and plenty of high-flying spectacle,\" we wrote. \"If for some reason, you believe you've seen another artist put more time and effort into doing acrobatics high above the crowd, you may just be thinking of Cirque du Soleil.\"\n\nDetails: 8 p.m. Saturday, March 30. Gila River Arena, 9400 W. Maryland Ave., Glendale. Resale prices vary. 623-772-3800, ticketmaster.com.\n\n3/30: Quetzal\n\nThese Grammy-winning East LA Chicana rockers are marking their 25th anniversary as they bring their blend of Mexican ranchera, cumbia, salsa, rock, R&B, folk, international music and a political vision based in social activism and feminism to Tempe.\n\nThe Los Angeles Times called them “one of Los Angeles' most important bands\" and they picked up a Latin alternative Grammy for 2013 \"Imaginaries.\"\n\nDetails: 7 p.m. Saturday, March 30. ASU Gammage, Mill Avenue and Apache Boulevard, Tempe. $52.65. 480-965-3434, asugammage.com.\n\n3/30: Wet\n\nThe alternative-R&B duo from Brooklyn spent a good part of last fall in Europe opening shows for Florence + the Machine in support of a soulful second album titled \"Still Run.\"\n\nThis one leans more heavily on ballads than \"Don't You,\" which had Fader raving \"Wet has what it takes to make everyone care about an indie band.\" But the more reflective tone here plays to Zutrau's growing strengths on vocals.\n\nDetails: 8 p.m. Saturday, March 30. Marquee Theatre, 730 N. Mill Ave., Tempe. $30-$60. 480-829-0607, luckymanonline.com.\n\n3/31: Luna\n\nSinger-guitarist Dean Wareham assembled the earliest version of Luna after breaking up with Galaxie 500. The current touring lineup is the 1999–2005 edition that recorded \"Luna Live,\" \"Romantica,\" \"Close Cover Before Striking\" and \"Rendezvous\": Wareham and Sean Eden on guitar, Lee Wall on drums, and Britta Phillips on bass.Their latest album is \"A Sentimental Education,\" which finds them covering classics by the Cure, Bob Dylan, Fleetwood Mac, Mercury Rev, the Rolling Stones and more.\n\nDetails: 7:30 p.m. Sunday, March 31. Musical Instrument Museum, 4725 E. Mayo Blvd., Phoenix. $43.50-$48.50. 480-478-6000, mim.org.\n\n3/31: En Vogue\n\nThese funky divas had a string of massive pop hits in the '90s, topping Billboard's R&B charts six times – with \"Hold On,\" \"Lies,\" \"You Don't Have to Worry,\" \"My Lovin' (You're Never Gonna Get It),\" \"Giving Him Something He Can Feel\" and \"Don't Let Go (Love).\"\n\nThey're won seven MTV Video Music Awards, three Soul Train Awards and two American Music Awards in addition to making Billboard's list of the 20 most successful artists of the '90s.\n\nDetails: 7 p.m. Sunday, March 31. Chandler Center for the Arts, 250 N. Arizona Ave. $38-$58. 480-782-2680, chandlercenter.org.\n\nPAST EVENTS\n\n3/1: Neal Schon's Journey Through Time\n\nThe Journey guitarist and keyboardist Gregg Rolie, who played together in Santana before forming Journey, have reunited for a tour that's been designed to celebrate the early days of Journey without necessarily ignoring the hit years. They're joined by former Journey member Deen Castronovo on vocals and drums, Todd Jensen on bass and Chris Collins on guitar and keys.\n\nDetails: 7:30 p.m. Friday, March 1. The Van Buren, 401 W. Van Buren St., Phoenix. $65-$99. 866-468-3399, thevanburenphx.com.\n\n3/1: Daughters\n\nBrooklyn Vegan says, \"It’s become pretty common for beloved bands to reunite and make good albums again, but it’s still rare for bands to reunite and make something that may very well be their best album, and that’s exactly what Daughters have done.”\n\nThey're referring, of course, to the Rhode Island noise-rock sensations' first album in eight years, the contagiously abrasive \"You Won't Get What You Want.\"\n\nDetails: 8 p.m. Friday, March 1. Rebel Lounge, 2303 E. Indian School Road, Phoenix. $20; $18 in advance. 602-296-7013, therebellounge.com.\n\n3/1: KMLE Country Double Header\n\nBrett Young topped the charts at country radio with \"Like I Loved You\" and \"In Case You Didn't Know\" in 2017 after making a name for himself with the platinum breakthrough single, \"Sleep Without You.\" And he was back at No. 1 last year with \"Mercy.\"\n\nFormerly known as LoCash Cowboys, LoCash peaked at No. 34 on Billboard's country chart in 2010 with \"Keep in Mind,\" but really started gaining traction in 2015 when \"I Love This Life\" hit No. 5 on Billboard’s country chart, followed by \"I Know Somebody.\"\n\nDetails: 7:30 p.m. Friday, March 1. Talking Stick Resort, 9800 E. Talking Stick Way, Salt River Reservation. $20 and up. 480-850-7777, talkingstickresort.com.\n\n3/1-3: McDowell Mountain Music Festival (M3F)\n\nIn addition to headlining sets by Odesza, Empire of the Sun and Umphrey's McGee, the festival features such notable acts as Margo Price, Kurt Vile and the Violators, Toro Y Moi, Marian Hill, Big Wild and Jungle. Phoenix Afrobeat Orchestra, Noodles and the Uncommon Good will represent the home team at this 100 percent non-profit event, established in 2004, that has become a destination festival for music fans.\n\nDetails: 3 p.m. Friday-Sunday, March 1-3. Margaret T. Hance Park, 1202 N. Third St., Phoenix. $60/day; $125 three-day pass. m3ffest.com.\n\n3/2: Lil Mosey\n\nBy the time he gets to Tempe, he'll be 17. But this Seattle-based hip-hop sensation has already touched off some serious buzz on the strength of a debut called \"Northsbest\" and its breakthrough single \"Noticed,\" which more than lived up to its title. His first single, \"Pull Up,\" has earned more than 20 million YouTube views while \"Noticed\" is closing in on 60 million views.\n\nDetails: 7:30 p.m. Saturday, March 2. Marquee Theatre, 730 N. Mill Ave., Tempe. $22.50-$37.50. 480-829-0607, luckymanonline.com.\n\n3/2: Kool Keith\n\nAmong the more eccentric hip-hop legends in the game, the Bronx rapper is playing the official after-party for Skatercon with MC Intelligence.\n\nIt's been 31 years since he first made a name for himself as a member of Ultramagnetic MCs, going solo as Dr. Octagon in 1996 with \"Dr. Octagonecologyst.\" And his music hasn't gotten any less, as Rolling Stone once summed up his aesthetic, \"profoundly bugged-out\" with the passage of time..\n\nDetails: 8 p.m. Saturday, March 2. Yucca Tap Room, 29 W. Southern Ave., Tempe. $20. 480-967-4777, yuccatap.com.\n\n3/2-3: Innings Festival\n\nIncubus tops Saturday's lineup at this two-day baseball-themed festival, with Sheryl Crow, Cake, Grouplove, Blues Traveler, Roger Clyne & the Peacemakers, Guster, Black Pistol Fire and Dorothy and the Baseball Project rounding out the first day. Eddie Vedder headlines Sunday with Jimmy Eat World, Band of Horses, St. Paul & the Broken Bones, Shakey Graves, Liz Phair, Mat Kearney, G. Love & Special Sauce, and the Record Company.\n\nDetails: 3 p.m. Saturday-Sunday, March 2-3. Tempe Beach Park, 80 W. Rio Salado Parkway. $130 for a two-day pass; $90 single day. inningsfestival.com.\n\n3/2: Mushroomhead\n\nThese masked-and-costumed alternative-metal sensations from Cleveland have always gravitated to the artier extreme of the mosh pit, as they reasserted with a vengeance on their latest effort, 2014's \"The Righteous & the Butterfly.\" Kerrang! included Mushroomhead's fourth album, \"XIII,\" in the Top 10 of a list of best nu-metal albums, calling it \"a genre mash-up encompassing thrash, doom, industrial, alt, prog, hip-hop and goth that somehow manages to be both coherent and compelling.\"\n\nDetails: 6 p.m. Saturday, March 2. Club Red, 1306 W. University Drive, Mesa. $30; $27 in advance. 480-258-2733, clubredrocks.com.\n\n3/3: Saves the Day\n\nThe Jersey-based pop-punk sensations are touring a musical autobiography called \"9.\" In a press release, singer-guitarist Chris Conley calls it \"the story of Saves the Day and my own personal journey through life, which all unfolded as my relationship with music progressed.”\n\nAlternative Press says they're \"melodically brilliant as ever, but the previous trilogy’s anguish and inner turmoil seem to have been replaced by warm sentimentality, declarations of undying love, and smart discourse on relationships and the human condition, with the occasional killer curveball.\"\n\nDetails: 7:30 p.m. Sunday, March 3. Crescent Ballroom, 308 N. Second Ave., Phoenix. $25; $21 in advance. 602-716-2222, crescentphx.com.\n\n3/3: Adia Victoria\n\nBy the time she gets to Phoenix, the Nashville-based Victoria will have released her long-awaited followup to her masterful debut, \"Beyond the Bloodhounds.\" Produced by Aaron Dessner of the National, \"Silences\" was written as Victoria was going through withdrawal from the touring she'd done in support of her debut.\n\nAs she explains it in a press release, \"I found when I went back home that the thing that disturbed me the most was the lack of activity. Having to deal with myself once again on an intimate level.\"\n\nDetails: 8 p.m. Monday, March 4. Valley Bar, 130 N. Central Ave., Phoenix. $14; $9 in advance. 602- 368-3121, valleybarphx.com.\n\n3/3 B.J. Thomas\n\nThe Grammy-winning singer is featured in an unplugged-style event in which he’ll participate in an interview about his life and career and be accompanied by a guitar player and keyboardist while he performs some of his greatest hits. Those hits include such genre-defying classics as “Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head,” “Hooked on a Feeling,” “Most of All” and “(Hey Won't You Play) Another Somebody Done Somebody Wrong Song.”\n\nDetails: 6 p.m. Sunday, March 3. Community of Grace Lutheran Church, 10561 W. Pinnacle Peak Road, Peoria. SOLD OUT. 623-572-0050, boldrecklessgrace.org.\n\n3/4: Metric\n\nEmily Haines and her bandmates are touring the States in support of \"Art of Doubt,\" the Canadian synth-pop veterans' seventh album of retro-futuristic New Wave dance songs.\n\nNME wrote, \"Album highlight ‘Now Or Never Now’ boasts that glow of sci-fi pop prowess that lit up 2009’s under-sung cult favourite ‘Fantasies’ – the space-age approach to pop that fans of Chvrches will adore.\"\n\nDetails: 7 p.m. Monday, March 4. The Van Buren, 401 W. Van Buren St., Phoenix. $46 and up. 866-468-3399, thevanburenphx.com.\n\n3/4: Kikagaku Moyo\n\n\"Masana Temples\" opens on a psychedelic sitar jam before immediately shifting gears with the pulsating bass and funk guitar of \"Dripping Sun.\" And so it goes for eight more songs, restlessly making its way through a variety of genres without losing focus.\n\nThe 405 says \"The result is an album that even in its slower moments seems to be constantly pushing forward, a hazy, dreamlike soundtrack to a classic road-trip movie.\"\n\nDetails: 8 p.m. Monday, March 4. Rebel Lounge, 2303 E. Indian School Road, Phoenix. $25; $20 in advance. 602-296-7013, therebellounge.com.\n\n3/4: Scars on Broadway\n\nDaron Malakian of System of A Down brings Scars on Broadway to town in support of \"Dictator,\" a solo effort he's been sitting on for six years.\n\nMalakian plays all the instruments on an album that serves its political broadsides with punkish abandon and humor while exploring a variety of genres. In other words, this one should speak directly to anyone who knows Malakian primarily through his other band.\n\nDetails: 8 p.m. Monday, March 4. Crescent Ballroom, 308 N. Second Ave., Phoenix. $25; $21 in advance. 602-716-2222, crescentphx.com.\n\n3/5: Justin Timberlake\n\nThis is a second stop at Talking Stick Resort Arena for Timberlake's Man in the Woods Tour. And don't let the theme of the tour, with its campfire and trees, confuse the issue. For all its rustic trappings, the Man of the Woods Tour felt more like a night at the club in downtown Phoenix than a trip to Payson, from the time the singer hit the stage singing \"Filthy,\" the opening track on the album for which the tour was named.\n\nDetails: 7:30 p.m. Tuesday, March 5. Talking Stick Resort Arena, Second and Jefferson streets, Phoenix. $49.50 and up. 800-745-3000, ticketmaster.com.\n\n3/5: Jukebox the Ghost\n\nIs it even possible to sound more like Queen than these Brooklyn pop sensations have managed on \"Off to the Races?\" Not based on anything I've heard – although, to be fair, at times they also venture winningly into the realm of Billy Joel with hints of Ben Folds (the Bizarro World Billy Joel). PopMatters says, \"After two albums of leaning increasingly heavily into the pop side of their sound, 'Off to the Races' finds the band reclaiming some of the weirder sensibilities that made their early work such a treat.\"\n\nDetails: 7 p.m. Tuesday, March 5. Crescent Ballroom, 308 N. Second Ave., Phoenix. $26; $23 in advance. 602-716-2222, crescentphx.com.\n\n3/6: YG\n\nThe Compton rapper arrives in support of \"Stay Dangerous,\" a third studio effort EW praised for \"spinning hard-edged street stories through a hypnotic haze of thick, hyphy G-funk, the kind favored by ‘90s forbearers like DJ Quik and King T.\" YG's hits include \"Toot It and Boot It,\" \"Left, Right,\" \"Who Do You Love?,\" \"Why You Always Hatin',\" the quadruple-platinum \"My N---a\" and this year's \"Big Bank.\"\n\nDetails: 8 p.m. Wednesday, March 6. Marquee Theatre, 730 N. Mill Ave., Tempe. $48; $42.50 in advance. 480-829-0607, luckymanonline.com.\n\n3/6: LP\n\nLP is short for Laura Pergolizzi, a New York songwriter who's written songs for Cher, Rihanna, Backstreet Boys, Leona Lewis and Christina Aguilera.\n\n\"Heart to Mouth\" is her poppiest album yet. The Irish Independent praised \"the ear for a great hook that has brought her gainful employment from the likes of Cher and Christina Aguilera while still maintaining the idiosyncratic style – think Kate Bush meets John Cooper Clarke – that has made her a cult sensation in her own right.\"\n\nDetails: 8 p.m. Wednesday, March 6. The Van Buren, 401 W. Van Buren St., Phoenix. $26-$45.50. 866-468-3399, thevanburenphx.com.\n\n3/7: Albert Hammond Jr.\n\nWell, he is a member of the Strokes, whose debut album, \"Is This It?,\" helped usher in the rock revival that however briefly had us thinking rock and roll would have a more successful time of it here in the 21st Century. And he's here in support of a great fourth album, \"Francis Trouble,\" whose title refers to the stillborn death of his twin brother. If that sounds intensely personal for rock and roll, it is, but the effortless pop sensibilities make for a breezier ride than the title suggests.\n\nDetails: 8 p.m. Thursday, March 7. Crescent Ballroom, 308 N. Second Ave., Phoenix. $18.75-$28. 602-716-2222, crescentphx.com.\n\n3/8: Rezz\n\nThe Canadian DJ/producer signed to Deadmau5's Mau5trap imprint in 2015, winning Electronic Album of the Year at the Juno Awards for her first full-length studio release, \"Mass Manipulation,\" in 2017. and following through last year with \"Certain Kind of Magic.\" Dancing Astronaut responded by declaring Rezz \"the epitome of artistry through and through, and maybe it takes a Certain Kind of Magic for other's within her grasp to realize.\"\n\nDetails: 7 p.m. Friday, March 8. Rawhide, 5700 W. North Loop Rd., Chandler. $43. 800-653-8000, www.relentlessbeats.com.\n\n3/8-10: Ostrich Festival\n\nThe 31st annual Chandler Chamber of Commerce Ostrich Festival features Flo Rida Friday, the Commodores Saturday and Andy Grammar Sunday.\n\nFlo Rida is best known for such huge multi-platinum smashes as \"Low,\" \"Right Round,\" \"Good Feeling,\" \"Wild Ones,\" \"Whistle,\" \"G.D.F.R.\" and \"My House.\" The Commodores are a Grammy-winning R&B/funk band whose hits include \"Brickhouse,\" \"Three Times a Lady\" and \"Still.\" Grammar is a pop singer best known for \"Honey, I'm Good.\"\n\nDetails: March 8-10. 2 p.m. Friday; 10 a.m. Saturday-Sunday. $15; $4 for children age 4-12; Free under age 4. 480-588-8497, ostrichfestival.com.\n\n3/9: Billy Joel\n\nThis is Joel's first Phoenix concert since 2014 and his first time ever at the ballpark, where one can probably expect to hear such massive hits as \"It's Still Rock and Roll to Me,\" \"My Life,\" \"We Didn't Start the Fire,\" \"Piano Man\" and \"Uptown Girl.\" This show is part of the Billy Joel in Concert Tour, which began in 2014 and has included a once-a-month residency at Madison Square Garden. His Jan. 24 performance was his 60th consecutive sellout at the Garden.\n\nDetails: 8 p.m. Saturday, March 9. Chase Field, 401 E. Jefferson, Phoenix. $49.50 and up. 800-745-3000, ticketmaster.com.\n\n3/9: Joe Jackson\n\nIs it really the 40th anniversary of Jackson's U.S. breakthrough with the New Wave classic \"Is She Really Going Out With Him?\" It really is.\n\nBut this tour isn't celebrating that so much as looking sharp at five specific albums he's released in those same 40 years: \"Look Sharp\" (1979) \"Night And Day\" (1982) \"Laughter And Lust\" (1991) \"Rain\" (2008) and this year's model \"Fool\"\n\nDetails: 8 p.m. Saturday, March 9. Orpheum Theatre, 203 W. Adams St., Phoenix. $35-$100. 800-282-4842, phoenix.ticketforce.com.\n\n3/9: Flying Burrito Music & Food Fest\n\nThe Flying Burrito Festival returns with music on four stages, Lucha Libre wrestling and more than 50 types of burritos. What more could you possibly want?\n\nThis year's lineup features Calexico paying tribute to Gram Parson of Flying Burrito Brothers, Bane's World, Sergio Mendoza Y La Orkesta, Donna Missal, the Suffers, Soft Kill, The Kvb, Playboy Manbaby, Jerusafunk, Calumet, Mariachi Rubor, Kolars, Nanami Ozone, Pinky Pinky, Pro Teens, Illuminati Hotties, Strange Lot, Numb.Er, Mute Swan, Bizou, Hazey Eyes, Bogan Via, Jerry Paper and Citrus Clouds.\n\nDetails: 4 p.m. Saturday, March 9. Crescent Ballroom, 308 N. Second Ave., Phoenix. $12. 602-716-2222, crescentphx.com.\n\n3/9: Neal Morse Band\n\nSinger/guitarist/keyboardist Neal Morse brings drummer Mike Portnoy, bassist Randy George, keyboardist Bill Hubauer and guitarist Eric Gillette to Chandler in support of a new double-record concept album called \"The Great Adventure.\" In a press release, Morse says, “I have to say it was a little daunting to follow up 'The Similitude of a Dream' as it was such a special album and delivered every night at our concerts, but I believe 'The Great Adventure' will have a tremendous impact as well.\"\n\nDetails: 8 p.m. Saturday, March 9. Chandler Center for the Arts, 250 N. Arizona Ave. $55-$75. 480-782-2680, chandlercenter.org.\n\n3/9: Blues Blast\n\nHosted by the Phoenix Blues Society, this family-friendly event includes local and national blues artists, local merch vendors, a variety of food and a kids' art zone, where they get to paint a mural that extends halfway around the park.\n\nArtists performing include the legendary Paladins, the 44s, Chuck Hall, Geo Bowman, Cadillac Assembly Line, Joe Kopicki and a special presentation from the Guitars4Vets Band\n\nDetails: 10 a.m. Saturday, March 9. Margaret T. Hance Park, 1202 N. Third St., Phoenix. $15-$30. 602-252-0599, phoenixblues.org.\n\n3/10: The Roadshow\n\nNow in its 10th year, the Roadshow tour brings Matthew West, Michael W. Smith, Tenth Avenue North, Matt Maher and Leanna Crawford to Grand Canyon University for an evening of contemporary Christian music. West has topped the Christian charts with several hits, including \"More,\" \"You Are Everything,\" \"The Motions\" and \"Hello, My Name Is.\"\n\nDetails: 6 p.m. Sunday, March 10. Grand Canyon University Arena, 3300 W. Camelback Road, Phoenix. Three-day passes, $20-$160. 877-552-7362, gcuarena.com.\n\n3/11: Wand\n\nThese psychedelic rockers are touring the States in support of \"Plum,\" a fourth album that finds them expanding the scope of their sound beyond the garage-rock revival of \"Ganglion Reef,\" their debut, arriving at something that's frequently closer to art-rock.\n\nPaste magazine notes that before \"Plum,\" \"It would have been fine to have regarded them as yet another good band living under the punk-y parasol of the neo-psych-garage revolution. Only, 'Plum' has quite simply separated them completely from the fray.\"\n\nDetails: 8 p.m. Monday, March 11. Rebel Lounge, 2303 E. Indian School Road, Phoenix. $15; $13 in advance. 602-296-7013, therebellounge.com.\n\n3/11: Low\n\nThese slowcore veterans are touring in support of \"Double Negative,\" an album that finished in the Top 10 in the Village Voice's Pazz & Jap poll, America’s most comprehensive survey of what music critics think you need to hear. It earned a perfect score at musicOMH.com, whose critic declared it \"an album that will endure for a long time\" and \"a thrilling development that proves how Low continue to release music of extremely high standards, restlessly creative and never content to stand still.\n\nDetails: 8 p.m. Monday, March 11. Valley Bar, 130 N. Central Ave., Phoenix. $20. 602- 368-3121, valleybarphx.com.\n\n3/12: Baroness\n\nThese Atlanta metal heavyweights earned raves in 2016 for an album called \"Purple\" after welcoming new members to replace the two who bailed in the wake of a near-fatal bus crash in 2012 and recruiting producer Dave Fridmann of Flaming Lips fame. This is a co-headlining tour with Deafheaven, who earned a Grammy nomination in the Best Metal Performance category for \"Honeycomb” from this year's exceptional (and exceptionally heavy) \"Ordinary Corrupt Human Love.\"\n\nDetails: 7:30 p.m. Tuesday, March 12. The Van Buren, 401 W. Van Buren St., Phoenix. $29.50-$34. 866-468-3399, thevanburenphx.com.\n\n3/13 Sha Na Na\n\nThe group appeared at the Woodstock Festival, offering ‘50s nostalgia to a very stoned ‘60s crowd. But it worked, with the band moving into television with their own variety show and an appearance on the big screen in “Grease,” which is pretty much the height of ‘50s nostalgia through a ‘70s lens.\n\nDetails: 4 and 7:30 p.m. Wednesday, March 13. Val Vista Villages Resort, 233 N. Val Vista Drive, Mesa. $30-$45. 480-832-2550, cal-am.com.\n\n3/14: Uncle Acid & the Deadbeats\n\nThese U.K. rockers are headed to Phoenix on the Peace Across the Wasteland Tour with Graveyard in support of \"Wasteland,\" a headphone record of psychedelic stoner rock that manages a perfect blend of heavy and hypnotic. Kerrang! declared the latest from Kevin A. Starrs and his Deadbeats \"another masterful, kaleidoscopic trip from your favourite freaked-out uncle\"\n\nDetails: 8 p.m. Thursday, March 14. The Van Buren, 401 W. Van Buren St., Phoenix. $25-$30. 866-468-3399, thevanburenphx.com.\n\n3/15: Zac Brown Band\n\nThey've topped the Billboard country charts with eight songs — five-times-platinum \"Chicken Fried,\" \"Toes,\" \"Highway 20 Ride,\" \"Free,\" \"As She's Walking Away,\" \"Colder Weather,\" double-platinum \"Knee Deep\" and \"Keep Me in Mind.\" The Boston Globe responded to their shows at Fenway Park with, “Zac Brown Band has amassed its stadium-filling following for being unpredictable, a combination of its musical chops and seemingly endless desire to please crowds.”\n\nDetails: 7 p.m. Friday, March 15. Ak-Chin Pavilion, 2121 N. 83rd Ave., Phoenix. $36.50 and up. 602-254-7200, livenation.com.\n\n3/15: The Revivalists\n\nOver the next few weeks, these groove-based jam-scene veterans will embark on the next leg of their Take Good Care Tour with sold-out shows in St. Louis, Chicago and Austin), tape an episode of \"Austin City Limits,\" headline their stage at New Orleans’ Jazz & Heritage Festival and perform at Mountain Jam and LOCKN’ Festivals.\n\nRolling Stone credits their popularity on the festival circuit to \"a dynamic live show and singer David Shaw's soulful howl,\" although we're sure the horns help.\n\nDetails: 8 p.m. Friday, March 15. Marquee Theatre, 730 N. Mill Ave., Tempe. $45-$75. 480-829-0607, luckymanonline.com.\n\n3/15: Blaqk Audio\n\nTheir publicist sent out a press release whose subject heading read: \"Depeche Mode + New Order Fans Should Check Out 'The Viles' From Blaqk Audio.\"\n\nTo which we say, \"And that should come as no surprise to fans of 2016's 'Material,' the previous release from AFI members Davey Havok and Jade Puget indulging their techno-pop revival fantasies.\" \"The Viles\" is the first single out of the box from \"Only Things We Love,\" an album that arrives the same day they play Phoenix.\n\nDetails: 9 p.m. Friday, March 15. Crescent Ballroom, 308 N. Second Ave., Phoenix. $28; $25 in advance. 602-716-2222, crescentphx.com.\n\n3/16-17: Pot of Gold Festival\n\nLucky Man Concerts and Steve Levine Entertainment are bringing out the stars for the fifth annual Pot of Gold Music Festival, with Post Malone, Lil Wayne and Ozuna topping the bill as the festival moves to its new home at Steele Indian School Park. Other acts include Ice Cube, Snoop Dogg, Kodak Black, Jhene Aiko, Young Thug, Lil Pump, Tinashe, Young M.A, Lil Baby, Ski Mask The Slump God, Gunna, Preme, Doja Cat, Tyla Yaweh, Young Dolph, Asian Doll, SAINT JHN and more.\n\nDetails: Friday-Sunday, March, 16-17. Steele Indian School Park, 300 E. Indian School Road, Phoenix. $130 and up, single day; $199 and up, two day. 480-829-0607, luckymanonline.com.\n\n3/17: Chris Tomlin\n\nThe Grammy-winning Christian-music superstar is touring in support of \"Holy Roar.\" Tomlin explained the album title in an interview with Billboard. “Holy means set apart completely, unlike anything else. It’s a word really reserved for God. And the word roar, you instinctively know what that word sounds like, what it feels like. Webster’s Dictionary says it’s a long, full prolonged sound or to sing and shout with full force.\"\n\nDetails: 7 p.m. Sunday, March 17. Gila River Arena, 9400 W. Maryland Ave., Glendale. $18 and up. 623-772-3800, ticketmaster.com.\n\n3/17: Earth, Wind & Fire\n\nEarth, Wind & Fire took funk to the masses with such consistency and soul that \"The Rolling Stone Album Guide\" suggests, \"It could be argued that 'The Best of Earth, Wind & Fire' portrays the best singles band of the '70s.\" They went Top 40 14 times that decade and began the '80s with one of their most enduring hits, \"Let's Groove.\" Hits include \"September,\" \"Shining Star\" and \"After the Love Has Gone.\"\n\nDetails: 7:30 p.m. Sunday, March 17. Comerica Theatre, 400 W. Washington St., Phoenix. 800-745-3000, livenation.com.\n\n3/17: Nils Frahm\n\nThis German composer is known for combining synthesizer loops and classical piano to intoxicating, ambient effect on efforts as inspired as “All Melody,” his latest album. Drowned in Sound said, “It’s continuously changing, perfectly timed, evenly spaced - an impeccable album” while the A.V. Club called it “a vibrant, exploratory album born from Frahm’s newly constructed Berlin studio and the freedom to experiment it allowed.”\n\nDetails: 8 p.m. Sunday, March 17. The Van Buren, 401 W. Van Buren St., Phoenix. $37 and up. 866-468-3399, thevanburenphx.com.\n\n3/17: Gordon Lightfoot\n\nThe singer-songwriter plays Phoenix as part of a tour celebrating his 80th birthday, promising a mix of hit songs as career-defining as “If You Could Read My Mind,” and “The Wreck Of The Edmund Fitzgerald\" and deeper album cuts.\n\nHe'll also share personal anecdotes and behind-the-scenes stories from 50-plus years in the business.\n\nDetails: 8 p.m. Sunday, March 17. Celebrity Theatre, 440 N. 32nd St., Phoenix. $35-$75. 602-267-1600, celebritytheatre.com.\n\n3/17: Raffi\n\nIf you were born in the '70s, '80s or '90s, there's a good chance a Raffi song is part of your childhood. The singer-songwriter became a huge name in children's entertainment, able to sell out such tony venues as Carnegie Hall in his prime. The tour is dubbed #belugagrads, in honor of his 1980 favorite \"Baby Beluga.\"\n\nDetails: 1 p.m. Sunday, March 17. Mesa Arts Center, 1 E. Main St. $35.50-$81.50. 480-644-6560, mesaartscenter.com.\n\n3/18: Jacquees\n\nThis Georgia native arrives in support of \"4275,\" a collection of sexed-up R&B songs boasting guest appearances from Birdman, Trey Songz, Chris Brown, Dej Loaf and Young Thug, among others.\n\nPitchfork responded with \"Jacquees’ music may be simple and familiar, but the personality he brings to it could charm the pants off a mannequin.\"\n\nDetails: 8 p.m. Monday, March 18. Marquee Theatre, 730 N. Mill Ave., Tempe. $30-$60. 480-829-0607, luckymanonline.com.\n\n3/18: Catfish and the Bottlemen\n\nSinger Van McCann cites the Strokes and Oasis as primary influences (and you can definitely hear that) while saying his ultimate goal is to be bigger than both. So he already has the “talking like a proper British rock star” thing down to a science. But he also puts his music where his mouth is.\n\n“The Ride” is packed with worthy new additions to the 21st century Britpop box sets of the future, at times suggesting where the Arctic Monkeys could have gone if they hadn’t decided they’d rather be Queens of the Stone Age.\n\nDetails: 8 p.m. Monday, March 18. The Van Buren, 401 W. Van Buren St., Phoenix. $32-$35. 866-468-3399, thevanburenphx.com.\n\n3/19: Nick Mason's Saucerful of Secrets\n\nThis is the Pink Floyd drummer's first U.S. tour with this project, which puts the focus squarely on the legendary rockers' early psychedelic years. The last time Mason played the States was Pink Floyd’s 1994 tour in support of \"The Division Bell.\" In a press release, Mason said, “With the help of some like-minded friends, I have embarked on a voyage of discovery of the music that was the launch pad of Pink Floyd and my working life. It seems too early to retire, and I missed the interaction.”\n\nDetails: 7:30 p.m. Tuesday, March 19. Comerica Theatre, 400 W. Washington St., Phoenix. $48.50 and up. 800-745-3000, livenation.com.\n\n3/19: Jamey Johnson\n\nIn an age when all it takes to earn a new traditionalist label is to add a little pedal-steel guitar to the proceedings, Johnson is an old-school New Traditionalist.\n\nHis latest album is a tribute to Hank Cochran, the Country Music Hall of Famer who co-wrote Patsy Cline's \"I Fall to Pieces.\" And consider the guest list Johnson managed to assemble for that stellar effort: Willie Nelson, Merle Haggard, Kris Kristofferson, George Strait, Emmylou Harris, Elvis Costello and Ray Price, to name a few.\n\nDetails: 8 p.m. Tuesday, March 19. The Van Buren, 401 W. Van Buren St., Phoenix. $35.50. 866-468-3399, thevanburenphx.com.\n\n3/19: Mandolin Orange\n\nThe North Carolina bluegrass duo are taking a five-piece band on the road in support of an understated treasure of an album called \"Tides of a Teardrop.\"\n\nThe vocal blend Andrew Marlin and Emily Frantz have honed in the course of six albums serves them well on such obvious highlights as \"Into the Sun\" and \"Like You Used To.\" PopMatters writes that the album \"contributes to a repertoire exhibiting Mandolin Orange's ability to capture musical beauty.\"\n\nDetails: 8 p.m. Tuesday, March 19. Crescent Ballroom, 308 N. Second Ave., Phoenix. SOLD OUT. 602-716-2222, crescentphx.com.\n\n3/20: Why Don't We\n\nThe new pop sensations are launching their biggest tour yet at Comerica Theatre in support of \"8 Letters,\" their first album, which debuted at No. 9 on Billboard's album chart.\n\nAre they the N 'Sync of their generation? When they recently performed the album's title track on \"Jimmy Kimmel Live!,\" Rolling Stone wrote that “…the crowd’s screams and shrieks of glee nearly overpowered the musicians’ voices.\"\n\nDetails: 7 p.m. Wednesday, March 20. Comerica Theatre, 400 W. Washington St., Phoenix. $39.50 and up. 800-745-3000, livenation.com.\n\n3/21: Ryan Bingham\n\nThis LA singer-songwriter may be best known in the mainstream for his work on \"Crazy Heart,\" the film for which he sang and collaborated with T Bone Burnett on the writing of the \"The Weary Kind,\" the Oscar-winning movie's theme song.\n\nHe also won a Critic's Choice Award, a Grammy and a Golden Globe for that same song. But he's no one-trick pony, as evidenced on \"American Love Song,\" a gritty collection of roots-rock songs that filter their Americana through the Rolling Stones.\n\nDetails: 8 p.m. Thursday, March 21. Crescent Ballroom, 308 N. Second Ave., Phoenix. SOLD OUT. 602-716-2222, crescentphx.com.\n\n3/21: Laura Jane Grace & the Devouring Mothers\n\nThe voice of Against Me! arrives in support of her first album at the helm of Laura Jane Grace & The Devouring Mothers, a solo project she started in 2016. \"Bought to Rot\" is a soulful punk explosion that should speak directly to fans of Against Me!\n\nThe Guardian raved that Grace is \"self-effacing, emotionally incisive and capable of inciting teenage fervour in cynical souls,\" adding that \"there are few like her.\n\nDetails: 8 p.m. Thursday, March 21. Valley Bar, 130 N. Central Ave., Phoenix. $25. 602- 368-3121, valleybarphx.com.\n\n3/22 Amanda Miguel and Diego Verdaguer\n\nThis long-married couple has maintained individual careers as well as a successful musical partnership. Miguel's hits include the epic ballad \"Él Me Mintio\" and the driving \"El Gato y Yo\" while Verdaguer has scored with \"La Ladrona\" and \"Volveré.\"\n\nDetails: 8 p.m. Friday, March 22. Orpheum Theatre, 203 W. Adams St., Phoenix. $50-$110. 877-840-0457, phoenix.ticketforce.com.\n\n3/23: Durand Jones & the Indications\n\nThe soul revival is in brilliant hands on \"American Love Call,\" the second LP by Durand Jones & the Indications. It sounds like something Robert Forster's character in \"Jackie Brown\" might reach for when the tape deck has eaten his favorite Delfonics cassette.\n\nQ Magazine calls it \"a giant leap from their 2016 debut,\" adding, \"Critical is the discovery of drummer Aaron Frazer's falsetto voice, leading six of the 12 songs, he's doubled the band's stylistic and emotional range.\"\n\nDetails: 8 p.m. Friday, March 22. Crescent Ballroom, 308 N. Second Ave., Phoenix. SOLD OUT. 602-716-2222, crescentphx.com.\n\n3/23 Garth Brooks\n\nBrooks is the reigning CMA Entertainer of the Year, an honor he's won six times.\n\nHe's also the first artist ever to receive seven Diamond awards for albums that have sold more than 10 million U.S. copies and the biggest-selling solo artist in U.S. history with more than 148 million album sales.\n\nBrooks recently finished a three-and-a-half-year world tour with Trisha Yearwood, which sold than 6.3 million tickets, making it the biggest North American tour in history.\n\nDetails: 7:30 p.m. Saturday, March 23. State Farm Stadium, Loop 101 and Glendale Avenue, Glendale. Sold out. 623-433-7101, statefarmstadium.com.\n\n3/23: Pancho Barraza\n\nThis singer-songwriter became involved in traditional Mexican Norteño and banda music after moving to Mazatlán and becoming involved with Banda San Sebastian and Banda Camino.\n\nHe established himself as a solo artists when his 1995 debut, \"Mis Canciones De Amor,\" became a hit.\n\nDetails: 8 p.m. Saturday, March 23. Comerica Theatre, 400 W. Washington St., Phoenix. $72.50 and up. 800-745-3000, livenation.com.\n\n3/23: Method Man & Redman\n\nThey were both doing well for themselves before the team-up. Method Man had Wu-Tang Clan and Redman topped the rap charts with his first hit, \"Blow Your Mind.\" But when they did hook up, sparks flew on the platinum album, \"Blackout!\" — spinning off three classic rap hits, \"Tear It Off,\" \"Y.O.U.\" and \"Da Rockwilder.\"\n\nTwo years later, they starred in a film adaptation of one of their songs, \"How High.\" Since then, they've had their own sitcom called \"Method & Red\" on Fox and dropped a sequel to their breakthrough, \"Blackout! 2.\"\n\nDetails: 7:30 p.m. Saturday, March 23. The Pressroom, 441 W. Madison St., Phoenix. $20. 602-396-7136, thepressroomaz.com.\n\n3/23: John Proulx Quartet\n\nSome have compared this LA jazz piano player's vocals to a young Chet Baker, a frame of reference that's apparently not lost on Proulx, who recorded an album paying tribute to the trumpet-playing singer, “Baker’s Dozen – Remembering Chet Baker,” in 2009.\n\nHe's also an acclaimed composer who landed a co-write called \"These Golden Years\" on Nancy Wilson's Grammy-winning “Turned to Blue.” This show is presented by Lakeshore Music as part of its 10th anniversary season.\n\nDetails: 7:30 p.m. Saturday, March 23. Tempe Center for the Arts, 700 W. Rio Salado Parkway. $35. 480-352-2822, tempecenterforthearts.com.\n\n3/23: Boy Harsher\n\nThese synth-pop revivalists are touring in support of \"Careful,\" a brooding throwback to the golden age of post-punk that at times, as Tiny Mix Tapes writes, suggests \"the dark, cool sweetness of early Eurythmics.\"\n\nAnd this is a darkness that's rooted in personal trauma, inspired in part by Jae Matthews processing her mother's diagnosis with dementia and looking for catharsis as the symptoms worsened while also dreaming of escape. The end result is deeply moving.\n\nDetails: 9 p.m. Saturday, March 23. Rebel Lounge, 2303 E. Indian School Road, Phoenix. $15; $12 in advance. 602-296-7013, therebellounge.com.\n\n3/24: Mike Doughty plays 'Ruby Vroom'\n\nThe former Soul Coughing front man is celebrating the 25th anniversary of their genre-defiant debut \"Ruby Vroom,\" an album that filtered hip-hop through a prism so distinctly white and quirky as to stand apart from claims of cultural appropriation. This is cultural interpolation. And it's really weird. But in a good way.\n\nDoughty is joined by a cellist, a bassist and a guitar player, performing \"Ruby Vroom\" in its entirety, in the original sequence, as well as additional highlights from his oeuvre.\"\n\nDetails: 8 p.m. Sunday, March 24. Crescent Ballroom, 308 N. Second Ave., Phoenix. $22-$3 602-716-2222, crescentphx.com.\n\nMORE MUSIC:\n\nReach the reporter at ed.masley@arizonarepublic.com or 602-444-4495. Follow him on Twitter @EdMasley.\n\nSupport local journalism. Subscribe to azcentral.com today.", "authors": [], "publish_date": "2019/03/01"}]}
{"question_id": "20230120_29", "search_time": "2023/01/20/16:39", "search_result": [{"url": "https://www.usatoday.com/story/life/health-wellness/2023/01/19/jacinda-ardern-resignation-burnout-privilege/11080849002/", "title": "New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern resigned. What that ...", "text": "Exhausted. Overworked. Done.\n\nMany people feel these emotions on a daily basis, and often specifically about their jobs. But that doesn't mean everyone is able to truly be \"done\" at the end of the day.\n\nThat's part of why New Zealand Prime Minister's Jacinda Ardern's decision to resign after taking the post in 2017 flabbergasted the world.\n\n\"Prime Minister Jacinda Arden stepping down is another example of the state of burnout people feel, across the globe,\" says ​​​Shavonne Moore-Lobban, licensed psychologist. \"The last few years have been extremely challenging and there are few people who are exempt from that. People are tired from the fights they have come out of and the ones that they may still ahead from there.\"\n\nFeel the urge to 'quiet quit'? Time to check in with your mental health, experts say\n\nNot 'enough in the tank':New Zealand prime minister Jacinda Ardern quits over burnout\n\nNew Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern resigns: What happened?\n\nFighting back tears, Ardern, 42, told reporters that Feb. 7 will be her last day in office.\n\nShe said: “I am not leaving because it was hard. Had that been the case I probably would have departed two months into the job. I am leaving because with such a privileged role, comes responsibility, the responsibility to know when you are the right person to lead, and also, when you are not. I know what this job takes, and I know that I no longer have enough in the tank to do it justice. It is that simple.\"\n\nThough she didn't use the word burnout, her resignation has sparked a larger conversation about what burnout feels like, the privilege of departing a job and mental health.\n\nSome pointed out to other possible motives for her resignation – was this merely a politically advantageous choice? – but others praised her.\n\n\"Jacinda Ardern, an accomplished female leader, a progressive voice against bigotry and hate, a young woman in the highest office who normalised (sic) kindness and empathy,\" one Twitter user wrote. \"I hope history will be kind to her – to resign at a time when leaders will go to any extent to stay in power.\"\n\nMore on the resignation:New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern stepping down; will not contest general elections\n\nAnother user added: \"It takes immense courage to be empathetic and honest and acknowledge that you are no longer in a place to do the work that took so much from you and those around you. There are many ways to lead. One that we never see is the capacity to be vulnerable.\"\n\nWhat is burnout?\n\nThe World Health Organization added burnout to the International Classification of Diseases Index in 2019. It defines burnout as “a syndrome conceptualized as resulting from chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed.”\n\nBurnout can be characterized by three dimensions, according to T.M. Robinson-Mosley, counseling psychologist:\n\nFeelings of energy depletion or exhaustion\n\nIncreased mental distance from job, including negativity or cynicism\n\nReduced sense of professional competence\n\n\"Many people can connect to the feeling of burnout,\" Moore-Lobban adds. \"The prime minister’s desire to spend more time with her family, and take a step back from her role, is aligned with the desires of many.\"\n\nThe bigger conversation about privilege\n\nOf course, not everyone can up and quit when they feel like it. They have bills to pay, mouths to feed, lives to live. And that may require them to work in spite of stress.\n\n\"For women of different levels of power, social privilege, and class privilege, leaning back could mean a loss of livelihood, hunger or eviction,\" says Miranda Nadeau, licensed psychologist. \"Stepping down from our responsibilities comes with tangible, existential risk along with the lure of psychological recovery.\"\n\nPerhaps Ardern's move can inspire a future where quitting can be more financially feasible.\n\n\"Everyone doesn’t have the ability to step down from their work when they are burned out, or to prioritize themselves and their family over their work; however, we should have that ability,\" Moore-Lobban says. \"It’s important to one’s mental health and well-being.\"\n\nNadeau agrees: \"Even those who are dependent upon ceaseless work will be better able to access rest when more leaders like Ardern both take action to improve equity and also model this necessary decision. It’s improving the ability for the least powerful amongst us to rest that will create necessary change – but you can’t be burned out to do that.\"\n\nAre you experiencing burnout?\n\nYou may be experiencing burnout if you:\n\nHave difficulty concentrating\n\nFeel like work has unrealistic expectations of you\n\nDreading the thought of work at the beginning or end of day\n\nExcessive fatigue\n\nIrritability\n\nDisinterest in social activities\n\nLower sex drive\n\nHeadaches and tightness in neck, shoulders and back\n\nGI issues\n\nAnd it's not something easily fixable.\n\n\"When it comes to burnout, leadership and work environment are the cause and the cure,\" Robinson-Mosley says. \"Which means it's really tempting to try to think about fixing burnout by looking at the person who's burned out and trying to advise self-care strategies and tips that they can do in order to curtail burnout or to be able to address it in a positive or significant way. The challenge is that burnout is a pervasive issue in organizational structure and context.\"\n\nMore on burnout:It starts with work and while self-care can help, it isn't just your problem to solve\n\nContributing: Orlando Mayorquin, USA TODAY; The Associated Press", "authors": [], "publish_date": "2023/01/19"}, {"url": "https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2023/01/19/new-zealand-prime-minister-jacinda-ardern-resigns/11080726002/", "title": "Why is New Zealand prime minister Jacinda Ardern resigning?", "text": "New Zealand's leader Jacinda Ardern is quitting her job as prime minister because of professional burnout, the 42-year-old said Thursday.\n\nArdern, who's been in the role since 2017, was elected at age 37, becoming, at that time, the youngest female leader of any government in the world. (Finland's Sanna Marin is now the youngest serving prime minister in the world at 34 years old.)\n\n\"I am not leaving because it was hard,\" Ardern said. \"Had that been the case I probably would have departed two months into the job. I am leaving because with such a privileged role, comes responsibility, the responsibility to know when you are the right person to lead, and also when you are not.\"\n\n\"I know what this job takes, and I know that I no longer have enough in the tank to do it justice,\" she told reporters in Napier, fighting back tears. ''It is that simple.\"\n\nMore on the resignation:New Zealand Prime Minister Ardern resigned. What that says about privilege, burnout.\n\n\"I would be doing a disservice to New Zealand to continue.\"\n\nArdern said her years in office were \"the most fulfilling\" of her life. However, she noted that leading New Zealand during years of \"crisis\" had been hard. \"There's never really been a moment when it's ever felt like we were just governing.\"\n\nArdern quits: What now?\n\nShe will remain on the job until Feb. 7. Lawmakers from her center-left Labour Party will vote on a successor. If they can't reach an agreement, the vote will be opened up to rank-and-file members of the party.\n\nArdern's resignation comes ahead of an October general election in New Zealand. Polls show her party has been losing support recently.\n\nWhat is Ardern's legacy?\n\nShe was lauded globally for her country’s initial handling of the COVID-19 pandemic after New Zealand managed for months to stop the virus at its borders. But its zero-tolerance strategy was abandoned once it was challenged by new variants and vaccines became available. She faced tougher criticism at home that the strategy was too strict.\n\nCan I go to New Zealand right now?:For the first time in more than 2 years, yes\n\nIn March 2019, Ardern faced one of the darkest days in New Zealand’s history when a white supremacist gunman stormed two mosques in Christchurch and slaughtered 51 worshippers during Friday prayers. Ardern was widely praised for her empathy with survivors and New Zealand’s wider Muslim community in the aftermath.\n\nAfter the mosque shootings, Ardern moved within weeks to pass new laws banning the deadliest types of semi-automatic weapons. A subsequent buyback scheme run by police saw more than 50,000 guns, including many AR-15-style rifles, destroyed.\n\nBut Ardern and her government also faced criticism that it had been big on ideas but lacking in execution. Supporters worried it hadn’t made promised gains on increasing the housing supply and reducing child poverty, while opponents said it was not focusing enough on crime and the struggling economy. Many observers said that sexist attitudes played a role in the anger directed at Ardern.\n\nMore on prime minister's announcement:New Zealand Prime Minister Ardern stepping down; will not contest general elections\n\nIn her private life, apart from breaking barriers for her relative youthfulness, she is only the second elected world leader to give birth while in office. The first was Benazir Bhutto, Pakistan's former prime minister who was assassinated in 2007.\n\nWho's saying what about her?\n\n\"Jacinda Ardern has shown the world how to lead with intellect and strength. She has demonstrated that empathy and insight are powerful leadership qualities. Jacinda has been a fierce advocate for New Zealand, an inspiration to so many and a great friend to me.\" - Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese\n\n\"Thank you ... for your partnership and your friendship – and for your empathic, compassionate, strong, and steady leadership over these past several years. The difference you have made is immeasurable. I’m wishing you and your family nothing but the best, my friend.\" - Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau\n\n“Her treatment, the pile on, in the last few months has been disgraceful and embarrassing. All the bullies, the misogynists, the aggrieved. She deserved so much better. A great leader.” - actor Sam Neill\n\nContributing: The Associated Press", "authors": [], "publish_date": "2023/01/19"}, {"url": "https://www.cnn.com/2022/10/20/uk/liz-truss-government-crisis-thursday-gbr-intl/index.html", "title": "Liz Truss resigns as Britain's Prime Minister after disastrous six ...", "text": "London CNN —\n\nLiz Truss will become the shortest-serving prime minister in British history, after announcing her intention to resign just six weeks into a disastrous term that pitched Britain deep into political and economic turmoil.\n\nTruss said Thursday that she would step aside for a new leader to be chosen within the next week, after a growing number of her own Conservative Party’s lawmakers said they could not support her any longer.\n\n“Given the situation, I cannot deliver the mandate on which I was elected by the Conservative Party. I have therefore spoken to His Majesty The King to notify him that I am resigning as Leader of the Conservative Party,” Truss said while standing outside the famous black door of 10 Downing Street, the same spot in which she had promised to put the UK back onto the path to economic growth and stability just six weeks earlier.\n\nThe announcement brings to an ignominious end a catastrophic tenure in Downing Street, which appeared doomed ever since the announcement of Truss’s flagship economic agenda sent markets into panic. A record rise in UK government bond prices sent borrowing costs surging and forced the Bank of England to make three successive interventions to rescue overstretched pension funds. The pound at one point hit an all-time low against the US dollar.\n\nTruss said she would stay in Downing Street until her successor is named.\n\nGraham Brady, who chairs the 1922 Committee which represents rank-and-file Conservative Members of Parliament, said Thursday that the new party leader – and therefore prime minister – should be in place before the end of October.\n\nCandidates to replace Truss will need at least 100 nominations from British Conservative lawmakers, Brady said later on Thursday, a move that effectively narrows the field of potential candidates.\n\nThe threshold allows for the possibility of three candidates, maximum, he said. There would be an online vote for Conservative Party members if two candidates make it through the parliamentary stages, party chairman Jake Berry added.\n\nIf only one candidate emerges, there could be a new party leader and Prime Minister by Monday, Brady said.\n\nTruss had tried to save her position by admitting her plan was a mistake and replacing her chancellor and long-time ally Kwasi Kwarteng with Jeremy Hunt, a staunch supporter of former Chancellor Rishi Sunak in the leadership contest over the summer.\n\nIn the end, even that was not enough.\n\nOn Wednesday, Truss lost another top official when Home Secretary Suella Braverman dramatically quit just a few weeks into the job, using her letter of resignation to launch a blistering attack on the prime minister’s leadership.\n\n“The business of government relies upon people accepting responsibility for their mistakes. Pretending we haven’t made mistakes, carrying on as if everyone can’t see that we have made them, and hoping that things will magically come right is not serious politics,” Braverman wrote in a critique of Truss’s numerous U-turns on taxes and public spending.\n\nBritish Prime Minister Liz Truss announces her resignation outside Number 10 Downing Street on October 20, 2022. Henry Nicholls/Reuters\n\nMaking a bad day even worse, chaotic scenes unfolded in the UK Parliament on Wednesday evening during a vote on whether to ban controversial fracking for shale gas.\n\nLawmakers reported that aides for Truss had manhandled MPs into the voting lobby to force them to vote against the ban proposed by the opposition Labour Party. Politicians in the lobby tweeted eyewitness accounts alleging that MPs were being physically dragged to vote in the government lobby, amid angry scenes of shouting and altercation.\n\nHouse of Commons Speaker Lindsay Hoyle announced Thursday that he had ordered an investigation into the allegations.\n\nShortest tenure ever\n\nThe names of potential successors began floating around even before Truss announced she was going to resign.\n\nLeader of the House of Commons Penny Mordaunt, who stepped in for Truss during a difficult parliamentary debate earlier this week and also stood in the leadership contest over the summer, will likely be in the running. Sunak, who was Truss’ biggest rival in that contest, is another possible candidate.\n\nMeanwhile, allies of Boris Johnson, Truss’s predecessor in Number 10, made it clear on Thursday that they think the former prime minister will stand in the leadership contest, according to two sources who worked on Johnson’s 2019 leadership campaign.\n\nNewly appointed Home Secretary Grant Shapps and Kemi Badenoch, who came fourth in the last leadership contest, could also stand.\n\nTruss announced her decision to leave on day 45 of her tenure. George Canning previously held the record for the shortest term in Downing Street, having served for 119 days until his death in 1827.\n\nHer move ensures a fresh power struggle within the ruling Conservative Party, which has hemorrhaged public support for the past year and has now overthrown Boris Johnson and Truss in the space of a few months. The new prime minister will be the third since the last general election in December 2019 and the fifth since the Conservatives came into power in 2010.\n\nEarlier this year, Truss’s predecessor Johnson narrowly survived a confidence vote in his leadership. But he resigned weeks later when dozens of ministers and members of the government quit, citing a lack of confidence in his government.\n\nTruss was elected the Conservative Party leader in early September. The September 6 audience during which Queen Elizabeth II officially appointed Truss as the new prime minister, the 15th of her reign, was one of the last duties carried out by the monarch before her death on September 8.\n\nThe new prime minister, whoever that may be, will become the first to be appointed by King Charles III.\n\nKeir Starmer, the leader of the opposition Labour Party, which is enjoying a huge lead in opinion polls, on Thursday repeated his calls for an early general election.\n\n“After 12 years of Tory failure, the British people deserve so much better than this revolving door of chaos,” the opposition leader said in a statement posted on Twitter.\n\n“The Tories cannot respond to their latest shambles by yet again simply clicking their fingers and shuffling the people at the top without the consent of the British people,” he added.\n\nScottish First Minister Nicola Sturgeon also called for an early vote.\n\n“The interests of the Tory party should concern no-one right now. A General Election is now a democratic imperative,” Sturgeon said on Twitter.\n\nThe next general election is due to take place no later than January 2025, but the prospect of Britain seeing its third prime minister since the last poll in 2019 would heap pressure on Truss’ successor to ask the public for a new mandate.\n\nThe British pound was trading 0.5% higher against the dollar after Truss announced her resignation, indicating that investors welcomed the decision.", "authors": ["Ivana Kottasová Rob Picheta", "Ivana Kottasová", "Rob Picheta"], "publish_date": "2022/10/20"}, {"url": "https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/columnist/2023/01/20/new-zealand-prime-minister-jacinda-ardern-resignation-inspires/11068041002/", "title": "New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern resigns – and inspires", "text": "New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern has had enough and is willing to say so.\n\n“I know what this job takes, and I know that I no longer have enough in the tank to do it justice,” she said Thursday. “It is that simple.”\n\nAnd so, 5½ years into her tenure, she is stepping down in February, eight months before New Zealand’s next election.\n\nThis is being covered around the world as astonishing news, but countless women will have little trouble understanding why the 42-year-old world leader wants to prioritize her well-being.\n\nSeven months ago, The Guardian reported that threats against Ardern had nearly tripled over three years. Most of this menace has come from two groups: Pro-gun zealots who hate her for legislation banning most military-style weapons, and anti-vaxxers who hate her for strict COVID-19 policies that saved lives. Both efforts had catapulted her to global fame – and we all know how a certain percentage of men feel about a woman who refuses to cower to their misogyny.\n\nArdern did what women do\n\nNew Zealand has a population of 5.1 million. It is roughly the size of South Carolina; half the size of Georgia. So how did Ardern, the youngest woman in the world elected to lead a government, become so famous?\n\nShe was 37 when elected in 2017. The following year she had a baby, making her only the second elected world leader to give birth in office. The first was Pakistan’s Benazir Bhutto in 1990. My, this slow crawl of progress.\n\nStaring back at us:What if our reaction to Prince Harry and his book is more about us than him?\n\nArdern's leadership was tested early and often.\n\nOn March 15, 2019, a lone gunman opened fire on two mosques during Friday prayers in the southern city of Christchurch. He killed 51 Muslims as he broadcast the shooting live on Facebook.\n\nArden did what women do: She showed up. Her hair was cloaked in a hijab as she hugged and consoled grieving survivors. She also did what most women in America want: Less than a month after the massacre, she shepherded legislation to change guns law, banning nearly all military-style semi-automatic weapons. Only one member of parliament voted against it.\n\n\"To owners who have legitimate uses for their guns, I want to reiterate that the actions being announced today are not because of you and are not directed at you,\" Ardern said. \"Our actions, on behalf of all New Zealanders, are directed at making sure this never happens again.\"\n\nAs U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez rightly pointed out at the time on Twitter, \"Sandy Hook happened 6 years ago and we can’t even get the Senate to hold a vote on universal background checks. …\n\n\"Christchurch happened, and within days New Zealand acted to get weapons of war out of the consumer market. This is what leadership looks like.\"\n\nGabby Giffords:Why I'm optimistic about reducing gun violence in America\n\nA year later, the pandemic arrived. Ardern quickly closed her country’s borders and enforced strict quarantine requirements for returning New Zealanders. Ensuing lockdowns kept infection rates dramatically low, earning her global praise and a landslide reelection.\n\nThe 'real reason was' life\n\nShe faced a tough reelection, but she has proved herself to be a tough competitor, and it’s hard to believe that alone is pulling her out. She’s aware that we’re wondering.\n\n“I know there will be much discussion in the aftermath of this decision as to what the so-called ‘real reason was.’ I can tell you that what I’m sharing today is it. The only interesting angle that you will find is that after going on six years of some big challenges, I am human. Politicians are human. We give all that we can for as long as we can, and then it’s time. And for me, it’s time.”\n\nI needed a moment of peace:Then I found this mother singing to her kids on TikTok\n\nI am remembering that moment last November, when Ardern stood on stage beside Finnish Prime Minister Sanna Marin and a male reporter asked whether the leaders had met because they were “similar in age and, you know, got a lot of common stuff there.” He didn’t provide a map for destination “there,” but we all knew what he meant. They were just two gals gabbing about world affairs and mani-pedi appointments.\n\nArdern was having none of that. “My first question is I wonder whether or not anyone ever asked Barack Obama and John Key if they meet because they were of similar age. We of course have a higher proportion of men in politics. It’s reality. Because two women meet, it’s not simply because of their gender.”\n\nThis week, Ardern listed her proudest achievements and said she hoped for a legacy \"as someone who always tried to be kind.\n\n\"I hope I leave New Zealanders with a belief that you can be kind but strong, empathetic but decisive, optimistic but focused. And that you can be your own kind of leader – one who knows when it's time to go.\"\n\nThe toll and inspiration of leadership\n\nAnyone practiced in the art of kindness knows its power, but also its limits. A powerful legacy, indeed, especially for women and the girls who are watching.\n\nPrime Minister Jacinda Ardern resigned. What that says about privilege, burnout.\n\nShe said nothing about the threats of violence. Good. I understand the desire not to give the haters that victory. True leaders do not create crises, they respond to them. Now, in real time, she is showing us both the toll of that leadership, and its inspired next steps.\n\nWe will hear again from Jacinda Ardern.\n\nIn her time, in her way.\n\nUSA TODAY columnist Connie Schultz is a Pulitzer Prize winner whose novel, “The Daughters of Erietown,” is a New York Times bestseller. You can reach her at CSchultz@usatoday.com or on Twitter: @ConnieSchultz", "authors": [], "publish_date": "2023/01/20"}, {"url": "https://www.cnn.com/2022/09/08/uk/queen-health-supervision-gbr-intl/index.html", "title": "Queen Elizabeth II dies at 96 | CNN", "text": "London CNN —\n\nQueen Elizabeth II, the longest-reigning British monarch whose rule spanned seven decades, died on Thursday at the age of 96, Buckingham Palace has announced.\n\nThe Queen’s oldest son Charles has now become King Charles III.\n\n“The Queen died peacefully at Balmoral this afternoon. The King and The Queen Consort will remain at Balmoral this evening and will return to London tomorrow,” the royal family said in a statement posted on its official Twitter account, referring to Charles as the new King for the first time.\n\nThe King said in a statement that the Queen’s death was “a moment of the greatest sadness for me and all members of my family.”\n\n“We mourn profoundly the passing of a cherished Sovereign and a much-loved Mother. I know her loss will be deeply felt throughout the country, the Realms and the Commonwealth, and by countless people around the world,” he said in the statement.\n\nCrowds of mourners gathered outside Balmoral Castle and other royal residences, despite heavy downpours in parts of the UK on Thursday evening. Many brought flowers and lit candles, some looking visibly shaken by the news.\n\nIn keeping with the royal tradition, a written statement announcing the Queen’s death was displayed on the gates of Buckingham Palace. In a striking moment just after the official announcement was made, the heavy rain battering London stopped and a large double rainbow appeared over the palace.\n\nFollow live updates here.\n\nElizabeth ascended to the throne in 1952, on the death of her father, King George VI. She oversaw the last throes of the British empire, weathered global upheaval and domestic scandal, and dramatically modernized the monarchy.\n\nShe lost Prince Philip, her husband of 73 years and the longest-serving consort in British history, in April last year.\n\nElizabeth ruled over the United Kingdom and 14 other Commonwealth realms, and became one of the most recognizable women ever to have lived.\n\nRoyal family rushed to the Queen’s side\n\nThe Queen’s four children were at Balmoral Castle when the announcement was made.\n\nCharles rushed to the Scottish castle earlier on Thursday together with his wife, Camilla. The Queen’s daughter, Princess Anne, known as the Princess Royal, was already there.\n\nPrince William, who is now the heir apparent to the throne, arrived at Balmoral Thursday afternoon together with the Queen’s other two sons, Prince Andrew and Prince Edward, as well as Edward’s wife Sophie, the Countess of Wessex.\n\nPrince William and his wife Catherine have taken on the title of Duke and Duchess of Cornwall, according to their official Twitter account. Charles and Camilla were previously known by that title. The couple are now known as the Duke and Duchess of Cornwall and Cambridge.\n\nCatherine remained at Windsor, where their three children attended their first day at a new school.\n\nPrince Harry arrived to Balmoral after the announcement was made. His wife Meghan, Duchess of Sussex was not traveling with him.\n\nLast public appearance\n\nThe Queen was last seen in public on Tuesday when she formally appointed Liz Truss as the UK’s new prime minister. A photograph from the audience showed the monarch smiling, standing in the drawing room in Balmoral, carrying a walking stick. Truss is the 15th – and the last – British Prime Minister to be appointed by Elizabeth.\n\nThere have been concerns over the Queen’s health ever since a brief hospital stay last October. She has experienced episodic mobility issues, which have at times caused her to withdraw from official engagements.\n\nBut those concerns grew deeper on Wednesday when Buckingham Palace announced the Queen had postponed a virtual meeting of her Privy Council after being advised by doctors to rest.\n\nOn Thursday, the palace announced that the Queen was under medical supervision, but said she was “comfortable” at Balmoral. As her children rushed to her side during the day, it became clear the situation was serious.\n\nHer death comes seven months after the Queen marked the 70th anniversary of her accession to the throne. The UK officially celebrated the platinum jubilee in June with days of pomp and pageantry and she made several public appearances in London.\n\nGlobal tributes\n\nMessages of condolences started pouring in from around the world immediately after the announcement was made, underscoring the global impact the Queen had made during her 70-year reign.\n\nSpeaking outside Downing Street on Thursday, Truss said the Queen’s death was “a huge shock to the nation and to the world.”\n\n“Queen Elizabeth II was the rock on which modern Britain was built,” the new prime minister said. “Our country has grown and flourished under her reign.”\n\nScottish First Minister Nicola Sturgeon paid tribute to Queen Elizabeth II, saying she was “loved and admired” by the people of Scotland.\n\nUnited Nations Secretary-General António Guterres described the Queen as a “good friend” of the UN, adding: “She was a reassuring presence throughout decades of sweeping change, including the decolonization of Africa and Asia and the evolution of the Commonwealth.”\n\nPope Francis also mourned the Queen’s death, praising her “steadfast witness of faith in Jesus Christ” in an open letter to King Charles III.\n\nCanadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said it was “with the heaviest of hearts” that Canada learned of the monarch’s passing, while Australia’s PM Anthony Albanese praised the Queen’s devotion to “duty, family, faith and service.”\n\nNew Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said in a national address that the Queen had come to define “notions of service, charity, and consistency.”\n\nThe Queen was the head of state in Canada, Australia and New Zealand.\n\nUS President Joe Biden and first lady Jill Biden called the Queen a “steadying presence.”\n\n“Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II was more than a monarch. She defined an era,” they said in a statement.\n\nPresident of Ireland Michael D. Higgins said the country had lost “a remarkable friend.”\n\n“Her Majesty served the British people with exceptional dignity. Her personal commitment to her role and extraordinary sense of duty were the hallmarks of her period as Queen, which will hold a unique place in British history,” Higgins said. In a hugely symbolic moment in 2011, the Queen became the first British monarch to make a state visit to the Republic of Ireland.\n\nNumerous kings, queens and royal families of other countries have also sent messages of sympathy. King Felipe VI of Spain, King Abdullah II of Jordan, Norway’s King Harald and King Willem-Alexander, Queen Máxima and Princess Beatrix of the Netherlands all sent condolences.\n\nTo get updates on the British Royal Family sent to your inbox, sign up for CNN’s Royal News newsletter.", "authors": ["Ivana Kottasová Max Foster Lauren Said-Moorhouse", "Ivana Kottasová", "Max Foster", "Lauren Said-Moorhouse"], "publish_date": "2022/09/08"}, {"url": "https://www.cnn.com/2022/07/05/uk/rishi-sunak-sajid-javid-resignation-boris-johnson-intl/index.html", "title": "Huge blow for Boris Johnson as senior UK government ministers ...", "text": "London CNN —\n\nBritish Prime Minister Boris Johnson was dealt a huge and sudden blow on Tuesday when two of his top ministers announced their resignations, saying they could no longer work for a government mired in scandal.\n\nChancellor Rishi Sunak and Health Secretary Sajid Javid announced their decisions to quit within minutes of each other on Tuesday evening, plunging Johnson’s troubled administration into renewed chaos and prompting a wave of other junior ministers and officials to resign.\n\nSome called on Johnson himself to step down, and there was speculation that if he refused to go, members of his own party would launch a formal effort to unseat him – less than a month after the last one failed.\n\nThe immediate cause of the resignations was the bungled handling of a recent controversy, but came against the backdrop of months of turmoil in which Johnson was fined by police for breaking Covid-19 lockdown rules.\n\n“The public rightly expect government to be conducted properly, competently and seriously,” Sunak said in his resignation letter, posted to Twitter. “I recognise this may be my last ministerial job, but I believe these standards are worth fighting for and that is why I am resigning.”\n\n“I am sad to be leaving Government but I have reluctantly come to the conclusion that we cannot continue like this,” Sunak added.\n\nJavid wrote that “it has been an enormous privilege to serve in this role, but I regret that I can no longer continue in good conscience.” Javid added that the vote of confidence in the prime minister last month “was a moment for humility, grip and new direction.”\n\n“I regret to say, however, that it is clear to me that this situation will not change under your leadership – and you have therefore lost my confidence too,” Javid wrote.\n\nOther ministers and officials occupying more junior posts in the government quit in the hours that followed, with more resignations continuing on Wednesday morning. Johnson moved to shore up his position, replacing his two Cabinet ministers late on Tuesday.\n\nScandal after scandal\n\nThe latest crisis blew up out of Downing Street’s handling of last week’s resignation of deputy chief whip Chris Pincher, who stepped down from his post last Thursday amid allegations he had groped two guests at a private dinner the night before.\n\nWhile he did not admit the allegations directly, Pincher said in a letter to Johnson that “last night I drank far too much” and “embarrassed myself and other people.”\n\nDowning Street had struggled to explain why Pincher was in government in the first place, amid a wave of revelations about his previous alleged conduct, denying Johnson knew anything specific about the allegations.\n\nOn Tuesday, it emerged that a complaint had been made against Pincher in the Foreign Office about three years ago and that Johnson was briefed on what happened.\n\nMinutes before Sunak and Javid announced their resignations, Johnson acknowledged it “was a mistake” to appoint Pincher to his government.\n\n“I got this complaint. It was something that was only raised with me very cursory, but I wish that we had acted on it and that he had not continued in government because he then went on, I’m afraid, to behave, as far as we can see – according to the allegations that we have – very, very badly,” Johnson said in a broadcast interview.\n\nUK opposition leader Keir Starmer said it was “clear” that the government was “collapsing.”\n\n“Tory cabinet ministers have known all along who this Prime Minister is. They have been his cheerleaders throughout this sorry saga. Backing him when he broke the law. Backing him when he lied repeatedly. Backing him when he mocked the sacrifices of the British people,” the Labour Party leader said in a statement released after the two resignations.\n\nFor months Johnson has been facing a barrage of criticism over his conduct and that of his government, including illegal, lockdown-breaking parties thrown in his Downing Street offices for which he and others were fined.\n\nJohnson has faced numerous other scandals that have hit his standing in the polls – despite his 80-seat landslide victory just two-and-a-half years ago. These include accusations of using donor money inappropriately to pay for a refurbishment of his Downing Street home and whipping MPs to protect a colleague who had breached lobbying rules.\n\nLast month, he survived a confidence vote, but the final count of his lawmakers who rebelled against him was higher than his supporters expected: 41% of his own parliamentary party refused to back him.\n\nBut while he managed to win the confidence vote, he suffered a further blow late last month when his party lost two parliamentary by-elections in a single night, raising new questions about his leadership.\n\nAccording to an Ipsos UK survey conducted between 22 and 29 June, Johnson’s Conservative Party, by some measures, is at its lowest level recorded in more than a decade. Just 21% of respondents said it is “fit to govern” – the lowest number for either the Conservatives or Labour since Ipsos started tracking this metric in 2011.\n\nThe chaos in Westminster had ripple effects in the financial markets, pushing the value of the British pound against the dollar to its lowest in more than two years.\n\nMore resignations\n\nDowning Street did not hesitate filling the vacant roles. Nadhim Zahawi, who was previously Secretary of State for Education, was appointed as Chancellor, while Downing Street Chief of Staff Steve Barclay became the new Health Secretary. Michelle Donelan replaced Zahawi as Education Secretary.\n\nThe resignation of the two Cabinet ministers prompted more junior figures to follow. Conservative party vice chair Bim Afolami announced his decision to quit live on television. During an interview with Tom Newton Dunn on Talk TV, Afolami said: “I just don’t think the Prime Minister any longer has my support… the support of the party or indeed the country anymore.”\n\nAlex Chalk, who served as the Solicitor General for Englnad and Wales, one of the government’s most senior law officers, also quit, saying in his resignation letter that it was time “for fresh leadership.”\n\n“To be in government is to accept the duty to argue for difficult or even unpopular policy positions where that serves the broader national interest. But it cannot extend to defending the indefensible,” Chalk said.\n\nThe Prime Minister’s trade envoy to Morocco, Andrew Murrison, also stepped down, blasting the “rolling chaos of the last six months” and saying that Boris Johnson’s “position has become unrecoverable.”\n\nAt least half a dozen other junior-ranking government officials also announced resignations later on Tuesday, and more quit on Wednesday morning.\n\nAllies of the Prime Minister insisted he would fight on. But, adding to the sense of chaos, two more ministers resigned just as Zahawi was giving an interview to BBC Radio 4’s Today program, regarded as the most high-profile of morning broadcast shows. As Zahawi responded to being told of the first resignation, the presenter, Nick Robinson, interrupted him to tell him of another.", "authors": ["Ivana Kottasová"], "publish_date": "2022/07/05"}, {"url": "https://www.cnn.com/2022/10/24/opinions/britain-uk-politics-prime-minister-elect-conservatives-beers/index.html", "title": "Opinion: Britain has a new prime minister -- that no one in Britain ...", "text": "Editor’s Note: Laura Beers is a professor of history at American University. She is the author of “Your Britain: Media and the Making of the Labour Party” and “Red Ellen: The Life of Ellen Wilkinson, Socialist, Feminist, Internationalist.” The views expressed here are solely hers. Read more opinion on CNN.\n\nCNN —\n\nBritain’s Conservative Party, which has weathered the resignation of two prime ministers since December 2019, cannot remain in government for another two years without calling a general election.\n\nWell, technically, they could. But that doesn’t mean they should.\n\nLaura Beers Laura Beers\n\nUnder British law, as long as a party can command a parliamentary majority, it can continue in power for up to five years before calling an election.\n\nAnd the Conservative Party, despite having suffered a series of recent by-election defeats, still maintains a working parliamentary majority of 71, meaning that Britain’s next general election could conceivably come as late as January 2025.\n\nOn Monday, Rishi Sunak, Boris Johnson’s former finance minister, won the contest to become the next leader of the Conservative Party and will become prime minister of Britain. Johnson himself had seriously considered challenging Sunak to regain the premiership, before announcing Sunday evening that he would not stand in the leadership race.\n\nSince the announcement of Liz Truss’s resignation on Thursday, Conservative MPs have been citing the letter of the law to defend the party’s seeming determination to remain in power, despite the insistence of opposition parties and even some Tories that a general election is now a moral, if not a legal, imperative.\n\nBut as any three-year-old knows, there are two meanings of “You can’t do that!” On the one hand, there is “You can’t do that because it is actually impossible.” There is also, “You can’t do that because it is unconscionable.” When one of my sons clocks the other one on the head and I shout, “You can’t do that!” both boys understand my meaning.\n\nChanging leaders twice in the course of a parliamentary term without consulting the British electorate is the political equivalent of whacking your brother just because he annoyed you. You just can’t do it and expect to get away with it. This is especially true when, as in the current political moment, there have been dramatic reversals of party policy since the previous general election.\n\nBritain is facing inflation, rising borrowing costs and predicted deficits on a massive scale which will likely require either significant tax increases, spending cuts or both.\n\nThe policy decisions taken in the next few months will have implications for years to come. There is a political imperative for Britons to be given a say as to how their leaders should tackle the current crisis. By ignoring that imperative, the Tory party would risk further eroding faith in Britain’s democratic process, at a time when democracy is under significant threat around the globe.\n\nThere is a political imperative for Britons to be given a say as to how their leaders should tackle the current crisis. Laura Beers\n\nIn the current situation, it is untenable to argue that the mandate which the public gave to Boris Johnson and the 2019 Conservative election manifesto still holds. This is true despite the fact that Sunak, the new party leader, served in Johnson’s administration.\n\nIt would have to be true even if Johnson had returned as prime minister – an incredible political reincarnation which Johnson seriously considered attempting before announcing on Sunday that he would not stand for the leadership despite the “very good chance that I would be successful in the election with Conservative Party members.”\n\nEven before Truss announced her resignation, Britain’s opposition parties have been calling for a general election in the wake of her disastrous “mini-budget,” the series of policy U-turns that followed and her decision to sack her newly appointed chancellor, Kwasi Kwarteng.\n\nFollowing Truss’s resignation announcement, Labour leader Keir Starmer reiterated those calls, emphasizing that the British people had a right to weigh in on the question of who should lead the country.\n\n“The Tories cannot respond to their latest shambles by yet again simply clicking their fingers and shuffling the people at the top without the consent of the British people. They do not have a mandate to put the country through yet another experiment; Britain is not their personal fiefdom to run how they wish,” Starmer said.\n\nLikewise Nicola Sturgeon, the leader of the Scottish National Party, asserted that there was now a “democratic imperative” to hold a general election, and the Liberal Party leader Ed Davey, insisted that the Conservatives had a “patriotic duty” to “give the people a say” about the future direction of the country.\n\nThat Britain’s opposition parties are clamoring for an election is unsurprising. The latest opinion polling shows Labour up over 30 points on the Tories, the party’s largest poll lead in history. If an election were called in the next few months, Labour would almost certainly win a comfortable majority.\n\nBut the conviction that “the British public deserve a proper say on the country’s future,” extends beyond the opposition ranks. A YouGov poll conducted Thursday found that nearly two-thirds of Britons believed that Truss’s replacement should call an early general election.\n\nIn asserting the imperative for an early general election after two changes of leadership, the opposition parties have history on their side. British political parties have frequently made a single change of prime minister without calling an early election.\n\nGordon Brown replaced Tony Blair in June 2007 and did not hold an election for nearly three years. John Major replaced Margaret Thatcher in November 1990 and did not call an election for another year and a half. Similar to Brown, Jim Callaghan, who succeeded Harold Wilson, lasted nearly three years without an election.\n\nBut in each of these cases, the men who took over had been long-serving and high-ranking members of their predecessors’ administrations, and (with the exception of Major’s abandonment of the highly unpopular poll tax) largely continued the policy program on which their predecessor had been elected.\n\nIn that sense, their ascension to the premiership was more akin to the elevation of a vice president after the death of a president in the United States – a significant change in government, but one accepted to be within the bounds of democratic legitimacy.\n\nIn contrast, the only prime minister in the modern era to govern without seeking a new electoral mandate after two changes in leadership was Winston Churchill, whose wartime coalition government had the united support of all parties in the House of Commons and the clear backing of the British public.\n\nBefore Churchill, we need to look back to 1828, when the Duke of Wellington succeeded the Viscount Goderich, who in turn had succeeded George Canning (who died in office after 119 days and who held the title of shortest serving prime minister for nearly two hundred years, until Liz Truss came along.)\n\nGet our free weekly newsletter Sign up for CNN Opinion’s newsletter. Join us on Twitter and Facebook\n\nThe Tory Wellington remained in office for a year and a half without calling a general election. But Britain in 1828 was not a true democracy. Fewer than 10% of adult males could vote, and several MPs represented “rotten boroughs” which were effectively controlled by a handful of wealthy families. The notion of democratic accountability simply did not exist in the way that it does now.\n\nToday, in the 21st century, with universal adult suffrage, Starmer is right that the Tories cannot treat Britain as their personal fiefdom. After all that has happened since Johnson’s resignation in July, they must seek a fresh mandate to remain in power.\n\nAfter all the chaos and dysfunction, the British people deserve a say over who governs the country.", "authors": ["Laura Beers"], "publish_date": "2022/10/24"}, {"url": "https://www.cnn.com/2022/07/07/europe/boris-johnson-career-intl-cmd-gbr/index.html", "title": "How scandals of Boris Johnson's own making brought him down ...", "text": "London CNN —\n\nUK Prime Minister Boris Johnson announced his resignation as Conservative Party leader Thursday, bringing his scandal-plagued tenure to an end after less than three years.\n\nJohnson was left with little choice but to step down after several high-profile members of his cabinet resigned in protest this week over his handling of misconduct allegations related to government officials. Dozens more members of his government have also quit.\n\nJohnson was ultimately undone by his response to fallout from the resignation last Thursday of deputy chief whip Chris Pincher, amid allegations Pincher had groped two guests at a private dinner the night before. While he did not admit the allegations directly, Pincher said in a letter to Johnson last week that “last night I drank far too much” and “embarrassed myself and other people.” Other historical allegations of misconduct by Pincher emerged in the ensuing days.\n\nJohnson initially denied being aware of some of those allegations, but ultimately the Prime Minister was forced to admit he had been briefed years before and apologize for his decision-making.\n\nIt was the final straw for many political allies who had supported Johnson through crisis after crisis over the years. In recent months the Prime Minister had been facing a barrage of criticism from all sides over his conduct and that of his government, including illegal, lockdown-breaking parties thrown in his Downing Street offices, for which he and others were fined.\n\nJohnson faced numerous other scandals that hit his standing in the polls – despite his 80-seat landslide general election victory just two and a half years ago. These include accusations of using donor money inappropriately to pay for a refurbishment of his Downing Street home and whipping lawmakers to protect a colleague who had breached lobbying rules.\n\nTwo weeks ago, the Conservatives lost two key by-elections – results that were blamed on Johnson personally.\n\nIn early June, he survived a confidence vote, but the final count of his lawmakers who rebelled against him was higher than his supporters expected: 41% of his own parliamentary party refused to back him.\n\nThat vote was triggered after months of speculation over Johnson’s future. The so-called “Partygate” scandal, which saw Johnson found guilty of breaking his own Covid-19 laws by attending a gathering to celebrate his birthday at a time when such events were banned, has dogged Johnson since the news broke late last year.\n\nA controversial rise\n\nWith the possible exception of his hero, Winston Churchill, Johnson was perhaps the most famous politician to enter Downing Street as Prime Minister, having forged a successful career as a journalist, novelist, TV personality and London mayor in the preceding decades.\n\nHe was a populist before populists really existed. His controversial comments – comparing Muslim women who wear face coverings to letterboxes, or calling gay men “bum boys” to name but two – appalled many. But he got away with his Lothario image, the public seemingly happy to accept his alleged affairs and love child. It seemed that Johnson could essentially laugh his way through any problem.\n\nYet, for all his ambition and charisma, the job of Prime Minister seemed out of reach for most of his adult life. Those who know Johnson personally say that he loathed the fact that many in the British Conservative elite saw him as a useful campaigning tool but more of a comedian cheerleader than a serious statesman.\n\nBoris Johnson waves from the steps of No. 10 Downing Street after giving a statement in London in July 2019. He had just become prime minister. Frank Augstein/AP A 15-year-old Johnson, right, is seen outside Eton College, a boarding school outside London, in 1979. Ian Sumner/Shutterstock Johnson, 21, speaks with Greek Minister for Culture Melina Mercouri in June 1986. Johnson at the time was president of the Oxford Union, a prestigious student society. Brian Smith/Reuters Johnson started his career as a journalist. He was fired from an early job at The Times for fabricating a quote. He later became a Brussels correspondent and then an assistant editor for The Daily Telegraph. From 1994 to 2005, he was editor of the weekly magazine The Spectator. Neville Elder/Corbis via Getty Images In 2001, Johnson was elected as a member of Parliament. He won the seat in Henley for the Conservative Party. Tim Ockenden/PA Images/Getty Images Johnson looks apologetic after fouling Germany's Maurizio Gaudino during a charity soccer match in Reading, England, in May 2006. Richard Heathcote/Getty Images Johnson is congratulated by Conservative Party leader David Cameron, right, after being elected mayor of London in May 2008. Cameron later became prime minister. Stefan Rousseau/PA Wire via AP Johnson, left, poses with a wax figure of himself at Madame Tussauds in London in May 2009. Sang Tan/AP Johnson poses for a photo in London in April 2011. He was re-elected as the city's mayor in 2012. Dean Mouhtaropoulos/Getty Images Johnson and his wife, Marina, enjoy the atmosphere in London ahead of the Olympic opening ceremony in July 2012. The couple separated in 2018 after 25 years of marriage. Pascal Le Segretain/Getty Images Johnson gets stuck on a zip line during an event in London's Victoria Park in August 2012. Barcroft Media via Getty Images Johnson waves on London's Wandsworth Bridge as a bike-sharing program was expanded in the city in 2013. Jonathan Brady/PA Images/AP Johnson poses with his father, Stanley, and his siblings, Rachel and Jo, at the launch of his new book in October 2014. Stanley Johnson was once a member of the European Parliament. David M. Benett/Getty Images Johnson takes part in a charity tug-of-war with British military personnel in October 2015. Jonathan Brady/AP Johnson and Michael Gove ride on a \"Vote Leave\" campaign bus in June 2016. Stefan Rousseau/PA Images/AP Johnson kisses a wild salmon while visiting a fish market in London in June 2016. A month earlier, he stepped down as mayor but remained a member of Parliament for Uxbridge and South Ruislip. Stefan Rousseau/AP Johnson arrives at a news conference in London in June 2016. During the Brexit referendum that year, he was under immense pressure from Prime Minister Cameron to back the Remain campaign. But he broke ranks and backed Brexit at the last minute. Mary Turner/Bloomberg via Getty Images Johnson sits next to Prime Minister Theresa May during a Cabinet meeting in November 2016. Johnson was May's foreign secretary for two years before resigning over her handling of Brexit. Peter Nicholls/WPA Pool/Getty Images As foreign secretary, Johnson meets with US House Speaker Paul Ryan in April 2017. Johnson was born in New York City to British parents and once held dual citizenship. But he renounced his US citizenship in 2016. Richard Pohle/WPA Pool/Getty Images Johnson launches his Conservative Party leadership campaign in June 2019. Leon Neal/Getty Images Johnson and Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt take part in the Conservative Leadership debate in June 2019. Jeff Overs/BBC via Getty Images Johnson speaks in July 2019 after he won the party leadership vote to become Britain's next prime minister. Toby Melville/Reuters Britain's Queen Elizabeth II welcomes Johnson at Buckingham Palace, where she invited him to become Prime Minister and form a new government. Victoria Jones/AP Johnson poses with his dog Dilyn as he leaves a polling station in London in December 2019. DANIEL LEAL-OLIVAS/AFP via Getty Images Johnson appears on stage alongside Bobby Smith during the count declaration in London in December 2019. Johnson's Conservative Party won a majority in the UK's general election, securing his position as Prime Minister. Kirsty Wigglesworth/AP Johnson and his partner, Carrie Symonds, react to election results from his study at No. 10 Downing Street. Andrew Parsons/i-Images/ZUMA Press Johnson speaks on the phone with Queen Elizabeth II in March 2020. Andrew Parsons/WPA Pool/Getty Images In March 2020, Johnson announced in a video posted to Twitter that he tested positive for the novel coronavirus. \"Over the last 24 hours, I have developed mild symptoms and tested positive for coronavirus. I am now self-isolating, but I will continue to lead the government's response via video conference as we fight this virus. Together we will beat this,\" Johnson said. He was later hospitalized after his symptoms had \"worsened,\" according to his office. From Twitter Johnson and Chancellor Rishi Sunak, outside of No. 10 Downing Street, join a national applause showing appreciation for health-care workers during the Covid-19 pandemic. Aaron Chown/PA Images/Getty Images Johnson is seen via video conference as he attends a Covid-19 meeting remotely in March 2020. Andrew Parsons/No 10 Downing Street After recovering from the coronavirus, Johnson returned to work in late April 2020. Chris J Ratcliffe/Getty Images Johnson and staff members are pictured together with wine at a Downing Street garden in May 2020. In January 2022, Johnson apologized for attending the event, which took place when Britons were prohibited from gathering due to strict coronavirus restrictions. Guardian/eyevine/Redux Johnson wears a face mask as he visits the headquarters of the London Ambulance Service NHS Trust in July 2020. Ben Stansall/WPA Pool/Getty Images US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo sits across from Johnson in the garden of No. 10 Downing Street in July 2020. HANNAH MCKAY/POOL/AFP/Getty Images 14/07/2020. London, United Kingdom. Boris Johnson and Carrie NHS Call.The Prime Minister Boris Johnson and his partner Carrie Symonds with their son Wilfred in the study of No10 Downing Street speaking via zoom to the midwifes that helped deliver their son at the UCLH. Andrew Parsons/No10 Downing Street Johnson holds a crab in Stromness Harbour during a visit to Scotland in July 2020. Robert Perry/Getty Images Johnson is seen with his wife, Carrie, after their wedding at London's Westminster Cathedral in May 2021. The ceremony, described by PA Media as a \"secret wedding,\" was reportedly held in front of close friends and family, according to several British newspaper accounts. Rebecca Fulton/Pool/Reuters Johnson and US President Joe Biden speak at Carbis Bay in Cornwall, England, after their bilateral meeting in June 2021. Biden and Johnson were participating in the G7 summit that weekend. Andrew Parsons/No10 Downing Street/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images Queen Elizabeth II greets Johnson at Buckingham Palace in June 2021. It was the Queen's first in-person weekly audience with the Prime Minister since the start of the coronavirus pandemic. Dominic Lipinski/Pool/Getty Images Johnson delivers his keynote speech on the final day of the annual Conservative Party Conference in October 2021. Ben Stansall/AFP/Getty Images Johnson and former British prime ministers attend a requiem Mass for Conservative MP David Amess in November 2021. From left are former Prime Ministers John Major, David Cameron and Theresa May, Speaker of the House of Commons Lindsay Hoyle, Home Secretary Priti Patel and Johnson. Stefan Rousseau/Pool/AFP/Getty Images Johnson and his wife, Carrie, holding their newborn daughter, Romy, hold video calls in December 2021. Simon Dawson/No10 Downing Street Johnson speaks in the House of Commons in January 2022. He apologized for attending a May 2020 garden party that took place while the UK was in a hard lockdown to combat the spread of Covid-19. Johnson told lawmakers he believed the gathering to be a work event but that, with hindsight, he should have sent attendees back inside. UK Parliament/Jessica Taylor via AP Johnson meets Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in Kyiv, Ukraine, in April 2022. Presidential Office of Ukraine/picture-alliance/dpa/AP Johnson attends the National Service of Thanksgiving at St Paul's Cathedral in London in June 2022. It was part of Platinum Jubilee celebrations for Queen Elizabeth II. Victoria Jones/AP \"I think it's an extremely good, positive, conclusive, decisive result which enables us to move on to unite,\" Johnson said in an interview shortly after surviving a confidence vote in June 2022. PA/AP Johnson leaves No. 10 Downing Street on July 6, a day after two senior Cabinet ministers quit over Downing Street's handling of the resignation of deputy chief whip Chris Pincher. Dan Kitwood/Getty Images At Prime Minister's Questions on July 6, Johnson said \"the job of a Prime Minister in difficult circumstances when he has been handed a colossal mandate is to keep going, and that's what I'm going to do.\" Jessica Taylor/UK Parliament/Reuters Johnson announces his resignation in front of No. 10 Downing Street on July 7. \"It is clearly now the will of the parliamentary Conservative party that there should be a new leader of that party and therefore a new prime minister,\" he said. Henry Nicholls/Reuters Johnson speaks outside No. 10 Downing Street on September 6. It was his last day as prime minister. Alberto Pezzali/AP In photos: Former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson Prev Next\n\nEven during his time as Mayor of London, winning two terms in a city that traditionally doesn’t vote Conservative, the most memorable moments of his time in office are images such as him inelegantly dangling from a zip wire or forcefully rugby tackling a 10-year-old child while on a trade visit to Tokyo. He just wasn’t considered serious enough for the top job.\n\nThen Brexit happened. Johnson led the successful campaign that defied the odds and saw the UK vote by a narrow majority to leave the European Union in 2016.\n\nOvernight, he went from being a man who seemed to have made a fatal political error by backing the wrong horse in the referendum, to the figurehead of a mass rebellion that had just overrun the entire British establishment.\n\nGuerilla journalism\n\nOn paper, Johnson was an unlikely candidate to become the voice of those who felt themselves to be voiceless. Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson was born in New York City in 1964 to an internationalist family. As a boy, Johnson would tell friends and relatives that he wanted to be “world king” when fully grown, his sister wrote in a family biography.\n\nHe was educated at Eton College, the most exclusive private school in the UK, alma mater of 20 Prime Ministers, followed by the University of Oxford. While at Oxford, he was a member of the notorious Bullingdon Club: An elite all-male group for wealthy students, famed for ostentatious (and sometimes rowdy) displays of wealth such as vandalizing restaurants, then paying for the damage on the spot in cash. Johnson was never proven to have been personally involved in any such activity.\n\nJohnson worked as a journalist for establishment newspapers, most notably The Daily Telegraph, which made him its Brussels correspondent in 1989. It was here in Belgium that Johnson began writing what would become the most important chapter of his life story: Brexit.\n\nBoris Johnson speaks at a Brexit press conference in London in November 2019. Chris J Ratcliffe/Getty Images\n\nAlthough the Telegraph was firmly Euroskeptic, the UK’s exit from the EU was not really on the cards at the time, and even English Conservatives seemed to accept this. However, they lapped up Johnson’s guerrilla journalism, which often stretched the truth of what was actually happening in Brussels.\n\nThe most famous example of this was a story by Johnson that claimed the EU was planning to ban the sale of bendy bananas. The EU repeatedly debunked that and many of the stories that Johnson published.\n\nIn 1999, Johnson was offered the editorship of The Spectator, a weekly magazine often jokingly called the “Conservative bible.” He accepted, agreeing with the owner that he would drop his by now well-known political ambitions, according to a biography by the political journalist Andrew Gimson. He kept his word for all of two years and stood to become a member of parliament in 2001.\n\nIn the years that followed, Johnson was swallowed by the conservative establishment. He carried on writing the conservative script as a journalist and building a base of loyalists both inside and outside of politics.\n\nAs Johnson’s confidence grew, he was determined to show the Conservative Party that his appeal went beyond the British right. In 2008, he was elected the Mayor of London – a liberal, cosmopolitan city that did not traditionally vote Conservative. Johnson believed that he was showing his party that he had the chops to drag them into the 21st century. The problem for Johnson was that they already had a new, young leader – his old schoolfriend and future Prime Minister, David Cameron.\n\nIt was Cameron who ultimately made Brexit possible. After winning his second general election as Conservative leader in 2015, he decided to hold the EU referendum on the understanding that Johnson would fall in line and be an asset for the “remain” campaign.\n\nInstead, in February 2016, Johnson shocked the nation by announcing on the front page of his old paper, the Telegraph, that he would defy Cameron and lead the Brexit campaign.\n\nThe rest is history. Johnson turned the establishment on its head and became the most influential politician in the UK. While he didn’t become Prime Minister immediately, he continued to build his power base, undermining then-incumbent Theresa May as she struggled with Brexit for three years.\n\nAs foreign secretary under May, he was blamed for worsening the predicament of the jailed British-Iranian mother Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe after wrongly saying in 2017 that she was in Iran teaching journalists, rather than on holiday, at the time she was detained. But his patchy record in the role did not appear to cost him much support within his party.\n\nA populist who became unpopular\n\nJohnson’s time finally came in July 2019 when he became leader of the Conservative Party, claiming around two-thirds of the membership vote. His brash style was vindicated later that year, when he silenced all of his opponents in a landslide election victory that would finally allow him to, as his own slogan boasted, “Get Brexit Done.”\n\nIt truly seemed that the stars had finally aligned for Johnson, who desperately wanted to be taken seriously. He made Brexit popular and personally dragged it across the line. He had completed his transition to the role of statesman. He had proved everyone wrong.\n\nYet, as the clock ticked down on so-called Brexit Day, January 31, 2020, a deadly virus was already causing alarm in Asia. It would soon start spreading across Europe and kick off the crisis that would remove him from office.\n\nJohnson had a mixed pandemic. He was lauded by the public for the amount of state spending unleashed to mitigate its impacts on those whose jobs and livelihoods were threatened, but panned by the more conservative elements of his party. He was accused of responding too slowly, but also for making lockdown rules so complicated even he and his team in Downing Street couldn’t follow them.\n\nThe breaking of these rules by Johnson and members of his team, the economic fallout of the pandemic leading in part to a cost-of-living crisis, his handling of the Pincher scandal and a general sense of the shine wearing off the Brexit golden boy were ultimately too much for his party. It seems its members couldn’t stand the thought of Johnson staying on and dragging the party into its grave.\n\nHis political career is a story of near-misses, sex scandals, celebrity, controversy and revolution that ended in personal tragedy. The man who only ever wanted to be taken seriously ended up, ultimately, as the joker once again.", "authors": ["Luke Mcgee"], "publish_date": "2022/07/07"}, {"url": "https://www.cnn.com/2022/01/31/americas/justin-trudeau-covid/index.html", "title": "Justin Trudeau, Canadian Prime Minister, tests positive for Covid-19 ...", "text": "1. How relevant is this ad to you?\n\nVideo player was slow to load content Video content never loaded Ad froze or did not finish loading Video content did not start after ad Audio on ad was too loud Other issues", "authors": ["Paula Newton"], "publish_date": "2022/01/31"}, {"url": "https://www.cnn.com/2022/03/01/politics/us-strategic-petroleum-reserve-release-latest/index.html", "title": "US and allies agree to release 60 million barrels of oil from their ...", "text": "CNN —\n\nThe US and its allies have agreed to a release of 60 million barrels from their reserves, the White House and International Energy Agency announced Tuesday, as leaders seek to dampen the effect of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on gas prices at home.\n\nHalf of that total – 30 million barrels – will come from the US Strategic Petroleum Reserve, and the other half will come from allies in Europe and Asia. Those other allies include Germany, the United Kingdom, Italy, the Netherlands and other major European countries, as well as Japan and South Korea.\n\nThe International Energy Agency announced Tuesday that member countries have agreed to the release from emergency reserves to send a “strong message to global oil markets that there will be no shortfall” as a result of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.\n\nIn its own statement, the White House said the release “is another example of partners around the world condemning Russia’s unprovoked and unjustified invasion of Ukraine and working together to address the impact of President Putin’s war of choice.”\n\n“President Biden was clear from the beginning that all tools are on the table to protect American businesses and consumers, including from rising prices at the pump,” the White House said in a statement.\n\nThe oil market was not immediately impressed. US crude spiked about 10% Tuesday morning to an intraday high of $105.14 a barrel. That’s the highest level since 2014. Brent crude, the world benchmark, soared about 8% to $105.40 a barrel.\n\n“The bottom line is this is not enough to cool off the market. It’s a bit of a band-aid solution,” said Michael Tran, managing director of global energy strategy at RBC Capital Markets.\n\n“You need to super-size the numbers,” said Robert Yawger, vice president of energy futures at Mizuho Securities.\n\nThe invasion of Ukraine has driven concerns about a supply disruption from Russia, the world’s No. 2 oil producer. Brent oil prices closed above $100 a barrel on Monday for the first time since 2014.\n\nHigh oil prices have lifted prices at the gas pump to seven-year highs. The national average for regular gasoline rose to $3.62 on Tuesday, up about 9 cents in a week and 24 cents in a month, according to AAA. At some point, energy prices could get so expensive that it erodes demand from consumers and slows the broader economy.\n\nUS officials have spent the last several weeks on calls and in meetings with counterpart key energy supplying countries in an effort to secure commitments to back-fill any market disruptions. The effort included an in-person visit to Saudi Arabia from two senior administration officials to discuss the need to address the effect on oil markets. The US informed Saudi Arabia ahead of the oil reserve announcement.\n\nPresident Joe Biden signaled his intent to release the oil last week.\n\n“We are actively working with countries around the world to evaluate a collective release from the Strategic Petroleum Reserves of major energy-consuming countries. And the United States will release additional barrels of oil as conditions warrant,” he said.\n\nTapping the reserve – the stockpile of 600 million barrels of crude oil stored in underground salt caverns in Louisiana and Texas – generally has only a limited effect on gas prices because of how much oil can be released at a time, but would act as a political sign that Biden is confronting the problem.\n\nChevron CEO Mike Wirth expressed support on Tuesday for governments to release emergency stockpiles of oil to offset supply fears triggered by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.\n\n“I do think a coordinated response by multiple countries could help in the near-term,” Wirth said in response to a question from CNN during a briefing with reporters. “Certainly, we’ve seen markets on edge with concern about supply and supply reliability.”\n\nWirth expressed confidence that there will not be a major supply disruption.\n\n“I’ve seen nothing to indicate that either Russia’s intentions or the intentions of governments involved in sanctions would be to restrict oil supply,” Wirth said. “In fact, quite the opposite. It would appear to me that people have been very careful to signal their intention is to try to maintain energy supply to a world that needs it.”\n\nBut it’s not a long-term solution. There is a finite amount of oil in emergency reserves. In fact, the SPR holds the least amount of oil since September 2002, according to government statistics.\n\nMatt Smith, lead Americas oil analyst at Kpler, said emergency releases are arguably bullish from a market sentiment standpoint.\n\n“Every time the US announces a release from the SPR,” Smith said, “it’s one less bullet that it has to be able to use later on.”\n\nThis story has been updated with additional reporting.", "authors": ["Phil Mattingly Kevin Liptak Kaitlan Collins Natasha Bertrand Matt Egan", "Phil Mattingly", "Kevin Liptak", "Kaitlan Collins", "Natasha Bertrand", "Matt Egan"], "publish_date": "2022/03/01"}]}