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The best telescopes for viewing the 2022 Perseid meteor shower
The Perseid meteor shower is one of the best astronomical events that stargazers have the pleasure of viewing yearly during the summer. Although the 2022 Perseid meteor shower peaked a few weeks ago, it’s not too late to check out the spectacle as it usually lasts until the end of August.
Before you drag your lawn chairs out to your backyard or balcony, you’ll need a telescope to view the meteor shower properly. There are many excellent models to choose from, whether you’re a beginner or an experienced star watcher.
What is the Perseid meteor shower
Where does it come from, and why is it called Perseid?
The Perseid meteor shower is caused by the Earth slamming into residual debris from a comet long ago. Its name is derived from a consensus of astronomers who believe the origin of the meteor shower is in the Perseus constellation.
When can I watch it?
You can watch the Perseid meteor shower in pre-dawn hours for approximately a month and a half, beginning mid-July and ending in late August. The peak fell on the night of Aug. 12 this year, but due to a full moon, clarity wasn’t the best. However, it’s not too late to check it out if you haven’t yet, as it’s still visible on most nights, depending on weather conditions and your location.
Telescope considerations and features
What are the different kinds of telescopes?
- Refractor telescopes are the most popular for beginners and casual stargazing. They’re affordable, portable and easy to set up.
- Reflector telescopes are bulkier than refractor telescopes but usually have a larger aperture and offer the best clarity.
- Cassegrain telescopes work similarly to refractor telescopes but are a bit heavier and offer a more magnified view.
Aperture
Aperture refers to the diameter of the optical lens that collects light. The more light your telescope can gather, the better the image brightness and clarity. A telescope with a 70-millimeter aperture is sufficient for casual viewing, but more experienced astronomers or stargazers might prefer one over 100 millimeters.
Focal length
Focus length refers to the distance from the primary lens to the spot where light rays converge in focus. A telescope’s focal length plays a crucial role in its magnifying power. A short focal length is suitable for viewing star fields and meteor showers, while a long one is ideal for homing in on objects such as the moon or planets to examine them in greater detail.
Best telescopes for this year’s Perseid meteor shower
Affordable telescopes under $150 for beginners and kids
ToyerBee Astronomical Refractor Telescope
This telescope has a large 70-millimeter aperture, and you can adjust the magnification power between 15 and 150 times. It comes with removable eyepieces, a Barlow lens and a wireless camera remote for taking snapshots of the night sky. Sold by Amazon
Kiosesi Telescope Astronomical Refractor Telescope
If you want an affordable telescope that offers a long focal length and a large aperture, this one won’t disappoint. It has two eyepieces that can be magnified up to 200 times, an adjustable 360-degree tripod and a smartphone adapter. Sold by Amazon
Celestron Refractor Travel Telescope
This telescope is an excellent choice for anyone who wants a simple telescope to watch the Perseid meteor shower this year. It has fully-coated glass optics, a 70-millimeter objective lens and a custom backpack for convenient storage and traveling. Sold by Amazon
Gskyer Astronomical Refracting Telescope for Kids and Beginners
This telescope delivers quality optics thanks to a 400-millimeter focal length and a 70-millimeter aperture. It comes with an adjustable tripod, two eyepieces, a magnifying Barlow lens, a finder scope with a mounting bracket, a smartphone adapter and a camera remote. Sold by Amazon
Emarth Astronomical Refractor Telescope
This portable telescope is affordable and an excellent gift idea for young stargazing enthusiasts. It has a high-transmission coated lens for enhanced image and eye protection and comes with essential accessories, including a Barlow lens, an adjustable tripod and a finder scope. Sold by Amazon
Merkmak 90X Refractor Telescope
Your little one can tune into the Perseid meteor shower with you this year with their personal telescope. This telescope is for kids but offers enough magnification power to see the moon’s surface clearly, and it has a multi-layered coated lens for improved light transmittance. Sold by Amazon
Larger telescopes for more experienced viewers
Hexeum Astronomical Portable Refracting Telescope
This telescope delivers an exceptional viewing experience. It offers a 600-millimeter focal length, 80-millimeter aperture and two eyepieces with 24 times and 60 times magnification. Sold by Amazon
Celestron PowerSeeker 70EQ Telescope
This powerful telescope is compact, portable and excellent for beginners. It has a German Equatorial mount with a slow-motion altitude rod you can adjust for smooth scanning, and it comes with two eyepieces and a Barlow lens for increased magnification power. Sold by Amazon
Gskyer 80-Millimeter Astronomical Refractor Telescope
This telescope has a 400-millimeter focal length, an 80-millimeter aperture and a coated optical glass for eye protection and optimal image brightness. It comes with three replaceable magnification eyepieces, a mounting bracket and a full-size adjustable tripod. Sold by Amazon
High-end telescopes for advanced astronomers and viewers
Solomark 130EQ Newtonian Reflector Telescope
If you want to upgrade to a high-end telescope, this model has a sizeable 130-millimeter aperture and delivers a high-resolution image. The surface has a carbon fiber cover, and it comes with a fully-coated glass lens and a German Equatorial mount for precise tracking. Sold by Amazon
Celestron NexStar 8SE Computerized Telescope
This high-quality computerized telescope has a tube design, 200-millimeter aperture and boasts an impressive light-gathering ability for superior image clarity. It has a fully-automated mount with a database of over 40,000 celestial objects and a single fork arm design for easy storage. Sold by Amazon
Celestron AstroMaster 130EQ Newtonian Reflector Telescope
You can’t go wrong with this powerful reflector telescope for viewing this year’s Perseid meteor shower. It has a 130-millimeter glass optic objective lens and a lightweight frame, and it comes with a travel tripod and a red dot finder scope. Sold by Amazon
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Which security monitor is best?
The world is a dangerous place, and having some method of security is practically a requirement. An excellent option is a security monitor system. It can be as simple as a single camera keeping tabs on your front door or as complex as covering every inch of the inside and outside of your home.
The best security monitor system is the Cromorc All-In-One Wireless Security Camera System. It comes with four cameras and can be expanded to up to eight. You can even access the footage from your phone while you’re out of the house.
What to know before you buy a security monitor
Security monitor types
There are three security monitor types.
- Analog: This type connects all cameras via wire to the monitor and a recording device (if it comes with one or you add one later). There are no extra features; this system is just an eye in the sky.
- Internet protocol: Most modern security monitors use your internet connection to sync everything up, whether you connect with a wire or wirelessly. Better monitors of this type offer extra features such as battery backups.
- Smart: The most advanced monitors can integrate with your current smart home setup, and what they see can frequently be accessed from anywhere. These tend to be the most customizable and feature-rich, especially as they go up in price.
Wired vs. wireless connections
Both connection styles have pros and cons.
- Wired connections are the most stable and are especially good for connecting cameras placed far from the system’s core. However, running all the necessary cables throughout your home can be unsightly and make it easier for invaders to locate well-hidden cameras.
- Wireless connections are cleaner and often easier to set up, plus their feeds can frequently be accessed while you’re away from home. The biggest downsides are that the connection can be unstable and that if anything happens to your internet service, your entire monitoring system goes down.
What to look for in a quality security monitor
Motion sensing
Unless you want to have hundreds of hours worth of footage of nothing happening, prioritize a system with motion sensing. The best systems even let you fine-tune their sensitivity so a stray animal or rustling tree won’t trigger the camera.
Audio response
Security monitors are often deterrent enough against criminals, but you can step it up a notch by using a system with an audio response. These systems use cameras with small speakers that play a sound when recording begins. The best even let you record a custom response.
How much you can expect to spend on a security monitor
They can cost as little as $20 or as much as $400-plus. A single camera that connects to your phone shouldn’t cost more than $60. Low-end multi-camera setups typically top out at around $150, with high-end options starting around there.
Security monitor FAQ
Where should I install my security monitor system?
A. The short answer is anywhere that experiences traffic, but there are some spots that are most commonly monitored.
- Entry points: These zones are the most important to watch, as they experience the most traffic. This means every door and window, inside and out.
- Interior sections: Besides entry points, those commonly covered include stairwells, garages and rooms with the most valuables.
- Exterior sections: Once again besides entry points, those commonly covered include front and back yards, driveways and around the sides.
Should I hire a security service instead of using a security monitor system?
A. There are pros and cons for each.
- Security monitor: The main draw of using your own security monitor system is that you control every aspect of it, from what tech you use to how and where it’s placed. That’s also the biggest downside — if anything goes wrong or you don’t set it up correctly, you’re on your own fixing it.
- Security service: The main draw of hiring a security service is that someone is always watching. If anything goes wrong, you and the authorities will be alerted immediately. The biggest downsides are the recurring cost and the fact that you don’t own anything.
What’s the best security monitor to buy?
Top security monitor
Cromorc All-In-One Wireless Security Camera System
What you need to know: This complete package is perfect for any home situation.
What you’ll love: The cameras automatically pair with the monitor system, so setup is as simple as plugging them in. The cameras also have a microphone so you can hear what’s happening near them. The monitor has a 1-terabyte hard drive for storing recordings.
What you should consider: A few consumers had issues with water getting inside exterior cameras. Others had issues connecting to the remote-view phone app.
Where to buy: Sold by Amazon
Top security monitor for the money
What you need to know: This smart camera is a good choice for those on a budget.
What you’ll love: The camera’s base is magnetic or can be screwed down, plus it can bend up to 180 degrees so you can get the perfect angle. It can connect to a USB port for power or to an outlet with an included adapter.
What you should consider: There’s no local storage, only cloud storage. Recording can only be triggered by a set alert and can’t be started manually.
Where to buy: Sold by Amazon
Worth checking out
Blink Home Security Outdoor 3 Camera Kit With Echo Show 5
What you need to know: This starter kit is excellent for those who use Amazon Alexa.
What you’ll love: It comes with three cameras and Amazon’s smart hub to use as the monitor base. It can also be purchased with one, two or five cameras and without the Echo Show. The cameras have a small profile, making them easy to hide.
What you should consider: A few purchasers had issues balancing the motion detection sensitivity to record consistently without recording excessively. Others found the night vision range too short.
Where to buy: Sold by Amazon
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Jordan C. Woika writes for BestReviews. BestReviews has helped millions of consumers simplify their purchasing decisions, saving them time and money.
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| 2022-09-20T21:53:40Z
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Which juice cleanse is best?
Juice cleanses might sound like a New Age phenomenon, but they’re an excellent way to detoxify and promote a healthier lifestyle. There are many factors to consider before buying one, but you should also know the benefits and downsides of a juice cleanse first.
Juice cleanses are short-term fasts that help detoxify your body and optimize your bodily functions, primarily your digestive system. The best cleanses, such as the Smart Pressed Organic Pressed Greens Juice Cleanse, have an enjoyable flavor and promote healthy well-being.
What to know before you buy a juice cleanse
The purpose of a juice cleanse
Most juice cleanses taste great, and while you can chug one down as a snack from time to time, their primary purpose is detoxification. They work by ridding your body of toxins caused by processed foods and are only meant to be taken for two days to a few weeks. Weight loss is a byproduct of most juice cleanses due to the calorie deficit, but they aren’t intended to be used strictly as weight loss supplements.
How juice cleanses work
Juice cleanses offer an easy way to get a healthy dose of essential vitamins and nutrients. They usually come in powder form and you must mix them into water or blend them into a fruit or vegetable smoothie. They cut a lot of the work you would typically spend chopping up produce or cooking other meals, conveniently letting you carry on with your day without getting sidetracked.
Juice cleanse pros
Juice cleanses provide plenty of nutrients and are easy to whip up. Although the human body is naturally efficient when ridding itself of toxins, a juice cleanse can ramp up your metabolism, promote weight loss and even increase lean muscle mass. Many contain high quantities of antioxidants that can also benefit skin health.
Juice cleanse cons
While a juice cleanse is fine if you plan on taking it for short periods, you won’t get the same amount of fiber you would get from whole foods and vegetables. Because of the calorie deficit, you may consume more juice to quell your hunger, raising your blood sugar levels. The calorie deficit also might cause experience irritability, headaches or low energy levels.
What to look for in a quality juice cleanse
Cold-pressed fruits and vegetables
When heated during pasteurization, fruits and vegetables lose many nutrients and vitamins. The best juice cleanses are made with cold-pressed organic foods and vegetables, meaning there’s no oxidization or heating when liquid is extracted.
Organic
Not all foods that call themselves “organic” are approved by the United States Department of Agriculture. It’s a highly regulated food label, so make sure any juice cleanse you get is made with ingredients approved by the highest standard.
Reaction
Juice cleanses can be made with the finest ingredients, but everyone’s body is different, so it may take some trial and error before you find the right one. You may react differently to certain juices, so it’s essential to analyze how you feel.
Stop taking it immediately if you experience discomfort and side effects such as bloating, diarrhea or acne breakouts. However, it may work well for you if you feel increased energy levels, clearer skin, improved digestion, and an overall happier mood.
How much you can expect to spend on a juice cleanse
Most cost $40-$60. However, if you’re looking for a more extensive cleanse that contains a high quantity of superfoods and nutrients, expect to spend up to $150.
Juice cleanse FAQ
Are there any risks to juice cleanses?
A. If you don’t mind the hefty price tag of some juice cleanses and don’t have a medical condition such as diabetes, liver disease or being immunocompromised, there is virtually no risk. Pregnant or breastfeeding women should also avoid juice cleanses.
What can I eat while I’m on a juice cleanse?
A. Eating whole fruits and vegetables such as kale, spinach, celery, apples and beets is best, but you can also drink nut milk and eat gluten-free foods. In any case, avoiding animal products such as cheese and processed foods is crucial.
What’s the best juice cleanse to buy?
Top juice cleanse
Smart Pressed Organic Pressed Greens Juice Cleanse
What you need to know: This award-winning juice blends 22 USDA-approved organic and whole cold pressed greens for a tasty cleanse.
What you’ll love: It’s loaded with healthy probiotics and enzymes and packs just one gram of natural sugar. You’ll get a solid dose of wheatgrass and barley grass, and six times more alkalizing greens than other leading green juice powders.
What you should consider: It has a sweet flavor that can be off-putting for those who want a more organic-tasting juice cleanse.
Where to buy: Sold by Amazon
Top juice cleanse for the money
Lemonkind Original Core Juice Cleanse
What you need to know: This detoxing juice tastes great and helps improve digestive processes and overall well-being.
What you’ll love: This juice is focused on getting people to eat more meals in a day without getting too full and provides crucial nutrients every two hours. It’s infused with superfoods and antioxidants to help increase lean muscle mass, speed up metabolism and reduce sugar cravings.
What you should consider: The cucumber taste was too strong for some reviewers, and others found it impractical to drink it every two hours.
Where to buy: Sold by Amazon
Worth checking out
Purity Products Organic Juice Cleanse
What you need to know: This juice cleanse has a terrific flavor and is excellent for those looking to lose weight.
What you’ll love: It’s an excellent dietary supplement, as many customer reviews report weight loss after a short period of consistent use. It can be mixed in water or a smoothie with other fruits for an enhanced flavor, and it contains over 25 superfoods and 5 grams of fiber.
What you should consider: Some users complained about it not mixing well, forming clumps. Others found it unpleasant due to a chalky or gritty texture.
Where to buy: Sold by Amazon
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| 2022-09-20T21:53:47Z
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What are the best planter boxes for your patio?
A few planter boxes can add life and color to any patio, no matter how much space you have or what climate you live in. In addition to the beautiful look of lush planters, they can also add a pleasant aroma and can be used to grow herbs. Because planters don’t usually come into contact with the earth, weeds are rare and maintenance is fairly low.
Planters come in a variety of materials and styles, so prices can vary widely. But this also means you can probably find the right planters for your patio.
What to know about planter boxes for your patio
Design
Most planter boxes have fairly similar designs: narrow rectangles or wide squares that are 4 to 24 inches in depth and have drainage holes at the bottom to prevent overwatering. All you need to get started are a few bags of garden soil and some seeds or seedlings.
Materials
Common materials include metal, wood, stone and plastic. Plastic is affordable and effective but will deteriorate over time, while wood, metal and concrete boxes are more expensive but much longer-lasting. Plastic boxes are lightweight and inexpensive but will probably only last for a few years before becoming warped or developing cracks.
Best plastic planter boxes
Top plastic planter box
Hanover 20-Inch Black Resin Square Planter
What you need to know: This is one of the better-looking plastic planter boxes.
What you’ll love: Its square, tall design means it can support small trees and shrubs without taking up too much space.
What you should consider: There aren’t any drainage holes, and you may need to add a new coat of paint after a few seasons.
Where to buy: Sold by Home Depot
Top plastic planter box for the money
Newbury Black Resin Window Box
What you need to know: With its affordable price, this planter is good if you need several boxes to cover a stone wall or attach to a railing.
What you’ll love: While it’s not much to look at, this simple planter does everything you could need it to with its included saucer and drainage holes.
What you should consider: The sides tend to flex when the planter is filled with soil or rocks.
Where to buy: Sold by Home Depot
Best wooden planter boxes
Top wooden planter box
Thirteen Chefs Wooden Planter Box
What you need to know: Made of solid acacia wood, this classic-looking planter box is a great touch for any patio.
What you’ll love: Its simple, solid design will look good for decades, and it can support several plants per box. The legs create a gap so the drainage holes can work properly.
What you should consider: Because it’s made of real wood, split beams are possible.
Where to buy: Sold by Amazon
Top wooden planter box for the money
What you need to know: The low price means you can buy several of these for the same price you might pay for one more expensive planter.
What you’ll love: The included plastic liner can be used to extend its lifespan, and the small size means it can be placed almost anywhere.
What you should consider: At a little over 11 inches long, it can only hold a couple of small plants.
Where to buy: Sold by Amazon
Best metal planter boxes
Top metal planter box
Veradek Metallic Series Corten Steel Long Box Planter
What you need to know: This planter adds an aged look to your space after it develops a bit of rust, as it is designed to do.
What you’ll love: The solid construction and optional drainage holes make this a good planter for any location.
What you should consider: Because it arrives unrusted, it won’t achieve its aged look until a few months have passed, so you may not like how it looks out of the box.
Where to buy: Sold by Amazon
Top metal planter box for the money
Buhbo Modern Trough Rectangular Planter
What you need to know: At 32 inches, this is large, with a sleek look.
What you’ll love: The stainless steel design is striking and long-lasting, making it good for a modern patio. Because it’s fairly narrow at 8 inches wide, it also can be used as a table centerpiece.
What you should consider: Without drainage holes, you run the risk of overwatering your plants.
Where to buy: Sold by Amazon
Best concrete planter boxes
Top concrete planter box
Kante Slate Gray Lightweight Outdoor Planter (Set of 2)
What you need to know: The simple concrete construction of these planters means they will likely last for decades.
What you’ll love: The differently sized boxes make for dynamic decoration, and the fiberglass interior makes them relatively easy to move and lift. The smooth concrete surface can easily be painted to add color or to match your patio furniture.
What you should consider: There have been a few reports of cracked or leaking planters.
Where to buy: Sold by Home Depot and Amazon
Top concrete planter box for the money
Ten-stone 15-Inch Rectangular Cement Planter
What you need to know: This small planter works well on a patio table or even a large side table.
What you’ll love: Its rubber feet mean it won’t scratch wood or glass, making it safe for most tables. The narrow size means it can fit on a windowsill or even wide railings as well.
What you should consider: While a single planter is fairly cheap, you may need to buy several of these for your patio.
Where to buy: Sold by Amazon
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Peter McPherson writes for BestReviews. BestReviews has helped millions of consumers simplify their purchasing decisions, saving them time and money.
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Which Eureka vacuum is best?
It’s surprising how few pieces of cleaning equipment you need to keep your home looking spick-and-span. One of those pieces is a good vacuum. Shopping for a good vacuum can be more complicated than it seems considering all the types of vacuums that exist and all the variables you need to decide between on top of that.
The best Eureka vacuum is the Eureka PowerSpeed UIpright Vacuum Cleaner. It works on most floor types and includes several helpful accessories for cleaning hard-to-reach areas.
What to know before you buy a Eureka vacuum
Eureka vacuum cleaner types
Eureka makes four types of vacuums.
- Upright vacuums are the traditional type of vacuum. They come with the widest range of possible features and abilities, so there’s almost always a model that meets your specific needs.
- Stick vacuums are like uprights, only they’re extremely thin. They also tend to have weaker suction and smaller dust bins. However, they’re more maneuverable and some are even cordless.
- Canister vacuums use a small tank connected via a hose to a brush head. These are the most versatile, especially if they come with several accessories. However, the larger the canister the harder it is to drag around.
- Robot vacuums are small vacuuming disks that roam your home, cleaning as they go. These aren’t a replacement for standard vacuums, but they can keep your home fresher in between major cleanings.
Corded vs. cordless
Corded and cordless Eureka vacuums each have pros and cons.
- Corded: Almost all Eureka vacuums are corded as corded models have more power and stronger suction. However, they’re also the bulkiest and heaviest.
- Cordless: Cordless vacuums may be weaker, but their light weight and smaller sizes make them much easier to use and store. However, they tend to have smaller dust bins so they need to be emptied mid-clean more often.
What’s included
Eureka vacuums often come with more than just a vacuum. The most common inclusions are brush heads with special designs for tackling specific jobs, such as a long thin one for cleaning between couch cushions and one with stiff bristles for dusting.
What to look for in a quality Eureka vacuum
Weight
You have to carry and push a Eureka vacuum around, so it’s important to get one that isn’t too heavy for you. Some Eureka vacuums can be as heavy as nearly 15 pounds while the lightest weigh around 7 pounds.
Retractable cord
Having to wrap up your power cord after vacuuming isn’t difficult, but it is time-consuming. It’s also possible to get the cord tangled up. That’s why some Eureka vacuums have retractable cords; just unplug it, give it a tug and watch it slither back inside the vacuum’s body.
Noise
High noise levels are unavoidable in vacuums, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t quieter ones available. The quietest tend to get no lower than 60 decibels, which is about as loud as a conversation, while the average vacuum generates about 70 decibels, which is about as loud as a busy street.
How much you can expect to spend on a Eureka vacuum
They can cost as little as $30 to as much as $250. Most cost less than $100 with higher-end models usually costing $150-$200. Only the most advanced Eureka vacuums cost $250.
Eureka vacuum FAQ
What kinds of flooring are Eureka vacuums compatible with?
A. Eureka vacuums can clean any type of floor depending on the vacuum. Most models can clean hard floors and low pile carpeting. More advanced models may be able to clean hard floors up to shag carpets. Basic models may only be able to handle one floor type.
Does how you move a vacuum affect how well it cleans?
A. Actually, yes. The key to successful vacuuming lies in approaching the same spot from every direction. This means moving up and down then left and right. By moving in all directions, you shake up the grime that’s settled into the floor that otherwise wouldn’t be loose enough to be sucked up.
What’s the best Eureka vacuum to buy?
Top Eureka vacuum
Eureka PowerSpeed Upright Vacuum Cleaner
What you need to know: This is an excellent all-around vacuum for any home.
What you’ll love: You can choose between five vacuuming heights so it’s just as effective on hardwood floors as it is on thick shag carpet. A detachable handle and three brush head accessories for it let you clean anything, anywhere. It comes in black, blue and purple.
What you should consider: Some consumers wished the detachable handle’s hose were longer. Others noted the plastic construction is easy to break if something hard hits it.
Where to buy: Sold by Amazon and Home Depot
Top Eureka vacuum for the money
Eureka WhirlWind Canister Vacuum Cleaner
What you need to know: This is perfect for spot cleaning and for cleaning cumbersome areas such as staircases.
What you’ll love: It has three surface settings: carpet, upholstery and hard floor. It weighs 8 pounds so it’s easy to move around. The power cord automatically retracts so there’s no tiresome winding when you’re done. The dust container holds up to 2.5 liters.
What you should consider: It requires cleaning from time to time and the process can be difficult for some. A few customers wished the power cord were longer.
Where to buy: Sold by Amazon
Worth checking out
Eureka RapidClean Pro Vacuum Cleaner
What you need to know: Never worry about power cords again with this cordless vacuum.
What you’ll love: The rechargeable battery lasts for up to 40 minutes on a full charge. It can clean hard flooring and low pile carpeting. The hinge can lay completely flat for vacuuming underneath furniture and it has LED headlights to make seeing underneath that much easier.
What you should consider: It’s top heavy, which can make it unwieldy to use. The battery doesn’t detach from the vacuum for charging.
Where to buy: Sold by Amazon
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Jordan Woika writes for BestReviews. BestReviews has helped millions of consumers simplify their purchasing decisions, saving them time and money.
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| 2022-09-20T21:54:02Z
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NEW YORK (AP) — Three-time Grand Slam champion Angelique Kerber withdrew from the U.S. Open on Wednesday because she is pregnant, announcing the news via social media by joking that “two against one just isn’t a fair competition” and posting a string of emojis that included a baby bottle.
The 34-year-old German won the title at Flushing Meadows in 2016 to rise to No. 1 in the WTA rankings. She also won the Australian Open that year and added a Wimbledon championship in 2018.
She hasn’t competed on tour since a third-round loss at Wimbledon on July 1. She is currently ranked 52nd.
“For the next months, I will take a break from traveling the globe as a tennis player but then again, I believe it’s for the best possible reason,” Kerber wrote Wednesday. “I will miss all of you.”
She also said: “Being a professional athlete means everything to me but I’m grateful for the new path I’m heading to. To be honest, I’m nervous and excited at the same time.”
Play in the main draw of the U.S. Open begins Monday.
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More AP tennis: https://apnews.com/hub/tennis and https://twitter.com/AP_Sports
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| 2022-09-20T21:54:09Z
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Reaction to the death of Hall of Fame quarterback and broadcaster Len Dawson:
“With wife Linda at his side, it is with much sadness that we inform you of the passing of our beloved Len Dawson. He was a wonderful husband, father, brother and friend. Len was always grateful and many times overwhelmed by the countless bonds he made during his football and broadcast careers. He loved Kansas City and no matter where his travels took him, he could not wait to return home.” — Dawson family statement.
“My family and I are heartbroken. Len Dawson is synonymous with the Kansas City Chiefs. Len embraced and came to embody Kansas City and the people that call it home. You would be hard-pressed to find a player who had a bigger impact in shaping the organization as we know it today than Len Dawson did. I admired Len my entire life — first as a Hall of Fame player on the field, and later as he transitioned into a successful broadcasting career. Throughout his remarkable career, Len made it a priority to give back to the community that he loved. The franchise has lost a true legend. Our thoughts and prayers go out to Linda and his family.” — Chiefs owner Clark Hunt.
“RIP to the legend Len Dawson. The legacy and impact you made on Kansas City will live on forever. Prayers to his family.” — Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes.
“Len grew up only a few miles from where the Pro Football Hall of Fame later was built, and fans in the area have always taken a special pride in seeing one of the greats from this region enshrined in Canton. Fans connected with Len’s story of perseverance, appreciating how he gave the game one more try after five nondescript seasons when many others would have quit. The American Football League, and Hall of Fame coach Hank Stram, gave Len a true opportunity, and he made the most of it, building the Chiefs into a Super Bowl contender, and eventually a world champion. Our thoughts and prayers extend to his wife, Linda, and to all of Len’s family and friends in Kansas City and in Alliance, Ohio. The flag at the Pro Football Hall of Fame will be flown at half-staff in his honor.” — Hall of Fame president Jim Porter.
“Len Dawson is an American legend, a Super Bowl champion, a world class broadcaster, and will forever be among the most important and beloved figures in our city’s history. The Royals send sympathy and support to the Chiefs and the Dawson family.” — Statement from the Kansas City Royals, whose stadium sits adjacent to Arrowhead Stadium.
“Rest in peace, Len Dawson. One of Kansas City’s greatest on the field, in broadcasting and in our community. My thoughts are with his wife, Linda, his family, and the many friends he made over a tremendous lifetime.” — Kansas City, Missouri mayor Quinton Lucas.
“My thoughts & prayers go out to the family and loved ones of legendary QB Len Dawson. Everyone that has ever been a part of Chiefs Kingdom knows his impact on the field and in the community. I’m thankful for the great memories I had with him during my time in KC. He’ll be missed.” — Former Chiefs quarterback Matt Cassel.
“We lost a true legend and wonderful human being Chiefs nation with the passing of Len Dawson. HOF QB, broadcaster and all-around great guy. RIP brother!” — Former NFL quarterback and TV analyst Rich Gannon.
“So sad to hear of the passing of Len Dawson. Lenny was a fantastic QB! Also had a tremendous career as a broadcaster. Was a class act. Rest In Peace my friend.” — Former NFL quarterback and broadcaster Ron Jaworski.
“Kansas City lost a legend in Len Dawson. Whether it was on the football field, in broadcasting or in our communities, his impact on our city will be remembered forever. My prayers are with his family, friends, and colleagues during this difficult time. May he rest in peace.” — U.S. Rep. Emanuel Cleaver.
“RIP Len Dawson. An amazing person who also was a HOF quarterback and a HOF broadcaster. Love and prayers to his family and friends.” — Former Chiefs quarterback and CBS analyst Trent Green.
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More AP NFL: https://apnews.com/hub/nfl and https://apnews.com/hub/pro-32 and https://twitter.com/AP_NFL
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| 2022-09-20T21:54:16Z
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NEW YORK (AP) — Coco Gauff’s shoes carried the message “Play for Peace” as she joined Rafael Nadal, Iga Swiatek and other tennis stars in a pre-U.S. Open exhibition event Wednesday night that helped generate more than $1 million for humanitarian assistance in Ukraine.
“You guys all know me: I like to speak out when it’s right,” Gauff said after teaming with former player John McEnroe in a mixed doubles match against Nadal and Swiatek. “I’m glad that I was able to be a part of this.”
The U.S. Tennis Association said 100% of proceeds from sales of tickets to its “Tennis Plays for Peace Exhibition” in Louis Armstrong Stadium went to an international nonprofit organization. Other players participating included Ukrainian pros Dayana Yastremska and Katarina Zavatska, 2021 U.S. Open finalist Leylah Fernandez, Carlos Alcarez, Maria Sakkari, Stefanos Tsitsipas and Jessica Pegula.
“It really means a lot to see so many people supporting Ukraine,” Zavatska told the crowd, noting that it was her country’s Independence Day. “I really hope and I wish that next year we will celerbate this day in freedom.”
Tournament director Stacey Allaster said $1.2 million was raised as part of the USTA’s effort to generate at least $2 million to benefit Ukraine by the end of the U.S. Open, which starts Monday.
“The daily fighting goes on. … So every dollar that Ukraine can get is a life saved, a child fed,” said Sergiy Stakhovsky, a former pro player from Ukraine.
Earlier in the day, two-time major champion and former No. 1 Victoria Azarenka was dropped from the exhibition. Azarenka is from Belarus, which helped Russia launch its invasion of Ukraine in February. At least one Ukrainian tennis player, Marta Kostyuk, questioned having a Belarusian player participate Wednesday night.
The USTA issued a statement Wednesday, saying: “In the last 24 hours, after careful consideration and dialogue with all parties involved, Victoria Azarenka will not be participating … this evening. Vika is a strong player leader and we appreciate her willingness to participate. Given the sensitivities to Ukrainian players, and the ongoing conflict, we believe this is the right course of action for us.”
Azarenka and all players representing Russia or Belarus were banned from entering Wimbledon — which was held in June and July — because of the invasion of Ukraine. The USTA announced in June that it would allow those athletes to compete in the U.S. Open.
Azarenka won the Australian Open in 2012 and 2013, and was the runner-up at the U.S. Open in 2012, 2013 and 2020.
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More AP tennis: https://apnews.com/hub/tennis and https://twitter.com/AP_Sports
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| 2022-09-20T21:54:24Z
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KANSAS CITY, Mo. (AP) — Whether it was in the huddle during the early days of the AFL or behind the microphone as the NFL grew into the behemoth it is today, Len Dawson carried himself with an unmistakable swagger and self-assurance that earned him the well-worn nickname “Lenny the Cool.”
He was a Hall of Fame quarterback who led the Kansas City Chiefs to their first Super Bowl championship, then a Hall of Fame broadcaster who brought football into the homes of millions on the iconic HBO show “Inside the NFL.”
“Len was my first sports hero and he remained someone I admired and respected his entire life,” Chiefs owner Clark Hunt said. “His impact on the Kansas City Chiefs and everyone who has worked for the organization cannot be overstated.”
Dawson’s family announced his death Wednesday at the age of 87. No cause was given, though Dawson had had prostate cancer and quadruple heart bypass surgery over the years. He had been in hospice care since Aug. 12.
The Chiefs intend to honor Dawson during their preseason finale against Green Bay on Thursday night, Hunt said, though the details were still to be decided. Other memorials will be arranged according to the wishes of his family.
“With wife Linda at his side, it is with much sadness that we inform you of the passing of our beloved Len Dawson,” his family said in a statement issued by KMBC, the TV station where he worked as an anchor. “Len was always grateful and many times overwhelmed by the countless bonds he made during his football and broadcast careers.”
Dawson’s career was going nowhere when he joined the Hunt family’s nascent AFL franchise, then located in Dallas. But along with Hall of Fame coach Hank Stram, Dawson led it to three AFL titles and two Super Bowls; the Chiefs would lose to Green Bay in the inaugural one before beating Minnesota three years later at Tulane Stadium in New Orleans.
He was the MVP of that 23-7 triumph over the Vikings in January 1970, then proceeded to set numerous franchise records that only now Patrick Mahomes is surpassing. Dawson was enshrined in Canton as a player in 1987, then received the Pete Rozelle Radio-Television Award from the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 2012.
“I’ve been blessed for what I had the opportunity to do,” Dawson said told The Associated Press in 2017. “I could not have accomplished so much without my teammates and colleagues, and I’m grateful for each of them.”
Dawson remained a beloved figure in Kansas City, even as his health declined and he cut back on public appearances. He would go out of his way to make time for fans, whether it be a photograph or signature. The latter often was scrawled upon a seminal photo from halftime of the first Super Bowl: the exhausted quarterback, white uniform covered in grass stains, sitting on a folding chair with a cigarette in his mouth and a bottle of Fresca at his feet.
It perfectly captured a time and place. And it perfectly captured “Lenny the Cool.”
“He was always under control,” Stram recalled years later. “I said to him once, ‘Leonard, make sure that you never let them see you sweat.’ And he said, ‘Coach, quarterbacks don’t sweat. Quarterbacks perspire.’”
Sophisticated yet blue-collar to his core, Dawson was born June 20, 1935, the ninth of 11 children of James and Annie Dawson in the manufacturing town of Alliance, Ohio. He was a three-sport athlete at Alliance High School, setting records in both football and basketball, but turned his focus to the gridiron with a scholarship to Purdue.
Dawson led the NCAA in passing efficiency as a sophomore while also playing defense and kicking. And by the end of his college career, he’d thrown for more than 3,000 yards in an era defined by ground-and-pound football.
He was chosen by the Steelers in the first round of the 1957 draft, but wound up riding the bench behind Earl Morrall as a rookie and then failed to beat out Bobby Layne for the starting job the following season. When the Steelers traded him to the Browns, Dawson was unable to beat out Milt Plum for the job and was summarily released.
With the sudden freedom to play anywhere, Dawson jumped to the upstart AFL and the Texans, lured in part by the chance to play for one of his old Purdue coaches. It was Stram who managed to tap into his talent, helping Dawson become one of the league’s prolific passers, as the Texans went 11-3 in 1962 and won the first of three titles together.
The second came in 1966, when Dawson led the Chiefs to an 11-2-1 record and a 31-7 blowout of the Bills in the AFL title game. That earned the Chiefs the chance to face the powerhouse Packers of coach Vince Lombardi in the inaugural Super Bowl, where Dawson threw for 210 yards and a touchdown in a 35-10 defeat.
It was the 1969 season that proved to be the most memorable of Dawson’s career, though. He hurt his knee against the Patriots in Week 2, forcing him to miss the next five games, but returned to lead the Chiefs over the defending champion Jets and rival Raiders to reach what would be the final Super Bowl before the AFL-NFL merger.
“It was overwhelming,” Dawson said after the victory over Minnesota. “It’s just, you know how that relief comes with you now that it’s over with, and we’ve been successful? That’s the feeling that I had when I came off the field.”
Dawson played six more seasons in Kansas City, setting many records that stood until Mahomes came along. The two became fast friends, and Dawson was overjoyed when the young quarterback led the Chiefs to their second Super Bowl title with a come-from-behind victory over the 49ers in February 2020.
“RIP to the legend Len Dawson,” Mahomes tweeted Wednesday, accompanied by photos of them together. “The legacy and impact you made on Kansas City will live on forever.”
While many fans know Dawson for his playing days, others think first of his career in broadcasting. It began as a publicity stunt in 1966, when then-Chiefs general manager Jack Steadman was trying to build local support for the team. Steadman persuaded Dawson to anchor a nightly sports segment on TV, and his charisma and folksy charm made him a natural.
Dawson turned to broadcasting full-time after his playing days ended, working both in local TV and doing national game analysis for NBC. But he’s perhaps best known for his groundbreaking work alongside Nick Buoniconti on the HBO staple “Inside the NFL,” which helped the growing league reach millions of fans.
Dawson also served for more than three decades on the Chiefs’ radio broadcast team before retiring in 2018.
“I did all those postgames with him and I think the world of him,” Chiefs coach Andy Reid said at the time. “He has been there, he has done it — it doesn’t matter the age gap or the time away from being in the huddle. He just gets it. I love that part of it. He is a Hall of Famer all the way around.”
Dawson was married to his high school sweetheart, Jackie, from 1954 until her death in 1978, and they had two children, Lisa and Len Jr. Dawson’s second wife, Linda, remained by his side even as he entered hospice care.
“Len was really the first big sports celebrity in Kansas City,” Hunt said. “He was the undisputed leader of that Chiefs team that won the Super Bowl, and I think not only me but anybody who was cheering for the team during that era has a very fond memory and a very special bond with him.”
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More AP NFL: https://apnews.com/hub/NFL and https://twitter.com/AP_NFL
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| 2022-09-20T21:54:32Z
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Daniel Ricciardo and McLaren will split at the end of the Formula One season after a buyout was negotiated with the Australian on the final year of his contract.
Ricciardo held the option on 2023 for his seat at McLaren but his performance has been underwhelming through 35 races. Although he did score McLaren’s first Formula One victory since 2012 with a win last September at Monza, Ricciardo has been outperformed by teammate Lando Norris nearly every race weekend.
The 33-year-old Ricciardo has just one podium with McLaren and only 19 points this season. Norris has one podium this season and 76 points.
“This will be my last year with McLaren. Obviously we put in a lot of effort on both sides, but it just hasn’t worked the way we wanted, so the team has decided to make a change for next year,” Ricciardo said in a video message posted to his social media platforms Wednesday.
“I think for the future, what lies ahead, I am not sure yet. I am not sure yet. But we’ll see. I look back on this time with McLaren, I look back with a smile. I learned a lot about myself, I think things that will help me for the next step in my career, but I think just in general in life.”
McLaren head Zak Brown in May acknowledged that Ricciardo’s seat was shaky and said there were “mechanisms” in which the driver and team could split ahead of the 2023 season. The mechanism turned out to be a buyout since Ricciardo held the option on next season.
Although initial reports suggested Ricciardo was seeking more than $20 million to exit the team early, it is believed McLaren paid $15 million to end the contract.
McLaren is widely believed to have signed F2 champion Oscar Piastri, also an Australian, for Ricciardo’s seat. No announcement has been made by McLaren, but Piastri has declined a promotion to F1 with Alpine.
“Daniel has been a great addition to McLaren, and it’s been a pleasure working with him,” said Brown. “It’s no secret that we hoped we could achieve more together but seeing him stand on the top step of the podium as a McLaren driver was a highlight.”
Following the Monza victory, Brown and Ricciardo visited a tattoo parlor in Texas so that Brown could commemorate the win with a permanent inking of the Monza circuit on his arm. He also rewarded Ricciardo by allowing him to drive the late Dale Earnhardt’s iconic No. 3 Chevrolet stock car in a demonstration at Circuit of the Americas. Brown owns the car and Ricciardo idolized Earnhardt as a child.
Ricciardo said it was difficult not to get the on-track results he desired since joining McLaren ahead of the 2021 season. His Monza victory is Ricciardo’s only podium since.
“From a results point of view, to consistently get the results and that form that I was after, it wasn’t always there and it made some weekends tough. I felt those, absolutely,” said Ricciardo, who added he’s not done racing.
“The sport, I still love it. I still love it. I still have that fire in me, that belief in my belly that I can do this at the highest level. All that stuff is still there,” he said. “This isn’t it for me, but yeah, we’ll see what lies ahead.”
McLaren team principal Andreas Seidl thanked Ricciardo for his “dedication and contribution” since joining the team.
“Despite the shared challenges, he has always turned up with a fighting spirit and positivity and helped the entire team to always keep pushing forward,” Seidl said. “We will never forget that memorable race win in Monza which was a great boost for the whole team. We still have an important battle in the constructors’ championship ahead of us for the remainder of the season and we look forward to battle this out with Daniel and Lando.”
Norris and Ricciardo helped McLaren to a fourth-place finish in the constructors championship last season.
Ricciardo, one of the most popular drivers in F1, is in his 12th season and has eight career victories.
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More AP auto racing: https://apnews.com/hub/auto-racing and https://twitter.com/AP_Sports
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| 2022-09-20T21:54:39Z
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NEW YORK (AP) — Every major league team will play each other in the same season for the first time next year as the sport switches to its first balanced schedule since 2000.
As a result of the format switch agreed to in the March lockout settlement, high-profile games between division rivals such as Yankees-Red Sox, Dodgers-Giants and Cubs-Cardinals will be reduced from 19. Intradivision games will drop from 47% to 32%.
A team will host all of the other 29 clubs at least once every two seasons.
“I think it’s great for the fans,” Mets manager Buck Showalter said. “I’m so tired of playing the same people.”
Major League Baseball said Wednesday it will open the 2023 season on March 30 and again will try to have every team start on the same day, which last occurred in 1968.
A team will play 13 games against each division rival for a total of 52 and six or seven against each other club in its league for a total of 64. The remaining 46 games are against interleague opponents: a home and road two-game series against a so-called natural rival and a single three-game series against each of the 14 other clubs in the opposite league.
“This new format creates more common opponents, both in the division and among your league opponents, so that typically when you’re competing for the wild card, there’s a much higher percentage of common opponents across divisions,” said Chris Marinak, MLB’s chief operations and strategy officer. “And we think that equity is good for the competition on the field.
“On the marketing side, we think that the new schedule gives our fans more opponents at home, so they get to see a broader array of clubs in their ballpark,” Marinak said. “And probably more importantly, it gives us a chance for our star players to get exposure more nationally and be seen in more places throughout the season.”
The American League used a balanced schedule from 1977-2000 and the National League from 1993-2000, with interleague play starting in 1997 and limited to 15-18 games per season for each team. Then-Commissioner Bud Selig had pushed for a return to an unbalanced schedule.
AL openers have Baltimore at Boston, the Chicago White Sox at Houston, Minnesota at Kansas City, the Los Angeles Angels at Oakland, Cleveland at Seattle and Detroit at Tampa Bay.
NL openers are Milwaukee at the Chicago Cubs, Pittsburgh at Cincinnati, Arizona at the Los Angeles Dodgers, the New York Mets at Miami, Colorado at San Diego and Atlanta at Washington.
Interleague openers have San Francisco at the New York Yankees, Toronto at St. Louis and Philadelphia at Texas.
Other home openers are the Giants at the White Sox and the Mets at Milwaukee on April 3; San Diego at Atlanta, the Dodgers at Arizona, the Yankees at Baltimore, Boston at Detroit, Houston at Minnesota, Miami at the Mets and Cincinnati at Philadelphia on April 6, and Seattle at Cleveland, Washington at Colorado, Toronto at the Angels, the White Sox at Pittsburgh and Kansas City at San Francisco on April 7.
Toronto opens with 10 road games before hosting Detroit on April 11, a request made by the Blue Jays because of construction at Rogers Centre.
The schedule usually is updated with game times during the winter.
Next year’s start is the earliest since 2019. The season will revert to 186 days from the 182 it was shortened to this year due to the lockout.
Natural interleague rivals include Mets-Yankees, Cubs-White Sox, Dodgers-Angels, Giants-Athletics, Reds-Indians, Marlins-Rays, Orioles-Nationals, Royals-Cardinals and Brewers-Twins.
Among the teams with no geographic interleague rivals, MLB paired Red Sox-Braves, Pirates-Tigers, Phillies-Blue Jays, Rangers-Diamondbacks, Astros-Rockies and Padres-Mariners.
Travel is roughly the same as the prior format, which had teams play 76 games against division foes, 66 against other clubs in the league (seven vs. six teams and six against four teams) and 20 interleague.
“The bulk of what dictates your travel is the number of trips you take, and this doesn’t change the number of trips,” said Chuck Torres, MLB’s senior director of scheduling and broadcasting.
Other than within its own division, a team can host or visit a maximum of three teams from another division.
To combat exhaustion, each team was scheduled for seven off days among its last 67 days, three among its last 32 and one in its last 10.
MLB tried to have all 30 clubs play on the same opening day for four of the past five seasons.
Pittsburgh at Detroit and Washington at Cincinnati were rained out in 2018. For 2019, Seattle and Oakland started ahead of other teams with a two-game series in Tokyo.
In 2020, the season’s start was delayed to July 23 because of the pandemic, and the only game on opening night had the Yankees at Washington. In 2021, the Mets’ game at Washington and Baltimore’s game at Boston were postponed.
This year’s start was delayed from March 31 to April 7 because of the 99-day lockout that ended on March 10, and only seven games were scheduled for opening day.
Every team is scheduled to play on Jackie Robinson Day, April 15, which falls on a Saturday.
The All-Star Game will be at Seattle’s T-Mobile Park on July 11, eight days earlier than this year’s game at Dodger Stadium. Then called Safeco Field, the ballpark hosted the 2001 All-Star Game.
No games are scheduled on the two days after the All-Star Game, creating a four-day break and leaving the second half to start July 14. The regular season ends Oct. 1.
There are two scheduled day-night doubleheaders: the Padres at Philadelphia on July 16 and the Dodgers at Colorado on Sept. 26. This year’s original schedule had one doubleheader but 30 twinbills were added in the revisions caused the lockout.
The Cubs and Cardinals play a two-game series at London’s Olympic Stadium in June 24-25, and the Phillies and Nationals play in the Little League Classic at Williamsport, Pennsylvania, on Aug. 20.
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More AP MLB: https://apnews.com/hub/mlb and https://twitter.com/AP_Sports
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SHREVEPORT, La. (KTAL/KMSS) – The threat of heavy rain is shifting east of the ArkLaTex, but we still have a few parishes in a Flood Watch until 7 p.m. Wednesday evening. Scattered storms will remain in our weather pattern into next week with temperatures expected to remain several degrees below normal.
Today’s Flood Watch is in effect until 7 p.m. for Sabine, Natchitoches, Red River, and De Soto parishes in Louisiana. These areas could see an additional 2+ inches of rain leading to localized flooding of streets and streams. The cold front and area of low pressure responsible for the rain and cooler temperatures this week are now located southeast of the ArkLaTex. The air moving counter-clockwise around the low will steer clouds and a few showers and storms into the rest of the ArkLaTex today. Storms are not expected to be severe but will bring frequent lightning and gusty winds.
The clouds will keep our temperatures running several degrees below average. Highs will be in the mid to upper 80s with a light breeze out of the east and northeast at 5 to 10 miles per hour.
Scattered storms to continue through the weekend: The weather pattern is looking to be kind to us as we head into the weekend. We will continue to see a mix of sun and clouds each morning, with scattered storms each day through Sunday. None of the upcoming days will be a washout, but the scattered storms should help keep our highs in the mid to upper 80s through Sunday. There will be an increase in storms by Sunday.
The scattered storms each day will continue to hold our highs in the mid to upper 80s through the middle of next week.
Get exclusive severe weather details on storms as they approach your area by downloading the Arklatex Weather Authority app, now available in the App Store and Google Play
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| 2022-09-20T21:55:01Z
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CHICAGO (AP) — Defense lawyers at R. Kelly’s child pornography trial in Chicago sought Wednesday to portray a key government witness as a liar and extortionist, contending the man first approached the R&B star in 2001 and demanded that Kelly pay $1 million or he’d go public with video that could put Kelly in serious legal peril.
Those assertions came during seven hours of often blistering cross-examination of Charles Freeman, a former merchandizing agent for Kelly who testified Tuesday that it was Kelly who first approached him, eventually offering Freeman $1 million to recover a VHS tape featuring Kelly.
“Your entire relationship with (Kelly) centered around stealing from him and lying to him,” lead Kelly attorney Jennifer Bonjean, raising her voice, told Freeman Wednesday. Minutes later, she added, “You were part of a shakedown scheme, right?” Freeman shot back, “No!” He also said, “I am not a thief.”
Federal prosecutors charged Kelly with production of child pornography based in part on that recording, which they say shows him sexually abusing a 14-year-old. He and co-defendant Derrel McDavid are also accused of successfully rigging Kelly’s 2008 state child pornography trial by threatening witnesses and concealing video evidence.
Freeman’s testimony at this trial helps buttress prosecutors’ claims that both Kelly and McDavid knew that videos Kelly had lost track of in the early 2000s were incriminating and could lead to his conviction at the 2008 trial.
McDavid’s lawyer, Beau Brindley, started the cross-examination Wednesday by pacing, waving grand jury transcripts at Freeman and several times telling the 52-year-old to “be quiet and listen” to his questions as he sought to tear down Freeman’s credibility.
“How many times have you told lies about videotapes connected to Robert Kelly?” Brindley asked, using Kelly’s full first name. “It’s multiple times right?”
Freeman agreed it was.
Freeman, who is testifying under an immunity agreement, also agreed when Brindley asked if it was difficult “to trust a person who lies … who will cheat and steal to get money.”
Kelly, 55, was handed a 30-year prison sentence by a federal judge in New York in June for convictions on racketeering and sex trafficking charges. If convicted in U.S. District Court in Chicago, he could see years added to that sentence.
Brindley also accused Freeman of lying when he testified that he found the video Kelly was looking for in Atlanta in 2001 and when he said he didn’t know its contents until he watched it later the same day. Brindley suggested Freeman never actually went to Atlanta and that he already possessed a potentially compromising video of Kelly, using it to extort Kelly.
“That’s how all this happened, isn’t it?” Brindley asked. Freeman said that wasn’t true.
Freeman said money wasn’t his only motivation for agreeing to hunt down the video, insisting he also wanted to help his friend, Kelly, whom he had known since around 1990.
Freeman conceded that he kept copies of videos for nearly 20 years. Not until a lawyer warned him in 2019 that police were poised to arrest Freeman for possession of child pornography did he finally turn them over to law enforcement, he testified.
After Freeman smiled as Brindley questioned him about holding onto child pornography for so long, Brindley asked: “Is this funny? Are you having a good time?” Freeman responded, “Yes, I am.”
“You aren’t upset with what you’ve done?” Brindley asked.
“I am not,” Freeman answered.
After acquitting Kelly in 2008, some jurors told reporters they had no choice because the girl — who then was in her 20s — did not take the witness stand to confirm it was her in the video that was at the heart of the state’s case. Last week, she testified at the federal trial in Chicago, saying she was the child in the video and Kelly was the adult man.
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Follow Michael Tarm on Twitter at https://twitter.com/mtarm and find AP’s full coverage of the R. Kelly trial at https://apnews.com/hub/r-kelly.
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| 2022-09-20T21:55:15Z
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NASHVILLE, Tenn. (AP) — Three more Republican-led states banned almost all abortions this week as yet another slate of laws severely limiting the procedure took effect following the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade.
To date, 13 states have passed so-called trigger laws that were designed to outlaw most abortions if the high court threw out the constitutional right to end a pregnancy. The majority of those states began enforcing their bans soon after the June 24 decision, but Idaho, Tennessee and Texas had to wait 30 days beyond when the justices formally entered the judgment, which happened several weeks after the ruling was announced.
That deadline was up Thursday. A fourth state, North Dakota, had its trigger ban blocked Thursday by a judge who is weighing an abortion clinic’s legal challenge on grounds that it violates the state constitution.
The change will not be dramatic. All of these states except North Dakota already had anti-abortion laws in place that largely blocked patients from accessing the procedure. And the majority of the clinics that provided abortions in those areas have either stopped offering those services or moved to other states where abortion remains legal.
Texas, the country’s second-largest state, has banned most abortions once fetal cardiac activity has been detected, which can be as early as six weeks into pregnancy, before many women know they’re pregnant. The ban has been in place for almost a year, since courts refused to stop the law last September.
While clinics were severely limited in the services they could provide during that time, they officially stopped offering abortions on the day of the Supreme Court ruling. Republican Attorney General Ken Paxton argued that state laws that banned abortion before Roe v. Wade could be enforced ahead of the implementation of the trigger law.
Much like Texas’ current abortion ban, the trigger law does not include exceptions for rape or incest. Instead it has a loophole if a woman’s life or health is in danger.
The political response to the change was swift: Democrat Beto O’Rourke chose Thursday to unveil the first TV ads in his campaign against Republican Gov. Greg Abbott, who signed off on the statute.
One of the ads includes a voice-over saying some women will die because of the law.
“From this day forward,” the ad begins, “women all across Texas are no longer free to make decisions about our own body.”
Meanwhile, Texas has challenged a legal interpretation put forth by the federal government that was aimed at requiring Texas hospitals to provide abortion services if the life of the mother is at risk. On Wednesday, a federal judge temporarily blocked the government from enforcing that interpretation.
Texas argued that the federal guidance would have required hospitals to provide abortions before the mother’s life is clearly at risk, which would have violated the state’s trigger law.
A similar situation played out in Idaho, but there a federal judge ruled Wednesday that the state’s abortion ban violated federal law.
U.S. District Judge B. Lynn Winmill said the state could not enforce its abortion ban in cases where pregnant patients were experiencing a medical emergency that seriously threatened their lives or health. Idaho’s abortion ban makes all abortions felonies, but allows physicians to defend themselves in court by arguing that the procedure was necessary to save the life of the mother or done in cases of rape or incest.
Over in Tennessee, just two of the six clinics that provide abortions continued to offer the service after Roe was overturned. They did so even as Tennessee enacted a “heartbeat law” similar to the one passed in Texas. Under both the new trigger law and the previous heartbeat law, doctors who violate the law risk felony convictions and up to 15 years in prison.
Operating after the high court’s abortion ruling has been at times a “painful” experience, said Melissa Grant, chief operations officer of carafem, which has had a Nashville clinic since 2019. The legal environment has required difficult conversations between staffers and patients who may be unaware how early in pregnancy cardiac activity can be detected.
Because Tennessee requires patients to wait 48 hours before getting an abortion, Grant says her staff has seen some patients qualify for the procedure during an initial visit only to be turned away two days later because an ultrasound picked up fetal cardiac activity.
“When we find that we do ultimately have to turn somebody away, whether it’s the first visit, the second visit, the conversations can be very emotional — primarily anger, fear, grief, sometimes disbelief,” she said.
The situation is similar in Memphis, where abortion providers at the region’s lone operating clinic say they turned away nearly 100 patients who did not qualify for an abortion during their second visit, said Jennifer Pepper, chief executive officer of CHOICES: Memphis Center for Reproductive Health.
That stress compounded in the days leading up to the trigger law deadline. As the last appointments took place, the staff had to weigh each patient’s situation against the likelihood that they would qualify under Tennessee’s already sharp restrictions and their ability to travel out of state.
CHOICES was the first abortion clinic to open in Memphis in 1974, and on Thursday it will become the last. The clinic is bracing for the change by increasing its midwife resources, expanding the birth center and offering gender-affirming care. It is also opening a second location in Carbondale, Illinois, a three-hour drive to the north.
The staff planned to gather Friday to “celebrate how we’ve served thousands of our patients. We’re starting a new chapter, but it is not our last chapter,” Pepper said.
In Idaho, the federal government argued that Medicaid-funded hospitals must provide “stabilizing treatment” to patients experiencing medical emergencies despite its trigger law.
Much of Idaho’s law went into effect Thursday, but due to the federal judge’s ruling Wednesday, the state cannot prosecute anyone who is performing an abortion in a medical emergency.
Most abortions in Idaho were effectively banned on Aug. 12, when the Idaho Supreme Court allowed a different law to go into effect allowing potential relatives of an embryo or fetus to sue abortion providers.
In North Dakota, lawyers for the state’s only abortion clinic, which recently moved a few miles to Minnesota, won a delay Thursday as they pursue a lawsuit challenging the ban. Burleigh County District Judge Bruce Romanick said he was not ruling on the probability of the clinic winning the lawsuit, rather that more time is needed to make a proper judgment.
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| 2022-09-20T21:55:23Z
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WASHINGTON (AP) — Pfizer’s COVID-19 pill appears to provide little or no benefit for younger adults, while still reducing the risk of hospitalization and death for high-risk seniors, according to a large study published Wednesday.
The results from a 109,000-patient Israeli study are likely to renew questions about the U.S. government’s use of Paxlovid, which has become the go-to treatment for COVID-19 due to its at-home convenience. The Biden administration has spent more than $10 billion purchasing the drug and making it available at thousands of pharmacies through its test-and-treat initiative.
The researchers found that Paxlovid reduced hospitalizations among people 65 and older by roughly 75% when given shortly after infection. That’s consistent with earlier results used to authorize the drug in the U.S. and other nations.
But people between the ages of 40 and 65 saw no measurable benefit, according to the analysis of medical records.
The study has limitations due to its design, which compiled data from a large Israeli health system rather than enrolling patients in a randomized study with a control group — the gold-standard for medical research.
The findings reflect the changing nature of the pandemic, in which the vast majority of people already have some protection against the virus due to vaccination or prior infection. For younger adults, in particular, that greatly reduces their risks of severe COVID-19 complications. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recently estimated that 95% of Americans 16 and older have acquired some level of immunity against the virus.
“Paxlovid will remain important for people at the highest risk of severe COVID-19, such as seniors and those with compromised immune systems,” said Dr. David Boulware, a University of Minnesota researcher and physician, who was not involved in the study. “But for the vast majority of Americans who are now eligible, this really doesn’t have a lot of benefit.”
A spokesman for Pfizer declined to comment on the results, which were published in the New England Journal of Medicine.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration authorized Paxlovid late last year for adults and children 12 and older who are considered high risk due to conditions like obesity, diabetes and heart disease. More than 42% of U.S. adults are considered obese, representing 138 million Americans, according to the CDC.
At the time of the FDA decision there were no options for treating COVID-19 at home, and Paxlovid was considered critical to curbing hospitalizations and deaths during the pandemic’s second winter surge. The drug’s results were also far stronger than a competing pill from Merck.
The FDA made its decision based on a Pfizer study in high-risk patients who hadn’t been vaccinated or treated for prior COVID-19 infection.
“Those people do exist but they’re relatively rare because most people now have either gotten vaccinated or they’ve gotten infected,” Boulware said.
Pfizer reported earlier this summer that a separate study of Paxlovid in healthy adults — vaccinated and unvaccinated — failed to show a significant benefit. Those results have not yet been published in a medical journal.
More than 3.9 million prescriptions for Paxlovid have been filled since the drug was authorized, according to federal records. A treatment course is three pills twice a day for five days.
A White House spokesman on Wednesday pointed to several recent papers suggesting Paxlovid helps reduce hospitalizations among people 50 and older. The studies have not been published in peer-reviewed journals.
“Risk for severe outcomes from COVID is along a gradient, and the growing body of evidence is showing that individuals between the ages of 50 and 64 can also benefit from Paxlovid,” Kevin Munoz said in an emailed statement.
Administration officials have been working for months to increase use of Paxlovid, opening thousands of sites where patients who test positive can fill a prescription. Last month, U.S. officials further expanded access by allowing pharmacists to prescribe the drug.
The White House recently signaled that it may soon stop purchasing COVID-19 vaccines, drugs and tests, shifting responsibility to the private insurance market. Under that scenario, insurers could set new criteria for when they would pay for patients to receive Paxlovid.
___
Follow Matthew Perrone on Twitter: @AP_FDAwriter
___
The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
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| 2022-09-20T21:55:30Z
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(NEXSTAR) — Texans are not living as long as they used to — and the decline in life expectancy happened over just one year. The Lone Star State is among the states where life expectancy dropped more than two years, according to new reporting from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The CDC’s National Vital Statistics Reports shows every U.S. state and Washington, D.C. saw a dent in their life expectancy rates from 2019 to 2020. Though all were impacted, New York is the only state that saw a 3-year decrease in life expectancy, with the average 2020 life span around 77.7 years.
The next highest decreases happened in the District of Columbia, Louisiana, New Jersey, Arizona, and Texas — life expectancy in these states all dropped by at least two years since 2019.
Average life expectancy in Texas is now 76.5 years, which is below the national average of 78.8 years. The CDC says the 2020 figures are the biggest drop in over 75 years. So what gives?
As you may have guessed, the COVID-19 pandemic accounts for much of the increase in deaths seen across the nation. In 2020, there were at least 400,000 confirmed COVID-19-related deaths in the U.S. Overall, there have been over 1 million deaths in the U.S. from COVID-19-related issues.
In Texas, there have been 88,373 COVID-19-related deaths between 2020 and 2022, Texas Department of Health and Human Services reported Tuesday. Outside of COVID-19, CDC says the leading cause of death in Texas is heart disease, followed by cancer. COVID-19 is the third leading cause of death.
COVID-19 helps account for the greatest spike in deaths in the U.S. in 100 years, as recorded in 2020 by U.S. Census. Between 2019 and 2020, deaths in the U.S. increased by 19%.
So how is life expectancy calculated? The CDC says it uses state death counts, Medicare information, and U.S. Census data to determine the average number of years residents live.
As for the states you are more likely to live longer in, Maine, Vermont, and Oregon (among others) saw decreases of less than one year. Meanwhile, you can say “Aloha!” to a life expectancy of 80.7 years in Hawaii — that’s the highest nationally and yet another reason to want to live on the island.
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| 2022-09-20T21:55:38Z
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If Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.), who lost her House primary last week, decides to embark on a presidential run in 2024 as an independent, she could end up hurting President Biden’s chances of reelection more than Trump’s, according to a new Yahoo News/You Gov poll.
After Cheney lost her reelection bid for the House to Trump-backed GOP candidate Harriet Hageman, she said she has political ambitions that go past Congress.
“That’s a decision that I’m going to make in the coming months, and I’m not going to make any announcements here this morning. But it is something that I am thinking about, and I’ll make a decision in the coming months,” Cheney said after her loss when asked about a potential White House bid.
She later told Politico she is “not at all focused” on specifics of a 2024 run, keeping open the possibility she could run as an independent.
The poll found that in a standoff between Trump and Biden without Cheney, Biden would lead Trump by 4 points among registered voters.
However, if it is a race among Trump, Biden and Cheney, with Cheney running as an independent, the poll found she would end up pulling more votes away from Biden.
In a three-way matchup in the poll, Trump jumped to the lead, beating Biden by more than 8 points.
Cheney could also, of course, challenge Trump as a Republican and seek to damage him in a primary to the extent that he cannot survive a general election.
Cheney, the top Republican on the House committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack, is Trump’s most vocal GOP critic on Capitol Hill.
She has said numerous times Trump is unfit for office, while he has painted Cheney as a “RINO,” Republican in name only, saying she has turned her back on her party.
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| 2022-09-20T21:55:44Z
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Former President Trump on Wednesday called on Republicans to boot Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) from his post as Senate minority leader, accusing the senator of being a “pawn for the Democrats.”
In a statement, Trump cited a Wednesday story from The Federalist about McConnell and his wife Elaine Chao’s alleged ties to China in calling for the senator’s ouster from his longtime leadership post.
“Mitch McConnell is not an Opposition Leader, he is a pawn for the Democrats to get whatever they want,” Trump said in his statement. “He is afraid of them, and will not do what has to be done. A new Republican Leader in the Senate should be picked immediately!”
Trump has feuded with McConnell, who he has dubbed “Old Crow,” since the Senate leader denounced the former president in Congress for his role in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.
Over the weekend, the former president slammed McConnell for making remarks last week about “candidate quality,” in a reference to Republicans running for Senate, a number of which were hand-picked by Trump. McConnell has said the race for Senate control in November will be close.
Trump also took a dig at Chao, his former Transportation secretary who resigned from office one day after the Jan. 6 attack, calling her McConnell’s “crazy wife.” In Wednesday’s message he called her “Coco.”
Last year, Trump also called for Republicans to select a new Senate leader to boost the GOP’s chances of retaking Congress in 2022.
“I think we’re going to do very well,” Trump said at the time. “We need good leadership. Mitch McConnell has not done a great job, I think they should change Mitch McConnell.”
In Wednesday’s statement, Trump accused McConnell of giving the “Radical Left the Trillions and Trillions of Dollars that they constantly DEMAND” and faulted him for failing to stop passage of the landmark tax, climate and healthcare law known as the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA).
In fact, Democrats have had to find routes around staunch GOP opposition for their major spending programs, such as passed the IRA through the budget reconciliation process to avoid a filibuster, and President Biden using executive authority to forgive student debt this week.
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| 2022-09-20T21:55:51Z
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(The Hill) – Democrats are coming off a special election win in New York with a fresh burst of energy and a sense that the 2022 midterm elections might not deliver the kind of devastating blow to their House majority that they have long feared.
Pat Ryan, a Democratic county executive, narrowly defeated Republican Marc Molinaro on Tuesday in the race for a vacant House seat in New York’s Hudson Valley that was largely seen as a bellwether for the political climate heading into the fall.
Ryan’s win was, in and of itself, a massive boon for House Democrats eager to stave off an electoral thrashing in November. But it was also only the latest in a series of better-than-expected special election performances for the party and the latest sign that the political tides may be shifting in Democrats’ favor.
“It’s a friendly reminder that, every time the narrative counts us out, we know how to change it,” Antjuan Seawright, a Democratic strategist and senior adviser to the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC), said. “You can’t always predict what defines an election six or seven months out. And the very things that Republicans and the media have considered to define the election, haven’t defined this election.”
“I do think we have a hell of a chance of maintaining this majority,” he added.
To be sure, special elections aren’t necessarily the best indicators for how the general elections will shake out.
Turnout tends to be lower and as political strategists and operatives on both sides of the aisle like to point out, special elections are just that: special. Michael McAdams, the communications director for the National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC), noted as much on Wednesday.
“Majorities are won in November not August,” McAdams said in a statement. “We look forward to prosecuting the case against Democrats’ failed one party rule that’s left American families worse off.”
But Democrats are nonetheless buoyed as begin the sprint to the general election, pointing to perhaps the most powerful driving force behind their recent special election performances: the Supreme Court’s decision earlier this summer to overturn Roe v. Wade.
Since then, Democrats have sought to rally voters around the idea that a Republican-controlled Congress could further erode protections for reproductive rights, a strategy that has so far shown signs of paying off.
In each of the four special elections decided since the Supreme Court made its ruling – one in Nebraska, one in Minnesota and two in New York – Democrats have outpaced President Biden’s 2020 performance, even in the three they lost. In Alaska, a state former President Trump carried by 10 points in 2020, Democrat Mary Peltola leads the field in the special election for the at-large House seat, though results are still being tabulated.
The issue of abortion rights proved particularly pivotal in the special election in New York’s 19th District on Tuesday. In the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision, Ryan centered his campaign around reproductive rights, casting the special election as a chance for voters to register their outrage at efforts to restrict abortion access.
Molinaro, meanwhile, focused more on issues like crime and inflation. While he has said that he opposes a federal ban on abortions, Ryan still hammered him over his belief that the issue should be decided by the states.
Chris Taylor, a spokesperson for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC), cast Ryan’s victory as the latest sign that voters are poised to reject Republicans this fall over the GOP’s approach to abortion rights, proclaiming that “House Republicans’ dream of a red wave has gone up in smoke.”
“For the fourth time this summer, voters rejected MAGA Republicans’ extreme attempt to rip away women’s freedoms by backing Democrats because they know we’ll protect their freedoms,” Taylor said. “Every day between now and Election Day we’ll make sure voters know Democrats are the party of freedom and MAGA Republicans are the party of extremism.”
One national Republican strategist, however, attributed Molinaro’s loss in the Hudson Valley district on Tuesday in part to low turnout among independents, who are unaccustomed to voting in primary elections in New York because of the state’s partisan nominating contests.
“Our fear, which turned out to be true, was that independents do not turn out on Primary Day in New York because New York has a closed primary system,” the strategist said. “What you saw was just partisan turnout. The general election in this district is going to look very different than last night’s special election.”
And Democrats are still facing strong headwinds in their bid to hold their House majority.
The party in power almost always loses ground in Congress in midterm elections, and Biden’s approval ratings have lingered underwater for the past year. What’s more, the GOP needs to gain just five seats to recapture control of the lower chamber and the party is poised to pick up a handful of those seats thanks to redistricting alone.
Even Seawright, the DCCC adviser, acknowledged that there are circumstances outside of Democrats’ control and that the party needs “to be able to respond” to the unexpected, especially in the final months before the general elections.
Still, there are signs that Democrats’ recent burst of momentum isn’t just limited to special elections. Over the past month, the party has regained a narrow lead on the generic ballot – a poll question asking voters which party they would rather see control the House – according to the data website FiveThirtyEight.
And on Wednesday, two election handicappers, the Cook Political Report and Sabato’s Crystal Ball, shifted the November election in New York’s 18th District, where Ryan will seek his first full term in Congress, in Democrats’ direction.
Even some Republicans concede that the political environment appears to be improving for Democrats.
“The Dems have had a pretty good run lately,” one GOP strategist familiar with House races said. “It’s getting harder to say that it’s just a fluke. Do I think that they’re going to win the House? No, not at all. But also, what’s happening now doesn’t exactly say ‘red wave’ to me.”
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| 2022-09-20T21:55:58Z
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(The Hill) – Falling water levels in lakes and rivers across the globe have caused great concern among climate experts, and they have also led people to stumble upon a range of newly uncovered relics, from sunken ships to human remains.
Nearly half our Europe is facing drought warnings, while dry conditions in the American West, the worst in more than 1,000 years, led to water allocation cutbacks last week for states along the Colorado River.
An EU-commissioned report from the Global Drought Observatory released this month found that 47 percent of Europe is in drought warning conditions, and 17 percent of the region meets the threshold for alert conditions.
As policymakers bring new urgency to addressing droughts in the U.S. and across the globe, here are five of the weirdest things exposed by lakes and rivers that are drying up:
Nazi warships
The drought has brought the Danube River, the second-longest in Europe, to some of the lowest water levels seen in nearly a century.
The levels have threatened shipping, especially in the Serbian section of the river, where officials have begun dredging to keep vessels moving through the waterway.
Near the port town of Prahovo, locals have found the hulks of dozens of Nazi warships, raising concerns about potential unexploded ammunition still aboard, Reuters reported last week.
“The German flotilla has left behind a big ecological disaster that threatens us, people of Prahovo,” local resident Velimir Trajilovic told Reuters.
The outlet reported the vessels were once operated by Nazi Germany’s fleet in the Black Sea and passed through the Danube River as they were retreating from Soviet forces.
Dinosaur tracks
At Texas’s Dinosaur Valley State Park, 113 million-year-old dinosaur tracks are preserved in the riverbed. They are typically covered by water and sediment, hindering their visibility.
But recent dry conditions this summer have lowered water levels at the park, located near Fort Worth, leading visitors last week to see the ancient tracks more exposed than ever.
Recent rains have since improved conditions, but the park wrote on its Facebook page it was not enough to fill the Paluxy River, which runs through the park.
Jeff Davis, the state park’s superintendent, told Nexstar, The Hill’s parent company, that employees who have worked at the site for upwards of 10 years have never seen the tracks so clearly.
“You won’t find them anywhere in the world,” Davis said. “You can actually see their individual toes, their individual claw marks. You can even see where they slipped as they were running.”
Hunger stones
The Guardian reported late last week that low water levels in the Czech Republic section of the Elbe River have revealed a sharp warning inscribed in German centuries ago: “Wenn du mich siehst, dann weine.”
The phrase translates to “If you see me, then weep.”
The inscription was written as a famine warning to future generations. This particular hunger stone was found near the town of Děčín, located in the northern region of the Czech Republic, close to the country’s border with Germany.
The recent drought isn’t the first time such inscriptions have been visible in recent years. NPR reported a hunger stone was visible in Děčín in 2018 during a separate drought and heat wave, and many additional hunger stones exist throughout the region.
Spanish ‘Stonehenge‘
Many are familiar with Stonehenge in the U.K., but the recent drought has once again revealed the so-called “Spanish Stonehenge” in the Valdecanas reservoir, located in western Spain.
Reuters reported the prehistoric stone circle is now visible for the fourth time since the area was flooded in 1963 as part of a rural development project. The arrangement is officially called the Dolmen of Guadalperal and is believed to have been created close to 5,000 BC.
“It’s a surprise. It’s a rare opportunity to be able to access it,” archaeologist Enrique Cedillo told Reuters.
Unexploded bomb
BBC reported that a group of fishermen found an unexploded bomb from World War II on the banks of the Po in Italy last month.
Italian military officials said the bomb, which weighed roughly 1,000 pounds, contained 530 pounds of explosives, BBC reported.
The object was found near Borgo Virgilio, located in the Lombardy province in the northern region of Italy.
Italy’s executive branch last month declared a state of emergency for five provinces until the end of the year in response to the drought and low water levels in the Po and the Eastern Alps. The move provided 36.5 million euros to the affected areas.
“For the Po basin, this is the most serious water crisis of the last seventy years, according to analysis by the Po River District Basin Authority,” Italian Prime Minister Mario Draghi said at a press conference in late June.
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| 2022-09-20T21:56:06Z
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FRIERSON, La. (KTAL/KMSS) – Six weeks ago, we met the bullfighter, boxer, and crime-fighting K-9 handler, Deputy Kelby Pearah from the Desoto Parish Sheriff’s Office.
While not much frightens him, he did share his concerns with us about an upcoming battle he had to face. It was watching his oldest daughter undergo surgery to help her overcome the effects of a rare genetic disorder.
“We’ve done a lot of praying about it, and we just think it’s time,” Pearah said at the time,
His family traveled to Houston, where Zyda underwent 9 hours of surgery. It went well, but now she’s wearing casts and leg braces and will undergo extensive physical therapy.
Deputy Pearah expects it will be worth it in the long run.
“I hope she’s able to run and play with all the other kids,” said Pearah. “That’s the goal.”
The community has pitched in with moral and financial support to help cover medical and travel expenses, for which the family is extremely grateful.
“God bless y’all,” Pearah said. “We really appreciate it. If I can ever help anybody in that type of way, I would love to.”
He also said the support from his law enforcement family has been invaluable.
“I got a call from my captain earlier today, and he was very supportive,” Pearah shared. “And he said take care of that baby girl. It makes it a lot easier.”
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| 2022-09-20T21:56:13Z
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Authorities in Rhode Island said two decomposed bodies were found inside a home that belongs to a former mayor.
Woonsocket Police Chief Thomas Oates said around 4 p.m. Monday, a neighbor called 911 because there was a strong odor coming from the residence and that he hadn't seen the elderly couple that lived there, NBC News reported.
After officers made their way into the home through a rear window, they found the bodies of an elderly woman and an elderly man inside the residence, WPRI reported.
The residence belongs to the town's former mayor Susan Menard, WPRI and The Boston Globe reported.
According to the city's website, Menard was the town's longest serving mayor, having held office from 1995 to 2009, NBC News reported.
The news outlets reported that it's unclear whether the body of the elderly woman found belonged to Menard.
According to the news outlets, criminal behavior is not suspected.
Oates said later this week that the identities of the two bodies would be released.
He also added that the state medical examiner would determine the cause of death.
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| 2022-09-20T21:56:15Z
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Melody Worsham is a mother, teacher and volunteer who says she's fought a 30-year battle with a disease that mental health professionals were supposed to help her with but instead left her feeling humiliated.
"I live with PTSD, with psychotic features. And as soon as someone hears the word 'psychotic,' they think I am that person that's in some sneaky little dark closet and I'm doing some sneaky little back-channel thing on social media, and I'm about to pull out an AR-15 and get on the rooftop somewhere," she said. "I don't have a dangerous bone in my body ... It angers me so bad because it puts a barrier up to people asking for help because it's that automatic."
Worsham penned an open letter to the state's attorney general pointing to a 2016 Department of Justice lawsuit against the state of Mississippi for unnecessarily institutionalizing adults and children with mental health disabilities.
A federal judge agreed there should be more community-based options.
The National Alliance on Mental Illness in Mississippi says even the state's big institutions weren't providing the help people needed.
Sitaniel Wimbley is the executive director of NAMI Mississippi.
"Prime example: A lot of the facilities are in bigger cities in the state. So, if you live in a rural area, you have to manage getting to the facility," she said. "Once you get there, you have to make sure you have an appointment. If you have an appointment, there has to be insurance. So, there's a lot of things that go into actually getting treatment."
Now in 2022, the Magnolia State — known for catfish, cotton and Southern charm — is still trying to figure out how to provide patients with the necessary care closer to home.
The good news is changes are on the horizon. For starters, the state is taking full advantage of the new National Suicide and Crisis Lifeline.
"When someone calls 988, they will be either sent to an officer who has to come out — and their person should be trained to help with mental health — or a clinician can come out to that person's home to try to do an assessment," Wimbley said. "So, things like that are making a difference."
SEE MORE: Swedish Program Aims To Fight High Youth Suicide Rate In Montana
Another area program making strides is NAMI's Peer-to-Peer Program. Jessica James is one of the peers specialists in recovery who's helping others.
"We have people who live with the mental illness that are in recovery, that are able to help others in their recovery," she said.
James is a longtime Mississippi resident who is proud of her accomplishments. She achieved her associate degree with honors, raised two successful kids and has been a peer support specialist with NAMI for eight years.
For James, it was a long path to get to where she is today.
"I really didn't know what was going on with me until it was 2014," she said.
James says she suffers from anxiety, depression.
"I also was told that I may have a little PTSD as well," she continued.
James recalls one tough day on a job she loved. She'd been missing work but couldn't muster the strength to get out of bed.
"I would have a boost of energy at times," she said. "But then, all of a sudden, it just seemed like my whole world just went and crashed down."
A supervisor called her in an after seeing her doctor's note
James says the supervisor dialed the number to make sure the note was real. It was devastating for her.
"I'm seeing her do this in front of me ... I felt like I'm being punished for me being sick and like she didn't care," she said.
That hopeless feeling didn't last long, though. She remembered seeing the NAMI promotion table at a health fair she went to with her son. That led to a partnership between the two.
As a peer, James now helps others push through the mental health issues she faced.
Worsham is also a peer support specialist. Newsy caught up with her during work at the Mental Health Association of South Mississippi.
"This isn't about looking at a disease," she said. "It's not what's wrong with you, it's what's strong with you. That's our focus with our people."
She says the program isn't what you would call "clinical." It's actually unique because there are no psychiatrists or licensed therapists involved, and it's voluntary.
"There's no one-size-fits-all model. And that's something that those of us with lived experience, we do understand," Worsham said. "We are about sitting down and exploring that with you and finding out what your pathway is and what's going to work. And it might be a Franken-program, you know, you do a little 12-step thing here, or you might have some spiritual thing going on, and then you need a drop-in, you know, meditation."
SEE MORE: Curbing People With Mental Illness Away From Jail
A 2019 report by Mental Health America says peer support specialists lower the cost of mental health services and help reduce the rate of hospital recidivism.
The National Institute for Health Research also found people receiving peer support lowered the risk of being hospitalized by 14% and significantly increased recovery.
"The state of Mississippi is now starting to focus on it a little bit more and make sure that peer specialists are in every county," Wimbley said. "I think last year, there were 164 trained to be peer specialists across the state. And then some of those, I want to say between 10 and 12, were actually in jail systems. So, they can now lead others through their mental health journey and say, 'It's OK not to be OK."
As the Magnolia State tries to grow its mental health programs to satisfy the Department of Justice, mental health advocates are helping to cultivate the Peer-to-Peer program to provide help to those in need.
Newsy’s mental health initiative “America’s Breakdown: Confronting Our Mental Health Crisis” brings you deeply personal and thoughtfully told stories on the state of mental health care in the U.S. Click here to learn more.
Newsy is the nation’s only free 24/7 national news network. You can find Newsy using your TV’s digital antenna or stream for free. See all the ways you can watch Newsy here.
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SHREVEPORT, La. (KTAL/KMSS) — NBC 6 morning anchor, Jezzamine Wolk, Cares Krewe Driven by Chevyland will be hitting local spots to surprise members of the community.
On a recent stop, they headed to Sam’s Club gas station on Youree Drive in Shreveport and paid for some much-needed gas for local residents.
One military wife shared the variety of costs her family is dealing with right now. They just had a newborn, so they are facing both childcare and clothing costs, while she is working at an unpaid internship.
Another woman from Minden mentioned that her family comes to Shreveport for therapy for her daughter, and they appreciate Cares Krewe’s surprise.
Stay tuned to see where we head next.
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BATON ROUGE, La. (BRPROUD) – Members of the armed services who are interested in attending college have a brief window of time to submit an application for financial assistance.
The Louisiana National Guard (LANG) issued a Tuesday, August 23 reminder that any members of the armed services seeking financial assistance for voluntary off-duty educational programs must complete their applications by Friday, August 26.
The document that must be completed is called an ‘FTA’ or Federal Tuition Assistance form.
LANG says the FTA form should be submitted via this link: ArmyIgnitED.
For additional information, call (504) 278-8314 or click here.
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| 2022-09-20T21:56:28Z
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(The Hill) – Three U.S. troops were injured in two separate rocket attacks on bases housing American service members in Syria, the Pentagon announced Wednesday.
One service member was treated for a minor injury and was returned to duty, while two others are under evaluation for “minor injuries” following rocket attacks at Conoco and Green Village in northeastern Syria, according to a statement from U.S. Central Command.
U.S. forces quickly responded to the attacks, which began at 7:20 p.m. local time, destroying three vehicles and equipment used to launch some of the rockets with attack helicopters, Centcom said.
“Initial assessments indicate that two or three suspected Iran-backed militants conducting one of the attacks were killed during the U.S. response,” the statement notes.
Centcom head Gen. Michael “Erik” Kurilla said forces are “closely monitoring the situation” and “have every confidence in our ability to protect our troops and Coalition partners from attacks.”
The individual returned to duty had been injured at Conoco, but the statement did not say where the other two service members had been located. The release also did not say whether either location had damage to structures or equipment.
No militant group has yet claimed responsibility for the attacks, but a day earlier, U.S. forces launched airstrikes on infrastructure in Syria that Washington claimed was used by Iran-backed groups.
The strikes targeted “infrastructure facilities” in the city of Deir ez-Zor in eastern Syria that were used by groups affiliated with Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, according to Centcom’s top spokesman, Col. Joe Buccino.
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SACRAMENTO, Calif. (AP) — Sephora Inc., one of the world’s largest cosmetics retailers, has settled a lawsuit claiming that the company sold customer information without proper notice in violation of the California’s landmark consumer privacy law, state Attorney General Rob Bonta said Wednesday.
Sephora failed to tell customers that it was selling their personal information, failed to allow customers to opt out of that sale, and didn’t fix the problem within 30 days as required by the law, even after it was notified of the violation, state officials said.
The company agreed to pay $1.2 million and immediately correct the problem under the settlement, the state’s first such enforcement action under the California Consumer Privacy Act, according to Bonta.
Sephora said it is already complying with the state law after cooperating with Bonta’s office.
“Data is power, and these days everyone wants it,” Bonta said.
“Some of the most intimate details about your life are being harvested,” he said. “The more data a company has on you, the more power they have over you, the more they can target you to buy their goods and services.”
But the state law gives consumers a way to block that collection and sale.
The act was passed by state lawmakers in 2018 and expanded by voters in 2020. It gives California, home to Silicon Valley, what is viewed as the strongest U.S. data privacy law, providing consumers with the right to know what information companies collect about them online, to get that data deleted and to opt out of the sale of their personal information.
Bonta’s office has warned more than 100 companies that they were out of compliance and sent more than a dozen new notices on Wednesday. The “vast majority” complied, he said, but not Sephora, which sells cosmetics, perfumes, beauty and skincare products in 2,700 stores in 35 countries.
“Their actions compared to others was egregious,” he said, saying the settlement should be a warning to other companies that don’t comply.
The company did not admit any liability or wrongdoing under terms of the settlement. The company was founded in France and has its U.S. headquarters in San Francisco.
In its settlement, Sephora agreed to clarify its website disclosures and privacy policy to tell customers it sells their data, and allow them to opt out of that sale —steps it said it has already taken. It will file reports with Bonta’s office on its sale of personal information and compliance with the law.
Sephora said in a statement that the company “respects consumers’ privacy and strives to be transparent about how their personal information is used to improve their Sephora experience.” It said it allowed customers to opt out of the sale of personal information starting in November 2021.
The company said its tracking allows it “to provide consumers with more relevant Sephora product recommendations, personalized shopping experiences and ads” but that customers can now “opt-out of this personalized shopping experience” easily.
Sephora allowed third-party companies to install tracking software that allowed them to build detailed consumer profiles that allowed them to better target customers, Bonta said. But on its website it promised “we do not sell personal information,” according to the lawsuit.
The 30-day grace period for companies violating the law will end next year, when companies will be required to be in compliance without warning.
Also next year, Bonta’s office will begin sharing enforcement responsibility with a new California Privacy Protection Agency. The agency is taking public comment this week on proposed privacy regulations under the 2020 expansion.
“Certainly there is overlap,” Bonta said, but “multiple watchdogs on the block standing up for consumers, standing up for their privacy, making sure that data decisions are in their hands and that their data isn’t being sold or misused against their wishes is a good thing and we’re excited about that.”
Bonta and other California officials also want to make sure the state’s strict law isn’t undermined as the federal government considers what are likely to be less stringent nationwide standards.
The executive director of the state’s new privacy agency sent a letter this month to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, both from California, warning that a version being considered in the House would replace California’s protections with weaker protections. Gov. Gavin Newsom and the state Assembly speaker are among others who have objected.
Bonta said California’s law wouldn’t be affected so long as Congress makes its standards “a floor, not a ceiling. That they do not preempt the incredible privacy protections, nation-leading privacy protections that we have here in California.”
The Federal Trade Commission said this month that it will also consider new rules.
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| 2022-09-20T21:56:41Z
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New York (AP) — President Joe Biden’s student loan forgiveness program announced on Wednesday aims to provide $10,000 in student debt cancellation for millions of Americans.
But for federal Pell grant recipients, that amount is even higher: $20,000
So what exactly is a Pell grant? And why is there a special benefit for people who got one?
Created by the Higher Education Act in 1965 as a way to promote access to education, federal Pell grants are special scholarships reserved for undergraduates and certain other students with the most significant financial need. The grants generally don’t need to be paid back, but they often don’t cover the full cost of college — so recipients take out additional loans.
The Biden administration is targeting Pell grant recipients for additional forgiveness “to smooth the transition back to repayment and help borrowers at highest risk of delinquencies or default once payments resume,” according to the Department of Education.
Roughly 27 million recipients of Pell grants will now be eligible for loan forgiveness. But for some, the $20,000 will hardly made a dent.
Lynn Hunt, a data analyst in Portland, Oregon, is a Pell grant recipient who borrowed somewhere around $45,000 to $50,000 to attend the University of Wisconsin and has paid back about $15,000 but still owes $70,000 because of interest.
“I know (Biden) mentioned, you know, $20,000 for Pell grants, but the people that had Pell grants had to take out the most loans,” Hunt said. “So $20,000 isn’t helping most of those people in any substantial manner. And the thing that happens every time when we get one of these half measures is, the can gets kicked for another decade.”
For Yaneth Peña, however, the money will make a difference. Peña graduated from North Carolina State University in 2014. She obtained about $4,000 in grants and approximately $25,000 in federal loans. Under Biden’s forgiveness plan, her debt would be whittled down to $5,000.
Relieved of the financial burden, Peña said she could now seriously pursue a graduate degree — something she said she hesitated to consider in the past because of her loans.
“This could like really change everything,” Peña said.
Pell grant recipients typically experience more challenges repaying their debt, the Department of Education notes. In the academic year of 2020-21, around 30% of all students that enrolled in undergraduate programs in the United States were awarded Pell grants and nearly every recipient came from a family that made less than $60,000 a year.
Almost all Pell grant recipients are independent students or dependent students from the bottom half of the income distribution, according to a report from the Urban Institute on college affordability.
Through the program, lower-income Americans can currently receive up to $6,895 annually for roughly six years.
If you’re not sure if you received a federal Pell grant, review any financial aid award letters administered through Office of Federal Student Aid.
__
Associated Press reporters Gillian Flaccus in Portland, Oregon, Claire Savage in Chicago and Arleigh Rodgers in Indianapolis contributed to this report. Savage and Rodgers are corps members for the Associated Press/Report for America Statehouse News Initiative. Report for America is a nonprofit national service program that places journalists in local newsrooms to report on undercovered issues.
___
The Associated Press receives support from Charles Schwab Foundation for educational and explanatory reporting to improve financial literacy. The independent foundation is separate from Charles Schwab and Co. Inc. The AP is solely responsible for its journalism.
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Not all hope is lost when it comes to Earth's ozone layer.
For years, environmentalists feared that irreparable damage had been inflicted on the ozone layer, which protects Earth from the sun's harmful rays.
Well, new research from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) can put some fears to rest as the agency announced that the path to the recovery of the ozone layer had passed a significant milestone.
"An annual analysis tracking the decline of ozone-depleting chemicals shows the levels of these harmful chemicals have significantly dropped, reaching a milestone in the recovery of the ozone layer," the agency said.
In the 1980s, scientists discovered that man-made chemicals were damaging the ozone layer, the agency said.
According to the BBC, in 1987, world leaders came together to ban ozone-depleting chemicals.
Now, 34 years later, the agency said the ozone layer has healed by 50%.
“It’s great to see this progress,” said Stephen Montzka, senior scientist for NOAA’s Global Monitoring Laboratory, in a press release. “At the same time, it’s a bit humbling to realize that science is still a long way from being able to claim that the issue of ozone depletion is behind us.”
Concentrations over Antarctica have also declined, but at a slower pace, decreasing by 26% from peak values in the 1990s, the agency said.
The agency said projections of the Antarctic ozone layer recovering could happen "sometime around 2070."
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| 2022-09-20T21:56:58Z
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WASHINGTON (NEXSTAR) – The U.S. is sending its largest aid package yet to Ukraine, just as the country marks six months since the war began.
Wednesday was Independence Day in Ukraine – a country that has now spent half a year fighting for that independence.
“I don’t think anybody wanted, certainly, to get to this point where we’re six months into brutal fighting in Ukraine,” White House National Security Coordinator John Kirby said.
President Joe Biden on Wednesday announced a new $3 billion package of military aid for Ukraine. This is the largest single package yet.
“The president has been very clear that we’re going to continue to support Ukraine for as long as it takes,” Kirby said.
The weapons in the new package will come from defense contractors instead of U.S. stockpiles. This could take some time and defense officials say this is intentionally part of a longer-term strategy.
“They will form the backbone of a robust future Ukrainian force capable of defending Ukraine for years to come,” Pentagon official Dr. Colin Kahl said.
George Washington Professor Robert Orttung predicts the new aid will be crucial to Ukraine’s efforts.
“The new weapons that the U.S. is sending are going to have a big impact as Ukraine organizes a counteroffensive,” Orttung said.
He doesn’t expect U.S. support to end any time soon.
“As Ukrainians continue to hold their own or make small advances, you know Americans like a scrappy underdog,” Orttung said.
Kirby says U.S. support extends beyond military efforts.
“We’re going to do everything we can to make sure that they succeed on the battlefield, but just as importantly that President Zelensky can succeed at the negotiating table if and when this ever gets to a diplomatic solution,” Kirby said.
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SHREVEPORT, La. (KTAL/KMSS) — Work is underway to remove and relocate bats from Shreveport‘s Fair Grounds Field in preparation for the demolition of the old baseball stadium.
Denham Spring-based Perault’s Nuisance Wildlife Control began removing the bats on Monday. The stadium closed in 2011 and has been infested with bats for some time.
The company has created a process that funnels the live bats safely into a system with a trampoline at the bottom.
“The system has a trampoline that the bats land on and hang out on and then each day we are gonna take that part and trade it so no more bats come out, then we know we got them all,” said bat-removal contractor David Perault.
Once PNWC completes the bat removal, Perault said the bats will be relocated and released into the wilderness where they can eat mosquitoes and bugs. He says bats are very important for the environment and make up 20% of mammals on earth.
“This is the best way to do it. Catching the bats live and bringing them back to the wilderness about 20-25 miles away and return them loose,” Perault said. “Once I turn them loose, they will fly off and climb up the trees.”
Perault said 500 bats have been captured so far, but they are expecting to catch many more, possibly more than 1,000. He expects the process to take about a week or a little longer.
The removal of the bats is the first step toward the demolition of the stadium, which is expected to get underway in early September.
Citizens can claim a piece of the stadium before the demolition and can contact the demolition contractor Henderson Constriction at 318-861-0512.
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| 2022-09-20T21:57:12Z
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SEVIER COUNTY, Ark. (KTAL/KMSS) – A retired K-9 was found dead Wednesday morning after escaping more than a week ago from his kennel inside a transport vehicle .
According to the Sevier County Sheriff’s Office, an animal transport company was making a cross-country trip from New Jersey to California when it made an emergency stop around 7:15 p.m. on Aug. 13 near the intersection of Hwy 71 and Hwy 27 after they realized retired K-9 Hunter had escaped from the vehicle.
Two women, one unknown and the other who later identified herself as Jess, claimed to be from the area and helped the transport company employees search for the Belgian Malinois. They searched all night, and when they did not find Hunter, the employees left the area. Jess offered to contact them if Hunter turned up.
The transport company says Jess contacted the transport company two days later and told them that she found Hunter and claimed that her father-in-law had the K-9 and wanted to keep him. They even offered to pay $200 for the dog. When the owner learned about the offer, they said Hunter was not for sale and stopped all communication.
Police realized that the number the woman was calling from was an internet application and not a traceable number.
Sgt. Davignon was told about the ongoing situation and went to several homes in the area where Hunter went missing. When no leads turned up, the sheriff’s office posted about Hunter on its Facebook page, hoping that someone would assist in his safe return.
A Facebook user contacted the sheriff’s office on August 24, saying they found what they believed were Hunter’s remains on a secluded road in Little River County about 15 miles from where Hunter disappeared.
Sevier County Sheriff Robert Gentry said while they are not sure what caused the animal’s death, it appears Hunter he had been dead for four to five days.
Sgt. Davignon confirmed that the remains were Hunter’s with the help of his owner.
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| 2022-09-20T21:57:19Z
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BATON ROUGE, La. (BRPROUD) – Authorities are asking the public for information related to a kidnapping that occurred on LSU campus early Wednesday (August 24) morning.
According to LSU Police, the victim was abducted around Aster Street near Cypress Hall.
Authorities say the case is being viewed as a second-degree kidnapping.
Though details related to the incident are few at this time, we do know that campus police made contact with the victim early Wednesday and the victim has since been offered resources through the university’s CARE team, according to Ernie Ballard of LSU’s Office of Communications & University Relations.
Authorities ask that anyone with information pertaining to the case contact LSU Police at 225-578-3231.
To submit information anonymously, visit: https://www.lsu.edu/police/report/anonymous.php
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NEW YORK (AP) — Amazon is shutting down the hybrid virtual, in-home care service it’s spent years developing, a surprising move that underscores the challenges it faces as it moves into health care.
The service, called Amazon Care, will end by Dec. 31, according to an email sent to staff by Neil Lindsay, senior vice president of Amazon Health Services.
Amazon Care was launched in 2019 for Seattle-based Amazon’s Washington state employees, who served as trial users before the company made it available last year to its workers in all 50 states.
The service connects patients virtually with doctors and nurses who can provide treatment 24 hours a day. It does not have physical locations, but offers in-person services for things like vaccinations and flu testing in several cities, including Seattle and Washington, D.C.
Amazon’s decision to pull the plug on Amazon Care is even more surprising given the company said in February it was planning to expand the in-person care service to include 20 additional cities. Last summer, Amazon also began offering the service to private employers nationwide.
In the email sent to staff, Lindsay wrote that Amazon listened to feedback from employers and worked to improve Amazon Care.
“However, despite these efforts, we’ve determined that Amazon Care isn’t the right long-term solution for our enterprise customers,” Lindsay wrote.
He added that Amazon Care “is not a complete enough offering for the large enterprise customers we have been targeting, and wasn’t going to work long-term.”
An Amazon spokesperson declined to say how many people will lose their jobs because of the shutdown of Amazon Care.
Amazon Care isn’t the company’s first failed health effort. The tech and retail giant was also part of a short-lived collaboration with JPMorgan and Berkshire Hathaway to improve health care costs. The three corporate giants formed an independent company called Haven to focus on improving care and manage expenses, but it dissolved last year.
Despite the setbacks, Amazon hasn’t relented on its focus on healthcare. Last month, it announced plans to spend $3.9 billion to buy the primary care organization One Medical, a membership-based service that offers virtual care as well as in-person visits. As of March, One Medical had about 767,000 members and 188 medical offices in 25 markets.
Neil Saunders, managing director at GlobalData Retail, said given that Amazon is now investing in other areas of health, it is taking a more aggressive stance on exiting things that are not delivering results.
“The closure underlines how hard making inroads into the health market is,” Saunders said. “It serves as a warning that even with acquisitions, Amazon’s bid to shake up the sector will be incredibly difficult and possibly expensive.”
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SACRAMENTO, Calif. (AP) — California plans to require all new cars, trucks and SUVs to run on electricity or hydrogen by 2035 under a policy approved Thursday by regulators that seeks a dramatic cut in carbon emissions and an eventual end to gasoline-powered vehicles.
The decision by the California Air Resources Board came two years after Gov. Gavin Newsom first directed regulators to consider such a policy. If the goal is reached, California would cut emissions from cars in half by 2040.
The move gives the most populous U.S. state the world’s most stringent regulations for transitioning to electric vehicles. It is expected to prompt other states to follow California’s lead and to accelerate the production of zero-emission vehicles by automakers.
Board member Daniel Sperling, founding Director of the Institute of Transportation Studies at the University of California, Davis, called the vote “the most important and transformative action” the air board has ever taken.
The policy still needs federal approval but that’s considered very likely under Democratic President Joe Biden’s administration. It allows Californians to keep driving gas-powered vehicles and buying used ones after 2035, but no new models would be sold in the state.
One-fifth of automakers’ sales after 2035 could be plug-in hybrids, which run on batteries and gas, but the rest must be powered solely by electricity or hydrogen.
The European Parliament in June backed a plan to effectively prohibit the sale of gas and diesel cars in the 27-nation European Union by 2035, and Canada has mandated the sale of zero-emission cars by the same year.
California climate officials say the state’s new policy is the world’s most ambitious because it sets benchmarks for ramping up electric vehicle sales over the next 13 years.
The first mandated threshold comes in 2026, when one-third of all vehicles sold in the state must be zero-emission. Automakers could be fined $20,000 per vehicle sold short of that goal.
About 16% of cars sold in California in the first three months of this year were electric. The air board is working on separate emissions rules for motorcycles and diesel trucks.
Washington state and Massachusetts already have said they will follow California’s lead and many more are likely to — New York and Pennsylvania are among 17 states that have adopted some or all of California’s tailpipe emission standards that are stricter than federal rules.
Kia Corp.’s Laurie Holmes said the company plans to spend $25 billion by 2025 on electric vehicles and hopes to offer seven models by 2027.
But she and several other representatives for auto companies expressed concern about the state’s timeline given factors such as supply chain challenges and the high cost of materials to build electric cars.
“Automakers could have significant difficulties meeting this target given elements outside of the control of the industry,” she said.
The switch from gas to electric cars will drastically reduce emissions and air pollutants. Transportation is the single largest source of emissions in the state, accounting for about 40% of the state’s greenhouse gas emissions. But the transition will be painful for the state’s oil industry. California remains the seventh-largest oil-producing U.S. state, though its output is falling as it pushes forward with climate goals.
California shouldn’t wrap its entire transportation strategy around a vehicle market powered by electricity, said Tanya DeRivi, vice president for climate policy with the Western States Petroleum Association, an oil industry group.
“Californians should be able to choose a vehicle technology, including electric vehicles, that best fits their needs based on availability, affordability, and personal necessity,” she said.
California is the nation’s most populous state , with about about 39 million people. They account for 10%. of the U.S. car market but have 43% of the nation’s 2.6 million registered plug-in vehicles, according to the air board.
Reaching the 100% goal by 2035 will mean overcoming very practical hurdles, notably enough reliable power and charging stations.
California now has about 80,000 stations in public places, far short of the 250,000 it wants by 2025. The Alliance for Automotive Innovation, which represents many major car makers, warned about the lack of infrastructure, access to materials needed to make batteries, and supply chain issues as being among the challenges to meeting the state’s timeline.
The new commitment came as California works to maintain reliable electricity while it moves away from gas-fired power plants in favor of solar, wind and other cleaner sources of energy. Earlier this year, top California energy officials warned the state could run out of power during the hottest days of summer, which happened briefly in August 2020.
That hasn’t happened yet this year. But Newsom, a Democrat, is pushing to keep open the state’s last-remaining nuclear plant beyond its planned closer in 2025, and the state may turn to diesel generators or natural gas plants as a backup when the electrical grid is strained.
Adding more car chargers will put a higher demand on the energy grid.
Ensuring access to charging stations is also key to ramping up electric vehicle sales. The infrastructure bill passed by Congress last year provides $5 billion for states to build charges every 50 miles (80 kilometers) along interstate highways.
Newsom, meanwhile, has pledged to spend billions to boost zero-emission vehicle sales, including adding chargers in low-income neighborhoods. The new rules approved by the air board say that the vehicles need to be able to travel 150 miles (241 kilometers) on one charge.
Driving an electric vehicle long distances today, even in California, requires careful planning about where to stop and charge, said Mary Nichols, former chair of the California Air Resources Board. The money from the state and federal government will go a long way toward boosting that infrastructure and making electric cars a more convenient option, she said.
“This is going to be a transformative process and the mandate for vehicle sales is only one piece of it,” she said.
Though hydrogen is a fuel option under the new regulations, cars that run on fuel-cells have made up less than 1% of car sales in recent years.
Both the state and federal governments have rebates for thousands of dollars to offset the cost of buying electric cars, and the rules include incentives for car makers to make used electric vehicles available to low- and middle-income people.
Over the past 12 years, California has provided more than $1 billion in rebates for the sale of 478,000 electric, plug-in or hybrid vehicles, according to the air board.
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| 2022-09-20T21:57:41Z
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RICHMOND, Va. (AP) — A federal ruling that gender dysphoria is covered by the Americans with Disabilities Act could help block conservative political efforts to restrict access to gender-affirming care, advocates and experts say.
A panel of the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals last week became the first federal appellate court in the country to find that the 1990 landmark federal law protects transgender people who experience anguish and other symptoms as a result of the disparity between their assigned sex and their gender identity.
The ruling could become a powerful tool to challenge legislation restricting access to medical care and other accommodations for transgender people, including employment and government benefits, advocates said.
“It’s a very important and positive ruling to increase people’s access to gender-affirming care,” said Rodrigo Heng-Lehtinen, executive director of the National Center for Transgender Equality.
The ruling is binding in the states covered by the Richmond-based 4th Circuit — Maryland, North Carolina, South Carolina, Virginia and West Virginia — but will inevitably be cited in cases in other states, said Kevin Barry, a law professor at Quinnipiac University.
The decision came in the case of a transgender woman who sued the Fairfax County sheriff in Virginia for housing her in a jail with men. The decision is not limited to transgender people challenging jail policies, but also applies broadly to all areas of society covered by disability rights law, including employment, government benefits and services and public accommodations, Barry said.
“This decision destigmatized a health condition — gender dysphoria — and it says that what Congress did in 1990 wasn’t OK,” Barry said.
The sheriff’s office did not respond to phone messages seeking comment.
Some Republican leaders who have led efforts to limit access to transition treatment for youths have labeled it a form of child abuse. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott this year, for instance, ordered the state’s child welfare agency to investigate reports of gender-affirming care for children as abuse.
A new rule in Florida restricts Medicaid coverage for gender dysphoria treatments for youths and adults. The state health agency previously released a report stating that puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones and sex reassignment surgery have not been proven safe or effective in treating gender dysphoria.
And Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who is widely touted as a potential 2024 Republican presidential candidate, recently tweeted that children should not be able to take puberty blockers “or mutilate their body by getting a sex change.”
But leading medical entities contradict those positions, Heng-Lehtinen said.
“This health care is under attack politically in a lot of the country, but medically all of the credible professionals involved — the American Psychiatric Association, the American Medical Association and others — have all recognized for years that this is essentially primary care,” Heng-Lehtinen said.
In the case before the 4th Circuit, Kesha Williams was initially assigned to live on the women’s side of the Fairfax County jail when she arrived in 2018.
Williams told the nurse she is transgender, has gender dysphoria and received hormone treatments for the previous 15 years. But after she explained that she had not had genital surgery, she said, she was assigned to the men’s section under a policy that inmates must be classified according to their genitals.
In her lawsuit, Williams said that she was harassed and that her prescribed hormone medication was repeatedly delayed or skipped. Deputies ignored her requests to refer to her as a woman and instead called her “mister,” “sir,” “he” or “gentleman,” she said. Her requests to shower privately and for body searches to be conducted by a female deputy were denied, she said.
A federal judge granted a motion by the sheriff’s office to dismiss the lawsuit, finding that because the Americans with Disabilities Act excluded “gender identity disorders not resulting from physical impairments,” Williams could not sue under the law.
A three-judge panel of the 4th Circuit reversed that ruling, sending the case back to U.S. District Court.
The 4th Circuit panel said in its ruling Aug. 16 that there is a distinction between gender identity disorder and gender dysphoria. The court cited advances in medical understanding that led the American Psychiatric Association to remove gender identity disorder from the current Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders and to add gender dysphoria, defined in the manual as the “clinically significant distress” felt by some transgender people. Symptoms can include intense anxiety, depression and suicidal ideation.
The modern diagnosis of gender dysphoria “affirms that a transgender person’s medical needs are just as deserving of treatment and protection as anyone else’s,” Judge Diana Gribbon Motz wrote in the majority opinion.
Judge A. Marvin Quattlebaum Jr. dissented in part.
“Whether we focus on when Congress passed the ADA or look beyond to today, the distinction Williams attempts to draw between gender identity disorder and gender dysphoria fails,” Quattlebaum wrote.
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| 2022-09-20T21:57:48Z
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MILWAUKEE (AP) — An uncle of Jacob Blake filed a federal lawsuit alleging sheriff’s deputies in Wisconsin unjustly arrested and tortured him during a protest over the 2020 Kenosha police shooting of his nephew.
Justin Blake filed the lawsuit Tuesday in Milwaukee, alleging that he was standing quietly outside Kenosha’s public safety building during an April 2021 protest when sheriff’s deputies arrested him and strapped him into an emergency restraint chair for almost seven hours. He says his neck, back and shoulders were injured and that the Kenosha County deputies’ treatment of him amounted to state-sponsored torture.
He argues that deputies recognized him as Jacob Blake’s uncle and that they used the restraint chair after he exercised his right not to answer questions following his arrest. The lawsuit seeks an order ending use of the restraint chair as well as unspecified damages.
Kenosha County’s corporation counsel, Joseph Cardamone III, didn’t immediately respond to a message seeking comment about the lawsuit Wednesday.
A white police officer shot Jacob Blake, who is Black, during a domestic disturbance in August 2020. The shooting left Blake paralyzed from the waist down. A prosecutor later declined to file charges against the officer.
Protesters converged on Kenosha in the days immediately following the shooting, with demonstrations at times turning violent. During one of those protests, Kyle Rittenhouse shot three men, killing two of them. A jury acquitted him of multiple charges last year, finding that he acted in self-defense.
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| 2022-09-20T21:57:55Z
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NEW YORK (AP) — New York’s highest court has agreed to hear an appeal from Harvey Weinstein over his 2020 rape conviction.
A spokesman for the Court of Appeals said Wednesday that oral arguments would likely be held sometime next year, after the decision to hear the case was granted Aug. 19.
Weinstein was convicted in February 2020 in New York of forcibly performing oral sex on a TV and film production assistant in 2006 and raping an aspiring actress in 2013. The 70-year-old was sentenced to 23 years in prison and is currently in custody in California awaiting trial on other assault charges.
In June, an intermediate-level appeals court in New York upheld the conviction, rejecting the former movie mogul’s claim that the trial judge unfairly let in testimony about accusations outside of the case.
Weinstein’s publicist, Juda Engelmayer, said, “We are hopeful and grateful for this rare opportunity.”
The Manhattan District Attorney’s Office declined to comment.
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| 2022-09-20T21:58:18Z
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TRAVERSE CITY, Mich. (AP) — The conviction of two men for conspiring to kidnap Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer shows that jurors in a deeply divided nation can still reach agreement in politically charged cases, according to experts.
But it leaves unanswered questions about the potential for violence by extremists with a vendetta against government and law enforcement, they say.
“I hope it will be a deterrent in the future, but we need to see some softening of the rhetoric before we can accurately predict that,” said Michael Edison Hayden, spokesman for the nonprofit Southern Policy Law Center, which monitors hate groups.
A federal jury in Grand Rapids, Michigan, returned guilty verdicts Tuesday against Adam Fox and Barry Croft Jr. on two counts of conspiracy. Two others in the plot, Kaleb Franks and Ty Garbin, pleaded guilty earlier. Franks’ sentencing hearing is set for Oct. 6, Fox’s for Dec. 12 and Croft’s for Dec. 28. Garbin is serving a six-year term, but prosecutors Wednesday asked a judge to cut that to three due to his “remarkable” assistance to the government.
Prosecutors said they planned to grab Whitmer at her vacation home and blow up a bridge to stop police from responding.
A different jury in April deadlocked on Fox and Croft while acquitting two other men. That outcome prompted worries that the overheated political landscape was hampering jurors’ ability to put aside biases, particularly when the FBI — a frequent target of right-wing activists and commentators — was involved.
Some legal observers criticized the government’s handling of the case and questioned the wisdom of retrying it. Barbara McQuade, a former federal prosecutor, said refusing to do so would have been “the coward’s way out.”
“We’re seeing an escalation of threats of violence against public officials,” McQuade said. “The only way to stop that is by holding people accountable when they engage in acts like this, threatening to harm public officials.”
The case unfolded against a backdrop of nationwide polarization.
Whitmer, a rising Democratic star, had exchanged barbs with former President Donald Trump and was unpopular with conservatives, including over her policies early on during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Trump and other Republicans had accused the FBI of being a tool of Democrats. He described the Whitmer kidnapping plan as a “fake deal.” Jury selection in the retrial of Fox and Croft happened the day after federal agents searched Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate for classified documents. During the trial, a man apparently angered by the search tried to breach the FBI’s Cincinnati office and was killed.
Even so, the jury in Michigan’s Western District — a blend of urban, suburban and rural areas representing a broad political spectrum — delivered “a real statement that citizens of our country aren’t going to put up with violent actions against public officials,” said Mark Chutkow, a former Detroit federal prosecutor.
Less clear is what, if any, effect the case will have on anti-government extremism and white-hot partisanship. Following the verdict, Whitmer renewed her call to “lower the temperature.”
“This is about every American who is serving the public, who’s dealing with threats, whether it’s an election worker or it is a police officer or a teacher,” she told reporters Wednesday after a back-to-school event in suburban Detroit. “This continued political rhetoric that is aimed at inspiring people to hurt their fellow Americans is dangerous.”
The convictions of Croft and Fox could be another rallying cry for far-right extremists, although likely not as potent as 1990s sieges in Waco, Texas, and Ruby Ridge, Idaho, said Jon Lewis, a research fellow with George Washington University’s program on extremism.
“It’s possible that individuals in anti-government spaces could leverage this as an example of continued tyranny, abuse of the rights of Americans,” Lewis said.
A more concerning outcome could be an increase in lone-wolf attacks as extremist groups become more wary of the potential for infiltration by undercover operatives, he said.
“It’s much harder with the lone actor,” Lewis said. “He doesn’t tell anyone his plans, he has legal access to firearms.”
The George Washington program is tracking cases against 49 people charged with “offenses related to the boogaloo movement,” a loose confederation of believers in a second civil war, he said.
Far-right paramilitary groups were gleeful about the first trial’s outcome and probably are unhappy with the convictions, said Mark Pitcavage, senior research fellow with the Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism. But history suggests guilty verdicts are less likely to incite violent reactions than arrests perceived as unjust, he said.
It’s equally doubtful that the case will bring about a calmer tone in politics, Pitcavage said.
“We’re in such a heavily polarized society right now and few people seem to want to step back from the brink,” he said.
The most significant ripple effect, he said, might be what was avoided: another defeat and further damage to the FBI’s credibility.
Neama Rahmani, a former federal prosecutor in California who has followed the Michigan case and criticized the government’s performance in the first trial, said the convictions vindicated the bureau’s investigation.
“Obviously there are folks who are always going to distrust the FBI,” he said. “But this is a big win.”
The convictions may boost public understanding of the FBI’s tactics in combating domestic terrorism, particularly use of undercover operatives, said Dennis Lormel, president of the Society of Former FBI Agents.
“I understand the concerns about overreaching, especially with the rhetoric about the FBI being politicized,” Lormel said. “But the opportunity to insert FBI employees or cooperating witnesses is critically important. If we lose that, we will be in a lot of trouble, we’ll see more terrorist attacks.”
___
Associated Press reporters Mike Householder in Novi, Michigan, and Ed White in Detroit contributed to this story.
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KOKOMO, Ind. (WXIN) – An Indiana woman left four young children home alone while she went on a shopping trip about an hour away, according to an incident report by Kokomo police.
Courtny Prater, 25, has been charged with neglect. The report states the children were ages 1, 4, 5 and 8.
Police were called to a trailer home in Kokomo on Aug. 2 for a child welfare check. When they arrived, they met another woman who told them she was the mother of two of the children.
The woman said her father, who lived nearby, went to check on the children earlier and was greeted at the door by the 8-year-old. The 8-year-old told the man that his mother and father were in Indianapolis and that the kids were home alone, according to court documents.
The distance between Indianapolis and Kokomo is about one hour.
Police say when they knocked on the door, they could hear “two large dogs barking and hitting the door.” When they went to check the windows, the dogs were reportedly so aggressive that one of them hit the window and caused the window frame to move.
The woman who had greeted police contacted the suspect — later identified as Prater, who is also the mother of the other children — and told her that police wanted her at the home right away, documents said.
When Prater arrived, she reportedly admitted she had been shopping in Indianapolis and pointed to two other people in the car and said they were supposed to be watching the kids, documents said.
After the dogs were secured, police went inside the home, which they say had trash on the floor and smelled of dog urine.
The incident report says the mother of the other two children asked for her children back at this point, and police say they granted her request immediately.
Prater told police that another man who lived at the trailer “off and on” was supposed to check on the kids throughout the day while she was in Indianapolis.
After determining the 8-year-old did not “appear qualified” to care for the other children, Kokomo police requested an arrest warrant be issued for Prater on four counts of neglect, but she was only charged with two counts.
Police also contacted the Department of Child Services.
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| 2022-09-20T21:58:32Z
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(The Hill) – Reality-star-turned-criminal-reform-advocate Kim Kardashian bested Hillary Clinton in a legal knowledge trivia contest during filming for “Gutsy,” Clinton’s forthcoming documentary series on women with her daughter Chelsea Clinton, People reports.
The mother-daughter-duo sat down with Kardashian, who in December announced she had passed her first “baby bar” exam, to discuss her criminal justice work, which the former Democratic presidential nominee and secretary of State called “impressive.”
“She’s very self-aware that her celebrity can make a difference positively, and where it may make a negative difference,” Clinton said of the mogul.
Clinton added, “She never wants to make a negative difference, so being judicious and thoughtful about when and where and how she engages was really impressive to us. I want, even beyond this series, to do whatever I can to help her in that work.”
Kardashian showcased her “impressive” knowledge by winning the trivia contest, which consisted of questions on topics such as use of deadly force, 11-4.
Clinton, who has a law degree from Yale, jokingly said her loss was more than just humbling.
“Oh, it was heartbreaking!” she told People.
Chelsea Clinton defended her mother, saying her loss appeared to be a result of reaction time.
“Sometimes, I could see my mom knew what the answer was, but she wouldn’t hit the buzzer in time,” the writer and global health advocate said in a video clip published by People.
Clinton said she was also intrigued by how well Kardashian performed.
“Mom, you made a good effort,” Chelsea said.
Kardashian has used her celebrity status to bring attention to several cases, including pushing for the jailed father of a Uvalde, Texas, school shooting victim to be allowed to attend his child’s funeral in June.
“Gusty,” based on the Clintons’ 2019 book “The Book of Gutsy Women: Favorite Stories of Courage and Resilience,” is set to premiere Sept. 9. on Apple TV+.
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| 2022-09-20T21:58:40Z
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LAFAYETTE, La. (KLFY) — The Louisiana Department of Health (LDH) is reporting the first human case of the potentially deadly neuroinvasive West Nile disease in Acadiana since 2018.
Louisiana has reported two deaths and 14 cases of the disease to date in 2022, according to LDH officials. There are two types of West Nile: neuroinvasive and non-neuroinvasive. Neuroinvasive includes cases reported as meningitis, encephalitis, or acute flaccid paralysis. All cases in Louisiana to date in 2022 have been neuroinvasive.
The news comes a day after mosquito samples submitted for testing from Iberia Parish Mosquito Control District tested positive for West Nile.
“This is shaping up to be a very challenging West Nile season, and we are entering the peak time for transmission in our state,” said Region 4 Medical Director Dr. Tina Stefanksi. “That is why it is so important for residents to please remember to protect yourself and your family from mosquito bites whenever you are participating in outdoor activities.”
According to LDH, West Nile virus is spread by mosquitoes and can cause illness in people and animals. While 80% of human cases are asymptomatic, many people can develop West Nile fever. A flu-like illness, symptoms can include fever, headache, body aches, nausea, or rashes.
A small percentage of people sickened by West Nile virus can develop a severe form of infection called West Nile neuroinvasive disease or West Nile encephalitis, which can result in hospitalization and death. Symptoms can include high fever, stiff neck, disorientation, muscle weakness, numbness, coma, and paralysis.
These symptoms may last several weeks and carry the risk of death or permanent brain damage. While anyone is at risk of developing severe disease, individuals with pre-existing medical conditions and those who are over 60 years of age are at a greater risk.
LDH said it has received reports of the West Nile virus present in more than 687 positive mosquito pools statewide this year, a significant increase over the 242 positive pools reported at this time last year. In Acadiana alone, the number of mosquito pools has jumped from eight at this time last year to 56 this year.
Tips to protect yourself against West Nile
- If you will be outside, you should wear EPA-registered approved mosquito repellent and always follow product label instructions.
- Apply repellent on exposed skin and clothing, but do not apply under your clothes or on broken skin.
- If you are also using sunscreen, apply sunscreen first and insect repellent second.
- To protect yourself from being exposed to mosquitos while indoors, make sure that windows and doors are tight-fitting and that all screens are free of holes.
Protecting your home from mosquitoes
- Reduce the mosquito population by eliminating standing water around your home, which is where mosquitoes breed.
- Dispose of tin cans, ceramic pots, and other unnecessary containers that have accumulated on your property that may collect water. Turn over wheelbarrows, plastic wading pools, buckets, trash cans, children’s toys, or anything that could collect water.
- Drill holes in the bottom of outdoor recycling containers. If a recycling container has holes on the sides, there is still room for the container to collect water for mosquitoes to breed, so holes should be added to the bottom if not already present.
- Check and clean roof gutters routinely. Clogged gutters can produce millions of mosquitoes each season.
- Water gardens and ornamental pools can become major mosquito producers if they are allowed to stagnate. Take steps to prevent stagnation, such as adding fish or aeration.
- Clean and chlorinate swimming pools that are not being used. A swimming pool that is left untended by a family for as little as a month can produce enough mosquitoes to result in neighborhood-wide complaints. Be aware that mosquitoes may even breed in the water that collects on swimming pool covers.
- Contact local mosquito abatement districts to report problem mosquito areas.
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Which fast-food burger is the best? Whataburger vs. Sonic
Nancy DeGennaro
Murfreesboro Daily News Journal
For those of you who grew up going to Whataburger as a kid, there's no comparison. But there are those who would argue that Sonic is the better fast-food burger.
So which is your favorite: Whataburger vs. Sonic? You can vote below.
Voting ends at 11:59 p.m. Thursday, Sept. 22. Results will be posted on Good Eats in the 'Boro (and Beyond) Facebook page.
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When the federal government started doling out COVID-19 relief money to colleges, HBCUs got a windfall. Many are spending the money in ways that will serve students for years to come.
Copyright 2022 NPR
When the federal government started doling out COVID-19 relief money to colleges, HBCUs got a windfall. Many are spending the money in ways that will serve students for years to come.
Copyright 2022 NPR
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FARMINGTON, N.M. (KRQE) – A new horned dinosaur species has been discovered south of Farmington, New Mexico, by a team of paleontologists, including two from the New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science.
Most of the skull is preserved. It shows large bite marks from another dinosaur, though they say those could be from after its death. They named the dinosaur bisticeratops froeseorum because it was discovered in the Bisti Denazin wilderness area. The plant-eating dinosaur spanned about 18 feet.
“Bisticeratops adds to the diversity of Late Cretaceous horned dinosaurs from New Mexico,” said Dr. Lucas in a news release. “It shows that important discoveries and analyses continue to be made in the state in our effort to understand better the history of dinosaurs during the last few million years before their extinction.”
According to a news release, the discovery of bisticeratops adds to New Mexico’s fossil record and to the understanding of horned dinosaurs from the late Cretaceous period. The bisticeratops fossil joins other recently described horned dinosaurs from New Mexico — navajoceratops, terminocavus and sierraceratops. Last year, a sierraceratops dinosaur was discovered in southern New Mexico.
These creatures found in New Mexico appear to be distinct from the horned dinosaurs that lived in what is now Montana and Alberta, which according to the news release, indicates a longitudinal variation among ceratopsians. The discovery also shows that the last few million years of ceratopsian evolution were more complex than first thought.
Researchers last year also found the fossil of the menefeeceratops, which included multiple bones from one individual. It was found by a research associate of NMMNHS in Cretaceous rocks of the Menefee Formation. That dinosaur is said to be related to but predates triceratops.
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| 2022-09-20T21:59:02Z
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Smyrna BBQ restaurant owner indicted on charges of tax evasion
The owner of a Smyrna barbecue restaurant has been indicted on charges of felony tax evasion, according to a spokesperson from the Tennessee Department of Revenue.
On Sept. 8, the Rutherford County Grand Jury indicted Kinfolks BBQ owner Scharneitha Britton on one felony charge of theft over $60,000 and 13 counts of money laundering, both Class B felonies, and 36 felony counts of tax evasion.
Agents from the Special Investigations Section of the TDR conducted the investigation that led to the indictment. TDR agents arrested Britton Monday. A bond was set at $25,000.
The indictments allege Britton underreported taxable sales and failed to remit additional sales tax collected from Kinfolks BBQ, which Britton opened in 2013 at 1203 Hazelwood Drive in Smyrna.
“Investigations, such as this one, should warn retailers that failing to properly remit all the sales tax monies they collect is a crime,” Revenue Commissioner David Gerregano said in an email. “The taxes collected from customers are property of the state and local governments at all times. Customers have a right to know that the tax they pay will be remitted to the state.”
If convicted, 66-year-old Britton could be sentenced to a maximum of two years in the state penitentiary and fined up to $3,000 for each count of tax evasion, and 12 years and fined up to $25,000 for money laundering and theft.
The department is pursuing this criminal case in cooperation with District Attorney Jennings Jones’ office.
Citizens who suspect violations of Tennessee's revenue laws should call the toll[1]free tax fraud hot line at 800-372-8389 or visit tn.gov/revenue.
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| 2022-09-20T21:59:05Z
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(NEXSTAR) – Following months of anticipation, and just a week before payments were set to begin again, President Joe Biden has extended the student loan payment pause.
Former President Trump first enacted the temporary pause on scheduled payments and stopped interest from accruing on federal student loans at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in March 2020. The pause essentially froze $1.6 trillion in debt for the roughly 40 million Americans with federal student loans.
Trump and Biden have since extended the pause seven times, meaning regular payments haven’t been made on those loans and interest hasn’t accrued (except for those borrowers who decided to opt-out of the pause) in nearly two and a half years.
Now, following Biden’s extension announced Wednesday, the payment freeze will remain in effect through the end of December.
Biden said Wednesday this is the last time payments will be put on pause.
When payments do resume on January 1, your payment could be smaller than it currently is, and not just because you may receive debt relief.
The Department of Education has proposed a new income-driven repayment plan to cap monthly payments on loans used for undergraduate education at 5% of your discretionary income (the amount of money you have left over after paying necessary expenses), down from the 10% mark currently in place.
To protect borrowers with less discretionary income, the plan states that anyone making roughly the equivalent of $15 an hour or less won’t have to make a monthly payment.
The proposed rule could also forgive student loan balances for borrowers who had an original balance of $12,000 or less after 10 years. The Education Department says the plan would also prevent interest from growing on a borrower’s balance as long as they are making their monthly payments, even if their payment is $0.
The Biden administration is currently proposing a rule to allow the Education Department to create this income-driven repayment plan. It’s unclear when it could take effect.
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| 2022-09-20T21:59:09Z
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(The Hill) – Twitter’s former security chief, who alleged the company has major security deficiencies in a bombshell whistleblower disclosure, will testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee in September, the committee said Wednesday.
The whistleblower, Peiter “Mudge” Zatko, will participate in a hearing aimed at examining the allegations of security failures at Twitter.
“Mr. Zatko’s allegations of widespread security failures and foreign state actor interference at Twitter raise serious concerns. If these claims are accurate, they may show dangerous data privacy and security risks for Twitter users around the world,” Senate Judiciary Chairman Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) and ranking member Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) said in a joint statement.
“The Senate Judiciary Committee will investigate this issue further with a full Committee hearing this work period, and take further steps as needed to get to the bottom of these alarming allegations,” the senators added.
In an 84-page disclosure, published by The Washington Post on Tuesday, Zatko alleged Twitter has not been complying with a 2011 consent order from the Federal Trade Commission that called for the company to create and maintain a security program designed to protect privacy and nonpublic consumer information.
Zatko also alleged the platform is vulnerable to exploitation by foreign governments.
Twitter has pushed back strongly on Zatko’s allegations.
“What we’ve seen so far is a false narrative about Twitter and our privacy and data security practices that is riddled with inconsistencies and inaccuracies and lacks important context,” a Twitter spokesperson said in a statement Tuesday. “Mr. Zatko’s allegations and opportunistic timing appear designed to capture attention and inflict harm on Twitter, its customers and its shareholders.”
The complaint in part references a back-and-forth between Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal and Elon Musk, the Tesla CEO who is trying to back out of his deal to buy Twitter for $44 billion.
Musk has accused Twitter of not providing information about the number of spam bots on the platform, an accusation the platform has pushed back on.
Zatko accused the Twitter CEO of misleading Musk and the public about the number of spam accounts on the platform and how the platform counts them.
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| 2022-09-20T21:59:16Z
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(The Hill) – The Department of Justice (DOJ) on Wednesday released an unredacted version of a memo prepared for former Attorney General Bill Barr that he used to justify his decision to not indict then-President Donald Trump after reviewing the Mueller report.
The memo was released following a suit from Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), which sought to unveil the legal guidance Barr received from DOJ’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC).
The suit spurred DOJ to release a redacted version of the memo in 2021 that fully blocked out six of the memo’s 10 pages.
The now fully unredacted memo details a Justice Department that cautioned against any prosecution of Trump stemming from special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into any coordination between his campaign and Russia as the country sought to interfere with U.S. elections.
The 2019 memo to Barr came just two days after Mueller released his more than 400-page report to DOJ, and was finalized just hours after Barr sent a letter to Congress saying he saw no grounds for a prosecution.
The OLC memo largely crafts an argument to decline prosecution for an attorney general who at that point was fiercely loyal to Trump.
It hangs much of its analysis on a line in the Mueller report indicating there was not sufficient evidence to charge anyone from the Trump campaign or the president with conspiring alongside members of the Russian government to interfere in the election.
“Given that conclusion, the evidence does not establish a crime or criminal conspiracy involving the president toward which any obstruction or attempted obstruction was directed. It would be rare for federal prosecutors to bring an obstruction prosecution that did not itself arise out of a proceeding relating to a separate crime,” Steven Engle, head of OLC, and his deputy Edward O’Callaghan wrote in the memo.
It goes on to describe Trump’s “potentially obstructive conduct” as “an attempt to modify the process under which the special counsel investigation progressed.”
CREW President Noah Bookbinder called the memo “a breathtakingly generous view of the law and facts for Donald Trump.”
“It twists the facts and the law to benefit Trump and does not comport with a serious reading of the law of obstruction of justice or the facts as found by Special Counsel Mueller,” Bookbinder wrote on Twitter.
“The memo is premised in large part on the argument that there was no underlying criminal conduct and that it’s hard to charge obstruction without an underlying crime. Of course that’s not what Mueller actually found…Mueller found there was not sufficient evidence to charge Trump and others with conspiring with Russia. He didn’t find no crime, just not enough evidence for charges,” he added.
The unredacted memo’s release comes as a result of a ruling last week by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit in the long-running lawsuit initiated by CREW in May 2019. The ruling, by a unanimous three-judge appellate court panel, affirmed a federal judge’s conclusion that the DOJ had improperly redacted the memorandum, and ordered its full disclosure.
The legal development amounted to a sharp rebuke of the department’s claim that the memo should be shielded under an exemption to the Freedom of Information Act that protects internal government deliberations.
The appeals court ruling affirmed a finding by the lower court that the memo did not reflect a deliberative process in part because Barr had already decided against charging Trump before the memo was finalized.
“Because the Department did not tie the memorandum to deliberations about the relevant decision, the Department failed to justify its reliance on the deliberative-process privilege,” Chief Judge Sri Srinivasan wrote for the panel.
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| 2022-09-20T21:59:24Z
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WASHINGTON (AP) — President Joe Biden on Wednesday named Kim Cheatle, a veteran Secret Service official, to be the agency’s next director as it faces controversy over missing text messages around the time thousands of supporters of then-President Donald Trump stormed the U.S. Capitol.
Cheatle, who left the Secret Service in 2021 for a job as a security executive at PepsiCo, takes the reins as multiple congressional committees and the Department of Homeland Security’s internal watchdog are investigating the missing text messages, which the Secret Service has said were purged during a technology transition.
Cheatle had served in the Secret Service for 27 years and was the first woman to be named assistant director of protective operations, the division that provides protection to the president and other dignitaries.
Cheatle had served on Biden’s protective detail when he was vice president. During that time, Biden “came to trust” her judgment and counsel, he said in a statement.
Biden said that her and first lady Jill Biden “know firsthand Kim’s commitment to her job and to the Secret Service’s people and mission.”
Cheatle replaces James Murray, who had announced his retirement to take a position with Snap, the social media company best known for its app, Snapchat. He announced last month that he would delay his retirement amid the investigations while Biden looked for a new director.
The Secret Service has faced increasing criticism after admitting that text messages from around the time of the attack of Jan. 6, 2021, on the Capitol were deleted.
The agency has said the messages were purged when its phones were migrated to a new system in the weeks after the 2021 attack. Rep. Stephanie Murphy, D-Fla., a member of the House committee investigating the attack, has said the Secret Service told the committee that it left it up to individual agents to decide what electronic records to keep and what to delete during the process.
The committee has taken a recent, renewed interest in the Secret Service following the dramatic testimony of former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson about Trump’s actions on the day of the insurrection.
The Secret Service has said all procedures were followed and pledged “full cooperation” with all of the reviews and investigations, including a criminal investigation by the Homeland Security’s inspector general.
Secret Service spokesman Anthony Guglielmi said Cheatle “is a law enforcement veteran and served as the first female assistant director in charge of all protective operations for the agency before retiring.”
“We are ecstatic to welcome her back as the next Director of the United States Secret Service,” he said in a tweet.
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| 2022-09-20T21:59:53Z
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WASHINGTON (AP) — The Biden administration on Wednesday unveiled a regulation aimed at fending off legal challenges to a decade-old program that shields immigrants from deportation if they arrived as young children.
The rule isn’t scheduled to take effect until Oct. 31 and its fate is tied to a lawsuit by Texas and other Republican-led states. The Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program has been closed to new registrants since July 2021 while the case winds its way through the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.
Its 453 pages are largely technical and represent little substantive change from the 2012 memo that created DACA, but it was subject to public comments as part of a formal rule-making process intended to improve its chances of surviving legal muster.
President Joe Biden said he would do “everything within my power” to protect DACA recipients while renewing a call for legislation to provide them a pathway to citizenship.
“Dreamers are part of the fabric of this nation,” said Biden, using a common name for the young immigrants. “They’ve only ever known America as their home.”
The rule keeps eligibility criteria the same, disappointing some DACA advocates who wanted to allow more immigrants to qualify. Applicants must prove they arrived in the U.S. by age 16 before June 2007.
More than 600,000 immigrants were enrolled in DACA at the end of March, about 80% from Mexico and many of the rest from El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras, according to government figures.
In July, the New Orleans-based appeals court heard arguments that ending the Obama-era program would cruelly upend the lives of hundreds of thousands who have grown up to become tax-paying, productive drivers of the U.S. economy. Opponents argued that DACA has cost taxpayers for health care and other services.
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Five Florida men affiliated with a militia group called “B Squad” have been arrested on charges that they joined a mob’s attack on the U.S. Capitol, disrupting Congress from certifying President Joe Biden’s 2020 electoral victory, federal authorities said Wednesday.
“B Squad” members stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, while wearing riot gear and armed with metal batons, knives, chemical spray and walking sticks, according to an FBI agent’s affidavit. Group members joined the mob in a “heave-ho” push against police officers trying to secure a tunnel on the Lower West Terrace, the affidavit says.
Officers ultimately repelled the mob after more than two hours of violence inside the tunnel. More than 100 police officers were injured at the Capitol on Jan. 6.
The FBI says the five defendants charged together are self-identified adherents to the “Three Percenters” militia movement, which refers to the myth that only 3% of Americans fought in the Revolutionary War against the British. The men are members of a group called Guardians of Freedom and a subgroup called “B Squad,” according to an FBI agent’s affidavit.
A criminal complaint charges four of the defendants with a felony count of interfering with a law enforcement officer during a civil disorder. They are Benjamin Cole, 38, of Leesburg; John Edward Crowley, 50, of Windermere; Brian Preller, 33, of Mount Dora; and Jonathan Rockholt, 38, of Palm Coast.
They and a fifth defendant — Tyler Bensch, 20, of Casselberry — also are charged with misdemeanor counts of entering and remaining in a restricted building or grounds and disorderly and disruptive conduct in a restricted building or grounds.
Crowley, Rockholt and Bensch were arrested in Florida, where a federal magistrate judge ordered them released after their initial court appearances Wednesday. Attorneys for the three men didn’t immediately respond to emails seeking comment.
Cole was arrested in Louisville, Kentucky. Court records didn’t immediately list an attorney for him.
Preller was arrested in Hardwick, Vermont, and ordered released after his initial court appearance in Rutland. A lawyer for Preller declined to comment on the charges.
A flier sent to “B Squad” members two weeks before the riot advertised a “March for Trump” bus trip to Washington for the “Stop the Steal” rally on Jan. 6, according to the affidavit. It says the flier encouraged Guardians of Freedom members to “deploy” and help protect people at the rally, where then-President Donald Trump addressed a crowd of supporters.
A man identified by the FBI only as “B Leader” coordinated the group’s travel from Florida to Washington and reserved a block of rooms at a hotel near Capitol. He, the five defendants charged in the complaint and approximately 40 other “B Squad” members stayed on the same floor of the hotel on the eve of the riot, the FBI says. “B Leader,” who isn’t one of the five arrested defendants, also spoke at a rally at Washington’s Freedom Plaza on Jan. 5, 2021, according to the affidavit.
More than 850 people have been charged with federal crimes for their conduct on Jan. 6. The Justice Department says more than 260 defendants have been charged with assaulting or impeding law enforcement at the Capitol.
Nearly 400 Capitol riot defendants have pleaded guilty or been convicted by a judge or jury after trials. More than 240 have been sentenced, with roughly half of them getting terms of incarceration ranging from seven days to over seven years.
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For full coverage of the Capitol riot, go to https://www.apnews.com/capitol-siege
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ATLANTA (AP) — The prosecutor investigating whether Donald Trump and others illegally tried to influence the 2020 election in Georgia is seeking to compel testimony from more allies of the former president, including former chief of staff Mark Meadows and lawyer Sidney Powell.
Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis filed petitions Thursday seeking to have Meadows and Powell, as well as James “Phil” Waldron, who met with Meadows, and former Trump campaign adviser Boris Epshteyn, testify before a special grand jury in Atlanta next month.
Meadows, Trump’s final chief of staff, and Powell, a dogged advocate of the president’s false claims of widespread election fraud, are among the highest-profile members of Trump’s circle to be summoned to testify in the probe, joining other top figures including Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani and U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham. It further raises the legal stakes for the former president as he weighs a 2024 presidential bid.
Because they don’t live in Georgia, Willis has to use a process that involves getting judges in the states where they live to order them to appear. The petitions she filed Thursday are essentially precursors to subpoenas. Fulton County Superior Court Judge Robert McBurney, who’s overseeing the special grand jury, signed off on the petitions, certifying that each person whose testimony is sought is a “necessary and material” witness for the investigation.
Willis wrote that each of them has unique knowledge about their communications with Trump, his campaign and others “involved in the multi-state, coordinated efforts to influence the results of the November 2020 elections in Georgia and elsewhere.”
George Terwilliger, a lawyer for Meadows, declined to comment Thursday. Epshteyn didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment. Powell and Waldron could not immediately be reached.
Willis last month filed similar petition s for seven other Trump associates and attorneys, including Giuliani and Graham. Giuliani, who’s been told he’s a target of the investigation, testified before the special grand jury last week. Graham is fighting his subpoena in court.
Also on Thursday, lawyers for Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp appeared in court to argue that he shouldn’t have to testify before the special grand jury. And Kenneth Chesebro, a lawyer who was part of the earlier batch of Trump associates whom Willis sought to compel to testify, filed a motion to quash his subpoena.
In the petition seeking Meadows’ testimony, Willis wrote that Meadows attended a Dec. 21, 2020, meeting at the White House with Trump and others “to discuss allegations of voter fraud and certification of electoral college votes from Georgia and other states.” The next day, Willis wrote, Meadows made a “surprise visit” to Cobb County, just outside Atlanta, where an audit of signatures on absentee ballot envelopes was being conducted. He asked to observe the audit but wasn’t allowed to because it wasn’t open to the public, the petition says.
Between Jan. 30, 2020, and Jan. 1, 2021, Meadows sent emails to Justice Department officials making allegations of voter fraud in Georgia and elsewhere and requesting investigations, Willis wrote. He was also on a Jan. 2, 2021, phone call with Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, during which Trump suggested the state’s top elections official could “find” enough votes to overturn his narrow election loss in the state.
In the petition seeking Powell’s testimony, Willis wrote that Powell is “known to be affiliated with both former President Donald Trump and the Trump Campaign.” The petition says attorney Lin Wood said in a television interview that Powell was part of a group who met at his home in South Carolina “for the purpose of exploring options to influence the results of the November 2020 elections in Georgia and elsewhere.” Wood, who’s licensed in Georgia, said Powell asked him to help find Georgia residents to serve as plaintiffs in lawsuits contesting the state’s election results, Willis wrote.
In June of this year, the U.S. House committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol released a deposition of Powell in which she said that in the weeks following the 2020 election, Trump asked her to be “special counsel to address the election issues and to collect evidence,” saying he was frustrated with law enforcement agencies, Willis wrote.
Last week, the Georgia Bureau of Investigation confirmed that it is helping the Georgia secretary of state’s office look into an alleged breach of elections data in Coffee County in south Georgia, Willis wrote. She noted that publicly reported emails indicate that Powell coordinated with a data solutions company to get elections data from Coffee County in early January 2021 and was involved in similar efforts in Michigan and Nevada.
Special grand juries are impaneled in Georgia to investigate complex cases with large numbers of witnesses and potential logistical concerns. They can compel evidence and subpoena witnesses for questioning, but they do not have the power to indict. When its investigation is complete, the special grand jury issues a final report and can recommend action. It’s then up to the district attorney to decide whether to ask a regular grand jury for an indictment.
During the hearing Thursday on Kemp’s attempt to avoid testifying, his lawyers argued that he is protected from having to testify by the principle of sovereign immunity, which says the state can’t be sued without its consent. Prosecutors argued that’s not applicable because Kemp is not being sued but instead is being called as a witness to provide facts for an investigation.
Kemp’s attorneys accuse the district attorney of pursuing a “politically motivated” probe, something she has vehemently denied.
Kemp attorney Brian McEvoy argued that, if the governor does have to testify, it shouldn’t happen until after the general election. Kemp faces a rematch with Democrat Stacey Abrams in November in one of the most high-profile and closely watched gubernatorial contests in the country.
“Your Honor is well aware of where we are, what state we’re in, what race we’re facing, and the governor ought not have to suffer political consequences for invoking a legal right,” McEvoy said.
Prosecutor Donald Wakeford noted that Willis waited until after contentious primary elections in late May to begin calling witnesses before the special grand jury for that very reason. The governor could have quietly honored a subpoena to appear last week without any media attention, Wakeford argued, but instead, his attorneys filed the motion to quash the day before, thrusting the issue into the public eye.
“To continually insist that this is a situation engineered by the district attorney’s office to the intentional detriment of the governor is just not true,” Wakeford said.
Judge McBurney did not immediately rule and it wasn’t clear when he would.
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Associated Press writers Eric Tucker in Washington and Jill Colvin in New York contributed to this report.
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More on Donald Trump-related investigations: https://apnews.com/hub/donald-trump
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WASHINGTON (AP) — The Biden administration is tying its authority to cancel student debt to the coronavirus pandemic and to a 2003 law aimed at providing help to members of the military. Legal challenges are expected.
Skeptics of the administration’s ability to act on its own, without new legislation, had once included President Joe Biden himself and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.
But in a legal opinion released Wednesday, the Justice Department said that the HEROES Act of 2003 gives the administration “sweeping authority” to reduce or eliminate student debt during a national emergency, ”when significant actions with potentially far-reaching consequences are often required.”
The law was adopted with overwhelming bipartisan support at a time when U.S. forces were fighting two wars, in Afghanistan and Iraq. It gives the Education secretary authority to waive rules relating to student financial aid programs in times or war or national emergency.
Former President Donald Trump declared a national emergency in 2020 because of the pandemic, and it remains in effect.
But neither Trump nor Biden, until the president’s announcement on Wednesday, had tried to wipe out so much student debt at one time.
The Justice Department’s legal justification seemed to be anticipating criticism that the broad-based debt cancellation might run afoul of Supreme Court rulings, including a June decision limiting the administration’s ability to combat climate change.
In that case, the court declared that when dealing with such “major questions,” the administration must point to clear congressional authorization when it asserts new power over an important part of the economy.
The justification for the debt cancellation “seems to tee up nicely — perhaps inadvertently — a major-questions doctrine challenge as the opinion seems to suggest the agency could forgive all student loans for everyone due to pandemic” if the agency head deemed it necessary, Chris Walker, a University of Michigan law professor wrote on Twitter.
But Abby Shafroth, an attorney at the National Consumer Law Center, said a challenge to the loan-forgiveness plan could falter in several ways, including the specific reference to national emergencies in the 2003 law.
Both the Trump and Biden administrations have previously relied on the HEROES Act to pause loan repayments during the pandemic and, in Biden’s case, overhaul a student debt forgiveness program for public workers, Shafroth said.
“Today’s action is significant, but not different in kind,” she said.
A separate issue may be finding someone who is harmed by the administration’s action and has legal standing to sue, she said.
The Job Creators Network, which promotes conservative economic policies, said it was weighing a lawsuit to try and block Biden’s plan.
“This executive overreach transfers taxpayer dollars from hardworking ordinary Americans and small businesses to disproportionately higher earners with college degrees,” said Alfredo Ortiz, president and CEO of the group. “It does nothing to address the underlying issue of outrageous college costs. Indeed, it rewards colleges for making education unaffordable and entrenches the failing status quo.”
An Education Department memo, produced in the final days of the Trump administration, concluded that there was no authority to cancel debt on a broad basis.
The department has never invoked the law, or any other statute, “for the blanket or mass cancellation, compromise, discharge or forgiveness of student loan principal balances,” Reed Rubinstein, then an Education Department lawyer, wrote in January 2021.
The issue has been under review for some 18 months, Lisa Brown, the top lawyer at the Education Department, wrote in a separate memo that was released Wednesday and called on Education Secretary Miguel Cardona to rescind Rubinstein’s memo.
Pelosi also reversed course. In Las Vegas Tuesday, Pelosi said that she “didn’t know what – what authority the President had to do this. And now clearly, it seems he has the authority to do this.”
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WASHINGTON (AP) — Justice Department officials who evaluated then-President Donald Trump’s actions during the Russia investigation concluded that nothing he did, including firing the FBI director, rose to the level of obstruction of justice and that there was no precedent for a prosecution, according to a memo released Wednesday.
The nine-page memo, prepared for then-Attorney General William Barr by a pair of senior Justice Department officials, offered a legal analysis on whether Trump had criminally obstructed the investigation into potential ties between Russia and his 2016 presidential campaign. Barr agreed with the conclusions of the March 24, 2019, memo and announced that same day that he had concluded that Trump’s conduct did not break the law.
Though the decision to clear Trump of obstruction has been well-documented, the newly disclosed memo offers additional details about how two of the department’s senior-most leaders arrived at that conclusion. The department’s decision was notable because special counsel Robert Mueller, who led the Russia investigation, declined in his 448-page report to decide whether Trump had obstructed justice but pointedly did not absolve him either.
The Mueller report scrutinized 10 instances in which Trump lashed out or otherwise injected himself into the Russia investigation. Those include his May 2017 firing of then-FBI director James Comey; his request to Comey three months earlier to drop an investigation into his administration’s national security adviser Michael Flynn; and his subsequent efforts to have Mueller fired.
In their memo, the two officials, Edward O’Callaghan and Steven Engel, asserted that none of those acts amount to criminal obstruction of justice and said evidence suggested that Trump took the steps he did “not for an illegal purpose” but because he believed the investigation was politically motivated and hampering his ability to govern.
In the case of Comey’s firing, for instance, they wrote that the “driving force” was anger over Comey’s refusal to publicly declare that the FBI was not investigating Trump himself rather than an effort by Trump to derail the investigation.
And in other instances, they said, none of Trump’s requests or directives to “change the supervision of the investigation” — including telling his White House counsel to engineer Mueller’s firing — was ever actually carried out.
“After the President provided his direction, in each instance, the orders were not carried out,” the memo states. “Of course, it is true that an act may constitute an attempt or an endeavor, even if unsuccessful. But the facts that the President could have given these directions himself, and did not remove any subordinate for failing to convey his directions, weigh against finding an intent to obstruct justice.”
They argued that the facts in the Trump investigation did not match up with any other prior obstruction prosecutions. Most of the obstruction cases cited by Mueller, they said, involved instances in which there was an inherently wrongful effort to hide or destroy evidence or to thwart the investigation of an underlying crime. Those factors do not exist here, they wrote.
“The Report identifies no obstruction case that the Department has pursued under remotely similar circumstances, and we have not identified any either,” the lawyers wrote, referring to Mueller’s report.
The department released the memo on Wednesday following an appeals court ruling from last week that said the document had been improperly withheld from a government watchdog group, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, that had sued for it.
In a statement Wednesday, the group criticized the memo as presenting a “breathtakingly generous view of the law and facts for Donald Trump.”
“It significantly twists the facts and the law to benefit Donald Trump and does not comport with a serious reading of the law of obstruction of justice or the facts as found by Special Counsel Mueller,” the statement said.
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Follow Eric Tucker on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/etuckerAP
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| 2022-09-20T22:00:29Z
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SIOUX FALLS, S.D. (AP) — A South Dakota ethics board’s finding that Gov. Kristi Noem may have engaged in misconduct by intervening in her daughter’s application for a real estate appraiser license isn’t likely the last word on the matter. But exactly how much more comes out on the episode may be up to the Republican governor herself.
The state’s Government Accountability Board appears to be letting Noem decide whether to defend herself in a public hearing or simply accept an “appropriate action” that the board hasn’t detailed. It presents Noem with a choice: Stick to her defense that she has done nothing wrong and fight the allegations in a public hearing or let the matter quietly die while accepting the board’s action.
How Noem handles the matter may not dent her prospects for reelection this year in a race where she’s heavily favored to win a second term. But it may be important down the road for a politician who has methodically positioned herself to move up in national politics, including for a potential 2024 presidential run.
So far, Noem has chosen to fight — at least in the public sphere. Her reelection campaign spokesman, Ian Fury, lashed out at the board after it moved against her Monday, calling the board’s action “illegal” and portraying the complaints against her as the work of an embittered political enemy. They were filed last year by Jason Ravnsborg, the former Republican attorney general, as he faced pressure from Noem to resign after he struck and killed a pedestrian with his car in 2020.
But neither her office nor her campaign has answered questions on whether she will fight the allegations through a contested case hearing before the board, which was created in 2017 and has never handled a case like Noem’s. Such a proceeding would allow the board’s three retired judges to publicly scrutinize how she took a hands-on role in a state agency while it was evaluating her daughter’s application for an appraiser’s license.
As first reported by The Associated Press, Noem held a meeting in July 2020 that included her daughter, Kassidy Peters, and key decision-makers in Peters’ licensure just days after the agency had moved to deny a license. After the meeting, Peters got another opportunity to demonstrate she could meet federal standards and was ultimately awarded the license.
By accepting the board’s action, Noem could avoid a public hearing over an episode that has drawn condemnation from government ethics experts, her political rivals and even some Republican lawmakers. Ravnsborg has said that it was concern from lawmakers that prompted him to send the complaint to the board.
“We’ll have to wait until the governor’s office makes a decision,” said Gene Kean, a current member of the Government Accountability Board who was appointed after serving more than two decades as a state circuit court judge and chairing the state Judges Association. “That’s sort of a linchpin in this thing.”
But giving up the fight also could have political fallout for Noem, said Alex Conant, a GOP strategist who previously worked as the communications director for Marco Rubio’s 2016 presidential campaign.
“If she doesn’t have a good explanation or is unable to pivot, it could be something that follows her,” Conant said.
The board hasn’t publicly said what action it may take against the governor. Its options in state law allow for a reprimand, a directive to do community service or coursework, as well as other “informal” resolutions that the governor would have to agree to. Statutes don’t describe what the community service or “coursework” might be.
John Pelissero, a scholar at the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics at Santa Clara University, said it’s “unusual” for an ethics board not to publicly announce the action it takes against an accused official.
“It lacks transparency if they do not announce the level of accountability,” he said. “That has the potential to undermine the public’s confidence in the accountability board and in state government generally.”
Meanwhile, the ethics board took another action Monday that holds the potential of not just a finding of ethical misconduct, but illegality. The board asked the state’s attorney general to investigate Noem’s practice of flying on state airplanes to gatherings hosted by political groups like the Republican Jewish Coalition and the National Rifle Association. State law bars the aircraft from being used for anything other than state business, though Noem has said she was acting as an ambassador for the state.
Noem’s gubernatorial challenger, Democratic state Rep. Jamie Smith, pounced on the issue Tuesday and called for Attorney General Mark Vargo to recuse himself and appoint a special prosecutor.
Vargo played a prominent role in the conflict between Noem and Ravnsborg earlier this year by leading the impeachment prosecution against Ravnsborg in the Senate over his actions and accounting of the 2020 crash that killed a pedestrian. After senators convicted Ravnsborg on charges including one that alleged he misled investigators, and removed him from office, Noem — who had pressed for impeachment — named Vargo as interim attorney general.
Vargo said this week he hadn’t made the decision on whether to recuse himself from the state airplanes probe, even as he issued a statement saying any investigation would remain confidential.
Pelissero, the ethics expert, agreed, saying that there was already a perception of a clear conflict of interest. And David Cleveland, a professor at the University of Minnesota Law School who specializes in legal ethics, referred to rules of professional conduct that ban lawyers from cases where they have a conflict of interest or stand to gain personally.
Even some Republican lawmakers said Vargo should recuse himself.
“I personally think it’s only appropriate for him to immediately recuse himself and appoint a special counsel,” said Republican Rep. Scott Odenback. “So that there’s a continued faith and trust in the process that you are held accountable no matter who you are.”
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| 2022-09-20T22:00:36Z
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WASHINGTON (AP) — Former Interior secretary Ryan Zinke lied to investigators about conversations he had with lobbyists, lawmakers and other officials regarding a bid by two Indian tribes to operate a casino in Connecticut, the department’s internal watchdog said Wednesday.
Zinke, now the Republican nominee for a new House seat in western Montana, made statements to investigators “with the overall intent to mislead them,” a report by Inspector General Mark Greenblatt said.
Both Zinke and his former chief of staff, Scott Hommel, “ presented an inaccurate version of the circumstances in which (Interior) made key decisions” on the casino project, the report said. “As a result, we concluded that Secretary Zinke and (Hommel) did not comply with their duty of candor when questioned.”
Zinke’s campaign could not immediately be reached for comment. But a letter from Zinke’s attorney, included in the report, said the finding that Zinke lacked candor was “wrong and without merit.”
In comments to investigators, Zinke called the report’s timing — less than three months before the November election — “disturbing and improper.” He asked that the report’s release be delayed until after the election. Greenblatt, who was nominated by former President Donald Trump, denied Zinke’s request, saying a delay “could be perceived as a political purpose and would be inconsistent with our typical processes.”
In an Aug. 3 letter from the law firm Schertler, Onorato, Mead & Sears, Zinke’s attorney called the IG’s report “distorted and misleading” and said it “fails to clarify that Secretary Zinke did not adopt the position of any lobbyist for or against the (casino) project.” The lawyer’s name is redacted in the IG report.
Zinke was accused of acting improperly on a request by the Mashantucket Pequot and Mohegan tribes in Connecticut to open a casino on non-tribal land in East Windsor, Connecticut. The request required federal approval. The proposed site was close to a casino planned by Las Vegas-based MGM Resorts in nearby Springfield, Massachusetts. The MGM casino opened in 2018.
Zinke did not approve or reject the tribes’ request, instead sending it back to the tribes in September 2017.
The lack of action led to a federal ethics investigation, one of several against Zinke, who served as Interior secretary from March 2017 to January 2019. The state of Connecticut and the tribes also filed a lawsuit in 2017, alleging that improper and undue political influence, including from MGM, was behind the decision not to sign off on the agreements.
Among those Zinke talked to during his deliberations was then-Sen. Dean Heller, R-Nevada, who told investigators he asked Zinke not to approve the tribes’ request. Heller said he believed Zinke lacked authority over the project because gaming would not occur on tribal lands. He also said representatives of MGM explained to him how approval of the request would allow the tribes to open a casino only 13 miles away from — and in direct competition with — the Springfield site.
Both Zinke and MGM have denied any wrongdoing. In a 2019 interview with The Associated Press, Zinke also denied reports that he may have lied to Interior’s inspector general, saying he was asked twice about the casino decision and was truthful both times.
The inspector general’s office ultimately shifted its focus from the casino decision to whether Zinke and Hommel, his chief of staff, were truthful in their statements.
Zinke’s Democratic opponent, Monica Tranel, tweeted that “one of the most common refrains I hear is that voters want someone in Congress they can trust. Based on his actions, it’s clear we can’t trust Ryan Zinke.”
The Connecticut tribes ultimately decided to set aside plans for the jointly owned casino, citing the need to focus on their two existing casinos that have been hit hard by the coronavirus pandemic.
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Associated Press writer Susan Haigh in Hartford, Conn., contributed to this report.
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| 2022-09-20T22:00:51Z
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For Nick Marcil, the cancellation of $10,000 of his student loans could mean at last moving out of his parents’ house.
Marcil, 24, studied at a Pennsylvania state college, earned scholarships and worked jobs while pursuing degrees in education but still owed $18,000 before Wednesday’s action by the Biden administration to erase some student loans.
“I feel like if I don’t have that burden, I’d be more likely to, you know, try to move out — try to have, you know, my own place,” said Marcil, who lives in a Philadelphia suburb.
For borrowers like Marcil — including millions whose entire debt will be wiped out — the decision means new freedom to move, start a family or keep a low-paying but fulfilling job. But for many others, the long-awaited plan brings bitterness and frustration.
Many student borrowers feel left out, perhaps because they didn’t qualify for federal loans and had to rely on private loans, which won’t be forgiven. Other Americans resent the break current debtors will receive because they already paid off their debts, worked to avoid college loans or oppose the move on philosophical grounds.
Then there are the systemic effects. Some inflation-watchers worry new spending power for borrowers will drive up prices even more. The loan forgiveness is estimated to cost the government more than $300 billion, according to an analysis from the Penn Wharton Budget Model. And the relief does nothing to address the ballooning cost of college.
Frustration may be greatest for the more than half a million people owing upwards of $200,000 in federal loans. For those borrowers, $10,000 to $20,000 seems out-of-touch with the exorbitant cost of American higher education. Average in-state college tuition last year cost more than $10,000, and the average private college charged $37,000 a year.
Christian Smith, 32, will owe more than $60,000 when she finishes her undergraduate degree at the University of Colorado Denver next year. That’s roughly equivalent to her household’s annual income. “It’s overwhelming,” she said.
Smith, who works full time doing student outreach for the Young Invincibles, a nonprofit that advocates for college students and young people, estimates that she and her partner will both pay a combined $900 a month to service their student loans once she graduates.
“We talk about buying a house, but it just doesn’t seem like anything I’ll ever be able to do,” she said.
Having a child also feels painfully out of reach. Smith plans to put off motherhood until she’s paid off her school debt.
“I was poor growing up, and I don’t want that for my child,” she said. “I don’t want to say you can’t attend that field trip or you have to wear hand-me-down clothes that the other children make fun of.”
If President Joe Biden had chosen to relieve more student debt, it would have a bigger impact, she said, especially for Black women like her. Statistics show they hold a larger share of student debt than white graduates because they don’t have family wealth to help finance their education.
“If he had erased my debt, I’d pull out my Mirena tomorrow,” she said, referring to her contraceptive device.
Dallas attorney Adwoa Asante borrowed $147,000 in federal loans to attend Emory University School of Law. She graduated in 2015 and has since paid back about $15,000. With interest, she still owes $162,000 — a debt that she says has limited her career options.
Asante, who is Black, said that $10,000 of forgiveness is “better than nothing,” but complete forgiveness would go much further to improve the wealth gap between Black and white Americans.
“If the Biden administration or any governmental administration is concerned about equity, then it just doesn’t make sense to make people who can’t afford it take out money to be able to go to school,” she said.
While $10,000 or even $20,000 doesn’t seem like enough for many indebted Americans, it’s too much for some student borrowers who see the scheme as an unnecessary burden on taxpayers.
“It took both of my parents years to pay off their college debt, and now they’re being told that if they had just waited for a little while it simply would’ve vanished,” said George Washington University student Jackson Hoppe, 19.
Hoppe has his own federal student loans and expects to owe about $18,000 by the time he’s done with his degree. But he doesn’t want forgiveness.
A bailout “places an additional burden on Americans, many of whom didn’t even go to college,” Hoppe said. “Don’t take out a debt that you can’t pay off, and don’t ask other people to pay off your own debts.”
Borrowing money has been the only way for many Americans to go to college or graduate school, steps considered necessary for joining and staying in the middle class or advancing beyond it.
For Catari Giglio, financing college and joining the middle class is harder than for most Americans. Giglio’s parents are from Chile, and the family moved to Boston from Italy when she was 13.
Giglio, 20, is in the country without legal permission and doesn’t qualify for federal loans because she doesn’t have a Social Security number. She won’t receive any benefit from Biden’s debt cancellation plan.
Giglio, who expects to borrow a total of $150,000 in private loans by the end of her four years studying graphic design at Suffolk University, is already paying nearly $400 a month to pay off the 12% interest on the money she borrowed to finance her first two years of school.
“It’s frustrating. It’s 10 times harder for me to go to school, to earn money,” she said. “There’s no help for us.”
Giglio has applied for legal permanent residence in the U.S. and hopes to have more options to pay for school once she receives a green card.
She feels some regret about the obligations she’s taken on and questions the American education system that allowed her to accumulate a mountain of debt.
“To put this much financial responsibility on an 18-year-old who just got out of high school is not a responsible thing to do,” she said. “Society and schools don’t prepare us to make these types of financial decisions.”
The decision brought joy for the many whose entire debt is being forgiven.
Emily Taylor, a single mother of three in Louisiana, owes $12,000 in student loans even though she never finished the degree. As a Pell Grant recipient, she expects that all will be eliminated.
Taylor, who works in customer service, said the cancellation will allow her to start saving for the education of her children who are 14, 12 and 10.
“Knowing that I’ll be able to help my kids do it differently, and help fund their education in a way that my parents weren’t able to help fund mine, that’s a big deal,” she said.
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Associated Press writers Claire Savage in Chicago, Heather Hollingsworth in Mission, Kansas, and Arleigh Rodgers in Indianapolis contributed to this report. Savage and Rodgers are corps members for the Associated Press/Report for America Statehouse News Initiative. Report for America is a nonprofit national service program that places journalists in local newsrooms to report on undercovered issues.
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The Associated Press education team receives support from the Carnegie Corporation of New York. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
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| 2022-09-20T22:00:58Z
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Which body wipes for cleansing are best?
When you need to freshen up but don’t have access to running water, a body wipe is the next best thing. Whether on an airplane, camping or just on the go, rinse-free wipes can cleanse your face, hands and body in a pinch.
The best wipes are compact and portable. If you’re camping, select biodegradable ones that can be buried. If you’re bringing wipes on a plane or train for extended travel, look for flushable ones such as Lume Natural Deodorant Wipes.
What to know before you buy body wipes for cleansing
Uses
Body wipes are similar to baby wipes in appearance but are designed for adult hygiene. The pre-moistened, disposable towelettes cleanse the body without the use of water. They can wipe away sweat, dirt and grime. There are subcategories of body wipes specifically for the face, which cleanse the skin and remove makeup, and ones for feminine hygiene.
Texture
Consider the texture of a body-cleansing wipe. Some users like soft wipes, while others prefer more textured wipes that are rougher on the skin and can provide a deeper scrub. This exfoliating texture may be irritating to sensitive skin.
Packaging
Some users prefer individually wrapped towelettes, so you can stash one or two in your gym bag or purse. Others prefer less wasteful, resealable packs with a dispenser. Choose a multipack with a slim profile if you want to slip it into your carry-on. The downside of the packs is that the towelettes are more prone to drying out.
Size and count
Wipes come in packs of six to 72 wipes. The lower the count, the easier the wipes are to stash in a bag or suitcase. Body wipes come in a variety of sizes, from as small as 6-by-6 inches to as large as 12-by-12 inches. On the whole, body wipes are typically larger and thicker than baby wipes.
What to look for in quality body wipes for cleansing
Biodegradable
Wipes that break down in a landfill over a short period are considered biodegradable. They are safe to bury or compost. Biodegradable wipes are made of vegetable fibers, bamboo, wood pulp and cotton instead of plastic and are considered better for the environment.
Flushable
Wipes that are safe for septic systems are labeled flushable. Body-cleansing wipes, however, aren’t meant to be used as toilet paper. You can find wet wipes designed specifically for that purpose.
Scent
Many wipes contain natural or synthetic fragrances that can help mask body odor and leave you smelling good. Choose a scent you’d want to smell like since it will linger on your skin. Wipes scented with essential oils are less irritating than ones with chemical fragrances.
Unscented
Unscented wipes don’t contain fragrance and are often labeled hypoallergenic. If you have sensitive skin, a fragrance-free wipe is less likely to cause irritation and skin reactions than a scented one.
Deodorizing
Select body wipes are made especially for the underarm area. There are not only good for wiping away excess sweat, but they also contain deodorizing and sometimes antiperspirant ingredients. Look for one that’s alcohol-free to prevent stinging in that sensitive area.
Ingredients
Body wipes contain added skin-friendly ingredients. Moisturizing ingredients such as shea butter and coconut oil soften the skin. Aloe vera helps soothe the skin, and tea tree oil is antibacterial. Vitamin E is also a common, skin-nourishing added ingredient.
How much you can expect to spend on body wipes for cleansing
Body-cleansing wipes cost between $0.10-$0.87 per wipe. Individually wrapped wipes and large wipes are on the higher end of that spectrum.
Body wipes for cleansing FAQ
What are some scenarios for which body-cleansing wipes are helpful?
A. They are useful for wiping away sweat on hot days or before a meeting. Use them after working out at the gym if you’re taking off to meet someone for brunch or after work if you’re meeting a date. Wipes are designed for convenient on-the-go cleansing needs but are also helpful for older adults or those with limited mobility for whom bathing presents difficulties.
Can I reuse a body-cleansing wipe?
A. No, these wipes are for single-use only. You may even need more than one wipe for your cleansing needs. After use, dispose of the wipe or wipes in the trash. Flushable wipes can be flushed down the toilet if you have access to one. Don’t bury or compost a non-biodegradable wipe.
What’s the best body wipe for cleansing to buy?
Top body wipes for cleansing
What you need to know: These deodorizing wipes work exceptionally well on pits, private parts and feet for all-over freshening.
What you’ll love: The wipes are biodegradable and flushable. The clean scent is long-lasting, and the wipes eliminate body odor, even after exercise. They are gentle on sensitive skin. The formula contains deodorizing ingredients without irritating aluminum or baking soda.
What you should consider: The wipes are small at only 6-by-6 inches.
Where to buy: Sold by Amazon
Top body wipes for cleansing for the money
What you need to know: A moisturizing formula that’s also non-comedogenic, these popular wipes are great for sensitive skin.
What you’ll love: The wipes are hypoallergenic and gentle enough to use on the face. They are soft and smooth, and can also remove makeup.
What you should consider: While these wipes can be used on the body, their size and formula are geared more toward the facial area. Most sensitive users don’t experience any irritation with these.
Where to buy: Sold by Amazon and Ulta Beauty
Worth checking out
Surviveware Biodegradable Wet Wipes
What you need to know: These heavy-duty body wipes are the perfect companion for camping and the outdoors.
What you’ll love: These biodegradable wipes don’t contain alcohol and feature added aloe vera and vitamin E for hypoallergenic cleansing. They’re popular with athletes, and their 8-by-12-inch size can cleanse the entire body.
What you should consider: The dispenser makes it difficult to pull out just one towelette at a time, and they can become wadded.
Where to buy: Sold by Amazon
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Ana Sanchez writes for BestReviews. BestReviews has helped millions of consumers simplify their purchasing decisions, saving them time and money.
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Which Canon fisheye lens is best?
When seeking a lens that delivers nontraditional photographs and fits your Canon DSLR camera, a Canon fisheye lens is a great tool. This type of lens distorts the edges of the photographic scene. It creates a round photo rather than a traditional rectangular photo when using the most extreme types of fisheye lenses.
Canon offers many different fisheye lenses, as well as lenses that have extreme wide-angle capabilities. The Canon EF-S 10-22 Millimeter DSLR Lens offers versatility and a strong autofocus system.
What to know before you buy a Canon fisheye lens
What is a fisheye lens?
When shopping for the best Canon lens with fisheye capabilities, you should pay attention to the minimum focal length of the lens. Any lens with a focal length setting of 18 mm or less can deliver fisheye capabilities.
Lenses with focal length settings of less than 35 mm are wide-angle lenses that also deliver some distortion at the photo’s edges. Some people consider a wide-angle lens to be a fisheye lens, although the level of distortion is significantly less than with the fisheye lens.
Compatibility with your camera
When you purchase a Canon-branded fisheye lens, it will only fit a compatible Canon camera. The lens is a separate piece of hardware that connects to the camera.
Some Canon cameras can accept non-Canon branded lenses. If you purchase a third-party fisheye lens, make sure it explicitly lists compatibility with your Canon camera model.
Fisheye lenses made to fit Canon DSLR cameras will not fit Canon mirrorless cameras (and vice versa) without a special adapter.
How does a fisheye lens fit your camera?
The Canon fisheye lens fits onto the lens housing of the Canon camera. The lens has threads that match the threads on the lens housing. You’ll line up the marker on the lens with the marker on the camera, slide the lens into the housing, and twist the lens half a turn to lock it in place.
What to look for in a quality Canon fisheye lens
Level of fisheye distortion
To achieve the round photograph that photographers most commonly associate with a fisheye lens, you need a focal length of 10 mm or less. This end of this type of lens often has a rounded bubble design in the glass versus the flat lens glass for a standard lens.
A lens with a focal length between 11 mm and 18 mm generates a fisheye image, but the image likely will not be fully round.
Zoom capabilities
A zoom lens can achieve multiple focal lengths, while a fixed lens can only achieve one focal length. Commonly, zoom lenses with fisheye capabilities also can shoot wide-angle photos.
The downside to picking a fisheye lens with zoom capabilities is that the fisheye images may not be quite as sharp as with a fixed fisheye lens.
Sharp focus
Because of the significant distortion in a fisheye photograph, your lens needs to be able to focus sharply. The good news is the majority of Canon lenses have a high-quality design that yields extremely sharp images with accurate focus.
How much you can expect to spend on a Canon fisheye lens
As with any lens, Canon fisheye lenses have an extremely wide price range. They can cost anywhere from $100-$2,000 or more.
Canon fisheye lens FAQ
Are Canon fisheye lenses good to use?
A. Fisheye lenses from Canon cannot record standard photographs clearly, as they highly distort the edges of the image. A true fisheye lens delivers a round image because of this distortion, which is nice for specialty photos.
Are fisheye lenses common?
A. No, fisheye lenses are not common. Most photographs that you will shoot require a standard lens. Purchasing a fisheye lens from Canon means you are interested in shooting specialty photos, so this lens is not as commonly available as standard lenses.
What’s the best Canon fisheye lens to buy?
Top Canon fisheye lens
What you need to know: With zoom capabilities in this lens, photographers can receive various focal lengths for shooting with a fisheye or wide-angle distortion.
What you’ll love: With a 10 mm focal length setting at the low end of this fisheye zoom lens, you can receive significant distortive capabilities. This lens delivers a strong autofocus system, which is essential when using a fisheye lens.
What you should consider: This is an expensive piece of hardware, carrying a higher price than an entry-level Canon DSLR camera body.
Where to buy: Sold by Amazon
Top Canon fisheye lens for the money
What you need to know: It’s challenging to find a zoom fisheye lens for a lower price than this model, especially a lens that carries the highly trustworthy Canon brand name.
What you’ll love: This lens includes stabilization, helping you shoot sharper photos without having a tripod available. It delivers excellent autofocus and manual focus capabilities.
What you should consider: It doesn’t quite have the same zoom range for shooting wide-angle photos as the number one pick on our list.
Where to buy: Sold by Amazon
Worth checking out
What you need to know: When you want one of the most extreme focal lengths available, this zoom lens has an extremely low focal length setting at 8 mm, creating outstanding fisheye effects.
What you’ll love: This is an extreme fisheye lens, allowing you to create impressive photos that other lenses cannot duplicate. With its zoom capabilities, it offers some versatility.
What you should consider: This is an expensive lens, especially for one that cannot create images other than fisheye photos.
Where to buy: Sold by Amazon
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Kyle Schurman writes for BestReviews. BestReviews has helped millions of consumers simplify their purchasing decisions, saving them time and money.
Copyright 2022 BestReviews, a Nexstar company. All rights reserved.
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| 2022-09-20T22:01:13Z
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Which wall-mounted drying rack is best?
Looking to save space and money when you dry your clothing? A wall-mounted drying rack kills two birds with one stone by saving you space and economizing on the costs of using a dryer. It also keeps your clothes out of the elements so they don’t get sun damaged, as they might on an outdoor clothesline. For a top-tier mounted rack that will maximize your hanging space, check out the Aero-W Stainless Steel Folding and Drying Rack.
What to know before you buy a wall-mounted drying rack
Dimensions
Unlike standing drying racks that can fold up and be stored, mounted racks have to be attached to your wall (typically with a drill, but sometimes also with nails or other adjustable attachments). Because of this, they’re a permanent fixture once they’re installed. It pays to be sure that the dimensions of the mounted rack will fit your space. Otherwise, they might end up being an overhead hazard, blocking your other furniture, or becoming a pain to use.
Material
The three most common materials for mounted racks are:
- Plastic: Cheap, sturdy, and lightweight, plastic is also rustproof and works well to hang small items of clothing. However, it may not be heavy-duty enough to hold up large amounts of clothing. It’s also not the prettiest material.
- Metal: The most popular of materials for mounted racks, metal makes for a sturdy base for your heavier clothes to hang from. Make sure it’s rustproof.
- Wood: While it’s nice on the eyes, wood is both expensive and potentially prone to damage and even rot if it’s not been sealed properly. It may also bleed onto your clothes if it’s been stained poorly.
Foldability
Some wall-mounted drying racks can fold back into the wall, saving you space when it’s not in use. Others remain as is, and may take up more space, which might not be a problem if they’ll be in an otherwise unused part of your laundry room.
What to look for in a quality wall-mounted drying rack
Number of racks
Some drying racks have just one rack to hang clothes from; others offer two, three or more. For lighter clothing, you can use multiple racks without weighing your wall down; for blankets, a single rack is best. You don’t want to put too much weight on your rack, as it might pull out of the wall.
Colors and styles
While the practicality of a drying rack matters most, choosing a stylish option matters if you will place it in a visible part of your home. Finding racks with chic colors or attractive sealed wood can ensure that your mounted rack won’t turn into an eyesore.
Adjustability
Racks with adjustable lengths and widths can help give you the flexibility to hang larger or smaller pieces as you wish. Be sure to check that your space can accommodate even the extended length or width of an adjustable rack.
How much you can expect to spend on a wall-mounted drying rack
A mounted drying rack costs $25-$150. Plastic is the least expensive, typically costing $25-$35. Metal and wood can cost $40-$150, depending on the size, quality of the material, and the design.
Wall-mounted drying rack FAQ
How do I avoid getting mold when drying my clothing indoors?
A. Being careful with how you dry your clothing inside your home can save you from the headache of mold removal. Try these tricks:
- Use a dehumidifier in tandem with an indoor drying rack. This will rid your space of excess humidity.
- Consider opening the windows and getting some good ventilation into the room, if possible.
- Don’t layer clothing items on top of each other. Aside from getting wrinkled, they won’t dry properly, increasing the chance of trapped moisture.
Will I damage my walls by installing a wall-mounted drying rack?
A. While a mounted drying rack is a permanent installment that will need to be drilled or otherwise affixed to your wall, it doesn’t have to cause irreparable damage. Here are a few tips:
- For starters, make sure to never drill into a stud in your wall.
- Next, check to make sure you won’t be drilling or hammering into a cable in your wall.
- Finally, ensure that the weight of the mounted rack won’t be too heavy for the material of your wall to hold up.
What’s the best wall-mounted drying rack to buy?
Top wall-mounted drying rack
Aero-W Stainless Steel Folding and Drying Rack
What you need to know: Built to last, this high-quality metal drying rack looks smart while saving you precious space.
What you’ll love: The stainless-steel build is rustproof, made to hold up even the heaviest of your garments and blankets, and is easy to use. It can fold back into itself, keeping your room looking neat when the rack is not in use. There are 60-pound and 45-pound capacity options.
What you should consider: Some buyers reported being confused or unsure about the installation instructions.
Where to buy: Sold by Amazon
Top wall-mounted drying rack for the money
Bartnelli Accordion Wall-Mounted Drying Rack
What you need to know: For a fraction of the price of most metal hangers, this solid and stylish mounted rack makes the most of the space in your laundry room.
What you’ll love: Rustproof metal can hold up to 60 pounds of clothing while being small and light enough to fold back into the wall when not in use. Customers love its durability and ease of installation.
What you should consider: Some customers reported using the template to mark hole placements in your walls caused a problematic installation.
Where to buy: Sold by Amazon
Worth checking out
Danya B Accordion Clothes Drying Rack
What you need to know: Chic painted wood and a large, rustic design put this mounted drying rack on another level.
What you’ll love: Not only can you dry clothes with the collapsible accordion racks, but you can also hang coats, umbrellas and such on the metal hooks beneath. This drying rack is a multipurpose piece designed to be installed directly on the wall.
What you should consider: It may be too bulky for some. The price is on the highest end for mounted drying racks.
Where to buy: Sold by Amazon
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Micayla Mead writes for BestReviews. BestReviews has helped millions of consumers simplify their purchasing decisions, saving them time and money.
Copyright 2022 BestReviews, a Nexstar company. All rights reserved.
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| 2022-09-20T22:01:28Z
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Which cooling pad for dogs is best?
As we continue to see record-high temperatures all over the world, it’s ever important that your dog can stay cool. Since their only methods of cooling are panting and releasing heat through their paws and nose, it’s much harder for them to cool off.
The best way to help them is through the use of a cooling pad, such as the Green Pet Shop Dog Cooling Mat. It doesn’t need to be refrigerated, and it comes in several sizes to fit any dog.
What to know before you buy a cooling pad for dogs
Cooling pad types
There are three types of cooling pads for dogs.
- Gel pads are the most common. They’re the easiest to use and maintain. They use a special gel with a cooling effect that’s activated by the pressure of your dog laying down, so you don’t need to pre-cool them. If your dog has been on it for a few hours, you’ll likely need to give the pad about a break for 15 to 30 minutes.
- Water pads are another options, which you need to fill with cold water right before you use them. These can be messy, especially if punctured, and you shouldn’t freeze them.
- Ice pads are a third option, which you can freeze. However, they can be too cold when you remove them from the freezer, so you should place an insulating layer such as a towel or blanket on top of it before your dog lays down.
Size
Cooling pads for dogs come in many sizes, so you can get one that fits your dog. Some cooling pads use weight ranges as a guide for what size pad to buy.
Depending on your dog, you may not be sure which size is best. However, in these situations, know that it’s always better to get a pad that’s a little too big than one that’s too small.
Color
Most cooling pads for dogs are blue. However, if you look long enough, you can find other colors, such as pink or gray.
What to look for in a quality cooling pad for dogs
Cooling time
The best cooling pads for dogs have long cooling times, and most pads offer cooling times of around two to four hours. However, these times can be affected by a variety of factors, such as where you’re using the pad and how old it is.
Ease of cleaning
Dogs get dirty, and they also have accidents. As such, the best cooling pads are machine-washable.
Nonslip base
Chances are your dog won’t gently step onto and off the cooling pad. As such, a pad without a nonslip base can slide around. This can be annoying for your dog and may even cause them to stumble and fall. However, you can always weigh it down or buy a nonslip pad to put under it.
How much you can expect to spend on a cooling pad for dogs
They can cost as little as $5 or as much as $100. Pads for under $20 usually aren’t great for more than occasional use. Better pads for small-to-medium-sized dogs cost up to $40-$50, while big-sized cooling pads typically start around $50.
Cooling pad for dogs FAQ
Can I use a cooling pad outside?
A. Most cooling pads can be safely used inside and outside. However, using them outside lowers their efficiency as the pad absorbs the heat around it and is even less effective if it’s placed in direct sunlight. Additionally, if it’s hot enough outside that your dog needs to be on a cooling pad to be safe, it’s probably too hot for it to be outside at all.
What do I do if my dog won’t use the cooling pad?
A. If your dog refuses to use it, there’s not much you can do. You can use positive reinforcement to reward them for laying on it, like treats or praise. But if it doesn’t respond to this, you’ll likely need to command it to use it, especially if it doesn’t naturally go to it when hot.
What is the best cooling pad for dogs to buy?
Top cooling pad for dogs
The Green Pet Shop Dog Cooling Mat
What you need to know: This is one of the simplest and most effective cooling pads out there.
What you’ll love: The gel works to naturally pull heat away from your dog. The cooling effect can last for up to three hours, and it recharges in as little as 15 to 20 minutes. It comes in five sizes.
What you should consider: If it isn’t used regularly enough, the gel can harden, rendering it useless. Dogs with sharp nails may puncture it.
Where to buy: Sold by Amazon, Chewy and PetSmart
Top cooling pad for dogs for the money
What you need to know: This is an excellent budget pad for occasional use.
What you’ll love: The exterior has self-cooling ice silk fabric, and the interior absorbs heat. The cooling pad is machine-washable, and the interior is absorbent, so it can double as a potty pad. It comes in three sizes and three colors.
What you should consider: There are no anti-slip features, so it slides around easily; some customers placed weights on the corners to keep it still.
Where to buy: Sold by Amazon
Worth checking out
Snagle Paw Self-Cooling Mat for Dogs
What you need to know: If you need to cover a lot of space, order one of these cooling pads.
What you’ll love: It uses ice silk cotton for the cooling effect. The inner layers are absorbent and hold up to 10 cups worth of liquid, plus it’s machine-washable for easy cleaning. It comes in 60- by 48- or 60- by 72-inch sizes.
What you should consider: Some purchasers found it didn’t cool as effectively as it should, and they considered it more of a potty pad with a bonus cooling feature.
Where to buy: Sold by Amazon
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Jordan Woika writes for BestReviews. BestReviews has helped millions of consumers simplify their purchasing decisions, saving them time and money.
Copyright 2022 BestReviews, a Nexstar company. All rights reserved.
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| 2022-09-20T22:01:35Z
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Peloton strikes deal with Amazon
Researchers are constantly finding additional benefits to exercising. Earlier this year, The Hill reported that exercising can take care of “the inflammation that leads to elevated blood glucose and the development and progression of diabetes and clinical depression” that is a symptom of long COVID-19.
In a groundbreaking move, Peloton announced that, for the first time, the company will partner with another retailer to help broaden its customer base. As of today, you can buy Peloton equipment and apparel on Amazon.
In this article: Original Peloton Bike, Peloton Guide and Peloton Bike Mat
A brief history of Peloton
Peloton Interactive was founded a decade ago. After raising nearly 4 million dollars in seed money throughout 2012, the company sold its first bike for $1,500 on Kickstarter in 2013. A year later, the company released its first internet-connected bike. This revolutionary idea made it possible for people to take studio-quality classes in their own homes. There was an explosion in sales. The Peloton bike became so popular that the brand name became synonymous with the product, much in the way facial tissues are called Kleenex.
Over the next few years, the beloved fitness company grew. It released a treadmill, strength training accessories, fitness apparel and more. A brand once known slowly for its innovative exercise bikes became a comprehensive yet exclusive, one-stop supplier for everything you need to work out in your own home.
A long series of tiny troubles plagued the company
In 2019, the company had its first ripple of trouble for using copyrighted music without proper synchronization licenses in its videos. Then, a controversial ad that was supposed to be a celebration of personal achievement was interpreted by some to be superficial. Also, a couple of prominent TV show plot lines portrayed Peloton in a less than flattering light, which created even more trouble for the company.
Peloton’s hardships translated to savings for the customer
While the high-quality of Peloton’s products never diminished, the constant struggles eventually impacted the company. This caused major shake-ups that culminated in CEO John Foley stepping down from his position earlier this year. This began a period of Peloton testing new price structures. The consumer was treated to purchasing options that could result in a savings of several hundred dollars. Even better, starting today, Peloton products are available on Amazon. This partnership is a trial run for the company, but if it proves to be successful, it may open doors for the deep discounts and superior service that Amazon is known for.
Top Peloton products you can find on Amazon today
This is the game-changing cardio bike that Peloton is known for. It has everything you need to have a high-end studio workout experience in your own home.
Sold by Amazon
Strength training is essential to any fitness program. This AI-enabled device uses advanced technology to create an idealized strength-training program for you.
Sold by Amazon
To get the best workout on your Peloton bike, you need an appropriate pair of shoes. These lightweight offerings quickly clip onto your pedals so you can experience the maximum benefit of your workout.
Sold by Amazon
This second option for cycling shoes features three adjustable straps so you can get a secure fit in seconds. They have a slightly lower price than the Altos cycling shoe.
Sold by Amazon
The wireless Peloton heart rate band gives you an in-the-moment assessment of your exercise intensity. It has a comfortable fit and provides up to 10 hours of battery life.
Sold by Amazon
It’s best to put a mat beneath your bike to keep it secure and stationary and to protect your floor. This mat is 72 inches by 36 inches to give you plenty of room to position your bike.
Sold by Amazon
Peloton Reversible Workout Mat
Just like your bike, it’s best for you to work out on a mat. No matter what your workout preference is, this mat is rugged enough to provide a durable cushion.
Sold by Amazon
Besides bikes, Peloton has dumbbells. The square design of these weights means they will never roll away when you set them down.
Sold by Amazon
For a lighter workout, these weights are ideal. They have a sweat-proof grip and come in 1-pound, 2-pound or 3-pound options.
Sold by Amazon
Peloton’s glass water bottle keeps your water pure while you work out. The nonslip silicone sleeve helps protect your bottle from minor damage.
Sold by Amazon
You can literally step up your yoga game with these EVA foam yoga blocks. Use them to modify your poses as necessary.
Sold by Amazon
This 6-foot adjustable yoga strap is used to increase your range of motion and build your confidence. It is made of durable nylon with corrosion-resistant zinc alloy rings.
Sold by Amazon
Peloton Women’s Tulip Run Short
These 4-inch women’s shorts feature a zipper closure and are made of 86% polyester and 14% spandex.
Sold by Amazon
Peloton Men’s Lined Turin Short
The classic, easy fit of these 8-inch shorts ensures a comfortable workout for men.
Sold by Amazon
If you prefer a tight fit while working out, these 7-inch shorts for women are seamless to provide a snug, comfortable fit against your skin.
Sold by Amazon
Peloton Women’s Cadent Sports Bra
Support is crucial when exercising. This sports bra has removable pads, a scoop neck and an open back for a tight, close-body fit.
Sold by Amazon
Peloton Men’s Striving Short Sleeve
Sometimes, all you want is a classic workout T-shirt that has a floating fit. This offering gives you exactly that.
Sold by Amazon
If you’re doing it right, you’re going to sweat. These absorbent towels will get you dry when the workout is over.
Sold by Amazon
There’s nothing that can bring a workout to a grinding halt faster than sweat in the eye. This one-size-fits-all headband will prevent that.
Sold by Amazon
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Allen Foster writes for BestReviews. BestReviews has helped millions of consumers simplify their purchasing decisions, saving them time and money.
Copyright 2022 BestReviews, a Nexstar company. All rights reserved.
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| 2022-09-20T22:01:43Z
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Formula One has multiple inquiries from potential team owners who have taken a more behind-the-scenes approach than Michael Andretti, who has been “quite vocal” in his desire to expand the current grid, F1’s CEO said Wednesday.
Andretti has petitioned to expand the current F1 grid to 22 cars to accommodate Andretti Global, which he’s billing as a true American team. Andretti has taken that route after attempts to purchase an existing F1 team fell apart late last year.
He said this week he’s building a 575,000 square-foot facility on roughly 90 acres in Fishers, Indiana, to house Andretti Global. But he’s still no closer to landing an F1 team and Domenicali offered very little update specific to Andretti.
“The status of Formula One, it is not a problem of quantity,” Domenicali said. “It’s a matter of understanding not only the ones who have a bigger, louder voice, but there will be other people because Andretti was quite vocal about his request.
“But there are others that have done the same in a different way. So we will listen not only to Andretti, but to others that are respecting the silence on trying to be more productive on proving who they are and respecting the protocol.”
At issue is what value — if any — comes with expanding the current 20-car grid.
Mercedes head Toto Wolff has been vehemently against expansion and argued it will only decrease profits as the pot would be split between 11 teams instead of 10. But McLaren boss Zak Brown has argued adding the Andretti name would increase North American interest and signing U.S.-based sponsors based on Andretti’s participation would compensate for any dilution to the purse.
Wolff has dismissed the notion the Andretti name brings any value to F1. Mario Andretti is the 1978 F1 world champion; Michael Andretti spent one unremarkable season driving in the series.
And even though Andretti has had discussions with Renault about entering F1, Wolff has only been supportive of a potential Audi-backed effort.
“Andretti is a great name, and I think they have done exceptional things in the US,” Wolff recently said. “But this is sport and this is business and we need to understand what is it that you can provide to the sport.”
The resistance has irritated Mario Andretti, who on Twitter responded to a question asking if Wolff is too powerful for F1 with: “This needed to be said; it’s about time.”
Domenicali on Wednesday said that Wolff has earned his respect in F1 and is a credible voice in the series. He also indicated all the back-and-forth on the Andretti issue is a moot point because the decision will be made by a governing body and not Wolff and the current team principals.
“Mario, I know him very, very well, and he is trying to present his idea in a way that he thought is the right way to do that,” Domenicali said. “But I do believe there is a governance in place and the decision has to follow the process and the protocol that is in place.
“Mario is very vocal, Michael is, too. We need to respect that we may have a difference of opinions, but at the end of the day it is a matter of following the protocol and there is someone that is to make the final decision.”
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More AP auto racing: https://apnews.com/hub/auto-racing and https://twitter.com/AP_Sports
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LOS ANGELES (AP) — Kobe Bryant’s widow was awarded $16 million as part of a $31 million jury verdict Wednesday against Los Angeles County for deputies and firefighters sharing grisly photos of the NBA star, his 13-year-old daughter and other victims killed in a 2020 helicopter crash.
The nine jurors unanimously agreed with Vanessa Bryant and her attorneys that the photos invaded her privacy and caused emotional distress. She cried quietly as it was read.
The jury deliberated 4 1/2 hours before reaching the verdict on Kobe Bryant Day, which is celebrated in LA on Aug. 24 because it represents his jersey numbers — 8 and 24 — and is the day after his birthday. He would have turned 44 on Tuesday.
After the verdict, Vanessa Bryant posted a photo on Instagram of herself with her husband and daughter.
“All for you!” the caption read. “I love you! JUSTICE for Kobe and Gigi!”
An attorney for the county declined comment on the verdict outside the courtroom.
The pictures were shared mostly between employees of the LA County sheriff’s and fire departments including by some who were playing video games and attending an awards banquet. They were also seen by some of their spouses and in one case by a bartender at a bar where a deputy was drinking.
Vanessa Bryant tearfully testified during the 11-day trial that news of the photos compounded her still-raw grief a month after losing her husband and daughter, and that she still has panic attacks at the thought that they might still be out there.
“I live in fear every day of being on social media and these popping up,” she testified. “I live in fear of my daughters being on social media and these popping up.”
Her co-plaintiff Chris Chester, whose wife and daughter were also among the nine people killed in the crash, was awarded $15 million.
“We’re grateful for a jury and a judge who gave us a fair trial,” said Chester’s lawyer Jerry Jackson.
Vanessa Bryant’s attorneys did not give jurors a dollar amount they thought their client deserved, but Chester’s attorney gave them suggested guidelines that would have meant tens of millions for each plaintiff.
Vanessa Bryant and her attorney declined comment outside court Wednesday. Her face was still streaked with tears as she walked past TV cameras and dozens of reporters and climbed into an SUV.
Vanessa Bryant’s lawyer Luis Li told jurors that the close-up photos had no official or investigative purpose, and were mere “visual gossip” shared out of a gruesome curiosity.
County attorney J. Mira Hashmall argued during the trial that the photos were a necessary tool for assessing the situation.
She acknowledged that they should not have been shared with everyone who saw them. But she emphasized that the photos had never appeared publicly, and had never even been seen by the plaintiffs. She said that meant that Sheriff Alex Villanueva and other officials had taken decisive and effective action when they ordered those who had the photos to delete them.
Kobe Bryant, the former Lakers star, five-time NBA champion and member of the Basketball Hall of Fame, was traveling with Gianna and seven others to a youth basketball game when the helicopter they were aboard crashed into hills in Calabasas west of Los Angeles on Jan. 26, 2020.
Federal safety officials blamed pilot error for the crash.
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FDA concedes delays in response to baby formula shortage
WASHINGTON (AP) — The Food and Drug Administration acknowledged Tuesday that its response to the U.S. infant formula shortage was slowed by delays in processing a whistleblower complaint and test samples from the nation’s largest formula factory.
A 10-page report from the agency offers its first formal account of the factors that led to the ongoing shortage, which has forced the U.S. to airlift millions of pounds of powdered formula from overseas.
The review zeroed in on several key problems at the agency, including outdated data-sharing systems, inadequate staffing and training among its food inspectors, and poor visibility into formula supply chains and manufacturing procedures.
“For things that are critical to the public health, if you don’t have some understanding of how all the pieces fit together, then when you get into a crisis or a shortage you have a real problem,” FDA Commissioner Robert Califf told The Associated Press in an interview. “To a large extent that’s what happened here.”
Califf said the FDA will seek new authority to compel companies to turn over key information.
One consumer advocate said the evaluation doesn’t go far enough to fix the problems.
“This internal evaluation treats the symptoms of the disease rather than offering a cure,” Scott Faber of the Environmental Working Group said in a statement. “Nothing in this evaluation addresses the fragmented leadership structure that led to critical communication failures.”
The FDA report was overseen by a senior official who interviewed dozens of agency staffers. It comes nearly eight months after the FDA shuttered Abbott’s Michigan plant due to safety concerns, quickly slashing domestic production within the highly concentrated formula industry.
A company whistleblower had tried to warn the FDA of problems at the plant in September 2021, but government inspectors didn’t investigate the complaints until February after four infants became sick, resulting in two deaths. The FDA is still investigating links between those illnesses and the formula.
The FDA previously told Congress that top agency officials didn’t learn about the complaint until February because of mail delays and a failure to escalate the Abbott employee’s allegations. The new report stated that FDA’s “inadequate processes and lack of clarity related to whistleblower complaints,” may have delayed getting inspectors to the plant.
“Whistleblower complaints come into the agency in many different ways, from many different sources,” said Dr. Steven Solomon, an FDA veterinary medicine official who oversaw the review. “One of the actions we’ve already taken is to make sure that however they come into the agency, they get triaged and escalated to the right leadership levels.”
FDA inspectors collected bacterial samples from the plant for testing, but shipping issues by “third party delivery companies” delayed the results, according to the report. The FDA also faced challenges ramping up its testing capacity for cronobacter, a rare but potentially deadly bacteria repeatedly linked to outbreaks in baby formula.
The FDA also noted that it had to reschedule its initial inspection of the Abbott plant due to cases of COVID-19 among company staff. That delay came on top of earlier missed inspections because the agency pulled its inspectors from the field during the pandemic.
The report concluded by listing new resources that Congress would need to authorize to improve infant formula inspections and standards, including:
— Increased funding and hiring authority to recruit experts to FDA’s food division;
— Improved information technology to share data on FDA inspections, consumer complaints and testing results;
— New authority to compel manufacturers to turn over samples and records on manufacturing supply chains, manufacturing quality and safety.
U.S. inventories of baby formula have been improving, hitting in-stock rates above 80% last week, according to IRI, a market research firm. That’s up from a low of 69% in mid-July. The U.S. has imported the equivalent of more than 80 million bottles of formula since May, according to White House figures, and the Biden administration is working to help foreign manufacturers stay on the market long term to diversify supply.
Califf has commissioned a separate external review of FDA’s food division citing “fundamental questions about the structure, function, funding and leadership” of the program. That review is being led by former FDA commissioner Dr. Jane Henney, who led the agency during the final years of the Clinton administration.
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Follow Matthew Perrone on Twitter: @AP_FDAwriter.
___
The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
Copyright 2022 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.
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PITTSBURGH (AP) — If the goal of swinging a bat is to hit the ball hard, then Oneil Cruz did it better than anyone.
The Pittsburgh Pirates rookie recorded the hardest-hit ball in the seven years that Major League Baseball has measured exit velocity, lashing a single that came off the bat at 122.4 mph in a 14-2 loss to Atlanta on Wednesday.
Cruz stepped in to face Braves starter Kyle Wright with one on and two outs in the third when he turned on a 91 mph fastball and smashed it off the 21-foot high Clemente Wall in right field.
New York Yankees slugger Giancarlo Stanton previously had the record for the hardest-hit ball, reaching 122.2 mph in 2017 and again last year. MLB began tracking the metric in 2015.
“At the moment, I didn’t even think I hit the ball that hard,” said the 23-year-old Cruz. “When I came into the dugout, some of my teammates shared with me that I hit it 122 (mph). I smiled but deep down inside I was like, ‘Wow, I really hit that ball hard.’ Now, finding out that I broke a record, it means a lot to me. That’s something positive to take away from today’s game.”
Cruz initially thought the ball would clear the fence. Instead, it caromed to Atlanta right fielder Ronald Acuña Jr. and Cruz had no shot at extra bases. Acuña might have had an outside shot to get Cruz at first if first baseman Matt Olson had been covering the bag.
“To be honest with you, I did think it was going to go out but I did notice that it was starting to go down and about to hit the fence, that’s when I started running even harder,” Cruz said. “But I did expect it to go out. I didn’t expect it to hit the wall and come right back.”
The Pirates are in the midst of a massive overhaul, one that is relying on the 6-foot-6 Cruz. He made a brief cameo at the end of last season before arriving in the majors to stay on June 20. He’s batting .199 with 10 homers and 30 RBIs.
Despite his early struggles, Cruz’s tools have impressed Atlanta manager Brian Snitker, who said he’s glad the ball hit the wall instead of going over it, where it might have hurt someone.
Cruz has been a StatCast darling since his debut. The shortstop made the hardest recorded assist by an infielder on July 14 when he fired the ball across the diamond at 97.8 mph.
“He’s got skills, my God,” Snitker said. “You start grading tools and it’s off the charts, you know, for a big guy. I mean, that’s going to be fun to watch.”
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More AP MLB: https://apnews.com/hub/MLB and https://twitter.com/AP_Sports
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| 2022-09-20T22:02:13Z
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NEW YORK (AP) — Edwin Díaz blazing on the hill, Timmy Trumpet blaring the horn live at Citi Field — how’s that sound, Mets fans?
The NL East-leading Mets announced Wednesday that Australian musician Timmy Trumpet, who teamed with Dutch pair Blasterjaxx to create the wildly popular “Narco” that Díaz uses for his entrance song, will be at the ballpark for a game next week.
And if Díaz happens to get summoned to pitch against the Los Angeles Dodgers on Tuesday night, then Timmy Trumpet will perform the song live when the closer comes in from the bullpen.
Timmy Trumpet will throw out the first ball at the game. No doubt, fans will really be rooting for him and Díaz to combine later for a high-decibel party.
Díaz began using “Narco” as his entrance song in 2018 in Seattle and put it back in play in 2020 with the Mets. “Narco” reached No. 1 on Spotify’s Viral 50 chart this month.
Díaz has become the most dominant closer in the majors this year, firing 100 mph fastballs while striking out 97 in 49 1/3 innings and posting 28 saves with a 1.46 ERA.
A huge part of his aura is his catchy entrance song. “Narco” sets off a two-minute fiesta all around Citi Field, boosted by mascots Mr. and Mrs. Met and fans pretending to play trumpets as Díaz warms up.
“When I was in Seattle, they picked that song for me. I liked it. And when I got here, I changed it. My wife told me to put that song (on) again. People will love it,” Díaz recently said.
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More AP MLB: https://apnews.com/hub/mlb and https://twitter.com/AP_Sports
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| 2022-09-20T22:02:20Z
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ATLANTA (AP) — Tiger Woods and Rory McIlroy are bringing their own version of team golf to the PGA Tour.
A day after Woods and McIlroy announced a new media venture called TMRW Sports, they unveiled a project Wednesday that involves 18 players competing in a series of matches featuring technology as much as shot-making.
It’s called “TGL,” a tech-infused golf league that will be held in a stadium built for the occasion where fans can watch three-man teams compete in an 18-hole match — using simulators for the long shots, live shots for the shorter ones — that will take only two hours.
The league is to start in January 2024 and feature 15 regular-season matches on Monday nights, followed by the semifinals and the finals.
“For the fans, think sitting courtside at an NBA game. It’s that type of environment — music, player introductions. You’re right on top of the action as a fan,” said Mike McCarley, the former Golf Channel president who formed TMRW Sports with Woods and McIlroy and is its CEO. “You see everything play out in front of you.”
TMRW Sports — pronounced “tomorrow” — was formed to build technology-focused projects with a progressive approach to sports, entertainment and media.
Among the investors is Dick Ebersol, the retired chairman of NBC Sports whose many contribution to sports on TV include Sunday Night Football. He worked with McCarley at NBC.
“Since I’ve retired, I’ve refused any real work besides giving advice for plenty of friends, but this is the right idea at the right time with one of the few people I would do this with,” Ebersol said.
The announcement was lacking many details, including a broadcast partner, thought NBC is a likely candidate given its relationship with the PGA Tour and with Ebersol and McCarley. Also, McIlroy has a deal with the “GolfPass” venture in conjunction with Golf Channel.
Still to be determined are the 18 players on the six teams and when the matches will be held, though a majority figure to be the week of elevated events also announced Wednesday for the new PGA Tour schedule that starts next year.
“As a big sports fan myself, I’m excited about blending golf with technology and team elements common in other sports,” Woods said in a statement. “We all know what it’s like to be in a football stadium or a basketball arena where you can watch every play, every minute of action unfold right in front of you. It’s something that inherently isn’t possible in traditional golf.”
Woods previously was involved in real golf on Monday night when he was part of the “Showdown at Sherwood” and “Battle at Bighorn.” That faded within a decade, though the Monday night spot on the sports calendar from January to August is attractive.
Woods played only three times — all majors — this year as he recovers from leg injuries suffered in a February 2021 car crash. But he will be playing in the TGL and won’t have to walk far.
“We don’t know what his schedule is going to be. We don’t know how his body is going to be,” McIlroy said. “But to be able to see him still showcase his skills on prime time on TV without really any wear and tear on his body, to be able to see Tiger hit golf shots and still sort of provide people with a glimpse of his genius, I think it is a really good use of his time.”
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More AP golf: https://apnews.com/hub/golf and https://twitter.com/AP_Sports
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| 2022-09-20T22:02:28Z
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TEXARKANA, Tx (KMSS/KTAL) – In 2021, after a 5-2 start, Liberty-Eylau finished the season on a four game losing streak. The Leopards were outscored by an average of over 30 points in those contests.
“We got on our heels and it kind of knocked the wind out of our sails,” said Head Coach Dewaski Davis.
With one of the most experienced teams in East Texas, the Leopards are ready to finish above .500 in the regular season for the first time since 2015.
“We’ve got about 19 guys that are seniors, and they’re doing a good job,” said Davis. “This is a great group of kids and a very talented group of kids.”
One of the most talented is quarterback Jay Jay Hampton.
The rising senior has started since he was a sophomore and threw for nearly 1,700 yards a season ago.
“Last year it was more offense versus defense, instead of a team thing,” said Hampton. “We’ve had team bonding…so we’re built together this year.”
Year four of the Dewaski Davis era also marks the first time Davis has seen a graduating class progress from freshmen into seniors.
“I feel like these are my sons because we’ve been together a long time,” said Davis. “They’re not settling for anything.”
This Fall, the Liberty-Eylau Leopards are motivated, experienced, and determined to again, become one of the best high school football programs in East Texas.
“They feel like they’ve got something to prove,” said Davis. They’ve got a chip on their shoulder.”
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| 2022-09-20T22:02:36Z
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UVALDE, Texas (KXAN) — The Uvalde Consolidated Independent School District school board has voted to fire the district’s police chief following allegations that he made several critical mistakes during the mass shooting at Robb Elementary School that left 19 students and two teachers dead.
The district was going to hold a similar meeting on Arredondo’s fate on July 23 but canceled it at the request of Arredondo’s attorney, who cited conformity with due process requirements. During a meeting Wednesday night, the school board voted unanimously to fire Arredondo.
Arredondo has drawn criticism for his leadership during the response to the Robb Elementary shooting that killed 21 people. He has been on administrative leave since June 22.
He is the first officer dismissed over the hesitant and fumbling law enforcement response to one of the worst school shootings in U.S. history. Only one other officer — Uvalde Police Department Lt. Mariano Pargas, who was the city’s acting police chief on the day of the massacre — is known to have been placed on leave for their actions during the shooting.
What led to the discussion of Arredondo’s firing
May 24: Arredondo held an initial news conference in the hours following the mass killing of students and teachers on May 24. He confirmed there was a mass casualty but did not give specifics on the police response. He briefly spoke about the family reunification process.
May 27: The Texas Department of Public Safety gave a preliminary update on what happened during the shooting. DPS Director Steven McCraw said the on-scene commander, considered to be Arredondo, waited to breach the classroom where the shooter was located because he believed the situation had transitioned to a “barricaded subject.”
June 9: In an interview with the Texas Tribune, Arredondo defended his actions during the shooting.
“Not a single responding officer ever hesitated, even for a moment, to put themselves at risk to save the children,” Arredondo told the Texas Tribune. “We responded to the information that we had and had to adjust to whatever we faced. Our objective was to save as many lives as we could, and the extraction of the students from the classrooms by all that were involved saved over 500 of our Uvalde students and teachers before we gained access to the shooter and eliminated the threat.”
Arredondo told the Tribune he never considered himself the scene’s incident commander and did not give any instruction that police shouldn’t attempt to breach the building.
June 20: Parents and families affected by the mass shooting called for Arredondo to be fired during a school board meeting.
“We were failed by Pete Arredondo. He killed our kids, teachers, parents, and city, and by keeping him on your staff, y’all are continuing to fail us,” said Brett Cross at that meeting. He identified himself as the father of a murdered student.
June 21: Texas DPS released an in-depth timeline of the law enforcement response inside Robb Elementary.
The timeline shows for more than 40 minutes, Arredondo and officers were trying to figure out how to open the doors to the classroom where the gunman was located, including asking for a master key and door-breaching tool.
“There’s a window over there, obviously. The door is probably going to be locked,” said Arredondo at 12:28 p.m., according to the Texas DPS timeline. “I am going to get some more keys to test.”
June 21: Arredondo testified in front of a Texas House committee in a meeting that wasn’t open to the public.
June 22: Arredondo was placed on administrative leave.
Uvalde CISD Superintendent Hal Harrell said previously he didn’t want to make a decision on changes to the district’s police leadership until investigations into the mass shooting were completed. He explained he made the call anyway due to “the lack of clarity that remains and the unknown timing of when [he] will receive the results of the investigations.”
July 2: Arredondo also served on the Uvalde City Council. In early July, he said he would resign from the role, telling the local paper, “I feel this is the best decision for Uvalde.”
July 12: Surveillance video from inside the school building during the shooting and subsequent law enforcement response was leaked. Prior to the video being published online, lawmakers had planned to show the video to the families of the victims first in a private viewing before releasing it to the public.
July 17: A preliminary report on the shooting compiled by a Texas House investigative committee was released. The report blamed “systemic failures and egregiously poor decision making” for the delayed law enforcement response.
July 18: Families pushed again for Arredondo to be fired during a school board meeting. They also called for security upgrades before the new school year starts.
July 19: CNN reported the Uvalde CISD school board was going to decide whether to terminate Arredondo in a special meeting July 23.
July 22: School board cancels July 23 meeting at the request of Arredondo’s attorney.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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Don’t expect much change in our weather pattern for the next few weeks. The chance for scattered thundershowers will continue and thanks to lots of clouds, temperatures will stay below normal.
The threat of rain sticks around: Rain was much more scattered over the ArkLaTex Tuesday and that trend continued Wednesday. It was most widespread over the southeastern part of the area. This part of the ArkLaTex will likely continue to see the best chance of rain over the course of the next few days. Futurecast shows that the cycle that we have seen over the past few days will continue for the next several days. The areas of rain that have developed this afternoon over our area will likely decrease this evening as temperatures begin to cool. Even though the rain will likely temporarily end Wednesday evening, the clouds will linger over all of the area Wednesday night. We will continue to see plenty of clouds Thursday. As temperatures Thursday afternoon begin to warm up, scattered thundershowers will begin to develop and reach their peak in coverage and intensity late Thursday afternoon. The rain will then decrease and end Thursday evening as temperatures cool down.
Below-normal temperatures continue: We have become rather spoiled over the past few days with the cooler daytime temperatures. Normal highs for this time of year are still in the middle 90s. Thanks to the continued presence of clouds, highs Thursday will remain well below as we will only warm to the mid to upper 80s. Overnight lows will likely stay close to normal in the low to middle 70s. This break from the typical heat of late summer will continue for the rest of this week and all of next week.
How much more rain? Not counting any rain that has fallen today, this August ranks as the 9th wettest August on record in Shreveport and the 17th wettest in Texarkana. Both locations have received more than 6” of rain. While we will have a decent chance of seeing more rain for the next few days, it likely won’t be much. Futurecast shows that most of the area will receive less than ¼”. It is possible that a few isolated locations over the southeast part of the area receive more than 1”.
Long-range rain outlook: Even though we will have the threat of rain each day from now through next weekend, rainfall totals during this period should be pretty close to normal. Long-range models show that rainfall totals will probably end up being between one and two inches during the next ten days. Given how scattered the rain will likely be, I expect we will see many locations get less and many get a little more. Stay Tuned
Get daily forecasts and exclusive severe weather details on storms as they approach your area by downloading the Arklatex Weather Authority app now available in the App Store and Google Play
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(Motor Authority) — Officials in New York are mulling a bill that would mandate speed limiters in new vehicles that would be set to the local maximum allowable limit. The system would use GPS and traffic sign recognition technology to determine the speed limit.
The system has an appropriately benign and Orwellian name: Active Intelligent Speed Assistance (ISA).
Senate Bill S9528 was introduced by Manhattan State Senator Brad Hoylman on Aug. 12 and, if passed, would require any vehicle manufactured or registered in the state of New York to be fitted with the ISA system, starting from Jan. 1, 2024. It cites the results of a study that show such a system could reduce traffic fatalities by 20%.
The bill also calls for existing active safety systems like automatic emergency braking, active lane control, blind-spot monitors with pedestrian detection, driver drowsiness detection, and even a data event recorder to be mandated from the same date.
If you’re thinking this sounds like a bad science fiction movie, New York City is already running a trial with 50 vehicles from the city’s fleet fitted with an ISA system. The trial will run for six months.
“Speeding ruins lives, so we must take action to prevent it, and New York City is leading by example by implementing new technology to reduce speeds on city fleet vehicles,” Eric Adams, New York City’s mayor, said in a statement.
Critics of the system argue that in certain circumstances it’s vital to be able to go past the limit, such as during merging. A solution here could be to introduce the limit in stages. For example, first, there could be a warning bell if the speed limit is exceeded. Then there could be a second, more serious warning, which if still ignored would then see the vehicle’s speed automatically reduced.
Of course, it’s not hard to imagine officials also using the system to constantly monitor a driver’s speed and automatically issue fines should the speed limit be exceeded.
A saving grace, as Jalopnik notes, is that safety standards for new vehicles, unlike emissions standards, are set at the federal level, which brings into question whether New York officials will be able to implement the bill even if passed.
The bill is currently In Committee, which means it’s under consideration. It has not passed the New York State Senate or State Assembly, and if it passes both it would have to be signed into law or vetoed by the governor.
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| 2022-09-20T22:02:58Z
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(The Car Connection) — The average new car price is set to reach $46,259 by the end of August, eclipsing last month’s record and the one before that, according to the latest sales forecast from J.D. Power.
New car prices breaking records has become a broken record for car shoppers in the past year. The average transaction price customers paid for a new car was $45,844 last month, up from more than $41,000 a year ago. The automotive research firm and consultancy estimate the highest new car price on record was an increase of 11.5% from last year.
The usual suspects of the global microchip shortage and other supply constraints have resulted in demand still outstripping supply.
“This August, the industry is still constrained by insufficient inventory to meet robust consumer demand,” Thomas King, president of J.D. Power’s analytics and data division, said in a statement. “The result is a retail sales pace that fails to fulfill its potential.”
The estimated sales volume for the year for both retail and fleet customers is projected to be 13.3 million vehicles, down from the 17 million pre-pandemic highs. Fleet sales will be slightly higher this year than last year, while retail sales are projected to be a fraction lower.
The lack of volume is more than being made up for by high margins on more expensive models. Many automakers are either delaying base models or discontinuing entry-level grades in favor of better equipped and higher-priced models. Shoppers continue to buy higher-priced trucks and SUVs. Together, trucks and SUVs will account for more than 78% of new car sales in August.
Dealers continue to benefit with an average profit of $4,976 on each car sold. That’s down from $5,123 in June but still up $639 from last year and way higher than the pre-pandemic expectation that hovered around $2,000.
Car shoppers keep paying more. The increases come amid prevailing trade winds meant to tame inflation, such as higher car loan interest rates. But robust demand powers through the economic rationale, leading to the highest monthly loan payment on record of $716. That’s an increase of $78, or 12.2%, from a year ago, according to J.D. Power. The average interest rate for a new car loan spiked to 5.5%.
Typically around Labor Day, automakers push new model-year cars and dealers offer more incentives to clear lots of the outgoing model years. Incentives remain low.
On the upside, used car prices remain high and trade-in values offset some of the high costs of new vehicle ownership. Of course, the downside to that is deals on any car are hard to find.
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BOSTON (AP) — The commission appointed to come up with a new state seal and motto for Massachusetts to replace the current ones that critics decry as racially insensitive to the state’s Indigenous communities discussed some early ideas, but made no firm decisions, at a meeting Tuesday.
The Special Commission on the Official Seal and Motto of the Commonwealth, made up of lawmakers, members of Indigenous tribes, historians and others, also disclosed plans to solicit feedback with a survey and several virtual and in-person public forums.
The current seal that appears on state flags, which dates to the late 19th century, features a depiction of a Native American man beneath a colonist’s arm brandishing a sword, which critics say is a reference to English colonists’ cruelty to local tribes centuries ago.
A new seal should not depict a human, said Donna Curtin of the commission’s research and design subcommittee.
“While a majority of state seals do include a human figure, the subcommittee’s feelings were that the design for the new seal should not include a human figure as it was felt it could not reflect the full diversity or identities of either Indigenous peoples or of the whole peoples on the Commonwealth,” she said.
Some ideas include symbols or elements from nature that might better reflect the state.
“We’re on the same page that we want to see a completely new design here,” said Commission co-Chair Brian Weeden.
The state’s Latin motto that translates as, “By the sword we seek peace, but peace only under liberty,” dates to about 1659 and is attributed to English politician Algernon Sydney, according to the secretary of state’s office.
A new motto should reflect concepts such as liberty, peace, justice, equity and educational opportunity, said Michael Comeau of the commission’s history and usages subcommittee.
It should also be easier to understand.
“It was suggested that the motto should be recognizable and be transferrable and should not require explanation to the general public,” he said.
Commission members stressed that all the ideas are in the early stages and nothing has been finalized.
The 20-member commission was created by the state Legislature and was supposed to complete its work by the end of this year, but has asked for an extension until next March.
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Prime corner assemblage on 1665-1667 Washington Avenue, located across Soundscape Park, to redefine standard for high-design offices in Miami Beach
MIAMI BEACH, Fla., Sept. 20, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- SHVO, the culture-defining real estate development and investment firm, is pleased to reveal plans for a new ultra-luxury office property, One Soundscape Park, at 1665-1667 Washington Avenue in Miami Beach.
Designed by frequent SHVO collaborator, renowned architect Peter Marino, the contemporary high-design and high-performance property One Soundscape Park is slated to elevate Miami Beach office standards with 52,500 square feet of Class A commercial space featuring panoramic exposures of Soundscape Park, South Beach, and the Atlantic Ocean.
Today's announcement reinforces SHVO's commitment to bringing world class design and architecture to Miami Beach following the recent announcement of the development of "The Alton" at 1656-1680 Alton Road, designed by internationally acclaimed Foster + Partners, and the redevelopment of the famed Raleigh Hotel and Residences, to be operated by Rosewood Hotel & Resorts, also being designed by Peter Marino. Kobi Karp Architects will reinforce both visions with local expertise.
Engaging Miami Beach's historic pedigree, the striking façade is a composition of white vertical fins that vary in density and pitch lining floor-to-ceiling glazing. A deliberate contemporary nod to Art Deco rhythmic verticals, the pleated fins also provide a sophisticated environmentally responsive solar shading device that maximizes internal daylight. The design emphasizes a rigorous commitment to quality, sustainability, state-of-the-art infrastructure, and elegant contemporary design.
Embracing a front row Soundscape Park exposure, the building features a refined, hospitality-driven lobby and five floors of vibrant office space with private loggia terraces for informal gathering. Additionally, the design showcases signature unobstructed corner exposures, an amenitized roof terrace, on-site valet parking, a tailored service program, and a dignified, private porte-cochere arrival with vertical gardens.
Integral to the design, Peter Marino has created an interior tailored to optimize a tenant's working culture and operational needs with meticulous, specialty artisanal architectural finishes, building services, and lighting components. Commissioned art and furniture play a central role in the project with Peter Marino curated pieces defining the porte-cochere and lobby.
"The vertical fins are designed to reflect an abstract version of classic 1930's shutters," according to Peter Marino. "This perfectly represents the iconic feeling of sunny Miami Beach while significantly raising the bar for office space in South Beach."
"In line with our commitment to bringing ultra-luxury Class A office to Miami Beach, we are delighted to be partnering with Peter Marino on his first office project in the city, building upon SHVO's considerable experience of delivering some of the most unique office developments in the country," said Michael Shvo, Chairman & CEO of SHVO.
SHVO is committed to high-performance and high-design commercial properties as demonstrated by additional portfolio assets Transamerica Pyramid Center in San Francisco, 711 Fifth Avenue and 530 Broadway in New York, and 333 South Wabash Avenue in Chicago.
SHVO is a real-estate development and investment firm built on the vision of founder and CEO, Michael Shvo, to create culture-defining experiences in iconic properties.
Headquartered in New York City with offices in Miami, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Chicago, SHVO owns and operates a national portfolio valued at more than $8 billion with more than 4.5 million square feet across industry sectors, including commercial office and retail, hospitality, and luxury residential assets. The firm's selective portfolio of architecturally significant properties, from innovative ground up new developments to revitalized landmarks that define skylines in the world's leading cities, includes the Transamerica Pyramid in San Francisco, The Raleigh Hotel in Miami Beach, 333 South Wabash Avenue also known as, "The Big Red," in Chicago, Mandarin Oriental Residences at 9200 Wilshire Boulevard in Beverly Hills, Mandarin Oriental Residences Fifth Avenue in New York City and the AMAN New York, hotel and residences at the Crown building.
With a proven track record of acquiring, developing, and managing super-prime assets, SHVO stands for iconic properties in cherished locations, distinctive design aesthetics, and unmatched quality. By emphasizing the unique experience and individual nature of each property, SHVO's record of increasing demand while achieving exceptional premiums has secured investments from the world's most selective institutional investors.
Renowned and trusted for its expertise, SHVO is fully integrated with highly diversified industry experience in every aspect of acquisitions, finance, development, design, sales, leasing, property management, hospitality, and sustainability.
Peter Marino, AIA, is the principal of Peter Marino Architect, a 160-person, New York–based architecture practice founded in 1978.
Working globally across a broad range of project types and scales, Marino is widely credited for redefining modern luxury through equal emphasis on architecture and interior design. The practice is recognized for its award-winning residential, retail, cultural, and hospitality projects worldwide. Well known for integrating art within architectural designs, Peter Marino has commissioned more than 300 site-specific works of art.
PMA projects currently in design or recently completed include a Cheval Blanc hotel in the historic 'La Samaritaine' in Paris; the Cheval Blanc Beverly Hills Hotel; a flagship for Bulgari in Place Vendome, Paris; a flagship for Dior on Avenue Montaigne in Paris; new buildings for Chanel in Miami and Beverly Hills; a complex of buildings in Greece; a Louis Vuitton flagship in Ginza, Tokyo; an art foundation in Southampton, New York; condominiums in Miami; numerous private residences worldwide. Peter Marino purchased and restored the former Rogers Memorial Library at 11 Jobs Lane in Southampton, New York, and opened Peter Marino Art Foundation in the summer of 2021.
Peter Marino's distinguished honors include 22 citations from the AIA for architectural design excellence. He is Chairman of Venetian Heritage Foundation and on the board of directors for International Committee of L'Union Centrale des Arts Décoratifs. He holds an architecture degree from Cornell University and began his career at Skidmore Owings & Merrill, George Nelson and I.M. Pei/Cossutta & Ponte.
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HOUSTON, Sept. 20, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- SunGrid Holdings ("SunGrid") has acquired Black Electric Inc., an electrical services contractor providing up-to-date, reliable and cost-effective electrical services to commercial, industrial, municipal and residential customers throughout the Hudson Valley of New York. SunGrid provides best in class comprehensive engineering, procurement and construction services, including balance of plant and integrated battery energy storage enclosure systems, to the global energy storage sector. The acquisition will enable SunGrid to provide services to projects scaling from 1 MW to 200 MW in support of the New York's aggressive decarbonization and energy storage goals.
"This transaction advances SunGrid's position as a premier Battery Energy Storage Solution company. The addition of Black Electric to SunGrid gives us capability and depth of expertise to deploy battery energy storage projects across the state of New York as SunGrid continues to grow," said Jeremy Goertz, SunGrid CEO. "James and Daphne Black, the current owners of Black Electric, have done an exceptional job building Black Electric over the last two decades, and they will continue to manage the company to ensure continuity and excellence as we continue to serve local customers and municipalities. We are very excited to welcome the Black Electric team to SunGrid."
The Law Office of Jon Staley acted as the legal counsel to SunGrid.
SunGrid, a Hull Street Energy affiliate, has US headquarters in Houston, Texas, with global headquarters in Canada, and uses its strong execution-focused team to deliver excellent partnerships across the North American Energy Storage sector. The company is focused on the BESS industry and brings its engineering-first delivery strategy to Turnkey and Balance of Plant EPC, and Integrated BESS enclosure systems, including its PowerPlay and SimpleOS platform. Having in-house engineering capabilities throughout North America allows SunGrid to take on projects from 250kWh to 1GWh. By focusing on strong Engineering as part of EPC and turnkey project delivery, SunGrid is a projects first company. For further information about SunGrid please see www.sungridsolutions.com.
Founded in 1934, in Fishkill, NY, Black Electric Inc. provides electrical contracting services for commercial, industrial, municipal and custom residential electrical customers, including municipal projects, warehouses, water/waste water treatment facilities, medical facilities, retail stores, hotels and spas, equestrian facilities as well as site and infrastructure projects throughout New York State.
Hull Street Energy is a private equity firm that specializes in deploying capital into the power sector as it decarbonizes. Headquartered in Bethesda, Maryland, the team leverages its decades of experience and unique knowledge of North American electricity infrastructure, fundamentals and grid operations, including fuel inputs, commodity contract structuring, renewable and fossil powered generation assets, energy storage, transmission and distribution systems, and electricity demand-side businesses to build value for stakeholders. For further information about Hull Street Energy please see www.hullstreetenergy.com.
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SOURCE Hull Street Energy
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https://www.wbko.com/prnewswire/2022/09/20/sungrid-expands-its-northeastern-united-states-footprint-with-acquisition-black-electric-inc/
| 2022-09-20T22:05:04Z
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AIDA Cruises has announced its official partnership with the Helene Fischer Rausch Live Tour 2023, newly developed with the largest contemporary circus producer in the world, Cirque du Soleil.
The Carnival Corporation-owned cruise line will accompany the German singer throughout her grand tour of 70 planned concerts in several areas in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland.
AIDA Cruises Partnership with Rausch Live Tour 2023
For the first time, Carnival Corporation-owned AIDA Cruises will be the official partner of the Helene Fischer Rausch Live Tour 2023, as she debuts yet another major tour next year.
The Rausch Live Tour 2023 will be the German star’s legendary stage show, filling arenas in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland with her award-winning records.
Developed in partnership with Cirque du Soleil, Helene Fischer’s 2023 tour will feature never-before-seen images, a stunning stage design, and even enhanced choreographies.
Read Also: AIDA Cruises Releases New 2023 Summer Itineraries
Having sold at least 15 million records, Fischer was ranked number eight on the list of top-earning female artists worldwide in 2018, making her one of the most successful non-English singers.
The Senior Vice President of Marketing & Sales at AIDA Cruises, Alexander Ewig stated, “Both Helene Fischer and we as a cruise line offer a unique concept in our industries. Helene Fischer stands for perfect entertainment and for a very special experience of entertainment without any constraints and in a relaxed atmosphere.”
“This fits perfectly with the philosophy we embody with AIDA Cruises. We are looking forward to a very successful collaboration,” Ewig said.
The German-founded cruise line will accompany the Russian-born artist on all of her 70 planned concerts during the tour throughout Germany, Austria, and Switzerland.
This partnership will offer AIDA’s guests, partners, fans, and staff an opportunity to enjoy new experiences through the remarkable Helene Fischer concert series.
AIDA Cruises’ Onboard Entertainment
Amongst its fleet of 12, AIDA Cruises hosts award-winning entertainment every day on 26 different stages at sea, attracting audiences with its elaborate productions.
Recently, the line announced its new Vice President of Entertainment, Christian Reuther, beginning on October 1, 2022, in a newly created position reporting to Steffi Heinicke, the Senior Vice President of Guest Experience.
As a seasoned and award-winning television and events producer, Reuther will fill the role of AIDA’s newest position, continuing to grow and expand its strong entertainment offerings.
Alexander Ewig also added, “The guest is our focus. We develop a tailor-made entertainment program for each individual cruise with great attention to detail.”
Read Also: AIDA Cruise Ship Adds New Virtual Reality Experience
Its current entertainment programs range from musicals to thrilling rock shows, and staged family shows to light-hearted “join-in” shows, such as “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire” or “The Voice of the Ocean” live aboard.
As the official partner of the Helene Fischer Tour 2023, the line proves its innovation and commitment to diverse entertainment with top-class show productions.
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| 2022-09-20T22:07:48Z
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Disney Cruise Line’s Disney Fantasy is sailing a completely different itinerary this week than the ship’s original schedule, due to the impact of Hurricane Fiona. Now, instead of an Eastern Caribbean itinerary, Disney Fantasy is sailing to popular Western Caribbean ports.
Disney Fantasy Changes Itinerary
Guests were notified by email of the itinerary change on Friday, September 16, 2022, the day before the ship departed Port Canaveral, Florida, on the 7-night cruise.
“Based on the storm’s forecast track and the possible impact to the Eastern Caribbean over the next few days, we have made the decision to change your itinerary,” the email read.
The ship’s initial itinerary had begun with two days at sea, followed by port stops in Tortola in the British Virgin Islands, St. Thomas in the U.S. Virgin Islands, another day at sea, and finally, Castaway Cay – Disney Cruise Line’s private island in The Bahamas, before returning to Port Canaveral on Saturday, September 24.
Now, the ship will be sailing a Western Caribbean itinerary instead, with just one day at sea to start, followed by port visits to Cozumel, Grand Cayman, and Jamaica, one more day at sea, and still finishing up with the visit to Castaway Cay on Friday, before returning to Port Canaveral on Saturday.
“The safety and well-being of our guests and crew members is our highest priority,” the email read. “We appreciate your understanding regarding this necessary itinerary change.”
Disney Cruise Line did clarify in their communication that “based on the current predicted storm timing and path, we do not anticipate additional changes to other sailings at this time.”
Shore Tours Refunded
As is standard practice when a port of call is canceled, all pre-booked shore tours – which Disney Cruise Line calls “Port Adventures” – will be refunded. This only applies to tours booked through the cruise line, however, and if guests has made independent tour arrangements, they would need to contact those tour operators to request a cancelation and refund.
Due to the last-minute change, guests were not able to book new tours for Cozumel, Grand Cayman, or Jamaica online before sailing, but could make those reservations once onboard Disney Fantasy.
Because there is no change to the ship’s visit to Castaway Cay on Friday, those pre-booked tours remain in place. If guests have not yet booked a tour for that port, they can check for additional options onboard.
Hurricane Fiona Update
Disney Fantasy is just one of several cruise ships to have changed itineraries or port plans due to Hurricane Fiona, as all cruise lines operating in the region must be concerned for their ships’ safety.
Royal Caribbean International’s Harmony of the Seas has also switched from an Eastern Caribbean sailing to a Western Caribbean route instead.
Carnival Cruise Line’s Carnival Freedom and Carnival Legend have both altered their planned Eastern Caribbean itineraries, as has MSC Cruises’ MSC Seashore.
As of 11 a.m. on Tuesday, Hurricane Fiona is classified as a Category 3 “major” hurricane, with maximum sustained winds of 110 miles per hour (177 kilometers per hour). The center of the storm is located barely east of the Turks & Caicos, with hurricane warnings in place throughout the region.
The storm is moving north-northwest at 9 miles per hour (15 kph), beginning the expected turn that will eventually have the storm moving northeast by Thursday.
While any storm can be difficult to predict more than a day or two in the future, Fiona’s expected track has the storm remaining a major hurricane and passing close to Bermuda on Thursday night and in the early hours of Friday morning.
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| 2022-09-20T22:07:54Z
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The French port of Le Havre will be constructing a new cruise port, with three new cruise terminals set to be operational by the end of 2025. The new construction will focus on the environment and provide an open space for residents of the French port city.
Le Havre is one of the busiest cruise ports in Western Europe, often used by cruise ships as the gateway to the French capital, Paris.
From Le Havre, guests board buses that shuttle them for a day in the city of light. The town is also close enough to the D-Day beaches, making Le Havre one of the best cruise destinations on the French Atlantic Coast.
Le Havre to Construct New Cruise Facility
By the end of 2025, the port of Le Havre will have a newly constructed area dedicated to welcoming cruise ship passengers while also providing a welcome haven for local residents to enjoy.
The restoration of the currently difficult-to-access Pointe de Floride will envelop several stages. First and foremost, the area will be transformed to open up to the city and invite the people of Le Havre to rediscover it.
The area will have space for sports facilities and cultural events, while the currently undeveloped central area of the port will be transformed into a sizeable vegetated walkway extending nearly 320 meters between the future cruise terminals.
The three new cruise terminals will be built using state-of-the-art materials to ensure the building is carbon neutral and running energy positive with large solar-power roof coverings. The docks will also be upgraded, ensuring that all ships can use shore power, reducing CO2 output by 100 tons and two tons of other pollutants during the cruise ship calls.
Construction is scheduled to start in the autumn of 2023. By early 2025, terminals two and three will be delivered, and by fall 2025, terminal one, together having a usable area of 15,000 m2. The port of Le Havre expects to welcome 600,000 cruise ship passengers annually by 2030, with a capacity of 13,500 passengers per day.
There will be more than enough to do for cruise ship passengers and local residents in and around the cruise terminals. There will be restaurants and an Amphitheater for cultural programming and events. There will be views of the water and events at sea from ‘Le Pont,’ and an exposition hall promoting Le Havre and the Port.
Why Cruise to Le Havre?
There are several good reasons why Le Havre features prominently on the itineraries of several big cruise companies. Most, if not all, cruise lines offer full-day tours or sometimes even overnight tours to Paris.
After leaving early in the morning by bus, guests can already be in the city of light by mid-morning, offering a full day of exploring what the French capital offers.
Le Havre is also the gateway to explore the world-famous D-Day beaches, where the allied forces landed during the second world war. From Le Havre, guests can visit the beaches, museums, and monuments that make the area a bucket-list destination for many.
Cruise Lines that have calls scheduled to Le Havre this year include Norwegian Cruise Line, Disney Cruises, MSC, Costa Cruises, Princess, and Viking. Carnival Cruise Line (Carnival Pride) and Royal Caribbean have scheduled calls to the port from next year. The new French cruise line Compagnie Française de Croisières (CFC) will use Le Havre as its base of operations.
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| 2022-09-20T22:08:00Z
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GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. — It’s safe to say the climate for business owners of color in Grand Rapids is less than ideal.
According to the Grand Rapids Chamber of Commerce, 98% of business revenue generated in the city comes from white-owned businesses. What’s more, of all the businesses that make $250,000 each year or more, only 1% of them are black- or brown-owned.
This month, the Chamber launched their new Center for Economic Inclusion. The aim is to provide resources that black- and brown-owned businesses have been lacking for decades: technical assistance, help obtaining certifications, loan referrals, CEO mentorship programs, employee training and more.
“A big part about it is really getting them connected to existing resources in the city already,” said Attah Obande, who leads the new center. “We don’t want to reinvent the wheel. We’re not trying to be duplicative, there’s a lot of great organizations out there doing good work for businesses.”
Obande says the chamber has already made partnerships with banks and CEOs who have signed on to be mentors. For business owners like Tony Hartz, the direction isn’t just sorely needed, it’s necessary. Hartz now runs the Bop Shop – a custom design printing service – out of his home but used to have a storefront near Burton and Division. He had to close during the pandemic, getting no loans, no assistance, and operating with no guidance.
“Yes, I had the building, I was a business owner, but my direction wasn’t how it was supposed to be,” he said.
Hartz has high hopes for the chamber’s new initiative, but implored city leaders not to forget that simple things make an enormous impact. Often times, he says, a new coat of paint, window replacement or even new sign can help drive business and attract customers.
“They don’t want to stop because you got homeless people on the corner, you got trash right here, you got an empty cigarillo pack right here,” Hartz said. “And they’re like, well why stop here when you can go downtown and smell the flowers and spend $50 on a shirt instead of going to the Bop Shop and spending $20?”
Ricardo O’Neal with the group Neighborhood Activation Project was also hopeful Tuesday as he met with the center’s leaders. Their organization helps fix up homes and neighborhoods, providing free repairs and beautification – often times offering the work to black- and brown-businesses. He hopes the new center will buttress resources with more grassroots efforts like those being undertaken by NAP to create more successful, thriving business districts.
“These businesses have to be educated, there’s no way around it,” O’Neal said. “The education is very much needed, the technical assistance is very much needed because a lot of the black and brown community have not had the richness of that education that other communities have.”
O’Neal has been frustrated by the growth of areas like downtown and the Wealthy Street corridor that’ve seen swift revitalization and gentrification over the course of only a few years.
“We can’t put a tree on one corner and leave the next corner barren, that’s not gonna work,” O’Neal said metaphorically. “We have to plant trees all the way down the street.”
“We’re figuring out what we’re going to do with these black and brown neighborhoods, and we’re watching the neighborhoods around us grow exponentially,” he continued.
There’s an economic case to be made for a more diverse distribution of resources, too. A recent Goldman Sachs study showed that by helping a million black-woman-owned businesses (the fastest growing sector of entrepreneurs), the nation’s GDP stood to grow by an estimated $450 billion. A similar study conducted by the GR Chamber showed that just injecting a small amount of help into black- and brown-owned businesses could grow the city’s economy by $6 billion annually.
For business owners like Jeff Kimbrel, who’s owned Painting by Jeff in Grand Rapids for nearly 40-years, the lack of resources to minority businesses has been generational. He’s seen business lost to glitzier, out of town painters, who charge more for the same job, simply because he doesn’t have the funds to expand.
“We may work harder, but sometimes we are not given the opportunity. If we were given the opportunity, it would be different,” he said. “We don’t have sometimes the collateral they have…the loans to get better equipment. Those little things really help.”
Weeks before the pandemic began in 2020, Kimbrel’s other business, Sophisticated Gentleman’s Club – a community space that hosted fundraisers, events, after-school tutoring and even funerals – burned down. Since then, only the foundation and the sign remain. Kimbrel, despite being in the community for decades and performing all sorts of pro bono work for elderly clients and clients with cancer, can’t get access to resources.
“No one’s knocking our doors down saying, Painting by Jeff, out of all these things you’ve done in Grand Rapids, can we build this for you, can we help you build this? Can we put a roof on for you?” he said. “Nope, all we can do is just sit back and just keep our fingers crossed and hope somebody comes to give us a hand.”
The Chamber hopes this new center will be that extended hand so many exhausted business owners need to succeed. With the right knowhow, the gap may just close.
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| 2022-09-20T22:14:28Z
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SEOUL, South Korea (AP) — South Korean prosecutors have asked Interpol to issue a fugitive alert for the founder of Terraform Labs as they investigate a $40 billion crash of the firm’s cryptocurrency that devastated retail investors around the world.
The Seoul Southern District Prosecutors’ Office asked Interpol on Monday to circulate the “red notice” for Do Kwon across the agency’s 195 member nations to find and apprehend him.
A South Korean court recently issued arrest warrants for Kwon and five other people connected to Terraform Labs as prosecutors investigate allegations of fraud and financial crimes in relation to the implosion of its digital currencies in May. South Korea’s Foreign Ministry said Tuesday that it’s processing the prosecutors’ request to restrict or revoke the passports of Kwon and four other suspects who are South Korean.
Interpol had not publicized the red notice for Kwon on its website as of Tuesday morning, and South Korean prosecutors say the designation may take more than a week. Interpol describes such notices as requests to law enforcement worldwide to locate and provisionally arrest fugitives “pending extradition, surrender, or similar legal action.”
Kwon’s whereabouts are unknown.
South Korean authorities initially believed Kwon was in Singapore before the city-state’s police announced last week that he wasn’t there. Kwon, who has been accused of exaggerating the stability of his digital currencies before their collapse, insisted in a tweet Sunday that he wasn’t on the run from any “government agency that has shown interest to communicate.”
“We are in full cooperation and we don’t have anything to hide,” Kwon said in the tweet.
The collapse of Terraform Lab’s digital currencies, TerraUSD and Luna, affected an estimated 280,000 South Korean investors while causing broader turmoil in the global cryptocurrency market.
TerraUSD was designed as a “stablecoin.” Those are pegged to stable assets like the U.S. dollar to prevent drastic fluctuations in prices. However, around $40 billion in market value was erased for the holders of TerraUSD and its floating sister currency, Luna, after the stablecoin plunged far below its $1 peg in May.
South Korean prosecutors launched the investigation following collective complaints filed by dozens of investigators.
The Bank of Korea, South Korea’s central bank, said in a report published in June that the collapse of TerraUSD and Luna was a major factor in the global cryptocurrency market shrinking by more than 40% compared to late 2021, when its market value reached over $2.3 trillion.
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| 2022-09-20T22:21:43Z
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WASHINGTON — The independent arbiter tasked with inspecting documents seized in an FBI search of former President Donald Trump's Florida home said Tuesday he intends to push briskly though the review process and appeared skeptical of the Trump team's reluctance to say whether it believed the records had been declassified.
“We're going to proceed with what I call responsible dispatch," Raymond Dearie, a veteran Brooklyn judge, told lawyers for Trump and the Justice Department in their first meeting since his appointment last week as a so-called special master.
The purpose of the meeting was to sort out next steps in a review process expected to slow by weeks, if not months, the criminal investigation into the retention of top-secret information at Mar-a-Lago after Trump left the White House. As special master, Dearie will be responsible for sifting through the thousands of documents recovered during the Aug. 8 FBI search and segregating those protected by claims of executive privilege or attorney-client privilege.
Though Trump's lawyers had requested the appointment of a special master to ensure an independent review of the documents, one of the former president's attorneys, James Trusty, made clear they were concerned that Dearie's proposed deadlines were too ambitious.
The lawyers are also resisting Dearie's request for information about whether the seized records had been declassified, as Trump has maintained. In a letter to Dearie on Monday night, the lawyers said that issue could be part of Trump’s defense in the event of an indictment.
But Dearie appeared unsatisfied with that position. He said if Trump's lawyers will not actually assert that the records have been declassified and the Justice Department instead makes an acceptable case that they remain classified, then “as far as I'm concerned, that's the end of it.”
Trusty said the Trump team should not be forced at this point to disclose a possible defense based on the idea that the records had been declassified. He denied that the lawyers were trying to engage in “gamesmanship” but instead believed it was a process that required “baby steps.”
But Dearie at one point observed: “I guess my view of it is, you can’t have your cake and eat it” too.
Trump has maintained without evidence that all of the records were declassified; his lawyers have not echoed that claim, though they have repeatedly asserted that a president has absolute authority to declassify information, and they said in a separate filing Tuesday that the Justice Department had not proven that the records remained classified.
“As someone who has been president of the United States, he has unfettered access along with unfettered declassification authority,” Trusty said Tuesday.
The resistance to the judge’s request was notable because it was Trump’s lawyers, not the Justice Department, who had requested the appointment of a special master and because the recalcitrance included an acknowledgment that the probe could be building toward an indictment.
In the letter, Trump’s lawyers said the time for addressing that question would be if they pressed forward with demands for the Justice Department to return some of the property taken from Mar-a-Lago.
“Otherwise, the Special Master process will have forced the Plaintiff to fully and specifically disclose a defense to the merits of any subsequent indictment.” they wrote.
The Trump team also asked the judge to consider pushing back all of the deadlines for his review. That work includes inspecting the roughly 11,000 documents, including about 100 marked as classified, that were taken during the FBI's search.
U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon, a Trump appointee who granted the Trump team's request for a special master, had set a Nov. 30 deadline for Dearie's review and instructed him to prioritize his inspection of classified records. The Justice Department has asked a federal appeals court to halt Cannon's order requiring it to provide him with classified documents for his review. That appeal is pending.
Dearie, a Ronald Reagan appointee whose name is on the atrium of his Brooklyn courthouse, made clear during Tuesday's meeting that he intended to meet the deadlines, saying there was “little time” to complete the assigned tasks.
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| 2022-09-20T22:28:12Z
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MINNEAPOLIS — Federal authorities charged 47 people in Minnesota with conspiracy and other counts in what they said Tuesday was the largest fraud scheme yet to take advantage of the COVID-19 pandemic by stealing $250 million from a federal program that provides meals to low-income children.
Prosecutors say the defendants created companies that claimed to be offering food to tens of thousands of children across Minnesota, then sought reimbursement for those meals through the U.S. Department of Agriculture's food nutrition programs. Prosecutors say few meals were actually served, and the defendants used the money to buy luxury cars, property and jewelry.
“This $250 million is the floor," Andy Luger, the U.S. attorney for Minnesota, said at a news conference. “Our investigation continues.”
Many of the companies that claimed to be serving food were sponsored by a nonprofit called Feeding Our Future, which submitted the companies' claims for reimbursement. Feeding Our Future’s founder and executive director, Aimee Bock, was among those indicted, and authorities say she and others in her organization submitted the fraudulent claims for reimbursement and received kickbacks.
Bock’s attorney, Kenneth Udoibok, said the indictment “doesn’t indicate guilt or innocence.” He said he wouldn't comment further until seeing the indictment.
In interviews after law enforcement searched multiple sites in January, including Bock’s home and offices, Bock denied stealing money and said she never saw evidence of fraud.
Earlier this year, the U.S. Department of Justice made prosecuting pandemic-related fraud a priority. The department has already taken enforcement actions related to more than $8 billion in suspected pandemic fraud, including bringing charges in more than 1,000 criminal cases involving losses in excess of $1.1 billion.
Federal officials repeatedly described the alleged fraud as “brazen,” and decried that it involved a program intended to feed children who needed help during the pandemic. Michael Paul, special agent in charge of the Minneapolis FBI office, called it “an astonishing display of deceit."
Luger said the government was billed for more than 125 million fake meals, with some defendants making up names for children by using an online random name generator. He displayed one form for reimbursement that claimed a site served exactly 2,500 meals each day Monday through Friday — with no children ever getting sick or otherwise missing from the program.
“These children were simply invented,” Luger said.
He said the government has so far recovered $50 million in money and property and expects to recover more.
The defendants in Minnesota face multiple counts, including conspiracy, wire fraud, money laundering and bribery. Luger said some of them were arrested Tuesday morning.
According to court documents, the alleged scheme targeted the USDA's federal child nutrition programs, which provide food to low-income children and adults. In Minnesota, the funds are administered by the state Department of Education, and meals have historically been provided to kids through educational programs, such as schools or day care centers.
The sites that serve the food are sponsored by public or nonprofit groups, such as Feeding Our Future. The sponsoring agency keeps 10% to 15% of the reimbursement funds as an administrative fee in exchange for submitting claims, sponsoring the sites and disbursing the funds.
But during the pandemic, some of the standard requirements for sites to participate in the federal food nutrition programs were waived. The USDA allowed for-profit restaurants to participate, and allowed food to be distributed outside educational programs. The charging documents say the defendants exploited such changes “to enrich themselves."
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| 2022-09-20T22:28:18Z
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U.S. doctors should regularly screen all adults under 65 for anxiety, an influential health guidelines group proposed Tuesday.
It’s the first time the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force has recommended anxiety screening in primary care for adults without symptoms. The proposal is open for public comment until Oct. 17, but the group usually affirms its draft guidance.
The recommendations are based on a review that began before the COVID-19 pandemic, evaluating studies showing potential benefits and risks from screening. Given reports of a surge in mental health problems linked with pandemic isolation and stress, the guidance is “very timely," said Lori Pbert, a task force member and co-author. Pbert is a psychologist-researcher at the University of Massachusetts’ Chan Medical School.
The task force said evidence for benefits, including effective treatments, outweighs any risks, which include inaccurate screening results that could lead to unnecessary follow-up care.
Anxiety disorders are among the most common mental health complaints, affecting about 40% of U.S. women at some point in their lives and more than 1 in 4 men, Pbert noted.
Black people, those living in poverty, people who have lost partners and those who have other mental health issues are among adults who face higher risks for developing anxiety, which can manifest as panic attacks, phobias or feeling always on edge. Also, about 1 in 10 pregnant and postpartum women experience anxiety.
Common screening tools include brief questionnaires about symptoms such as fears and worries that interfere with usual activities. These can easily be given in a primary care setting, the task force said, although it didn’t specify how often patients should be screened.
“The most important thing to recognize is that a screening test alone is not sufficient to diagnose anxiety," Pbert said. The next step is a more thorough evaluation by a mental health professional, though Pbert acknowledged that finding mental health care can be difficult given shortages of specialists.
Megan Whalen, a 31-year-old marketing specialist who was diagnosed with anxiety in 2013, says regular doctors should screen for mental health issues as commonly as they do for physical problems.
“Health is health, whether the problem is visible or not," said Whalen, of Hoboken, New Jersey.
She has gotten help from medicine and talk therapy, but her symptoms worsened during the pandemic and she temporarily moved back home.
“The pandemic made me afraid to leave home, my anxiety telling me anywhere outside of my childhood house was unsafe," Whelan said. “I absolutely still struggle with feelings of dread and fear sometimes. It’s just a part of my life at this point, and I try to manage it as best as I can."
The task force said there isn’t enough solid research in older adults to recommend for or against anxiety screening in those aged 65 and up.
The group continues to recommend depression screening for adults and children, but said there isn’t enough evidence to evaluate potential benefits and harms of suicide screening in adults who show no worrisome symptoms.
In April, the group issued similar draft guidance for children and teens, recommending anxiety screening but stating that more research is needed on potential benefits and harms of suicide screening kids with no obvious signs.
Guidelines from the task force often determine insurance coverage, but anxiety is already on the radar of many primary care doctors. In 2020, a group affiliated with the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists recommended routine primary care anxiety screening for women and girls starting at age 13.
Melissa Lewis-Duarte, a wellness coach in Scottsdale, Arizona, says rhythmic breathing, meditation and making a daily list of three things for which she is grateful have all helped with her anxiety.
“Doctors say, ‘Make sure you’re sleeping, control your stress.’ Yeah, I get that," but not everyone knows how, said the 42-year-old mother of three. “It’s difficult to prioritize self-care, but that’s what’s necessary.”
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https://www.lockportjournal.com/news/panel-us-adults-should-get-routine-anxiety-screening/article_caed4ca0-3923-11ed-9521-0725e87fa529.html
| 2022-09-20T22:28:24Z
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The creator of a true-crime podcast that helped free a Maryland man imprisoned for two decades said Tuesday that she feels a mix of emotions over how long it took authorities to act on evidence that’s long been available.
The judge’s order to release Adnan Syed and vacate his murder conviction Monday came after the local prosecutor started a unit to review sentencing and a new Maryland law relating to juvenile sentencing provided a mechanism for reexamining the case, all after the “Serial” podcast in 2014 turned the details of the case into an obsession for countless amateur sleuths.
Baltimore State’s Attorney Marilyn Mosby immediately applauded the judge's decision as a victory for justice, but Syed's win came as a bittersweet reminder to those who had been aware of the gaps in the case for years. In a new episode of “Serial” released Tuesday, host Sarah Koenig noted that most or all of the evidence cited in prosecutors’ motion to overturn the conviction was available since 1999.
“Yesterday, there was a lot of talk about fairness, but most of what the state put in that motion to vacate, all the actual evidence, was either known or knowable to cops and prosecutors back in 1999,” Koenig said. “So even on a day when the government publicly recognizes its own mistakes, it’s hard to feel cheered about a triumph of fairness. Because we’ve built a system that takes more than 20 years to self-correct. And that’s just this one case.”
Koenig argued that the case against Syed involved “just about every chronic problem” in the system, including unreliable witness testimony and evidence that was never shared with Syed's defense team.
On Monday, Circuit Court Judge Melissa Phinn in Baltimore ordered Syed's release after overturning his conviction for the 1999 murder of high school student Hae Min Lee, Syed's ex-girlfriend. Syed, 41, has always maintained his innocence but in 2019 the state's highest court had rejected his appeal for a new trial.
At the behest of prosecutors who said they had recently uncovered new evidence, Phinn ruled that the state violated its legal obligation to share evidence that could have bolstered Syed’s defense. The judge said the state must decide whether to seek a new trial date or dismiss the case within 30 days.
Mosby, who entered office in 2015, filed a motion last week to vacate Syed's conviction, a filing that Koenig described as a “firework" coming from the same office that asked a jury to convict Syed years ago.
In the “Serial” episode posted Tuesday, Koenig broke down prosecutors’ motion and described how some evidence they cited was featured in the podcast, while other evidence – including the evidence of other possible suspects – became public more recently.
Key to Monday's outcome was evidence uncovered by a unit that Mosby's office launched to reexamine cases in which juvenile defendants were given life sentences. That worked in tandem with a 2021 Maryland law that enables someone convicted as a juvenile to seek a reduced sentence after serving at least 20 years. Syed was 17 when Lee was killed.
Prosecutor Becky Feldman led the unit and found notes written by one of her predecessors describing two phone calls in which people gave them information before Syed’s trial about someone with a motive to harm Lee. That information wasn’t given to the defense at the time, according prosecutors, an omission that Phinn said violated Syed's rights.
Koenig noted that she knew who these two new potential suspects were – and so did detectives who investigated Syed two decades ago – but declined to name them because they haven’t been charged.
“One of (the suspects) was investigated at the time, submitted to a couple of polygraphs. The other was investigated also, but not with much vigor, as far as I can tell,” she said.
Other supporting evidence on the unreliability of a key witness and questions about cellphone data was previously featured on “Serial,” Koenig said.
“If you’ve listened to our show you probably remember all of this,” Koenig said.
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https://www.lockportjournal.com/news/serial-host-evidence-that-freed-syed-was-long-available/article_1ee076c6-3923-11ed-9639-33766c8581e7.html
| 2022-09-20T22:28:30Z
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MIDDLEVILLE, Mich. — Nathan Fischer is being recognized for his Excellence in Education.
“Mr. Fischer is a great person to have in an educational system,” says Stacey Baab, Fischer's nominator. “He’s making an impression on these kids that can last him throughout their lives.”
When asked how it feels when a student understands the material they are taught, Nathan answered, “We call them 'a-ha moments.' The moment they get ... maybe it’s a new concept, or a skill, they just light up and that fuels me as — well — as a teacher. And then we also do, like, a truck driver cheer in the classroom where we celebrate that, then I go, 'Honk honk!' and the kids go, 'Good job, good buddy!' So, it just feels good all around.”
Nathan has received a $1,500 check from the Michigan Lottery, and his class at Lee Elementary will receive a $500 grant.
Is there an educator in your community who displays Excellence in Education? Click here to nominate them.
SEE MORE: Excellence in Education nominees wanted
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https://www.fox17online.com/news/excellence-in-education/excellence-in-education-nathan-fischer
| 2022-09-20T22:32:11Z
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Bone-heals to normal when implantal material does. How ? How do other skeled animal heall if a part get loot and cut up with only wound to close to start..How to a dog can a cat make another can dog have puss..\nBurden of cancer burdens our society with expense. Do we care as the patient does ? How are we pay attention that one is strangle..Can a child help or teach ? Why have do When considering purchasing investment, tax diversify their sources will mean they protect that they’re going over the maximum, however for them an individual get some relief over tax charges, particularly at this stage in each investment cycles in.\nGreet them with their real titles and then let those who like being inundations are. This also allows them for you to decide very they’ve already arrived and make your conversation with this new one so you can easily start sway them the GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. — The Blue Bridge in downtown Grand Rapids will be closed from midnight to 6:00, says GRPD.
A representative for GRPD says that the closure was prompted by concerns for public safety and for the protection of art installations displayed downtown during the annual ArtPrize competition.
The Blue Bridge will be closed overnight for the duration of ArtPrize, which runs from September 15 to October 2.
It has not been determined if the overnight closures will continue after ArtPrize. A representative for GRPD says they are currently assessing the feasibility of making the overnight closure permanent.
"GRPD is continuing to work with Downtown Grand Rapids Inc. on other long-term safety improvements, such as increased patrols, additional surveillance, and structural changes to prevent access by vehicles," said the representative.
Pearl St and Fulton St will both stay open, to allow for pedestrians to still cross the Grand River overnight.
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| 2022-09-20T22:32:17Z
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Gareon Mclean Giving Himself The Game In Houston. A Ridiculously Hard Worked Dunker With A Chromadear\n#5 Gareonglean#All Ball Chamenics#H2p20K91HHOHQXpqTpNy067WrU\nhttp://tmiyatronkova8a9bkrzpbdq77qe6v1y.t3 One of the safest bets in politics is that young people don't show up. That's especially true in the midterms when participation among younger voters trails significantly behind older generations.
"We have to start saying every election is important. And that's why we do the work that we do because we want folks to understand that it's each and every election, not just the general, not just the midterms, it's every election," said Stephanie Young, executive director of When We All Vote.
So, what does it take to get young voters to fill out a ballot? Stephanie Young from When We All Vote says it's as simple as asking.
"Especially with young people, they say, 'Oh, I didn't vote because nobody asked me to,'" said Young.
Former First Lady Michelle Obama started When We All Vote in 2018 with the goal of trying to meet voters where they are and make the voting process less intimidating.
"Sometimes we look to Mrs. Obama or big celebrities or other voices and think, 'Okay, well, you know, if they can't get people to move, then I can't.' And actually, that's the wrong thought. You are the best influencer for the people that are in your life, the people that you work with, go to church with, go to school with, go to synagogue, mosque, whoever. You influence them," said Young.
That idea of meeting voters where they are can lead to unexpected partnerships. This year, When We All Vote is working with BLK — a dating app for black singles that are popular with people aged 18-24.
"It was really those young voters, those first-time voters where we can actually help them, encourage them to at least get education and information about voting to really like shift the culture and make a positive impact on the community,” said Jonathan Kirkland, the head of brand and marketing at BLK.
National Voter Registration Day was first recognized in 2012 and has helped over 4.7 million people register to vote over the past decade.
Newsy is the nation’s only free 24/7 national news network. You can find Newsy using your TV’s digital antenna or stream for free. See all the ways you can watch Newsy here.
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https://www.fox17online.com/news/national/organizations-race-to-register-eligible-voters-ahead-of-midterms
| 2022-09-20T22:32:29Z
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Learning Innovation
A space for conversation and debate about learning and technology.
Title
42 Team Meeting Icebreakers
Prompts for warming up conversations before getting down to work.
September 20, 2022
At the start of our DCAL (Dartmouth Center for the Advancement of Learning - our CTL) team meetings, we kick things off with a quick icebreaker. The person running the meeting is responsible for writing or finding the prompt.
Below are some of the icebreakers that have been effective for warming up our team meetings. Please feel free to use them as you see fit.
- Dream car for you when you were 16.
- What food would you eat every day if you had to for the next 30 days?
- Tell us about your favorite museum.
- What technology (or technological advance) did you think would exist by now, but does not? Why do you want that technology, and how would you use it if it existed today?
- What is one thing you are grateful for in your work life this week?
- It’s Global Accessibility Awareness Day! Let's take the No Mouse Challenge to learn about web accessibility. Take 2-3 minutes to explore your universities website without using your mouse (Tab / Shift-Tab are your friends).
- Would you identify yourself as an introvert, extrovert or an ambivert?
- Share something about your mom.
- Tell us one thing about your work or non-work life that she might not otherwise find out.
- What’s the most significant change you notice at the beginning of a new term/semester?
- Share one thing that your family did when you were a child that you have either affirmed or rejected as an adult.
- What is your favorite mud season event, tradition, or feature?
- Reflect on our constructive and destructive behaviors. See link.
- Which management/leadership styles do you use? Which ones do you prefer? (Click here for the definition of each).
- Gratitude - please share something you are grateful for about yourself, your circle, and (or) the world you live in.
- “_________ , I’ll never do that again.
- What is your favorite game?
- A memory of playing as a kid.
- “It could only happen here.”
- The biggest surprise of the term/semester?
- What is one new non-work-related thing you’d like to do or try in the fall?
- The trip you’ve been dreaming about.......
- The big thing at work that you are hoping/trying to accomplish this week.
- What is the best thing that has happened to you in the last week?
- What is something you’ve learned online?
- What are you grateful for this week?
- Words to Live By. Good words to live by (or a personal motto). We will do a lightning round of reading these to kick off our meeting.
- Show us a photo of a place in your house that you would feature in a "cribs" walk-through.
- What is the best thing you or others in your house have cooked or baked this week?
- Show us an object of meaning from your home and tell us why you chose it (keep it brief-ish).
- What is the most memorable April Fools joke of your childhood?
- Strategies for dealing with campaign primary workers (for a friend).
- If you had one extra hour each day, what would you use it for?
- Favorite Super Bowl commercial?
- Favorite restaurant (or food?) anywhere in the world?
- Your best method for combating Seasonal Affective Disorder?
- New Year’s Resolutions, Yea or Nay?
- Do you think you have a pretty good work-life balance? Why or why not?
- Favorite holiday as a kid, and favorite holiday now.
- Favorite season, summer or winter?
- When you were a kid, what did you want to be when you grow up?
- If you could download any skill, like Neo downloading Kung Fu in the Matrix, what would you download?
If you have icebreakers that have worked for your team, please share.
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| 2022-09-20T22:35:15Z
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Don’t Worry Darling’s New York Premiere Was a Fashion Filled, Drama Free Affair
This week, Don’t Worry Darling hits theaters, meaning the Internet can finally start talking about the actual movie instead of focusing on all of the drama surrounding the promotional cycle...probably. In actuality, the conversations surrounding the cast of this cursed film will likely continue as long as the cast keeps providing content to discuss. Of course, Olivia Wilde, Florence Pugh, and Harry Styles don’t have to do much to get the Internet talking. Twitter will find anything to go off about when it comes to this group of people, as was proven at the Venice Film Festival earlier this month. So, when the cast of Darling (minus a few key people) gathered together again on Monday night for the New York premiere, it’s no surprise that the rumor mill began spinning once again. This time around, though, there wasn’t anywhere near as much fodder.
Director Wilde led the pack at the premiere at the Lincoln Square Theater, wearing an open-back, long-sleeved Saint Laurent pre-fall 2022 dress, which she paired with side swept hair, strappy black pumps, and layers of chunky bangles. Wilde managed to avoid her rumored boyfriend, Styles, throughout almost the entirety of the night, per usual, lest they give Styles’ fans more to chatter about online. Of course, they were still spotted interacting on the red carpet, as well as entering an elevator together at one point, and leaving the event in one car at the end of the night. We know all of this because it was so well-documented on Twitter.
For his part, Styles of course wore Gucci, pairing blue pinstripe wide-leg pants with a velvet double-breasted blazer, the off-center buttons adding a bit of an odd illusion as the singer posed on the red carpet, as if his body was detached from his head. It seems like all bodily fluids remained where they should be during the premiere, as no version of “spitgate” was trending online this morning. That could also be because Chris Pine opted not to attend the New York premiere. It was known Florence Pugh would miss out on the event, but Pine’s absence came as more of a surprise. Ahead of the screening last night, the two actors shared a pre-recorded message to attendees, with Pugh saying she’s filming halfway across the world (referring to Dune: Part 2), and Pine explaining that he’s “all the way in Los Angeles in production.” It’s unclear what project Pine is currently working on, but one could surmise it’s an upcoming Star Trek film set for next year.
The cast was filled out by a pink-suited Nick Kroll, Sydney Chandler, who also wore a long-sleeved Saint Laurent, and Gemma Chan in a belted, light blue custom Louis Vuitton dress, which resembled icicles climbing down her body. The cast came together for a group pic where, per usual, Styles and Wilde stayed very separated, with multiple “bumpers” between them.
Likely, this is the end of the road for the promotional cycle, as the film hits theaters on Friday. But don’t worry, darling, if there’s more drama to discuss, the Internet will find it.
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https://www.wmagazine.com/culture/dont-worry-darling-new-york-premiere-chris-pine-florence-pugh-olivia-harry
| 2022-09-20T22:36:34Z
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The House of the Dragon Actresses Definitely Picked Up on the Queer Subtext
No matter how unlikely the relationship, if you’re sensing romantic or sexual tension between two characters in the realm of Game of Thrones, you’re probably right. And if you’ve watched all five available episodes of the prequel series House of the Dragon and are wondering if Rhaenyra (Milly Alcock) and her best friend Alicent (Emily Carey) will be our next unexpected couple, know that you aren’t alone. Even Alcock and Carey, who will exit the show as their characters will be aged up next episode, have been wondering what exactly is up between the pair. (Yes, Alicent is the wife of Rhaenyra’s father—but seeing as Rhaenyra has already hooked up with her uncle, anything is possible.)
“As a queer person myself, I read an undertone in the script that I knew could be played,” Carey said when the New York Times asked her about the possibility of “sublimated romantic or sexual tension” between Rhaenyra and Alicent. “That being said, I don’t think Ryan Condal [a creator and showrunner] sat there writing a Sapphic drama. If you want to see it, you can. If you want to pretend it’s not there, you can also do that.” Carey went on to posit that the characters don’t have a concept of a binary between romantic and platonic. “There’s just a closeness between two young women that cannot be verbalized, especially in the world they live in,” she continued. “I don’t think they fully understand the feelings; it’s just all-consuming love.”
That all sounds pretty vague, but Carey and Milcock also pointed to a moment in which they felt the tension got pretty explicit. “There’s an underlying jealousy that I read into it, especially coming off the back of episode 4,” the former said. “It was this scene where we were on a bench, and it’s the first time we’ve seen these two women reconnect after losing this closeness they had. I remember in rehearsal at the end of the scene, we were like, ‘Did you feel like we were about to kiss?’” Alcock enthusiastically agreed. “Yeah, dude, it felt like we were going to kiss,” Carey continued. “That was really strange.”
Still, Carey and Milcock were careful not to push for any changes or interfere with the script. “We didn’t do anything to make them gay, or to force ‘the gay’ upon anyone,” Carey said. “It felt so natural. As I said, it’s easy to ignore if you really don’t want to look at it. But if you’re rooting for them and you want to make the story more heartbreaking, then choose to see it.”
So, is a kiss actually in store? Don’t ask Carey or Milcock: Their time on the show has come to an end. They haven’t read the remaining scripts, nor even met the older actors replacing them as their characters. Like us, they’ll just have to wait and see what happens in the rest of season 1.
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https://www.wmagazine.com/culture/house-of-the-dragon-rhaenyra-alicent-sexual-tension
| 2022-09-20T22:36:40Z
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Hilde Lynn Helphenstein Wants to Be the Art World’s Anthony Bourdain
Earlier this month, Hilde Lynn Helphenstein, the gallerist and curator behind the extremely niche yet wildly popular art world Instagram meme account @jerrygogosian, posted a video in which she announced that Sotheby’s will now be known as Hildeby’s, and that as the auction house’s new leader, she would be implementing a series of absurdist new policies: every wine bottle in the cellar would be free, every assistant hired on looks and family connections alone (the latter a silly but blunt critique of typical art world machinations).
If you’ve been among @jerrygogosian’s 112,000-plus followers at any point over the past four years, the video came across as a classic bit: The account (its name a portmanteau of Larry Gagosian, the founder of the Gagosian gallery empire, and the New York magazine art critic Jerry Saltz) has become art world catnip for its playful trolling of the industry’s heady self-seriousness. And while there’s practically zero chance that the blue chip auction house will allow Helphenstein to carry out those plans, the fact that she is collaborating with Sotheby’s is very much not a joke.
On September 23, a sale of work by emerging artists, titled Suggested Followers: How the Algorithm is Always Right, will go live on Sotheby’s Buy Now digital platform. Curated by Helphenstein, the artists represented were pulled directly from @jerrygogosian’s Instagram network. The concept is a commentary on the ways social media algorithms influence taste, as well as a testament to the combined power of a follower base made up of gallerists, curators, collectors and museum staffers.
As Helphenstein wrapped up final preparations for the sale and its concurrent exhibition at Sotheby’s headquarters in New York City, we spoke with her about her journey from anonymous meme creator to guest curator at one of the most powerful auction houses in the world.
So, how did @jerrygogosian come to be?
I contracted a disease that had me in bed for a year. I wasn’t even thinking about followers; I just thought it was inside-track jokes. Then, it went from 100 people—which is about what I thought I’d get—to 18,000 in four months. In my opinion, pre-pandemic, the art world was at a place where it both needed and wanted to laugh at itself, but there wasn’t an outlet for that yet. I think the account caught fire really fast because people were like, Oh my god, there’s somebody who knows our secrets and that’s hilarious. I still get messages every day from gallery administrators and senior directors of major blue-chip galleries being like, “You keep us laughing and on our toes.” Sorry, I’m kind of bragging, but I’m proud of this: There have been a couple of collectors who have told me that they learned how to collect art ethically by following my account—and how not to be assholes. I’m like, “Oh, I taught you not to be an asshole—that’s good!”
How did this whole Sotheby’s thing come about?
First, I didn’t know if they wanted to tie me, Hilde, into it, or if it was just going to be Jerry Gogosian. I used to have a gallery, so I could curate a show at the snap of a finger. But I thought it was a more interesting challenge for an avatar to curate the show. It’s crazy, but Jerry is now four years old. And because I'm followed by pretty much every gallery, major institution, big collector, et cetera, when I go to my “suggested” or Explore pages, Instagram shows me people who are going to be rising stars. So for the past four years, I’ve saved artists to an Instagram folder that’s literally called “Paintings I Like.” I realized that the algorithm caught on to what I liked in relation to my suggested follows or the people who are following me, so I decided to approach artists who appeared on that page. I had to make a judgment call on whose followings were big enough that I should get to them via email instead of DM, which was what I mostly did. You know, even Jerry Gogosian sometimes gets sent to that other inbox. [laughs] It’s funny seeing the final artist checklist and how the internet really pushed us together. As the show title goes, the algorithm is always right.
Though I don’t think everyone would necessarily agree with that.
I’ll tell you a story. I was in Maui with my friend Vajra Kingsley. We were doing yoga and I was reading a book of poems by Rumi, and at some point, I posted a photo of a white Persian cat that I had as a child on my Instagram. After I got back to the mainland, I went to my Explore page and there was a white Persian cat born of a litter called Maui. Her name was Rumi, and she was available at this place called Kingsley Kittens right down the street. I was like, “It’s God”—and my friend Olive Allen, a VR artist who’s very firm and Russian, was like, “What are you talking about? It was algorithm.” I was like, “Fuck you!” [laughs]
What it was like to work with Sotheby’s after you firmed up the artist list?
I’m so scrappy and bootleg-y. I’m used to doing everything: getting the artists in the show, finding the space, finding the collectors, finding the people who want to come to the opening. And I’ve worked with well-oiled galleries—I actually once quit a higher-up job to be an intern at a blue chip gallery because I wanted [to experience] that polished, finishing school style. But Sotheby’s? It’s an extremely well-oiled machine. It's been so amazing how each step of the way, there’s been someone there to assist. Not just to assist, but to assist with professional finesse.
Did you play a role in pricing the works?
It’s really up to the artists. Some of them work with galleries and some of them don’t. I study and write about the market, so I know how things should be priced. If an artist is like, “What do you think about this?” I can say with pretty decent surety, “You should probably price it at this point.” But some of their dealers are like, “You know, that is where we have you right now. Let’s not play around with it.”
You must have seen Jerry’s following change quite a bit over the past four years.
When I first started Jerry, it was hardcore art people who got every joke. Now that it’s at 112k followers, people will be like, “What’s primary access? Who’s Zoe and Chloe?” [Ed. note: The pair is the account’s mascot “gallerinas” and a running gag.] I’m just like, “Scroll back.” It’s funny because I have a couple random celebrities who follow me, like Katherine Heigl and Zoe Saldaña. Sometimes I'm just shocked. I’m like, How did you end up here?
Do you know what Larry Gagosian thinks of the account?
I have no idea.
Does his gallery follow you?
I don’t think so. The Pace account follows, and everyone from Hauser & Wirth follows. Same thing with David Zwirner—their staff does, including Lucas [Zwirner, the founder’s son and the gallery’s head of content]. I think it's very political, even though at this point, the jokes are relatively soft. I'm not naming names or throwing hard balls. But I think there is still a politicalness to following, and especially to commenting.
Apart from the following, how else has Jerry grown—especially in the time since you went public as the account’s creator?
I’ve started writing about my experiences going to all these art world things and putting them in a private mailing list. Really, my bread and butter is my writing, which I can’t fucking believe. It’s just five bucks per month—as I always say, cheaper than a latte. And I’m in the process of getting a TV show made, with some support from [Pace CEO and president] Marc Glimcher. He’s helped me get the ball rolling in some ways that I wouldn’t have been able to without him. Essentially, I want to be the female Anthony Bourdain of the art world.
So, instead of restaurants, going to galleries and fairs?
Yeah, I want to take it global. As you know, the art world travels in packs. And it’s actually a very small crowd. My partner, who was at Christie’s for a while and now runs an art capital firm, loves doing numbers. So he made a formula, and we think that there are only 500 people maximum in the “real” art world, buying blue chip art and going to all the fairs. It’s funny—I just came back from Frieze Seoul, and people there were air-kissing, like, “Oh, I’ll see you in London, and then Paris, and then Miami, and then…”
The level of carbon emissions is so wild.
That’ll be incorporated into the show. It’s about revealing—and not in a negative way, per se—all the things that people want to know and understand about the art world. I always think of my mother-in-law. She’s like, “Explain it to me. Tell me about the artsy things.” And I’m like, “Okay, first, we don’t call them ‘artsy.’” [laughs] But she doesn’t mean it in that way. Like so many other people, she just wants to know.
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Chattanooga's Division of Transportation is working to make sure the city’s full Ironman race is ready to go.
Starting Wednesday, September 21 at 9 a.m., the Riverfront will be closed to traffic.
At 7:30 a.m. on Sunday, Ironman participants will begin with a 2.4-mile swim in the Tennessee River.
Afterwards, they will take a 116-mile bike ride through St Elmo and north Georgia before making their way back to the North Shore area for a marathon which is 26.2 miles.
“During the race, particularly Sunday morning, there are going to be a couple of places that see the greatest impact. West 20th Street around Board Street, St. Elmo Avenue will also see a little bit of delays, and West 40th Street,” Justin Strickland said.
Justin Strickland is the Public Space Coordinator for the Chattanooga Division of Transportation.
He said days before the race, the Ironman course is inspected multiple times to ensure the safety of racers.
“Both the officials from Ironman and the city like to travel the entire route to inspect road conditions, to make sure there is no work zones taking place where folks will be biking or running. If something as simple as a pot hole, we make sure they are filled before racers get over here,” he said.
If you are headed to church Sunday morning and it is usually a 10 to 15 minutes commute, Strickland suggests people leave 35 or even 45 minutes earlier.
“When it comes to the amount of traffic expected, I would recommend giving yourself some extra time because at all intersections there will be an officer, but it may take time before they allow you through. I would take 27 and 24 to get through town,” he said.
Strickland wants to remind people to be mindful of Ironman participants who are out on the road.
“There is going to be several places where the bikers are going to be riding with traffic. So, just give them plenty of space and give them enough room where they can continue on the side of the lane. Give them a couple of feet if you can, but slow down if you see any of the bikers or runners,” Strickland said.
Closure details:
Riverside Drive/Riverfront Parkway between Aquarium Way and Molly Street, Chestnut Street between Aquarium Way and Riverfront Parkway, Power Alley from the parking lot to Riverfront Parkway, and the southbound Veterans Bridge ramp to Riverside Drive will be closed from 9:00 AM on Wednesday, September 21 until 8:00 PM on Monday, September 26 for the IRONMAN setup, race, and take-down.
The right eastbound lane of Riverfront Parkway between Molly Lane and Market Street, the right southbound lane of Market Street between West 20th Street and West 40th Street (the I-24 on-ramp and off-ramp at Market Street will be closed), West 40th Street between Alton Park Blvd and Tennessee Avenue, and all streets crossing this route will be controlled by CPD officers. The intersections of St Elmo Avenue and Virginia Avenue at West 45th Street will be 4-way stops from 8:00 a.m. until 6:00 p.m. on Sunday, September 25, 2022, for the IRONMAN bike portion. Cyclists will also be on Tennessee Avenue and St Elmo Avenue to the state line, riding with traffic.
The right eastbound lane of Frazier Avenue between Forest Avenue and the Veterans Bridge, the right northbound lane of Barton Avenue between Frazier Avenue and Baker Street, the right northbound lane of the Veterans Bridge between East 3rd Street and Barton Avenue, the right westbound lane of Amnicola Highway between Old Curtain Pole Road and Lindsay Street, Riverside Drive between Lindsay Street and Molly Lane, the Battery Place off-ramp from Riverside Drive, Aquarium Way between Riverside Drive and Walnut Street will be closed and all streets crossing this route will be controlled by CPD officers to give right-of-way to the runners from 12:25 p.m. on Sunday, September 25 until 1:00 a.m. on Monday, September 26 for the IRONMAN run portion.
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Margot Robbie Was “Mortified” When the Barbie Set Pics Went Viral
While these days, Margot Robbie is back to wearing designer looks while promoting her upcoming David O. Russell film, Amsterdam, it wasn’t long ago that the Internet was obsessing over pictures of the Australian actress decked out in neon digs on the set of Barbie. In the heat of the summer, the set pics from Greta Gerwig’s highly anticipated film were seemingly all anyone could talk about, but now, Robbie is revealing she wasn’t too pleased with all the attention.
“I can't tell you how mortified we were,” Robbie told Jimmy Fallon on The Tonight Show when he brought out a picture of the actress alongside her costar, Ryan Gosling, in costume. “We look like we're laughing, having fun, but dying on the inside.” Overnight, the pics were everywhere, in memes on Twitter, in videos on TikTok, they were inescapable. It seemed like all the Internet could talk about was the movie and its plot, costuming, and cast. Robbie called the pictures going viral “the most humiliating moment” in her life, though if she was embarrassed about a few photos, it’s unclear how the actress will handle it when the full movie is released.
Robbie explained that she really didn’t expect the fanfare. “I knew that we had some exteriors to shoot in LA. Once you're doing exteriors, you're gonna get papped. There's probably going to be a little crowd of people there who are gonna take notice,” she said, adding that the fluorescent costumes also made them really stand out (the film cameras and crew probably didn’t help either, nor did her and Gosling’s highly-recognizable faces). “I knew there would be a little bit of attention and probably some photos would get out there but not like it did.” She called the situation “mad,” saying there were hundreds of people watching at all times.
Luckily, Robbie and Gosling are professionals and they seemed to be able to keep their composure and get the job done. And now that the movie has wrapped, neither actor can stop singing the other’s praises. Robbie emphasized how funny Gosling is in the film, with Fallon responding that Gosling had the same sentiments about Robbie. Seems like we are in for quite the treat when the film finally comes out next summer. Hopefully, Robbie will be able to handle all the attention she and the movie will inevitably receive once again.
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Everything We Know About The Way Down, Starring Sarah Paulson as a Cult Leader
We wouldn’t blame you if you said that you worshipped Sarah Paulson—and are also going to guess that you don’t mean that as sincerely as those who adore her character in HBO Max’s upcoming scripted adaptation of its 2021 docuseries The Way Down: God, Greed, and the Cult of Gwen Shamblin. The 47-year-old actor has signed on to play the titular cult leader, who amassed thousands of followers (and millions of dollars) through her Weigh Down dieting program and Remnant Fellowship church. And if you’ve caught Paulson in Impeachment or any of the many seasons of American Horror Story, you know that she’s going to commit to the role and thereby make the series into a can’t-miss. Here, the answers to all your questions about The Way Down.
Who was the real Gwen Shamblin?
Shamblin studied biochemistry while earning her master’s degree in food and nutrition at the University of Tennessee, then went on to work as a dietitian at Memphis State University for years. All that lent her a sense of legitimacy when she started the Weigh Down Workshop in 1986. As time wore on, the more the program incorporated christianity; shedding pounds was seen as simultaneously shedding sin. Within a decade, it was being offered at roughly 5,000 churches. In 1999, she founded a Tennessee-based church of her own—and in fact, the Remnant Fellowship still exists to this day.
Shamblin herself, however, died in a plane crash just months before the original docu-series premiered.
How faithful is the adaptation starring Paulson?
We’re assuming very, given that the docuseries’s director, Marina Zenovich, and executive producer, Nile Cappello, are involved. The latter spent months digging into Shamblin’s exploits and getting to know Remnant Fellowship alums for the docuseries. Unsurprisingly, the church disputes their many harrowing recounts of child abuse and more. “Children here are happy and healthy, being raised with the most love, care, support, and protection imaginable,” its statement begins. “The church’s stance is that parents should determine how they set boundaries and guide their children based on their own family decisions, as long as it is founded on love and protection. There is no harshness in God nor Jesus Christ—there is only gentleness. Countless parents have shared that they are more loving and kind to their children after they started attending Remnant than they were before.”
Besides Paulson, who’s in the cast of The Way Down?
No further casting has been made at this time. Though, likely the second biggest role will be that of Joe Lara, Shamblin’s second husband. Lara was a hunky former actor-turned-aspiring musician who came to lead the Church with his wife despite no qualifications. Other major roles likely to figure in are David Shamblin, Gwen’s first husband, and their two children Michael and Elizabeth. Elizabeth now leads Remnant Fellowship.
Though, it’s safe to say that none of the actors will have to spend as much time in the hair and makeup trailer as its star. Shamblin sported an unmissable beehive, not to mention a full face of makeup, and Paulson has never shied from physically transforming for her roles.
When does The Way Down hit HBO Max?
Again, TBA. But since Paulson only has one project—the horror-thriller Dust—hopefully we won’t have to wait too long.
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| 2022-09-20T22:36:58Z
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Katie Holmes Kicks Off Autumn in a Luxe Cardigan
Have you been spending an inordinate amount of time staring in your closet every time you get dressed lately, struggling to figure out how to dress for this weather? Wondering if you can still pull off a sundress or if it’s time to transition to a sweater? Well, worry no further, because Katie Holmes is here and she has an announcement. We may have Punxsutawney Phil to tell us when spring is coming along, but as for autumn, that’s Holmes territory, and she has officially announced its arrival.
On Tuesday, the actress attended the Tribeca Chanel Women’s Filmmaker Program Luncheon at Locanda Verde in NYC. For the event, Holmes wore a look by Chanel, pairing some culotte-style pants with a white tank. On top, she layered a knit cardigan from Chanel’s fall/winter 2022/23 show, featuring a floral pattern and decorative buttons. Holmes then finished off the look with some square-toed flats and a silver Chanel purse.
The look is quintessential autumn dressing, with layers in case the weather gets unruly, comforting autumnal hues, and what’s proving to be the season’s biggest shoe. Of course, Holmes has been dressing like it’s fall for months at this point. Back in July, she wore a full knit dress and cardigan, despite the fact that NYC was in the middle of a heatwave. Now, though, the weather has finally caught up to Holmes’ closet, and the actress can dress how she pleases without risking heatstroke. If you were looking for a sign to pull your sweaters out of storage, you just got it.
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| 2022-09-20T22:37:04Z
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Kim Kardashian Can Barely Walk in Her Latest Balenciaga Fit
Over the years, Kim Kardashian has become the face of suffering for fashion. She’ll go hours without using the restroom because she’s wrapped up in designer caution tape or she’ll lose an unnecessary amount of weight to wear a historically significant dress that can’t be altered. Basically, she’ll risk it all when it comes to the right look. Because of that, not being able to walk in an outfit it pretty much par for the course for the reality star; it’s child’s play. So, when Kardashian had to hobble along the streets of New York City on Tuesday, she seemed unbothered, as it was all in the name of a good ‘fit.
The beauty mogul is currently in town to promote season two of The Kardashians on Hulu. In between TV appearances, Kardashian was seen in Midtown Manhattan, getting lunch with family friend Fai Khadra. For the outing, Kardashian stuck to her tried-and-true Balenciaga, pairing the brand’s turtleneck glove top with a black high-waisted maxi skirt, effectively covering her from her chin to her toes. The skirt was so formfitting, with just a slight slit in the back, Kardashian had to take very small steps in order to keep from falling down, forcing the very tall Khadra to slow down his pace for her as they walked together.
Kardashian paired the tight-fitting ensemble with some sunglasses from the brand, silver hoop earrings, and an odd, hardshell Balenciaga bag. It’s hard to pinpoint the purpose of this bag, but it kind of looks like either a motorcycle helmet case or one of those carriers people put their cat in so their feline can see the world. Kardashian’s though, doesn’t seem to have a furry friend in there.
The all-black look came after Kardashian wore a seemingly more comfortable outfit earlier in the day for an appearance on Good Morning America. She paired the same turtleneck top with her favorite pantaleggings, this time in a leopard print. For accesories, Kardashian opted for all Balenciaga items once again—black sunglasses, a fluffy version of the brand’s Hourglass bag, and earrings that resemble credit cards, the most fitting Kardashian accessory we could ever imagine.
While visiting Good Morning America, Kardashian spoke about the upcoming season of her family’s show. She expressed her excitement for the first episode, which airs on September 22nd. There have been no promos for the episode and Kardashian revealed there won’t be any. “It's, like, a really, seriously deep, vulnerable episode that we really haven't talked about,” she said. “I think people will be really surprised.” As for what’s in store, Kardashian didn’t reveal much, but anyone who has been paying attention to the famous family over the past few months has an idea of what to expect. Likely, Khloé’s new baby with Tristan, as well as Kim’s breakup from Pete Davidson will play out for us all to see.
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| 2022-09-20T22:37:10Z
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Madonna Seems to Be Taking Style Notes From Rihanna
Over the past few weeks, Madonna has been reclaiming her title as the Queen of New York City, attending events with a fervor rivaled only by Julia Fox. During Fashion Week, the singer made appearances at some of the hottest shows and after parties, but when the events moved on to another one of her other favorite cities, London, Madonna remained in New York, where she continues to rule the night life, and do so in style. On Monday, she attended the Don’t Worry Darling after party at the Bowery Hotel, wearing a look that seemed like it could have been inspired by another one of NYC’s favorite night owls—Rihanna.
Now, we’re not saying Madonna isn’t an original—she was setting trends before Rihanna was even born. Looking at Madonna’s latest ensemble, though, one could easily see the Fenty founder wearing something in a very similar vein. Madonna stepped out in a pair of oversized jeans with a dark layer underneath, so while the wide-leg pants were covered in rips, they didn’t reveal skin, just more fabric. On top, the singer wore an oversized, zip-up Balenciaga nylon jacket, which is also featured in her most recent music video for “Hung Up on Tokischa.” She then layered on the accesories as she is known to do, wearing leather fingerless gloves, layers of bracelets and diamond necklaces (one of which featured the Yankess logo), white sunglasses, black pointed toe heels that peeked out from underneath the hem of the jeans, and a black top-handle bag. Later, the pink-haired singer unzipped her shirt to reveal another layer to the look—a leather corset, with a sheer panel on top.
Seriously, have we not seen Rihanna in a totally similar ensemble? In fact, Madonna has been embracing this baggy, sportswear aesthetic for a bit now. She attended the LaQuan Smith after party in an oversized yellow Balenciaga sweatsuit and then wore a Yankee pinstripe-inspired tee by Willy Chavarria to his show, which she paired with a black maxi skirt also by the designer. Often times, Madonna’s style is defined by more form-fitting pieces, and corsets of course, which she is still hiding under these oversized layers, but at the moment, the singer seems to be having fun exploring a slightly more comfortable aesthetic.
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| 2022-09-20T22:37:16Z
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WASHINGTON — The General Services Administration, which provides purchasing options for tens of billions of dollars of goods and services for federal agencies, is urging its procurement officials to use their discretion in adjusting prices in government contracts to address inflation, and is making it one step easier for them to do so.
GSA temporarily lifted restrictions on economic price adjustments in its contracts in March to fight inflation. With prices still rising, the agency this month extended the flexibilities through March 2023 and said officers can now make adjustment decisions without the need for approval from a more senior official.
Agency officials said they recognize how supply chain shortages and price volatility impact the global economy and U.S. suppliers, creating a need for immediate relief for contractors who are getting squeezed by rising costs and fixed revenue.
“Inflation and uncertain economic market conditions erode scarce contracting dollars, cause severe hardship on federal partners, and discourage new entrants from pursuing federal acquisition,” said GSA in the memo announcing the extension. “The acquisition workforce has both the authority and the tools to take action to mitigate the impact of inflation in federal contracts.”
How is the Pentagon responding to inflation?
The Department of Defense took a similar step on Sept. 9, saying contracting officers may apply “schedule relief” or otherwise amend contractual requirements in certain circumstances to address inflation, according to a memo from the Pentagon’s pricing chief, John Tenaglia.
That could include some wiggle room on firm, fixed-priced contracts, which as the name suggests are notoriously rigid and hard to alter, worth tens of billions of dollars.
GSA, however, directly encouraged procurement officials to make use of flexibilities.
Unlike GSA, the Pentagon “wasn’t exactly encouraging contracting officers to be flexible or understanding when it comes to economic price adjustment or requests for equitable adjustments,” said Stephanie Kostro, executive vice president for policy at the Professional Services Council, a trade organization for the government technology and professional services industry.
The memos can help keep funding appropriated by Congress moving into the hands of workers on government contracts, Kostro said, by relieving economic pressures and fortifying the procurement pipeline against bureaucratic impasses.
Defense trade groups, seeking to sway Congress to add more for defense in a continuing resolution, say record-high inflation is costing the Pentagon $6 billion per month, endangering military readiness and throwing tech development plans off course.
The Aerospace Industries Association, National Defense Industrial Association and Professional Services Council ― which represent thousands of defense contractors ― asked congressional appropriators in a letter earlier this month to factor inflation into the CR and add money to allow new programs to start.
How does inflation impact federal procurement contracts?
Inflation is being felt widely across the government procurement sector. As costs rose, contractors began removing items from Federal Supply Schedule contracts to avoid selling at a loss. Also known as the GSA schedule, the purchasing vehicle is a long-term governmentwide contract with commercial companies that provide access to nearly 11 million products and services at at pre-negotiated prices. Government buyers spend over $30 billion annually through these contracts.
Assets on contracts overall are simply more costly, and that includes labor. On service contracts, which are especially human-capital centric, companies end up offering reduced capability for the same labor costs because dollars don’t go as far as they used to and workers have been lost to the private sector or other government offices.
The latest memo takes power that was tied up in the request and approval process and puts it into the hands of contractors and procurement officers to evaluate, make decisions and keep business flowing.
“Acquisition Letter MV-22-02 initially lowered the approval level from the contracting director to one level above the contracting officer. This Supplement, in recognition of ongoing price volatility and impacts to the global economy, removes the requirement to obtain additional approvals,” the memo says.
However, the temporary moratorium does not diminish a contracting officer’s responsibility for reviewing EPA requests and asking for additional information, if applicable, “within the confines of what is normally necessary for processing EPA requests.”
Can procurement officials negotiate prices on their own?
This gives contracting officers in the federal government on these contracts more latitude to negotiate adjustments themselves. The guidance will help shorten delivery timelines, Kostro said, and get rid of bureaucratic levels of approval.
Still, it probably won’t diminish workloads for contract officers, she said.
Additionally, contractors don’t have to hold their contract for a minimum of year before submitting a price increase. The guidance also temporarily did away with the limit of three increases per year and the 30-day waiting period between requests.
For fixed-price contracts, GSA acknowledges the possibility of reimbursement if the inflated costs are the direct result of government action. For example, an agency delays the work into a period where higher costs are unavoidable.
As a general rule, inflation is not a government-directed change and thus cannot form the basis for an equitable adjustment.
Time is another destroyer of value during periods of high inflation. An agency can lose the purchasing power of its initial budget if a deal takes weeks or months to solidify. Thus, the updated guidance encourages the use of contract vehicles that streamline procedures and simplify acquisitions, such as multiple-award schedules or Indefinite Delivery Indefinite Quantity contracts.
Awarding contracts for shorter periods of time are also a way to reduce unforeseen losses and risk, GSA said.
Industry experts and GSA officials acknowledged that the inflation-era guidance has been working and should, at least until next spring, be extended.
“The temporary moratorium is achieving some of its key objectives, including ensuring GSA continues offering customers a full range of products, services, and solutions through the Federal Supply Schedule program and GSA Global Supply,” the memo said.
With reporting by Joe Gould of Defense News
Molly Weisner is a staff reporter for Federal Times where she covers labor, policy and contracting pertaining to the government workforce. She made previous stops at USA Today and McClatchy as a digital producer, and worked at The New York Times as a copy editor. Molly majored in journalism at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
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| 2022-09-20T22:40:29Z
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