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Courvoisier – VS Cognac
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GOLD MEDAL 2009 SAN FRANCISCO SPIRITS COMPETITION. Mainly from the Fins Bois region with a bit from and some Cognac from champagne that are aged from 4 to 10 years, which creates a very smooth Cognac. | https://www.saucey.com/spirits/specialty/brandy-cognac/courvoisier/SP-C09026-1L | 2022-03-31T16:27:01 | en | 0.909505 |
(NewsNation) — President Joe Biden is ordering the release of 1 million barrels of oil per day from the nation’s strategic petroleum reserve for six months, the White House said Thursday, in a bid to control energy prices that have spiked amid Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Biden will deliver remarks on his administration’s plans to combat the rising gas prices. NewsNation will livestream Biden’s remarks in the player above.
Prices at the pump were rising long before Russia invaded Ukraine and have spiraled faster since the start of the war. The U.S. national average for a gallon of gasoline has soared in the past month and topped $4.22 on Thursday, according to auto club AAA.
Energy prices have spiked as the U.S. and its allies announced a plethora of sanctions against the Russian government and oligarchs over the course of the last month.
The move by Biden shows that oil remains a key vulnerability for the U.S. at home and abroad. Higher prices have crushed Biden’s approval domestically, while also adding billions of dollars to the Russian war chest as it wages war on Ukraine. The release of reserves could create pressures that could reduce oil prices, though Biden has already twice ordered releases from the strategic reserves without causing a meaningful shift in oil markets.
According to the Department of Energy, which manages it, more than 568 million barrels of oil were held in the reserve as of Friday. | https://cw33.com/news/biden-taps-oil-reserve-to-control-gas-prices/ | 2022-03-31T16:27:14 | en | 0.968773 |
You need to enable JavaScript to run this app. | https://sportspyder.com/mlb/cleveland-indians/articles/39006824 | 2022-03-31T16:27:19 | en | 0.738227 |
Seagram's – 7 Crown American Blended Whiskey
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Put your feet up, relax and let the crisp aroma of Seagram's 7 Crown American Blended Whiskey envelop you. Our whiskey has a smooth, slightly sweet taste that leaves your palate with a creamy, vanilla finish. Our American whiskey is 80 proof and carefully blended and aged in oak barrels to bring out its bold flavors. Simply mix Seagram's 7 Crown Blended American Whiskey and lemon-lime soda in a highball glass with ice for a signature 7 & 7 cocktail. Includes one 80 proof 50 mL bottle of American Blended Whiskey. Please drink responsibly. | https://www.saucey.com/spirits/whiskey/american-whiskey/seagrams-whiskey/WS-S38178-50ML | 2022-03-31T16:27:17 | en | 0.927584 |
CONCORD, N.H. (AP) — A former hermit in New Hampshire who went back to live on the wooded property he was ordered to leave realizes that his time there is drawing to a close.
David Lidstone, who just turned 82, is scheduled for a contempt of court hearing Thursday in his tug-of-war with a Vermont landowner over a patch of forest near the Merrimack River that he’s called home for 27 years.
A judge issued an injunction in 2017 for “River Dave” — as Lidstone is known — to leave after the landowner, Leonard Giles, sued him. But there have been delays in the case: Besides the pandemic, Lidstone didn’t always show up for court and he’s been in and out of jail over the last year as he resisted the injunction.
“I know my days are numbered here,” he told The Associated Press in a recent interview, a day after he showed up in court to plead not guilty to a trespassing charge on the land. “Eventually I’m going to have to move.”
Lidstone, who became known as a friendly face to kayakers and an advocate for keeping the river clean, wasn’t sure what he would do next or where he would go, even though he’s had offers of other places to live and more than $200,000 in donations.
Lidstone, a logger by trade, is accused of squatting in a rustic cabin he built on the land in Canterbury. The wooden, two-level A-frame cabin had solar panels, a small, cluttered kitchen with pots hanging from the ceiling, and curtains on the windows. His porch had a footstool with a base made of stacked beer cans. He converted a wood stove into a beehive. He attached lights, a mirror and a pulley for a clothesline to logs supporting the cabin. He also had a vegetable garden.
But while Lidstone was in jail over the property dispute, his cabin burned down in August as it was being dismantled at Giles’ request. The fire chief said the fire was accidental.
Lidstone, who has been representing himself, was ordered to pick up his remaining possessions and leave. An outpouring of support followed. He didn’t think he could go back to being a hermit and lived with some friends. But by December, he had turned a shed that survived the fire into a makeshift home, outfitted with a wood stove.
Court records say the undeveloped property has been in the Giles family since 1963 and is used for timber harvests. Lidstone had claimed that years ago, the current owner’s father gave his word — but nothing in writing — allowing him to live there. He also has disputed whether he’s on the property in the first place.
Lidstone was given permission last year to hire a surveyor to give him “peace of mind,” a judge said, but he has been unable to get someone to come out yet.
It hasn’t been easy to serve Lidstone with a notice to appear in court. There’s no road access to the property, which is about a mile and half (2.4 kilometers) into the woods. In January, one process server slipped, fell down an embankment, and injured his leg in his attempt to reach Lidstone at the woodshed, according to a motion filed by Giles’ attorney.
“Mr. Lidstone has been painted as a sympathetic figure in the media because he is an 81-year-old veteran wanting to live a romanticized life off-the-grid,” another plaintiff’s motion from December said. “That does not excuse his conduct of returning to Mr. Giles’ land, again, and again, and again.”
Giles has asked a judge for compensation from Lidstone to cover his legal costs since 2017 and cleaning up the property. Lidstone hasn’t agreed to that. | https://cw33.com/news/famous-hermit-i-know-my-days-are-numbered-at-disputed-woodlot/ | 2022-03-31T16:27:21 | en | 0.988747 |
You need to enable JavaScript to run this app. | https://sportspyder.com/mlb/cleveland-indians/articles/39006878 | 2022-03-31T16:27:25 | en | 0.738227 |
(STACKER) — Elementary school teachers can expect stability in their profession for the foreseeable future, as employment in elementary school education is expected to grow by 7% by 2030.
A career as an elementary school teacher can be impactful and rewarding, as teachers help shape the development of young children in their early educational stages. Oftentimes, elementary school—especially pre-K and kindergarten—is where a child first learns to follow specific routines, socialize outside of their family environment, and comprehend rules and consequences from someone other than a family member. Elementary education also marks a child’s introduction to various subjects they will continue to learn over the years.
Some typical job duties of elementary school teachers include creating lesson plans for specific subjects such as English or math, assigning and grading homework, observing students’ performances, and communicating with parents about their child’s progress. There will always be a need for educators in society, and though there’s currently a nationwide demand for all sorts of teachers—in the subject areas of mathematics, science, special education, and teaching English as a second language, especially—there’s been a noticeable shortage of elementary school teachers in recent years.
It’s been a challenging few years for school employees, largely due to the COVID-19 pandemic, which has given way to a whole host of obstacles in retaining teachers—temporary school closures, staffing absences, low wages, and increased demands of educators, among them. In order to reduce staffing shortages, school districts are working on a variety of strategies, such as increasing compensation through federal recovery funds, creating teaching residencies, investing in more recruitment staff, adding more staff members to support students and parents, and overall focusing on employee retention.
The job outlook for educators in elementary and secondary schools is expected to change for the better. Study.com examined the total employment and growth rate for elementary school teachers projected in 2028 across every state, utilizing data from Projections Central, sponsored by the U.S. Department of Labor.
States are ranked by expected percent increase in elementary school teacher jobs between 2018 and 2028. Estimates for average annual job openings are based on projections, taking into account annual growth and net replacement. To contextualize the current employment base across the country, Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics is included for each state.
Keep reading to see how elementary school teacher employment is projected to change across the nation.
#50. Maine
– Projected employment in 2028: 4,830 (-6.2% decrease from 2018)
– Total employment in 2020: 5,760
– Average annual wage in 2020: $53,640
– Average annual job openings 2018-2028: 340
#49. Vermont
– Projected employment in 2028: 3,910 (-1.8% decrease from 2018)
– Total employment in 2020: 3,870
– Average annual wage in 2020: $62,750
– Average annual job openings 2018-2028: 280
#48. Connecticut
– Projected employment in 2028: 16,220 (-1.6% decrease from 2018)
– Total employment in 2020: 15,000
– Average annual wage in 2020: $79,610
– Average annual job openings 2018-2028: 1,180
#47. Ohio
– Projected employment in 2028: 49,460 (-.9% decrease from 2018)
– Total employment in 2020: 52,910
– Average annual wage in 2020: $64,700
– Average annual job openings 2018-2028: 3,620
#46. Alaska
– Projected employment in 2028: 2,260 (-.9% decrease from 2018)
– Total employment in 2020: 3,380
– Average annual wage in 2020: $74,720
– Average annual job openings 2018-2028: 170
#45. Illinois
– Projected employment in 2028: 61,210 (-.7% decrease from 2018)
– Total employment in 2020: 57,880
– Average annual wage in 2020: $66,140
– Average annual job openings 2018-2028: 4,480
#44. New Hampshire
– Projected employment in 2028: 5,610 (+.5% increase from 2018)
– Total employment in 2020: 6,480
– Average annual wage in 2020: $60,730
– Average annual job openings 2018-2028: 420
#43. Rhode Island
– Projected employment in 2028: 3,360 (+.9% increase from 2018)
– Total employment in 2020: 4,020
– Average annual wage in 2020: $71,640
– Average annual job openings 2018-2028: 250
#42. Delaware
– Projected employment in 2028: 4,400 (+.9% increase from 2018)
– Total employment in 2020: 3,810
– Average annual wage in 2020: $66,140
– Average annual job openings 2018-2028: 330
#41. Massachusetts
– Projected employment in 2028: 32,110 (+1.1% increase from 2018)
– Total employment in 2020: 29,900
– Average annual wage in 2020: $84,810
– Average annual job openings 2018-2028: 2,390
#40. Missouri
– Projected employment in 2028: 24,990 (+1.8% increase from 2018)
– Total employment in 2020: 20,580
– Average annual wage in 2020: $52,050
– Average annual job openings 2018-2028: 1,870
#39. Hawaii
– Projected employment in 2028: 6,520 (+2.2% increase from 2018)
– Total employment in 2020: 4,810
– Average annual wage in 2020: $65,060
– Average annual job openings 2018-2028: 490
#38. Virginia
– Projected employment in 2028: 36,440 (+2.8% increase from 2018)
– Total employment in 2020: 37,160
– Average annual wage in 2020: $72,620
– Average annual job openings 2018-2028: 2,750
#37. Oklahoma
– Projected employment in 2028: 17,830 (+2.8% increase from 2018)
– Total employment in 2020: 16,670
– Average annual wage in 2020: $48,570
– Average annual job openings 2018-2028: 1,350
#36. Montana
– Projected employment in 2028: 4,550 (+2.9% increase from 2018)
– Total employment in 2020: 4,610
– Average annual wage in 2020: $50,270
– Average annual job openings 2018-2028: 340
#35. Alabama
– Projected employment in 2028: 24,900 (+2.9% increase from 2018)
– Total employment in 2020: 20,750
– Average annual wage in 2020: $51,280
– Average annual job openings 2018-2028: 1,880
#34. New Jersey
– Projected employment in 2028: 45,760 (+3.2% increase from 2018)
– Total employment in 2020: 37,870
– Average annual wage in 2020: $73,330
– Average annual job openings 2018-2028: 3,460
#33. South Carolina
– Projected employment in 2028: 22,530 (+3.3% increase from 2018)
– Total employment in 2020: 20,740
– Average annual wage in 2020: $52,960
– Average annual job openings 2018-2028: 1,710
#32. North Carolina
– Projected employment in 2028: 39,420 (+3.3% increase from 2018)
– Total employment in 2020: 43,200
– Average annual wage in 2020: $50,130
– Average annual job openings 2018-2028: 2,990
#31. West Virginia
– Projected employment in 2028: 5,740 (+3.4% increase from 2018)
– Total employment in 2020: 6,080
– Average annual wage in 2020: $47,780
– Average annual job openings 2018-2028: 440
#30. Michigan
– Projected employment in 2028: 38,300 (+3.5% increase from 2018)
– Total employment in 2020: 36,190
– Average annual wage in 2020: $68,850
– Average annual job openings 2018-2028: 2,910
#29. Louisiana
– Projected employment in 2028: 24,220 (+3.6% increase from 2018)
– Total employment in 2020: 21,580
– Average annual wage in 2020: $49,620
– Average annual job openings 2018-2028: 80
#28. Indiana
– Projected employment in 2028: 26,560 (+3.6% increase from 2018)
– Total employment in 2020: 25,360
– Average annual wage in 2020: $53,650
– Average annual job openings 2018-2028: 2,020
#27. New Mexico
– Projected employment in 2028: 7,180 (+3.8% increase from 2018)
– Total employment in 2020: 7,860
– Average annual wage in 2020: $60,740
– Average annual job openings 2018-2028: 550
#26. Kansas
– Projected employment in 2028: 16,500 (+4.0% increase from 2018)
– Total employment in 2020: 15,250
– Average annual wage in 2020: $54,460
– Average annual job openings 2018-2028: 1,260
#25. Minnesota
– Projected employment in 2028: 24,500 (+4.6% increase from 2018)
– Total employment in 2020: 23,200
– Average annual wage in 2020: $62,560
– Average annual job openings 2018-2028: 1,870
#24. California
– Projected employment in 2028: 196,500 (+4.9% increase from 2018)
– Total employment in 2020: 156,920
– Average annual wage in 2020: $85,110
– Average annual job openings 2018-2028: 15,070
#23. Tennessee
– Projected employment in 2028: 29,830 (+5.2% increase from 2018)
– Total employment in 2020: 27,870
– Average annual wage in 2020: $53,430
– Average annual job openings 2018-2028: 2,290
#22. Kentucky
– Projected employment in 2028: 18,720 (+5.2% increase from 2018)
– Total employment in 2020: 18,170
– Average annual wage in 2020: $52,950
– Average annual job openings 2018-2028: 1,440
#21. Nebraska
– Projected employment in 2028: 11,900 (+5.6% increase from 2018)
– Total employment in 2020: 9,020
– Average annual wage in 2020: $61,890
– Average annual job openings 2018-2028: 920
#20. Wisconsin
– Projected employment in 2028: 34,590 (+5.7% increase from 2018)
– Total employment in 2020: 26,790
– Average annual wage in 2020: $58,340
– Average annual job openings 2018-2028: 2,670
#19. Arkansas
– Projected employment in 2028: 12,660 (+6.0% increase from 2018)
– Total employment in 2020: 12,750
– Average annual wage in 2020: $49,380
– Average annual job openings 2018-2028: 980
#18. Wyoming
– Projected employment in 2028: 2,610 (+6.1% increase from 2018)
– Total employment in 2020: 2,440
– Average annual wage in 2020: $59,300
– Average annual job openings 2018-2028: 200
#17. South Dakota
– Projected employment in 2028: 4,520 (+6.1% increase from 2018)
– Total employment in 2020: 3,880
– Average annual wage in 2020: $44,790
– Average annual job openings 2018-2028: 350
#16. Pennsylvania
– Projected employment in 2028: 56,820 (+7.1% increase from 2018)
– Total employment in 2020: 53,460
– Average annual wage in 2020: $69,410
– Average annual job openings 2018-2028: 4,430
#15. Iowa
– Projected employment in 2028: 23,530 (+7.1% increase from 2018)
– Total employment in 2020: 16,290
– Average annual wage in 2020: $55,040
– Average annual job openings 2018-2028: 1,830
#14. Florida
– Projected employment in 2028: 79,570 (+7.2% increase from 2018)
– Total employment in 2020: 73,840
– Average annual wage in 2020: $57,520
– Average annual job openings 2018-2028: 6,200
#13. North Dakota
– Projected employment in 2028: 4,410 (+7.3% increase from 2018)
– Total employment in 2020: 4,190
– Average annual wage in 2020: $55,850
– Average annual job openings 2018-2028: 350
#12. Mississippi
– Projected employment in 2028: 14,880 (+7.4% increase from 2018)
– Total employment in 2020: 12,150
– Average annual wage in 2020: $43,280
– Average annual job openings 2018-2028: 100
#11. New York
– Projected employment in 2028: 90,350 (+8.0% increase from 2018)
– Total employment in 2020: 92,700
– Average annual wage in 2020: $84,380
– Average annual job openings 2018-2028: 7,090
#10. Oregon
– Projected employment in 2028: 14,480 (+8.3% increase from 2018)
– Total employment in 2020: 15,030
– Average annual wage in 2020: $71,420
– Average annual job openings 2018-2028: 1,140
#9. Texas
– Projected employment in 2028: 149,970 (+10.8% increase from 2018)
– Total employment in 2020: 131,370
– Average annual wage in 2020: $56,760
– Average annual job openings 2018-2028: 11,980
#8. Arizona
– Projected employment in 2028: 8,690 (+11.0% increase from 2018)
– Total employment in 2020: 23,370
– Average annual wage in 2020: $47,910
– Average annual job openings 2018-2028: 700
#7. Idaho
– Projected employment in 2028: 8,680 (+11.3% increase from 2018)
– Total employment in 2020: 8,050
– Average annual wage in 2020: $50,850
– Average annual job openings 2018-2028: 90
#6. Nevada
– Projected employment in 2028: 11,840 (+13.8% increase from 2018)
– Total employment in 2020: 9,870
– Average annual wage in 2020: $56,780
– Average annual job openings 2018-2028: 960
#5. Maryland
– Projected employment in 2028: 34,400 (+14.4% increase from 2018)
– Total employment in 2020: 27,050
– Average annual wage in 2020: $77,470
– Average annual job openings 2018-2028: 2,810
#4. Colorado
– Projected employment in 2028: 28,870 (+15.5% increase from 2018)
– Total employment in 2020: 25,130
– Average annual wage in 2020: $56,150
– Average annual job openings 2018-2028: 2,370
#3. Georgia
– Projected employment in 2028: 61,500 (+15.8% increase from 2018)
– Total employment in 2020: 43,610
– Average annual wage in 2020: $61,290
– Average annual job openings 2018-2028: 5,070
#2. Utah
– Projected employment in 2028: 16,400 (+16.0% increase from 2018)
– Total employment in 2020: 12,800
– Average annual wage in 2020: $59,680
– Average annual job openings 2018-2028: 1,350
#1. Washington
– Projected employment in 2028: 39,940 (+17.4% increase from 2018)
– Total employment in 2020: 29,080
– Average annual wage in 2020: $74,400
– Average annual job openings 2018-2028: 3,910
This story originally appeared on Study.com and was produced and distributed in partnership with Stacker Studio. | https://cw33.com/news/how-elementary-school-teacher-employment-is-projected-to-change-in-every-state/ | 2022-03-31T16:27:27 | en | 0.907617 |
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DALLAS (KDAF) — It is officially the end of March and also Friday’s eve and North Texas will see some morning clouds to start then a mostly sunny and breezy rest of the Thursday.
The National Weather Service center in Fort Worth says it will be cooler than a normal day with winds coming from the north accompanied by low humidity. Most of the area’s highs will be in the high 60s and low 70s.
NWS Fort Worth says, “An upper disturbance moving across early this morning will bring a few sprinkles to North Texas. Clouds clear out by the afternoon with brisk northwest winds 10 to 15 mph and occasionally gusty. Highs will range from the mid 60s to lower 70s.” | https://cw33.com/news/local/few-sprinkles-to-start-the-north-texas-thursday-before-a-sunny-breezy-end/ | 2022-03-31T16:27:33 | en | 0.950543 |
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(The Hill) — Milk cartons filled with hand sanitizer were given to children at a preschool and kindergarten center in New Jersey on Wednesday.
Officials announced in a tweet that an investigation into a “possible contamination of milk” at the Early Childhood Development Center in Camden showed that milk cartons were filled with the sanitizer used to clean the machines that fill the cartons and were shipped out before anyone noticed.
At about 9 a.m. Wednesday, staff at the school called 911 after 25 children drank the milk from cartons that reportedly had an antiseptic odor, according to WPVI Philadelphia.
Eleven students were taken to Virtua Our Lady of Lourdes Hospital for examination and discharged shortly thereafter. Twenty-one additional students were taken to Cooper Medical Center, where they were also discharged a couple of hours later, according to WPVI.
“This was a scary situation but thankfully, everyone who was exposed to the milk is in stable condition and either back at school or home,” Camden County Health Officer Paschal Nwako said. “This investigation is ongoing, and our department will get to the bottom of this situation.
The Camden City School District said that the sanitizer is not toxic, and the students were sent to the hospital for precautionary purposes. Emergency teams were also dispatched to the school, officials said.
“We pulled all milk today and NO milk will be served until the investigation is completed.” | https://cw33.com/news/milk-cartons-filled-with-hand-sanitizer-given-to-children-at-nj-preschool-a-kindergarten-center/ | 2022-03-31T16:27:39 | en | 0.986414 |
WASHINGTON (WPRI) — The Transportation Security Administration is working to improve the screening experience at TSA checkpoints for all passengers.
On Thursday, TSA officials announced new standards for screening transgender, nonbinary, and gender-nonconforming airline passengers. Thursday is also Transgender Day of Visibility.
“Over the coming months, TSA will move swiftly to implement more secure and efficient screening processes that are gender-neutral, as well as technological updates that will enhance security and make TSA PreCheck enrollment more inclusive. These combined efforts will greatly enhance airport security and screening procedures for all,” TSA Administrator David Pekoske said in a news release.
TSA officials said they will begin implementing an enhanced screening technology later this year and also plan on changing its operating procedures to reduce the number of pat-down screenings without compromising security.
Additionally, TSA officials say they have removed gender considerations when validating a traveler’s identification at security checkpoints. They are also making the TSA PreCheck more inclusive.
As of Thursday, two major air carriers — American Airlines and United — offer “X” and “U” (undisclosed) gender markers in their travel reservation systems.
The TSA has updated its Transgender, Nonbinary, and Gender Nonconforming Passengers webpage to provide information to the traveling public on all gender-related updates, including changes to AIT (advanced imaging technology) screening protocols, identity-verification practices, and the TSA PreCheck program. | https://cw33.com/news/tsa-to-make-airport-screenings-more-gender-neutral/ | 2022-03-31T16:27:45 | en | 0.935735 |
George Dickel – 9 Year Black Barrel Select Whisky
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Experience smoothness and depth that only time and quality craftsmanship can imbue with George Dickel Hand Selected Barrel 9 Year Old Tennessee Whisky. Cascade Hollow Distillery has set aside a limited number of barrels holding our most precious and richly complex whisky at peak periods of maturation. As our whisky ages and mellows, each barrel imparts its own unique taste and aroma, ensuring that no two are the same. Exceptional in taste and aged at least 9 years, this hand-selected, handcrafted whisky is a testament to Tennessee whisky's rich and bold character. Simply enjoy neat or with iced water on the side. Includes one 103 proof 750 mL bottle of George Dickel Hand Selected Barrel 9 Year Old Tennessee Whisky. Please drink responsibly. | https://www.saucey.com/spirits/whiskey/tennessee-whiskey/george-dickel/WS-G58159-750ML | 2022-03-31T16:27:44 | en | 0.885377 |
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CHICAGO (AP) — Grain futures were lower on Thursday in early trading on the Chicago Board of Trade. Wheat for May was off .25 cent at $10.2975 a bushel; May corn lost 7 cents at $7.3875 a bushel; May oats declined 13.75 cents at $7.2250 a bushel; while May soybeans fell 4 cents at $16.74 a bushel.
Beef and pork lower on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange.
Apr. live cattle fell .48 cent at $1.3967 a pound; Mar. feeder cattle was off .33 cent at $1.5597 a pound; Apr. lean hogs lost 1.80 cents at $1.0360 a pound. | https://www.expressnews.com/business/article/Grains-lower-Livestock-lower-17048393.php | 2022-03-31T16:35:32 | en | 0.936358 |
WASHINGTON (AP) — Average long-term U.S. mortgage rates rose again this week as the key 30-year loan rate vaulted over 4.5% and attained its highest level since the end of 2018.
Against a backdrop of inflation at a four-decade high, the increases in home loan rates come a few weeks after the Federal Reserve raised by a quarter point its benchmark short-term interest rate — which it had kept near zero since the pandemic recession struck two years ago — to cool the economy. The central bank has signaled potentially up to seven additional rate hikes this year.
The developments mean that mortgage rates likely will continue to rise over the year.
Mortgage buyer Freddie Mac reported Thursday that the average rate on the 30-year loan this week rose to 4.67% from 4.42% last week. That’s a sharp contrast from last year’s record-low mortgage rates of around 3%. A year ago, the 30-year rate stood at 3.18%.
The average rate on 15-year, fixed-rate mortgages, popular among those refinancing their homes, jumped to 3.83% from 3.63% last week.
Home prices are up about 15% over the past year and as much as 30% in some cities. Homes available for sale have been in short supply even before the pandemic started two years ago. Now higher prices and rising loan rates will make it even harder for would-be buyers as the spring homebuying season gets underway.
The government reported Thursday that an inflation gauge closely monitored by the Fed jumped 6.4% in February compared with a year earlier, with sharply higher prices for food, gasoline and other necessities squeezing Americans’ finances. That figure was the largest year-over-year rise in 40 years — since January 1982. Excluding volatile prices for food and energy, so-called core inflation increased 5.4% in February from 12 months earlier.
Robust consumer demand has combined with shortages of many goods to fuel the sharpest price jumps in four decades. Measures of inflation will likely worsen in the coming months because Thursday’s report doesn’t reflect the consequences of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which began on Feb. 24. The war has disrupted global oil markets and accelerated prices for wheat, nickel and other key commodities.
Squeezed by inflation, U.S. consumers increased their spending by just 0.2% in February, down from a much larger 2.7% gain in January. | https://www.expressnews.com/business/article/Long-term-mortgage-rates-rise-again-30-year-17048487.php | 2022-03-31T16:35:36 | en | 0.974385 |
1. “Where the Crawdads Sing” by Delia Owens (G.P. Putnam's Sons)
2. “The Recovery Agent” by Janet Evanovich (Atria Books)
3. “Run, Rose, Run” by Dolly Parton and James Patterson (Little, Brown)
4. “It Ends With Us” by Colleen Hoover (Atria Books)
5. “Verity” by Colleen Hoover (Grand Central Publishing)
6. “A Safe House” by Stuart Woods (G.P. Putnam's Sons)
7. “The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo” by Taylor Jenkins Reid (Washington Square Press)
8. “Atomic Habits” by James Clear (Avery)
9. “A Sunlit Weapon” by Jacqueline Winspear (Harper)
10. “French Braid” by Anne Tyler (Knopf)
11. “Little Blue Truck’s Springtime” by Alice Schertle (HMH Books for Young Readers)
12. “It’s Not Easy Being a Bunny” by Marilyn Sadler (Random House Books for Young Readers)
13. “The Great Reset” by Glenn Beck (Forefront Books)
14. “The Match” by Harlan Coben (Grand Central Publishing)
15. “Ugly Love” by Colleen Hoover (Atria Books)
16. “How to Catch the Easter Bunny” by Adam Wallace (HMH Books for Young Readers)
17. “The Paris Apartment” by Lucy Foley (William Morrow)
18. “November 9” by Colleen Hoover (Atria Books)
19. “Shadows Reel” by C.J. Box (G.P. Putnam’s Sons)
20. “Life Force” by Tony Robbins and Peter H. Diamandis (Simon & Schuster)
21. “You, Happier" by Daniel G. Amen (Tyndale House)
22. “Reminders of Him” by Colleen Hoover (Montlake)
23. “Here, There and Everywhere” by Marie Force (HTJB)
24. “The Very Hungry Caterpillar Board Book” by Eric Carle (Philomel)
25. “The Whole Body Reset” by Stephen Perrine (Simon & Schuster) | https://www.expressnews.com/entertainment/article/US-Best-Sellers-Books-USAToday-17048569.php | 2022-03-31T16:35:39 | en | 0.786787 |
It was the first census after World War II. The baby boom had begun. The Great Migration of Black residents from the Jim Crow South to places like Detroit and Chicago was in full swing. And some industrial cities reached their peak populations before Americans started moving to the suburbs.
Starting Friday, genealogists and historians can get a microscopic look at those sweeping historical trends when individual records on 151 million people from the 1950 census are released.
Researchers view the records as a gold mine, and amateur genealogists see it as a way to fill gaps in family trees, a field of research that has seen dramatic growth in recent years through the popularity of home DNA testing kits.
“This is genealogy heaven when a census is rolled out,” said Matt Menashes, executive director of the National Genealogical Society. “People are waiting anxiously. It’s hard to overstate.”
For privacy reasons, records identifying people by name can’t be made public until 72 years after they are gathered during the once-a-decade U.S. head count. The 1940 records were released a decade ago.
For Wendy Kalman, an amateur genealogist in Atlanta, the 1950 records will help her solidify details about her parents and grandparents and their relatives. She has traced her father's side of the family back to 18th century Ukraine, and her research has put her in touch with previously unknown third and fourth cousins in the U.S. whom she talks to regularly.
“It’s an interesting journey to find out where you are from and the census records help you find information that isn’t always available,” said Kalman, 55. “Family stories aren’t always passed down and the census records give you a snapshot in time. It helps put together a picture.”
Ronnie Willis’ relatives from both sides of his grandparents’ families were itinerant farmers who traveled through Texas and Oklahoma as a blended group throughout the 1930s and 1940s. But they broke into nuclear family units after World War II. Willis hopes the 1950 census records help him piece together what happened to those relatives who settled in other states.
“That will help get me 10 years closer to putting the puzzle together, a little bit,” said Willis, 53, a software company executive who lives in Greenville, South Carolina.
The records released by the National Archives and Records Administration will be indexed into a searchable website. The digitized, handwritten forms have information about household members' names, race, sex, age, address, occupations, hours worked in the previous week, salaries, education levels, marital status and the country in which their parents were born. The website will include a tool allowing users to fix any incorrect names or add missing names.
Claire Kluskens, a digital projects archivist at the National Archives, acknowledged that what will be on the website starting Friday is “a first draft," in which specific people are most likely to be found initially only by searching for whoever was listed as the head of their household.
Two outside genealogical groups, Ancestry and FamilySearch, a division of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, have teamed up to serve as a quality check on the records by creating their own index separate from the National Archives.
At Ancestry, scores of workers will be ready at 12:01 a.m. EDT Friday to start downloading the more than 6.5 million digital images of the census files. The Utah-based company will scan the millions of surveys, using artificial intelligence to decipher sloppy handwriting and converting the information into readable database form.
“We are so excited to dive into the census," said Crista Cowan, corporate genealogist at Ancestry.
Anywhere from 400,000 to 800,000 volunteers across the U.S., under the coordination of FamilySearch, will then double-check the entries with the actual digital images. If the digital record of the 1950 census form says “Wilhelmina" but has been entered as “William" in the index, that will be corrected, said David Rencher, director of the Family History Library in Salt Lake City and FamilySearch’s chief genealogy officer.
The effort could take six to nine months, he said.
“We believe we will get better accuracy because we are having humans look at it,” Rencher said.
The new data will flesh out the contours of a dramatically different world.
In 1950, the U.S. had less than half of the 332 million residents it has today. Households were larger, with an average of 3.5 people, compared with 2.6 people per household in 2019. Just 9% of households had someone living alone in 1950, compared with 28% in 2019. Adults were also more likely to be married, with more than two-thirds of adult men and women being married in 1950 compared with less than half of men and women in 2019, said Marc Perry, a senior demographer at the Census Bureau.
Elaine Powell is excited because this is the first release in which she will see herself in the census records. The president of the Central Florida Genealogical Society was born in 1946 and grew up in the St. Louis area.
“It’s just exciting. I remember the first time I found my parents in the census, you could hear me whooping and hollering in the library,” Powell said. “It verifies what you have been told by your parents and grandparents."
It can also correct the record left by family lore. After all, as Powell noted, “genealogy, without documentation, is mythology.”
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Follow Mike Schneider on Twitter at https://twitter.com/MikeSchneiderAP | https://www.expressnews.com/living/article/Gold-mine-of-census-records-being-released-from-17048377.php | 2022-03-31T16:35:52 | en | 0.969373 |
AUSTIN, Texas (AP) _ The winning numbers in Thursday morning's drawing of the Texas Lottery's "All or Nothing Morning" game were:
02-03-04-05-06-09-10-12-13-15-19-23
(two, three, four, five, six, nine, ten, twelve, thirteen, fifteen, nineteen, twenty-three) | https://www.expressnews.com/lottery/article/Winning-numbers-drawn-in-All-or-Nothing-Morning-17048378.php | 2022-03-31T16:35:58 | en | 0.863857 |
AUSTIN, Texas (AP) _ The winning numbers in Thursday morning's drawing of the Texas Lottery's "Daily 4 Morning" game were:
8-4-7-9, FIREBALL: 4
(eight, four, seven, nine; FIREBALL: four)
AUSTIN, Texas (AP) _ The winning numbers in Thursday morning's drawing of the Texas Lottery's "Daily 4 Morning" game were:
8-4-7-9, FIREBALL: 4
(eight, four, seven, nine; FIREBALL: four) | https://www.expressnews.com/lottery/article/Winning-numbers-drawn-in-Daily-4-Morning-game-17048380.php | 2022-03-31T16:36:05 | en | 0.837538 |
AUSTIN, Texas (AP) _ The winning numbers in Thursday morning's drawing of the Texas Lottery's "Pick 3 Morning" game were:
2-3-2, FIREBALL: 7
(two, three, two; FIREBALL: seven)
AUSTIN, Texas (AP) _ The winning numbers in Thursday morning's drawing of the Texas Lottery's "Pick 3 Morning" game were:
2-3-2, FIREBALL: 7
(two, three, two; FIREBALL: seven) | https://www.expressnews.com/lottery/article/Winning-numbers-drawn-in-Pick-3-Morning-game-17048379.php | 2022-03-31T16:36:11 | en | 0.872616 |
ROSEMONT, Ill. (AP) — Police have arrested an 18-year-old Chicago man wanted in last week's fatal shooting of a man and wounding of a girl at a suburban Chicago shopping mall.
Rosemont police said the suspect was taken into custody Wednesday “without incident” in the March 25 shooting that killed Joel Valdes, 20, of Skokie, at the Fashion Outlets of Chicago in Rosemont, just northwest of Chicago.
A second shooting victim, a 15-year-old girl, was treated and released from a hospital, police said.
Authorities did not immediately announce formal charges against the suspect or say when he would be in court.
Rosemont Police Sgt. Joe Balogh also did not disclose details of the suspect's capture, but told the Daily Herald that the man was apprehended by Rosemont officers. A nationwide arrest warrant was issued Tuesday for the suspect.
Police said the shooting occurred near the mall's food court during an argument that escalated into violence. Frightened shoppers ran for cover and the mall was locked down.
Authorities said surveillance video shows the suspect pulling out a weapon and shooting at Valdes, striking him. Valdes was later pronounced dead at a hospital.
After the shooting, the suspected gunman fled in a car with other people, police said. | https://www.expressnews.com/news/article/18-year-old-arrested-in-fatal-shooting-at-17048311.php | 2022-03-31T16:36:17 | en | 0.983257 |
Senate lawmakers in Mississippi briefly suspended work when weather sirens blared during a tornado warning Wednesday.
Severe storms packing isolated tornadoes and high winds are racing across the Deep South, killing two in the Florida Panhandle and leaving scattered damage to buildings and homes in their path.
In Florida, the Washington County Sheriff's Office said two were killed and two injured when a tornado touched down in the town of Alford, west of Tallahassee.
More than 150,000 homes and businesses between the Gulf Coast and Great Lakes of Florida were without power Thursday morning, according to PowerOutage.us.
A tornado also hit a dorm in Alabama.
The University of Montavallo posted on Facebook saying, “very few people were on campus during the storms.”
One person was hurt.
Police and university officials were assessing the campus for damage.
High winds overturned semitrailers in Louisiana and damaged a hotel in downtown Nashville. | https://www.fox13now.com/news/national/at-least-two-dead-after-round-of-severe-storms-in-the-south | 2022-03-31T16:36:20 | en | 0.976665 |
TUCSON, Ariz. (KGUN) — TuSimple is a company building and testing autonomous semi-trucks in Tucson. These trucks can successfully navigate side streets, highways and traffic signals, all while responding to surrounding cars. They have around 20 cameras that allow for a 360-degree vision of the road around the vehicle.
“The truck is capable of detecting when vehicles cut in front of it," said Koabi Brooks, Director of Technical Operations. "It will slow down if necessary to create a safe follow distance. It sees when cars are merging on the highway.”
Autonomous trucks could provide a real solution to recent supply chain issues. The American Trucking Association estimates there’s a shortage of 80,000 truck drivers in the United States.
“People were shopping more online, getting more product delivered to their houses," said Lee White, Vice President of Strategy. "What that means is more movement by trucks, there’s been more demand than ever for truck movements.”
In December, TuSimple’s truck became the first fully autonomous and driverless semi on the open road. The company is now accelerating toward commercial use.
“In December we did a technology demo showing the world that driver-out capability is closer than we think," Brooks said. "The path to commercialization is closer than the world thinks.”
People could start seeing semis without drivers in the next few months. This year, Union Pacific will be the first company to use TuSimple’s trucks without drivers to haul freight from Tucson to Phoenix. Other partners like FedEx, DHL, and UPS will use the trucks for commercial shipments starting in 2023.
“We believe autonomous trucking is coming to the industry, we believe it's going to be on our roads in the very near future,” White said.
This story was first reported by Paula Shaheen at KGUN in Tucson, Ariz. | https://www.fox13now.com/news/national/driverless-semi-trucks-pose-real-solution-to-shortages-supply-chain-issues | 2022-03-31T16:36:26 | en | 0.968327 |
LVIV, Ukraine (AP) — Ukraine's nuclear operator: Russian troops are leaving Chernobyl nuclear power plant, heading towards Belarus border.
LVIV, Ukraine (AP) — Ukraine's nuclear operator: Russian troops are leaving Chernobyl nuclear power plant, heading towards Belarus border. | https://www.expressnews.com/news/article/Alert-Ukraine-s-nuclear-operator-Russian-troops-17048347.php | 2022-03-31T16:36:30 | en | 0.800233 |
When it comes to heart disease, everyone isn't created equal.
According to the Centers for Disease Control, Hispanics are nearly 25% more likely than non-Hispanic whites to have poorly controlled high blood pressure. Black adults are 40% more likely to have high blood pressure.
Geraldo Rodriguez is originally from Trinidad and Tobago. Now he lives in Pinellas County, Florida. He’ll marvel at the weather and his surroundings— yet he talks less about his health.
At 83 years old, Rodriguez suffers from hypertension and high blood pressure.
“My mother died from high blood pressure,” Rodriguez said.
He is part of a statistic that has reached epidemic proportions. According to a study by the American Heart Association, it’s not just about how a person lives, but where they live may be just as important.
“Cardiovascular disease overall is not just a problem of older people. We've known for a long time that it actually begins to occur much earlier in the course of people's lives out in these communities,” Dr. Kevin Sneed said. “These lower socioeconomic situations leave more segregated opportunities that are lack of opportunity that overall people have. They reveal the worst cardiovascular outcomes later in life.”
The study found where a person calls home from ages 18 to 30, and how diverse the home is, may have a strong impact on their heart health. It found racially segregated neighborhoods often have less access to health care, fewer grocery stores providing healthy food options, and fewer safe spaces for recreation. They bring more stress, driving unhealthy coping behaviors like poor eating habits that increase the risk for heart disease.
Geraldo has to pay for a bus service to get to the nearest grocery store. He is on a fixed income which makes spending money to purchase healthy food.
By knowing which neighborhoods need help means knowing how to target that help. The American Heart Association is visiting food banks and talking about nutrition. They’re educating youth about heart risks. And most of all, they’re facilitating the necessary medical attention so many don’t receive. Their hope is to catch heart disease early and break the cycle.
“Our quest right now is to really erase the difference in terms of cardiovascular challenges between African American communities, our Latino communities and even some of the Asian communities that we're beginning to reach out to right now to get to a point where there is no difference at all as we're continuing to lower the number for everybody,” Dr. Sneed said. | https://www.fox13now.com/news/national/leveling-the-playing-field-in-dealing-with-heart-health | 2022-03-31T16:36:33 | en | 0.96886 |
FRANKFORT, Ky. (AP) — Gov. Beshear appointed eight members Thursday to Kentucky State University's Board of Regents. Nominees include a former Kentucky governor, a former state auditor and several KSU alumni.
KSU, the state’s only public historically Black university, has remained under state oversight since last summer, when concerns about the school’s finances and lawsuits alleging misconduct by campus officials came to a head.
A state report, ordered by Beshear, later found evidence of poor financial management by university leadership.
Last week, the Democratic governor signed legislation that required him to appoint a new board by April 4. The board, which will have to be confirmed by the Senate, is tasked with steering the 136-year-old institution though a financial recovery and an extensive review of departments, programs, faculty and staff.
State lawmakers passed legislation Wednesday that mandated the evaluation. The bill also appropriated an extra $15 million for the school, in addition to the $23 million school officials had requested to stabilize the school’s finances.
If signed into law, the KSU Board of Regents would have the authority to fire any employee, including tenured employees, upon a 30-day notice. The board would also be required to suspend its search for a university president until April 15, 2023.
In a statement, Beshear said he was grateful that a group “of highly qualified individuals, with diverse backgrounds and expertise, has stepped up to serve KSU students, staff and alumni through their work on this board.”
“They are helping ensure the university’s long-term success, and when KSU succeeds, Kentucky succeeds," he added. "As the state’s only public HBCU, this university holds a unique place in our past, present and future, helping make higher education more accessible and inclusive.”
The nominees include:
Ernie Fletcher, a physician and former Republican governor of Kentucky from 2003-2007, who will serve for a term expiring on June 30, 2023.
Edward Hatchett, a former Democratic state auditor from 1995–2003, who will serve for a term ending on June 30, 2025.
Tammi Dukes, an automotive executive and KSU graduate, who will serve for term expiring June 30, 2027.
Charles Moyer, a professor and former dean at the University of Louisville College of Business, who will serve for a term expiring June 30, 2027. Moyer is also a graduate of Howard University.
Michael Adams Jr., a KSU graduate and a vice president at Independence Bank and a managing member of Urban Industries LLC, who will serve for a term expiring June 30, 2024.
Jason Moseley, a head basketball coach at Frederick Douglas High School in Lexington and KSU graduate, who will serve for a term expiring June 30, 2026.
Gerald Patton, a former director of assessment and educational effectiveness at California State University and KSU graduate, who will serve for a term expiring June 30, 2022.
Robert Ramsey, who served as Executive Branch Cabinet secretary during the Fletcher administration, who will also serve for a term expiring June 30, 2022. He is a graduate of Florida A&M University.
___
Hudspeth Blackburn is a corps member 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. | https://www.expressnews.com/news/article/Beshear-names-members-of-Kentucky-State-17048433.php | 2022-03-31T16:36:36 | en | 0.975208 |
NASA says they captured a massive solar flare erupting from the sun.
In a blog post, the space agency said the solar flare occurred Wednesday, peaking at 1:35 p.m. EST.
The incredible moment was captured by NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory, which is always watching the sun.
The burst was powerful enough to cause a short-wave radio blackout in some areas.
Some airplane pilots, boat captains, and ham radio operators may have noticed the disturbance.
Nasa classified the event as an x-class flare.
More powerful solar flares can pose dangers to satellites, power lines, and even astronauts in space. | https://www.fox13now.com/news/national/nasa-captures-intense-solar-flare-erupting-from-the-sun | 2022-03-31T16:36:39 | en | 0.95007 |
WASHINGTON (AP) — CIA Director William Burns has tested positive for COVID-19, according to an agency statement Thursday.
The statement said Burns is experiencing mild symptoms and working from home, with plans to return to the office after five days and testing negative. The director is fully vaccinated and boosted.
Burns last met with President Joe Biden on Wednesday morning in a socially distanced meeting where the director wore an N-95 mask. The agency says Burns is not considered a close contact of the president by Centers for Disease Control and Prevention standards. The nature of the meeting was not disclosed by the CIA.
Biden is not known to have tested positive for the virus since the pandemic began. Several people in recent weeks have tested positive for the virus shortly after seeing the president, including press secretary Jen Psaki, deputy press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre and Irish Prime Minister Micheál Martin. | https://www.expressnews.com/news/article/CIA-director-tests-positive-for-COVID-19-has-17048488.php | 2022-03-31T16:36:42 | en | 0.954808 |
The United Nations has appointed a commission to investigate possible war crimes in Ukraine.
Three human rights experts were appointed to the independent panel.
The team will look at all accusations of international humanitarian law violations.
The panel will interview witnesses and collect evidence, including forensic material, before presenting its findings in September.
Ukrainian leaders have accused Russian military forces of targeting and killing civilians, but Moscow has denied those claims.
The International Criminal Court, the Organization of Security and Cooperation in Europe, as well as ten countries have started investigations into the war in Ukraine.
The UN has reported nearly 1,200 civilians have been killed since Russia began its invasion.
However, the toll is likely much higher, according to UN officials. | https://www.fox13now.com/news/national/russia-ukraine-conflict/un-creates-investigative-panel-to-investigate-war-crimes-in-ukraine | 2022-03-31T16:36:45 | en | 0.975769 |
Sen. Lindsey Graham said Thursday that he will not support Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson's nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court.
The Republican senator's decision is not unexpected. During Jackson's confirmation hearing, Graham was among the Republicans who were vocal in their criticism of Jackson's sentencing of child porn offenders.
"If you're on the internet trolling for images of children and sexual exploitation. So, so you don't think that's a bad thing, I think that's a horrible thing," Graham said as he continually cut off Jackson as she attempted to explain how she sentences people.
Graham claimed Thursday that Jackson lacks "steady judicial philosophy."
Despite his decision to vote no on her confirmation, Graham praised Jackson on a personal level.
"I find Judge Jackson to be a person of exceptionally good character, respected by her peers, and someone who has worked hard to achieve her current position," he said.
Most Republicans are expected to oppose Jackson's nomination. However, she will get support from at least one member of the GOP.
Sen. Susan Collins of Maine said Wednesday that she will vote to confirm Jackson.
If confirmed by the full Senate, Jackson will become the first Black woman to serve on the U.S. Supreme Court. | https://www.fox13now.com/news/national/sen-lindsay-graham-to-oppose-judge-jacksons-nomination-to-supreme-court | 2022-03-31T16:36:51 | en | 0.981077 |
PIGEON FORGE, Tenn. (AP) — Firefighters from across Tennessee continued working Thursday morning to contain a wildfire near the Great Smoky Mountains National Park that spread overnight despite rain from storms that passed through the area, officials said.
The blaze, which began as a brush fire Wednesday morning in the Hatcher Mountain area of Wears Valley, had spread to more than 3,700 acres (1,497 hectares) and had impacted more than 100 structures, Sevier County Mayor Larry Waters said during a press conference. Around 11,000 homes in the area had been evacuated. Three injuries were reported during the blaze, but Waters said no fatalities or missing people had been reported.
He said a coordinated response from emergency personnel, firefighters, forestry officials and others helped mitigate damage in the area.
“This fire could have been much more devastating had we not had this team in place. They were able to, even with the winds and the low humidity, they were able to stay ahead of it as much as possible,” he said.
Officials had warned early Wednesday that warm temperatures, low humidity and strong winds increased the risk of fire danger. Waters said the conditions were similar to those in 2016 when wildfires ravaged the tourism town of Gatlinburg, killing 14 people and damaging or destroying about 2,500 buildings.
Firefighters from more than 70 agencies helped respond to the blaze and many worked through the night in an effort to keep it from spreading. It was only 5% contained, but fire lines drawn overnight helped keep the blaze from spreading into the city of Pigeon Forge, Waters said.
Rain early Thursday from storms passing through did not put the fire out, but officials said it helped the situation and the current weather conditions were more favorable for containing the fire.
Evacuation orders remain in effect until the fire is under control. Schools in the area were closed Thursday as a precaution, officials said.
The fire was in what the state Agriculture Department described as steep and difficult terrain. The cause is still undetermined.
At least three shelters were established for those evacuated, authorities said. More than 100 people stayed overnight at the Pigeon Forge Community Center, Sharon Hudson, executive director of the Eastern Tennessee chapter of the American Red Cross. told the Knoxville News Sentinel.
A line of severe storms packing isolated tornadoes and high winds ripped across the Deep South overnight, killing at least two in the Florida Panhandle, toppling trees and power lines and leaving homes and businesses damaged as the vast weather front raced across several states. | https://www.expressnews.com/news/article/Crews-work-to-contain-wildfire-near-Smoky-17048448.php | 2022-03-31T16:36:55 | en | 0.983194 |
Tornadoes are touching down in areas that historically don’t commonly see them, now research is showing that Tornado Alley may be shifting, and scientists are trying to figure out why.
Neighborhoods in Round Rock, Texas have houses that have been destroyed after a tornado caused an estimated $32 million in damages.
“I heard a loud bang and crash,” said Linda Stevens, who has lived in Round Rock since 1993. “I went and got a couple cushions and made my way to the bathroom to get into the tub when all the noise suddenly stopped. I came outside and opened the front door, and it was a total disaster everywhere.”
Stevens is forced to stay in an apartment.
“Everything has to be moved out, and that’s what we’re doing today,” Stevens said. “I have never seen a tornado here. I feel like things are getting worse. We hear more and more about these weather disasters; they seem to be going to areas that just don’t generally have that.”
While Round Rock is just on the edge of Tornado Alley, the National Weather Service in Austin and San Antonio said that they aren’t necessarily rare, but they are very uncommon in that area.
“The number of tornadoes in this area varies from year-to-year,” said Jason Runyen, with the NWS. “Some years, we only get a few and others we can get a couple dozen.”
The tornadoes are sparking concern of Tornado Alley shifting, or as Runyen would describe it as the original Tornado Alley slowing down in frequencies while the southeast is ramping up.
“Traditionally, we have tornado alley in the central plains, and another cluster of tornadoes form over the mid and deep south,” Runyen said.
Research by the NOAA shows that more tornadoes have been turning up in the southeast in the last 15 years. A map shows that frequencies of tornadoes have been declining in Tornado Alley while there have been higher frequencies of tornadoes in the southeast.
“Is there a link to climate change? That’s what is being debated right now,” Runyen said. “And if climate change has to do with it, what degree is it playing a role? There is more distribution of tornadoes in the deep south and those are the factors that are being debated right now.”
According to atmospheric scientists from Purdue University, not only are the frequencies in the southeast increasing, but the studies have shown that they are more destructive. The research also explained that the dry air predominantly in the west triggers moist air and severe storms in the east causing Tornado Alley to shift.
The NWS is now warning those living in the southeast to prepare accordingly.
“If you’re moving to that area, you’d ought to think about tornado shelters,” Runyen said. “If you’re building a new home, build on that has been reinforced with a safe room in the home. Those are some things people can think about.” | https://www.fox13now.com/news/national/the-shift-in-tornado-alley | 2022-03-31T16:36:57 | en | 0.977886 |
COLUMBUS, Ohio (AP) — Lawyers representing an Ohio doctor accused in multiple hospital deaths wrapped up their case Thursday one day after calling only a single witness.
Dr. William Husel is accused of ordering excessive painkillers for 14 patients in the Columbus-area Mount Carmel Health System. He was indicted in cases involving at least 500 micrograms of the powerful painkiller fentanyl.
Prosecutors said ordering such dosages for a nonsurgical situation indicated an intent to end lives. Husel has pleaded not guilty to 14 counts of murder. His attorneys say he was providing comfort care for dying patients, not trying to kill them.
Jurors seated for the trial heard from 53 prosecution witnesses since the trial began Feb. 22, including medical experts, Mount Carmel employees, investigators, and family members of all 14 patients. Prosecutors took five weeks to present their case.
Defense lawyers called a Georgia anesthesiologist on Wednesday to testify that Husel's patients died from their medical conditions and not Husel's actions. The defense rested on Thursday, with closing arguments set for Monday.
Mount Carmel has reached settlements totaling more than $16.7 million over the deaths of at least 17 patients, with more lawsuits pending. | https://www.expressnews.com/news/article/Defense-rests-after-1-day-in-Ohio-doctor-s-murder-17048403.php | 2022-03-31T16:37:01 | en | 0.966267 |
TOOELE COUNTY, Utah — A semi-truck rollover crash on I-80 was blocking traffic in Tooele County on Thursday morning.
Both eastbound lanes were blocked near milepost 79.
A Utah Highway Patrol spokesperson said the truck was hauling food. No injuries were reported.
The full cleanup was expected to take a few hours. | https://www.fox13now.com/traffic/semi-truck-rollover-blocks-i-80-in-tooele-county | 2022-03-31T16:37:03 | en | 0.990647 |
CAPE TOWN, South Africa (AP) — Ethiopia’s Supreme Court has upheld the order to release on bail journalist Amir Aman Kiyaro, who has been imprisoned for four months without charges, rejecting a police effort to block his bail.
The Supreme Court on Thursday dismissed the appeal by police against bail that had been granted by a lower court earlier this week for Kiyaro, an Ethiopian video journalist accredited to The Associated Press. That ruling said Kiyaro should be freed on bail while prosecutors determine whether or not to press charges against him.
The bail of 60,000 Ethiopian birr, about $1,170, has been paid, but Kiyaro remained in custody Thursday while police processed the bail paperwork before his expected release, according to his lawyer.
Kiyaro, 30, was detained on Nov. 28 in Addis Ababa under the country’s war-related state of emergency powers.
Kiyaro is accused of “serving the purposes” of what the government has classified as a terrorist group by interviewing its officials, according to reports by Ethiopian state media, which cited federal police. Local journalist Thomas Engida was arrested at the same time and faces similar charges. Ethiopia's Supreme Court also ruled that Engida should be released on bail.
If the journalists are found guilty of violating Ethiopia’s anti-terrorism law or the state of emergency law, they could face sentences of seven to 15 years behind bars, federal police inspector Tesfaye Olani has told state media.
Despite the granting of bail after four months of police investigation and detention, it still remains uncertain whether prosecutors will proceed to press charges against Kiyaro. The state of emergency was lifted in February as the government cited changing conditions in the deadly conflict between Ethiopian forces and those of the northern Tigray region.
“We are relieved that journalist Amir Aman Kiyaro has again been granted bail," Julie Pace, the AP’s executive editor, said. "However, Ethiopian authorities continue their investigation against him. We urge the Ethiopian authorities to drop their baseless investigation against Amir, an independent journalist targeted for his work.”
Press freedom group Reporters Without Borders urged Ethiopian authorities to immediately release Kiyaro and Engida and to not press any charges against them. “They should be freed with no further delay and the case be dropped!” said the group in a tweet. | https://www.expressnews.com/news/article/Ethiopia-s-Supreme-Court-upholds-bail-for-17048571.php | 2022-03-31T16:37:38 | en | 0.976366 |
After an 8-year wait, the US men's soccer team will once again compete in a World Cup
After an eight-year wait, the U.S. Men's National team secured a spot Wednesday in the 2022 FIFA World Cup, although not in a way the team would have preferred.
In its 14th and final match of CONCACAF World Cup qualifying, the U.S. clinched a spot with a 2-0 loss against Costa Rica at Estadio Nacional in San Jose, Costa Rica.
"I'm extremely proud of this group," U.S. star Christian Pulisic said. "It's a bit of a weird feeling right now because I hate to lose so much, but I'm really proud, and I can't wait to go to the World Cup."
Entering Wednesday night, the U.S. knew it could punch its ticket with a win, draw or loss by less than six goals.
The top three teams in CONCACAF automatically qualify for the World Cup, while the fourth-place team will compete in an intercontinental playoff against Oceania's qualifying tournament.
The final table shows the U.S. in third position, behind Canada and Mexico, who also qualify. Costa Rica finished fourth.
This will be the first men's World Cup appearance for the U.S. since 2014. The U.S. did not qualify for the previous men's World Cup in 2018, having finished fifth in CONCACAF World Cup qualifying.
The 2022 World Cup will be held in Qatar and is scheduled for Nov. 21 through Dec. 18. | https://www.wbaltv.com/article/after-an-8-year-wait-the-us-men-s-soccer-team-will-once-again-compete-in-a-world-cup/39591484 | 2022-03-31T16:37:39 | en | 0.965419 |
NEW YORK (AP) — Fox News Channel says it has hired Caitlyn Jenner as a contributor, with her first appearance set for Thursday on Sean Hannity's program.
Jenner, the former Olympic decathlete, ran an unsuccessful campaign for California governor last year. The network said she'll offer commentary and analysis across various Fox News Media platforms.
“Caitlyn's story is an inspiration to us all,” said Suzanne Scott, Fox News Media CEO. “She is a trailblazer in the LGBTQ+ community and her illustrious career spans a variety of fields that will be a tremendous asset for our audience.”
Jenner won the Olympic gold medal in the decathlon in 1976. She later came out as a transgender and identifies as a female.
She said in a statement she was “humbled by this unique opportunity” to speak directly to Fox's audience. | https://www.expressnews.com/news/article/Fox-News-hires-Caitlyn-Jenner-as-contributor-and-17048362.php | 2022-03-31T16:37:44 | en | 0.976018 |
Amazon has deals on a popular telescope and a highly-rated bed-in-a-box mattress - Deal of the Day March 31, 2022
Did you know that Amazon has a “Deal of the Day” every day on their website? If you didn’t know, now you know.
The online shopping giant does daily deals on a multitude of products and even provides recommendations catered to your recent searches and purchases.
For March 31, Amazon is featuring deals on several items that we wanted to share with you, including a markdown on what is the top-selling telescope on Amazon.
The Gskyer telescope is listed at 35% off its original sticker price.
Can't see the product below? Click here for the best viewing experience.
The second deal we’re highlighting is actually a number of deals on mattresses.
We’ll specifically highlight a deal on a mattress that has the “Amazon Choice” label associated with it due to having over 43,000 customer reviews that rated it 4.5 stars out of 5.
The Vibe bed-in-a-box queen mattress is listed as a “limited-time deal” at 36% off its original price.
Lastly, if you’ve been thinking about sprucing up your backyard with something for your kids to have fun with, Amazon has marked down one of their popular playsets.
There are plenty of other deals to choose from. Click here to be directed to Amazon’s “Deal of the Day” page. | https://www.wbaltv.com/article/amazon-deal-telescope-mattress/39598701 | 2022-03-31T16:37:49 | en | 0.965564 |
BERLIN (AP) — Germany's independent vaccination advisory panel is recommending a booster shot with a messenger RNA vaccine for people who have had a full course of four Chinese, Indian and Russian COVID-19 vaccines that aren't currently approved for use in the European Union.
In a draft recommendation Thursday, the panel, known by its German acronym STIKO, said the advice applies to people given a full course and also a booster of the Chinese Sinovac and Sinopharm vaccines, the Indian-made Covaxin and Russia's Sputnik V.
It said that the new booster shot should be administered at least three months after the previous vaccination.
The German panel said that people who have received only a single shot of the four vaccines should start a new vaccination series.
And it added that recipients of other vaccines not cleared by the EU should in general start a new series with a vaccine European authorities have approved.
Scientists believe that mixing and matching vaccines prompts a better immune response.
The BioNTech-Pfizer and Moderna mRNA vaccines have been the mainstay of Germany's vaccination program. Three other vaccines using different technologies have been cleared for use in the 27-nation EU — the AstraZeneca, Johnson & Johnson and Novavax products.
The mRNA vaccines have shown to be better than others at protecting against newer variants like omicron.
___
Follow AP’s pandemic coverage at https://apnews.com/hub/coronavirus-pandemic | https://www.expressnews.com/news/article/German-panel-recommends-booster-for-recipients-of-17048251.php | 2022-03-31T16:37:57 | en | 0.949293 |
CHICAGO (AP) — Grain futures were lower on Thursday in early trading on the Chicago Board of Trade. Wheat for May was off .25 cent at $10.2975 a bushel; May corn lost 7 cents at $7.3875 a bushel; May oats declined 13.75 cents at $7.2250 a bushel; while May soybeans fell 4 cents at $16.74 a bushel.
Beef and pork lower on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange.
Apr. live cattle fell .48 cent at $1.3967 a pound; Mar. feeder cattle was off .33 cent at $1.5597 a pound; Apr. lean hogs lost 1.80 cents at $1.0360 a pound. | https://www.theheraldreview.com/business/article/Grains-lower-Livestock-lower-17048393.php | 2022-03-31T16:37:58 | en | 0.936358 |
Biden to mark Transgender Day of Visibility with new actions
President Joe Biden is commemorating Transgender Day of Visibility by celebrating prominent transgender Americans and advocating against what his administration terms “dangerous anti-transgender legislative attacks" that have passed in statehouses across the country.
Biden on Thursday is announcing new measures aimed at making the federal government more inclusive for transgender people, including a new “X” gender marker on U.S. passport applications beginning on April 11 and new Transportation Security Administration scanners that are gender-neutral.
The president's administration is working to expand the availability of the “X” gender marker to airlines and federal travel programs and will make it easier for transgender people to change their gender information in Social Security Administration records.
Visitors to the White House will soon also be able to select an “X” gender marker option in the White House Worker and Visitor Entry System, which is used to conduct screening background checks for visitors to the executive mansion.
At airports, there will changes to screening scanners as well as the use of an “X” for travelers going through Precheck who do not identify as male or female. TSA officers will receive new instructions on screening intended to make procedures less invasive. The TSA will work with airlines to promote the acceptance of the “X” gender marker.
“Transgender Americans continue to face discrimination, harassment, and barriers to opportunity,” Biden wrote in a proclamation marking the day. “In the past year, hundreds of anti-transgender bills in States were proposed across America, most of them targeting transgender kids. The onslaught has continued this year. These bills are wrong."
Biden also planned to release a video message to transgender Americans on Thursday.
“Jeopardy!” champion Amy Schneider, the first openly transgender winner on the quiz show, will visit the White House on Thursday to meet with second gentleman Doug Emhoff. Emhoff, along with Admiral Rachel Levine, the assistant secretary for health at the Department of Health and Human Services, will also host a conversation with transgender kids and their parents at the White House.
In Florida, Education Secretary Miguel Cardona will meet with LGBTQ+ students in the wake of the state's new law that bars instruction on sexual orientation and gender identity in kindergarten through the third grade. Republicans argue that parents should broach these subjects with children. Democrats have said the law demonizes LGBTQ people by excluding them from classroom lessons.
“Their conversation will focus on the impacts of Florida’s so-called ‘Don’t Say Gay’ bill, students’ experiences at school and, in particular, support for LGBTQI+ student mental health and well-being,” the White House said.
HHS, the White House said, will also be the first agency to fly a trans pride flag. | https://www.wbaltv.com/article/biden-marks-transgender-day-of-visibility/39594609 | 2022-03-31T16:37:59 | en | 0.950987 |
WASHINGTON (AP) — Average long-term U.S. mortgage rates rose again this week as the key 30-year loan rate vaulted over 4.5% and attained its highest level since the end of 2018.
Against a backdrop of inflation at a four-decade high, the increases in home loan rates come a few weeks after the Federal Reserve raised by a quarter point its benchmark short-term interest rate — which it had kept near zero since the pandemic recession struck two years ago — to cool the economy. The central bank has signaled potentially up to seven additional rate hikes this year.
The developments mean that mortgage rates likely will continue to rise over the year.
Mortgage buyer Freddie Mac reported Thursday that the average rate on the 30-year loan this week rose to 4.67% from 4.42% last week. That’s a sharp contrast from last year’s record-low mortgage rates of around 3%. A year ago, the 30-year rate stood at 3.18%.
The average rate on 15-year, fixed-rate mortgages, popular among those refinancing their homes, jumped to 3.83% from 3.63% last week.
Home prices are up about 15% over the past year and as much as 30% in some cities. Homes available for sale have been in short supply even before the pandemic started two years ago. Now higher prices and rising loan rates will make it even harder for would-be buyers as the spring homebuying season gets underway.
The government reported Thursday that an inflation gauge closely monitored by the Fed jumped 6.4% in February compared with a year earlier, with sharply higher prices for food, gasoline and other necessities squeezing Americans’ finances. That figure was the largest year-over-year rise in 40 years — since January 1982. Excluding volatile prices for food and energy, so-called core inflation increased 5.4% in February from 12 months earlier.
Robust consumer demand has combined with shortages of many goods to fuel the sharpest price jumps in four decades. Measures of inflation will likely worsen in the coming months because Thursday’s report doesn’t reflect the consequences of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which began on Feb. 24. The war has disrupted global oil markets and accelerated prices for wheat, nickel and other key commodities.
Squeezed by inflation, U.S. consumers increased their spending by just 0.2% in February, down from a much larger 2.7% gain in January. | https://www.theheraldreview.com/business/article/Long-term-mortgage-rates-rise-again-30-year-17048487.php | 2022-03-31T16:38:04 | en | 0.974385 |
'Thank you all': Bruce Willis' daughter grateful for outpouring of support
Bruce Willis and his family shared some personal news this week and his daughter Scout felt the supportive response.
On Wednesday, his family announced that Willis is stepping away from his career because he has aphasia, which is affecting his cognitive abilities.
Aphasia hinders a person's ability to communicate, making it difficult for them to comprehend others, write or speak.
Scout Willis, 30, shared a note of gratitude for the supportive messages she received about her dad.
"The exquisite outpouring of love that I am experiencing right now is just blowing me away," Scout wrote on her Instagram Story. "Thank you all for showing up with so much tenderness and stunning love for my daddio and my whole family."
Some colleagues of Bruce Willis shared some of their experiences working with the actor in recent years.
Actor Rob Gough, who filmed "American Siege" with Willis in November, told People he feels "honored and blessed" to have worked with him.
"The guy is a legend and just so iconic," Gough told the publication. "Even without this information [about his diagnosis], just to be on set with the guy was so memorable and so amazing for me. And then, learning about his condition, and that that was going to be one of his last films, I'm so honored and blessed that I got to work with the guy and learn from him."
"Even though he was going through this when he was on camera -- it's second nature to him, he just turned on, and you had no idea that anything was going on," Gough said.
Some who have worked with Willis within the last two years have noticed some changes in his health, according to a report by the Los Angeles Times.
Mike Burns, the director of "Out of Death," worked with Willis on that film in 2020 and said there was a request to shorten the actor's lines - compressing 25 pages of dialogue into one day of filming.
"After the first day of working with Bruce, I could see it firsthand and I realized that there was a bigger issue at stake here and why I had been asked to shorten his lines," Burns said.
Jesse V. Johnson told the paper he was a stuntman decades ago when he first worked with Willis.
Johnson, who directed the low-budget film "White Elephant," said "it was clear that he was not the Bruce I remembered" when the pair met up before filming last April.
"He just looked so lost, and he would say, 'I'll do my best,'" Terri Martin, the production supervisor on "White Elephant," said. "He always tried his best."
CNN has reached out to reps for Willis for comment. | https://www.wbaltv.com/article/bruce-willis-s-daughter-grateful-for-outpouring-of-support/39598404 | 2022-03-31T16:38:09 | en | 0.992702 |
LONDON (AP) — Climate activist Greta Thunberg has compiled a handbook for tackling the world’s interconnected environmental crises, with contributions from leading scientists and writers.
Penguin Random House announced Thursday that “The Climate Book” will be published in Britain in October.
It contains contributions from more than 100 academics, thinkers and campaigners, including novelists Margaret Atwood and Amitav Ghosh, climate scientist Saleemul Huq and World Health Organization chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus.
The book aims to help readers connect the dots between threats to the climate, environment, sustainability and indigenous populations — among others — and is intended as a guide to understanding and activism.
Contributors including Kenyan environmentalist Wanjira Mathai, Brazilian indigenous activist Sonia Guajajara, French economist Thomas Piketty and Canadian journalist Naomi Klein offer “compelling stories of change, action and resilience,” the publisher said, alongside Thunberg’s own stories of "learning, demonstrating, and uncovering greenwashing around the world.”
“My hope is that this book might be some kind of go-to source for understanding these different, closely interconnected crises,” Thunberg said in a statement.
Chloe Currens, editor at Penguin Press, said it was “a unique book, alive with moral purpose, which aims to change the climate conversation forever.”
Thunberg began skipping classes once a week to protest climate change in 2018, when she was 15, sparking a series of school walkouts that grew into a global youth movement.
Now 19, the Swedish activist has already published a memoir, “Our House Is On Fire” and a collection of speeches, “No One Is Too Small to Make a Difference.”
“The Climate Book” is published Oct. 27 in the U.K. by Allen Lane and in the U.S. in early 2023 by Penguin Press, as well as in countries around the world. | https://www.expressnews.com/news/article/Greta-Thunberg-aims-to-drive-change-with-The-17048508.php | 2022-03-31T16:38:09 | en | 0.947888 |
AUSTIN, Texas (AP) _ The winning numbers in Thursday morning's drawing of the Texas Lottery's "All or Nothing Morning" game were:
02-03-04-05-06-09-10-12-13-15-19-23
(two, three, four, five, six, nine, ten, twelve, thirteen, fifteen, nineteen, twenty-three) | https://www.theheraldreview.com/lottery/article/Winning-numbers-drawn-in-All-or-Nothing-Morning-17048378.php | 2022-03-31T16:38:11 | en | 0.863857 |
DETROIT (AP) — One security guard has been fatally shot and another wounded after a man was told to leave a Detroit health facility.
The shooting was reported about 1 p.m. Wednesday at the Team Wellness Center on the city's eastside, police said.
One security guard was pronounced dead at the scene. The other was in temporary serious condition at a hospital.
A man identified as the suspected shooter failed to complete the facility's intake process and had been asked to leave, police Capt. Conway Petty told reporters.
Petty said the man returned and had some type of confrontation with the security guards before pulling a gun and shooting them. The suspect then fled. | https://www.expressnews.com/news/article/Guard-slain-another-wounded-at-Detroit-health-17048337.php | 2022-03-31T16:38:15 | en | 0.988482 |
AUSTIN, Texas (AP) _ The winning numbers in Thursday morning's drawing of the Texas Lottery's "Daily 4 Morning" game were:
8-4-7-9, FIREBALL: 4
(eight, four, seven, nine; FIREBALL: four)
AUSTIN, Texas (AP) _ The winning numbers in Thursday morning's drawing of the Texas Lottery's "Daily 4 Morning" game were:
8-4-7-9, FIREBALL: 4
(eight, four, seven, nine; FIREBALL: four) | https://www.theheraldreview.com/lottery/article/Winning-numbers-drawn-in-Daily-4-Morning-game-17048380.php | 2022-03-31T16:38:17 | en | 0.837538 |
Less than 10% of children ages 5 to 11 are fully vaccinated against COVID-19 in about half of US counties
Related video above: Moderna reports results of COVID-19 vaccine study in young children
The youngest group eligible to be vaccinated against COVID-19 in the U.S., children ages 5 to 11, is also the least vaccinated one.
In about half of U.S. counties, less than 10% of children 5 to 11 are fully vaccinated, according to a CNN analysis of data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Most of the counties with especially child low vaccination rates are in the South, where nearly two-thirds of counties have vaccinated fewer than 1 in 10 children ages 5 to 11.
"This has been a constant concern for all of us," said Dr. Yvonne Maldonado, chair of the American Academy of Pediatrics Committee on Infectious Diseases. "It's very disturbing to see that families just haven't embraced [vaccination]."
About 1,500 counties have less than 10% of this age group vaccinated, including more than 500 counties that have less than 5% of this age group vaccinated, according to CNN's analysis.
Overall, about 66% of the U.S. population is fully vaccinated, including three-quarters of adults and nearly 90% of seniors, according to the CDC. Even among adolescents ages 12 to 17, the vaccination rate is higher than 50% nationally.
But even though they've been eligible for vaccination for nearly five months, less than 28% of children ages 5 to 11 are fully vaccinated.
Of more than 3,100 counties in the U.S., only a few dozen have fully vaccinated more than half of this age group.
Misconceptions about risk
"Certainly, this is a group that we have seen a much slower uptake," said Dr. Brannon Traxler, director of public health for South Carolina's Department of Health and Environmental Control.
No county in South Carolina has fully vaccinated more than a third of 5- to 11-year-olds, according to CNN's analysis, and more than a third of counties have vaccinated fewer than 1 in 10 in this age group.
Traxler wasn't surprised by the low rates. The overall vaccination rate in South Carolina lags behind the national average across all ages, but vaccinating children has been particularly difficult, she said, because of a number of parents' perception of COVID-19 as a disease that affects the elderly.
"A number of them don't see COVID-19 as being significant or severe in children," Traxler said.
It's a sentiment that pediatricians and public health officials have heard repeatedly.
"We know that the vast majority of hospitalizations and deaths overall over the pandemic have been in people over 65 and those with underlying medical conditions," said Maldonado, who is also chief of the Stanford University School of Medicine's division of pediatric infectious diseases and is leading vaccine trials in children. "This basically is a risk perception issue, that families don't feel that their children are at risk for getting severe disease."
But according to the CDC, about 18% of all COVID-19 cases have been in children. More than 118,000 children have been hospitalized, and nearly 1,400 have died — including 321 between the ages of 5 and 11.
The recent 0micron wave pushed children's case numbers and hospitalizations to the highest levels of the pandemic.
A study published Wednesday in the New England Journal of Medicine found vaccination to be a key factor in preventing hospitalization in that time period. The researchers, including some from the CDC, found that vaccination reduced the risk of hospitalization for 5- to 11-year-olds by 68% during the 0micron wave.
Like adults, children who are immunocompromised or have risk factors such as obesity or asthma may be at higher risk of becoming seriously ill with COVID-19, but with many children, it's not clear why they end up in the hospital and others don't.
"We can't risk-stratify children," Maldonado said. "We can't predict which children are going to be at risk for hospitalizations."
A delicate balance
Beyond the South, there are also hundreds of counties in the Midwest that have particularly poor vaccination rates among children, including Genesee County, Michigan, which is home to Flint.
"There's people who don't think it's severe, so they haven't bothered yet, and I think there's also people who are afraid of the vaccine," said Dr. Pamela Hackert, the county's medical health officer.
Hackert said it's been challenging to balance the messaging around potential side effects from vaccines with dispelling misinformation about them.
The most common vaccine side effects in children and adults include aches and fever. But there has been a slight increase in the risk of myocarditis, which is inflammation of the heart muscle, and pericarditis, inflammation around the heart, which has happened occasionally in males 16 to 39 who were vaccinated.
"We know that myocarditis in [the 16- to 39-year-old] group is mild and that it's not the kind of myocarditis that we tend to see from other pathogens, other viruses or bacteria, or from even from COVID disease itself. But that has been an issue that parents have really focused on," Maldonado said.
But there's also been a lot of work dispelling vaccine myths, such as effects on fertility.
"We just have to learn how to move beyond the misinformation and try to dispel it," Maldonado said.
A political struggle
In contrast to the South and Midwest, there are only about a dozen counties in the Northeast — less than 10% of all counties in the region — that have vaccinated less than 10% of children ages 5 to 11.
Places like Manhattan's New York County and some counties in the West — including Seattle's King County and a few in California's Bay Area — have had more success, with more than half of their 5-to-11 population fully vaccinated.
Many of those counties cite strong local partnerships and programs aimed at bringing vaccines to people where they are. But public health experts in areas with lower rates of vaccination — such as Dr. Rendi Murphree in Mobile County, Alabama — said they've made similar relationships and efforts.
Rather, Murphree said, the struggle is entrenched in parents' politics.
"For some reason, with this illness," she said, "they've made their decisions."
In Mobile County, just 9% of kids 5 to 11 have been vaccinated with both doses, and 60% of adults have had their two shots.
"I think last year, we did 300 community events out in the community. They're just not going to do it. We can take it to their back door. We can sit still and let them come to us. They're not going to do it," Murphree said.
She is optimistic that when kids return to school this fall, vaccine uptake among children 5 to 11 might inch up as pediatricians talk about getting ready for the school year and flu season. But she doesn't anticipate it budging much.
"I'm not hopeful that we're going to get above 50% of our 5-to-11-year-olds vaccinated," she said.
With fewer than 1 in 10 children vaccinated in Mobile County, she is worried about how vulnerable that leaves them.
"They're not vaccinated. They are not encouraged to wear masks, and there are no routine testing programs in schools," she said.
In South Carolina, Traxler is also worried. She says children may have a short-term benefit of protection if they were infected during the omicron wave, but she worries about the future.
"It's the same areas that have the lower vaccination rates that we're experiencing the lower masking rates. And so, certainly, that concerns me," she said.
"There could be a variant that escapes immunity, either from natural infection or from vaccines. And if that were to happen, that would be significant." | https://www.wbaltv.com/article/children-ages-5-to-11-covid-19-vaccine-rate/39595121 | 2022-03-31T16:38:19 | en | 0.984203 |
SOUTH BEND, Ind. (AP) — A 15-year-old boy accused of molesting and fatally strangling a 6-year-old northern Indiana girl last year will remain held at a county jail as he awaits trial, a judge says.
The boy's attorneys have argued that their client, who's charged as an adult in the March 2021 death of 6-year-old Grace Ross of New Carlisle, should be held at a juvenile facility away from adults.
They asked a St. Joseph County judge during a Wednesday court hearing to send the teen back to the county's juvenile facility. But the judge repeatedly denied those requests, saying that while the situation was not ideal the juvenile center will not take the young defendant.
The boy's next court hearing is set for May 4. He is currently being held in the St. Joseph County Jail, where he stays in his cell approximately 23 hours a day to avoid contact with adult inmates.
Jeff Kimmell, one of the teen's attorneys, said alternatives, such as moving him to facilities in Allen or LaPorte counties, would negatively impact his ability to represent his client.
“A case of this magnitude, I really need to visit him frequently,” he said.
According to court documents, the boy, then 14, told police a “shadowy man” controlled him and made him strangle Ross after she followed him into a wooded area from the nearby apartment complex where she lived about 75 miles (120 kilometers) east of Chicago. | https://www.expressnews.com/news/article/Indiana-teen-charged-in-death-of-girl-6-to-17048436.php | 2022-03-31T16:38:22 | en | 0.986734 |
AUSTIN, Texas (AP) _ The winning numbers in Thursday morning's drawing of the Texas Lottery's "Pick 3 Morning" game were:
2-3-2, FIREBALL: 7
(two, three, two; FIREBALL: seven)
AUSTIN, Texas (AP) _ The winning numbers in Thursday morning's drawing of the Texas Lottery's "Pick 3 Morning" game were:
2-3-2, FIREBALL: 7
(two, three, two; FIREBALL: seven) | https://www.theheraldreview.com/lottery/article/Winning-numbers-drawn-in-Pick-3-Morning-game-17048379.php | 2022-03-31T16:38:23 | en | 0.872616 |
3 men sentenced to a total of 200 years behind bars on drug crimes
Published: Mar. 31, 2022 at 11:02 AM CDT|Updated: 34 minutes ago
MADISON, Miss. (WLBT) - A Madison County judge sentenced three men to a total of 200 years behind bars this week in separate drug cases.
“All three of these cases are prime examples of how habitual offenders revolve in and out of our justice system,” Madison and Rankin Counties’ District Attorney Bubba Bramlett said.
Here are the details of each case:
- Torrey Powell of Canton was sentenced to a total of forty years for two counts of possession of methamphetamine. Investigators say Powell had at least six prior felony convictions in Oklahoma, Georgia, and Mississippi. Because he had been previously convicted of drug offenses, he was considered a subsequent drug offender, which doubled his maximum sentence on the current drug offenses. He was also a non-violent habitual offender, which requires that he serve the maximum sentence allowed by law without parole or early release.
- Carlos Dominque Allen of Jackson was sentenced to 100 years for the sale of fentanyl, trafficking in fentanyl, possession of hydrocodone, and possession of amphetamine
- Lucas Howard was sentenced to serve sixty years after a jury convicted him of possession of cocaine with the intent to sell and conspiracy to sell cocaine
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Copyright 2022 WLBT. All rights reserved. | https://www.wlbt.com/2022/03/31/3-men-sentenced-total-200-years-behind-bars-drug-crimes/ | 2022-03-31T16:38:26 | en | 0.960483 |
SPOKANE, Wash. (AP) — After Washington State University freshman Sam Martinez died from alcohol poisoning after a fraternity event in 2019, his parents became determined to prevent similar tragedies.
One of Jolayne Houtz’s and Hector Martinez’s many goals was met Wednesday when Gov. Jay Inslee signed the Sam’s Law Act. The Spokesman-Review reported the measure is named after their son, an Alpha Tau Omega pledge.
Sam’s Law will expand the definition of hazing and create requirements for colleges to provide hazing education and training to students and employees. It also will require colleges to publicly report findings of misconduct by student groups.
“This bill is a solemn reminder that we can and will do more to educate students on the dangers of hazing,” Inslee said.
The law expands the legal definition of hazing to include harmful acts that take place as part of a person’s continued affiliation with a club, athletic team or living group. Current law only covers hazing associated with the initiation process and does not include sports groups. Hazing, on and off campus , will be expressly prohibited in a school’s code of conduct.
Under the law, hazing education will be incorporated into orientation programs all new students are required to attend. Employees will receive annual training on hazing and be required to report suspected incidents. | https://www.expressnews.com/news/article/Inslee-signs-law-intended-to-reduce-hazing-17048415.php | 2022-03-31T16:38:28 | en | 0.962608 |
When will you get some relief from high energy prices? Experts share their predictions
Related video above: These everyday products are made with oil
Oil prices will probably stay near triple-digits and could even spike to $150 a barrel if the war in Ukraine severely disrupts Russia's energy supplies, Joe McMonigle, the secretary general of the International Energy Forum, told CNN.
McMonigle, whose organization serves as a go-between for energy-consuming countries like India, producers such as Saudi Arabia and ones who are both like the United States, is warning the public to get used to elevated energy prices.
"Prices are going to be high and very volatile for the foreseeable future, until one of two things happens," McMonigle said in an interview from his office in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.
Either Russia's supply situation gets back to normal or "the world goes into recession and there's demand destruction," McMonigle said.
Russia's invasion of Ukraine has set off fears of an epic supply shock. Russia, the No. 2 oil producer in the world last year, has struggled to find buyers for its oil because of a stigma of doing business with the country and sanctions uncertainty.
'The fog of war'
An estimated 1.5 million barrels per day of Russian oil has been displaced from the market since the war began, according to the IEF, the world's largest international organization of energy ministers from 71 countries.
"If that number looks to be higher, not even necessarily a lot higher ... you could see a pretty negative reaction in the market," McMonigle said.
For weeks, oil prices have swung wildly as investors struggle to make sense of the supply situation. In early March, U.S. crude briefly spiked to $130 a barrel, the highest level since 2008. Brent crude, the world benchmark, hit nearly $140 a barrel. That spike raised inflation fears and triggered concern of an energy-fueled slowdown or even recession.
Even now, there is considerable uncertainty over precisely how much Russian oil has been sidelined.
"The market's not really trading on fundamentals anymore. It's trading on the whims of the war and a guessing game," said McMonigle. "You have the fog of war and then you also have the fog of energy market."
Pump prices stuck near record highs
U.S. oil prices plunged below $100 a barrel on Tuesday on hopes of a ceasefire in the war, only to reverse course and spike back to $108 on Wednesday amid skepticism about a diplomatic breakthrough. They fell another 6% to about $101 a barrel Thursday after the White House considered releasing 1 million barrels of oil per day from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve.
Pump prices, meanwhile, remain stubbornly high. The national average for regular gasoline is stuck at about $4.24 a gallon, according to AAA. That's down just 9 cents from the record set earlier in March.
The longer energy prices stay elevated, the greater the risk the economy slows down or even tumbles into recession.
"I'm talking to a lot of energy ministers, especially from consuming countries, who are quite concerned about high energy prices," McMonigle said, "concerned not just about the impact on consumers in their countries but also the world economy." | https://www.wbaltv.com/article/relief-from-high-energy-prices/39594988 | 2022-03-31T16:38:29 | en | 0.963565 |
ROSEMONT, Ill. (AP) — Police have arrested an 18-year-old Chicago man wanted in last week's fatal shooting of a man and wounding of a girl at a suburban Chicago shopping mall.
Rosemont police said the suspect was taken into custody Wednesday “without incident” in the March 25 shooting that killed Joel Valdes, 20, of Skokie, at the Fashion Outlets of Chicago in Rosemont, just northwest of Chicago.
A second shooting victim, a 15-year-old girl, was treated and released from a hospital, police said.
Authorities did not immediately announce formal charges against the suspect or say when he would be in court.
Rosemont Police Sgt. Joe Balogh also did not disclose details of the suspect's capture, but told the Daily Herald that the man was apprehended by Rosemont officers. A nationwide arrest warrant was issued Tuesday for the suspect.
Police said the shooting occurred near the mall's food court during an argument that escalated into violence. Frightened shoppers ran for cover and the mall was locked down.
Authorities said surveillance video shows the suspect pulling out a weapon and shooting at Valdes, striking him. Valdes was later pronounced dead at a hospital.
After the shooting, the suspected gunman fled in a car with other people, police said. | https://www.theheraldreview.com/news/article/18-year-old-arrested-in-fatal-shooting-at-17048311.php | 2022-03-31T16:38:30 | en | 0.983257 |
4 people wanted after robbery at Family Dollar
Published: Mar. 31, 2022 at 10:50 AM CDT|Updated: 45 minutes ago
JACKSON, Miss. (WLBT) - Jackson Police Department is searching for four people tied to an armed robbery at Family Dollar.
The robbery happened just before 4 p.m. at the location on Terry Road.
If you know who they may be, call Crime Stoppers at 601-355-TIPS.
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Copyright 2022 WLBT. All rights reserved. | https://www.wlbt.com/2022/03/31/4-people-wanted-after-robbery-family-dollar/ | 2022-03-31T16:38:32 | en | 0.916115 |
PORTLAND, Ore. (AP) — A federal judge this week denied a temporary restraining order sought by environmental groups that would block grazing in six eastern Oregon pastures.
U.S. District Judge Michael Simon said the plaintiffs haven’t shown that cattle grazing on the pastures will cause irreparable harm to sage grouse or to rangeland research, The Capital Press reported.
He said continued grazing isn’t likely to irreparably harm the ability of environmental plaintiffs to enjoy undisturbed sagebrush grassland, since the pastures have long been grazed and are rested on a rotating basis.
Any hardship suffered by the environmental nonprofits is also “minimal” compared to the harm that a temporary restraining order would cause Cahill Ranches near Adel, Oregon, which relies on an affected pasture to turn out cattle, the judge said.
“Several families’ livelihoods depend on Cahill, which in turn depends on the ability to use public lands for its livestock operations,” said Simon, noting that the public interest also doesn’t weigh in favor of a temporary restraining order.
Six other ranches are seeking to intervene in the case, which was filed against the U.S. Bureau of Land Management by the nonprofits Oregon Natural Desert Association, Audubon Society of Portland and Defenders of Wildlife.
Aside from seeking the temporary restraining order, the plaintiffs have requested a broader preliminary injunction against grazing on a total of 13 Oregon pastures.
“There are a lot of other places the cattle can go,” Mac Lacy, attorney for the environmental groups said during oral arguments Monday. “The permittees, we believe, have greatly overstated the harm they may suffer.”
Grazing in the 13 pastures must end to allow for research into its impacts on sage grouse habitat, which has already been delayed to the detriment of that species and the environment, he said.
“Economic harm never outweighs irreparable environmental harm,” Lacy said.
Lacy also noted that the plan to stop grazing was enacted seven years ago, while the ranchers were formally notified two years ago.
According to the Oregon Natural Desert Association, grazing must be prohibited in the 13 pastures to allow for research on the sage grouse under a broader 2015 conservation plan for the species across the West, where its populations have been falling for decades.
These 13 “research natural areas” were originally required under a conservation plan developed during the Obama administration but dropped from a revised version enacted by the Trump administration.
A 2019 federal court order in a separate case reinstated the original conservation plan that required grazing to end in the 13 pastures. The environmental groups then sued alleging the federal government has unlawfully failed to implement the livestock-free “research natural areas.”
The BLM counters that it must follow bureaucratic processes before halting grazing within the 13 pastures, such as studying the environmental impacts of building necessary fences to keep cattle out.
“Fences don’t spring into existence at the stroke of a pen,” said Carroll, noting that fences are “not the most environmentally friendly way” to close pastures because of the effects on wildlife and plant species. For that reason, BLM is studying alternative methods. | https://www.expressnews.com/news/article/Judge-refuses-to-block-grazing-in-eastern-Oregon-17048424.php | 2022-03-31T16:38:34 | en | 0.954339 |
LVIV, Ukraine (AP) — Ukraine's nuclear operator: Russian troops are leaving Chernobyl nuclear power plant, heading towards Belarus border.
LVIV, Ukraine (AP) — Ukraine's nuclear operator: Russian troops are leaving Chernobyl nuclear power plant, heading towards Belarus border. | https://www.theheraldreview.com/news/article/Alert-Ukraine-s-nuclear-operator-Russian-troops-17048347.php | 2022-03-31T16:38:36 | en | 0.800233 |
A surge in demand for COVID-19 tests and vaccines helped Walgreens deliver a better second quarter than Wall Street expected.
Sales jumped as customers spent money on at-home COVID-19 tests as well as cold, flu and beauty products. Vaccines boosted pharmacy sales as the omicron surge of the virus peaked in the U.S. during the quarter.
Revenue from the company’s Boots stores in the United Kingdom also jumped as more customers returned to stores even though restrictions to fight omicron were in place for much of the quarter.
Walgreens Boots Alliance Inc., based just outside of Chicago in Deerfield, Illinois, pulls in most of its revenue from retail pharmacies in the U.S., where it runs nearly 9,000 stores. The company also runs nearly 2,300 Boots locations in the United Kingdom and some in Ireland and Thailand as well.
Walgreens CEO Rosalind Brewer said in January that the company was exploring “strategic options” for its Boots business, which it acquired several years ago. That move, the CEO said, was in line with the company’s increased focus on U.S. health care. She said then that they expected the review to move quickly.
The company said Thursday that review was still in progress.
Walgreens, like main rival CVS Health, is providing more options for care in the United States as it tries to become a steady resource for customers who want to improve their health or keep chronic problems in check.
Latest Business
The company has spent billions on a partnership with VillageMD to open primary care practices that work with its drugstores.
Overall, Deerfield, Illinois-based Walgreens Boots Alliance Inc. reported adjusted earnings of $1.59 per share in the quarter that ended Feb. 28. Revenue climbed about 3% to $33.76 billion.
Analysts expect, on average, earnings of $1.39 per share on $33.23 billion in revenue, according to FactSet.
Walgreens also said Thursday that it was keeping its forecast for low-single digit full-year adjusted EPS growth.
Analysts forecast adjusted earnings of $5.02 per share for the full fiscal year, which ends in August. That would represent about 2% growth from last year. | https://www.pilotonline.com/business/ct-biz-walgreens-earnings-20220331-4gnvnkwh6vdw5lgmyzmvf55ofm-story.html | 2022-03-31T16:38:37 | en | 0.977504 |
COVID-19 package could shrink to $10 billion as talks continue
WASHINGTON (AP) — The size of a bipartisan package to provide fresh spending to combat COVID-19 could shrink to $10 billion, Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell said Thursday, and the chamber’s top Democrat also suggested its price tag could fall.
Negotiators have been trying for weeks to revive a $15.6 billion compromise they had agreed to earlier this month. That fell apart after House Democrats rejected cuts in pandemic aid to states to help pay for it, and the parties remain divided over how to find savings both sides can accept.
The new money would be to purchase vaccines, treatments and tests, which the administration says are running low, even as the more transmissible omicron variant BA.2 spreads quickly in the U.S. and abroad.
“It’s still kind of a work in progress, but as of late last night, it appeared as if that would be skinnying down from 15 to 10,” McConnell, R-Ky., said in an interview with Punchbowl News.
Minutes later, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer took to the Senate floor and suggested a similar outlook, though he mentioned no figures.
“I’m pleading with my Republican colleagues, join us,” said Schumer, D-N.Y. “We want more than you do, but we have to get something done. We have to get something done.”
Republicans have demanded that the measure be paid for by pulling back pandemic funds that were approved in earlier relief measures but not yet spent. Bargainers from both sides have said they remain divided over how to do that.
McConnell said that Democrats “are unwilling to find another $5 billion” in savings from around $100 billion that’s not yet been spent. Democrats have said the cuts Republicans are pushing are unreasonable, such as revisiting the already rejected reductions in state assistance.
Since the pandemic began, Congress has approved more than $5 trillion to address the economic and health crises it produced. Only a small fraction of that has been for public health programs like vaccines.
McConnell said reducing the bill’s size could mean the one-third of the measure that was to go for vaccines and treatments overseas would be dropped, “which I think is terribly unfortunate.”
Schumer said the two sides’ differences have been “narrowed greatly.” But he acknowledged the need to win GOP support in the 50-50 chamber, where 60 votes are needed to pass most major bills.
“We would like considerably more money than our Republican colleagues,” said Schumer. “But we need to reach 60 votes to get something passed through the Senate. And so we’re going to push as hard as we can.”
President Joe Biden and congressional Democrats have said existing funds are running out and want a deal before Congress leaves town for a recess after next week.
Biden initially requested $22.5 billion for the effort.
Asked if he thought an agreement could be reached before lawmakers’ recess, McConnell said, “We’ll see. Hope so.”
Copyright 2022 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. | https://www.wlbt.com/2022/03/31/covid-19-package-could-shrink-10-billion-talks-continue/ | 2022-03-31T16:38:38 | en | 0.97614 |
A line of severe storms packing isolated tornadoes and high winds ripped across the Deep South overnight killing at least two in the Florida Panhandle, toppling trees and power lines and leaving homes and businesses damaged as the vast weather front raced across several states.In Florida, the Washington County Sheriff's Office said Thursday morning that two were killed and two injured when a tornado touched down in the western Florida Panhandle.The sheriff's office also said the tornado destroyed homes there. Its Facebook page showed at least one home that was obliterated, as well as trees down on another home. No other details were immediately available.At least two confirmed tornadoes injured several people Wednesday, damaged homes and businesses and downed power lines in Mississippi and Tennessee after earlier storm caused damage in Arkansas, Missouri and Texas.About 185,000 customers were without electricity Thursday morning in the wake of the storm along a band of states: Mississippi, Alabama, Tennessee, Kentucky, Indiana, Ohio and Michigan, according to poweroutage.us, which tracks utilities.The worst of the weather Thursday morning appeared to be at the southern end of the storm front, which was expected to bring heavy rain and high winds all along the U.S. East Coast later in the day. Much of the Florida Panhandle was under a tornado watch, according to the National Weather Service in Tallahassee.Widespread damage was reported in the Jackson, Tennessee, area as a tornado warning was in effect. “Significant damage” occurred to a nursing home near Jackson-Madison County General Hospital and the Madison County Sheriff’s Office in Jackson, said Madison County Emergency Management Director Jason Moore.In Nashville, Tennessee, paneling fell five stories from the side of a downtown hotel Wednesday evening and onto the roof of a building below. The fire department warned that debris could become airborne as high winds continued, and some hotel guests were moved to other parts of the building due to concerns the roof would become unstable. No injuries were immediately associated with the collapse.Daylight revealed widespread wind damage across Alabama.One person was hurt when a storm hit the University of Montevallo campus south of Birmingham, damaging a dormitory, officials said, and a woman was injured when a manufactured home rolled over in rural Bibb County. A school bus was flipped at a high school in south Alabama, and part of the roof was missing from a church in northwest Alabama.Elsewhere, a warehouse roof collapsed as the storms moved through Southaven, Mississippi, near Memphis, police said. The building had been evacuated and no injuries were reported.The Mississippi Senate suspended its work Wednesday as weather sirens blared during a tornado watch in downtown Jackson. Some employees took shelter in the Capitol basement.Rander P. Adams said he and his wife, Janice Delores Adams, were in their home near downtown Jackson when severe weather blew through during a tornado warning Wednesday afternoon. He said their lights flashed and a large window exploded just feet from his wife as she tried to open their front door.“The glass broke just as if someone threw a brick through it,” he said. “I advised her then, ‘Let’s go to the back of the house.’”Adams said the storm toppled trees in a nearby park, and a large tree across the street from their house split in half. “We were blessed,” he said. “Instead of falling toward the house, it fell the other way.”Earlier Wednesday, a tornado that struck Springdale, Arkansas, and the adjoining town of Johnson, about 145 miles northwest of Little Rock, shortly after 4 a.m. injured seven people, two critically, according to Springdale Mayor Doug Sprouse.Sprouse said in a statement that one of those critically injured had improved and was in stable condition and the other five were released from a hospital.“Our first responders have completed door-to-door searches, and we believe everyone has been accounted for,” Sprouse said.The National Weather Service in Tulsa said Thursday that the tornado has been rated an EF-3, up from an initial assessment of EF-2, with wind speeds between 136-165 mph. The tornado reached a peak speed of about 145 mph and 5 miles while on the ground for about eight minutes, according to the weather service.In northwest Missouri, an EF-1 tornado with wind speeds around 90 mph struck St. Joseph on Tuesday night, damaging two homes.A small tornado also touched down briefly on the eastern edge of Dallas, according to the National Weather Service in Fort Worth. The tornado struck just after 4:30 a.m. Wednesday near McClendon-Chisolm with top winds of about 100 mph and damaged homes, but no injuries were reported, according to the weather service.The storms come a week after a tornado in a New Orleans-area neighborhood carved a path of destruction during the overnight hours and killed a man.Strong winds in Louisiana overturned semitrailers, peeled the roof from a mobile home, sent a tree crashing into a home and knocked down power lines, according to weather service forecasters, who did not immediately confirm any tornadoes in the state.Firefighters, meanwhile, have been trying to get handle on a wildfire spreading near Great Smoky Mountains National Park in Tennessee, amid mandatory evacuations as winds whipped up ahead of the approaching storm front.The fire, which was not contained, had expanded to about 250 acres as of Wednesday afternoon. One person was injured, and a plume of smoke rose above one community not far from where 2016 wildfires ravaged the tourism town of Gatlinburg, killing 14 people and damaging or destroying about 2,500 buildings.
A line of severe storms packing isolated tornadoes and high winds ripped across the Deep South overnight killing at least two in the Florida Panhandle, toppling trees and power lines and leaving homes and businesses damaged as the vast weather front raced across several states.
In Florida, the Washington County Sheriff's Office said Thursday morning that two were killed and two injured when a tornado touched down in the western Florida Panhandle.
The sheriff's office also said the tornado destroyed homes there. Its Facebook page showed at least one home that was obliterated, as well as trees down on another home. No other details were immediately available.
At least two confirmed tornadoes injured several people Wednesday, damaged homes and businesses and downed power lines in Mississippi and Tennessee after earlier storm caused damage in Arkansas, Missouri and Texas.
About 185,000 customers were without electricity Thursday morning in the wake of the storm along a band of states: Mississippi, Alabama, Tennessee, Kentucky, Indiana, Ohio and Michigan, according to poweroutage.us, which tracks utilities.
The worst of the weather Thursday morning appeared to be at the southern end of the storm front, which was expected to bring heavy rain and high winds all along the U.S. East Coast later in the day. Much of the Florida Panhandle was under a tornado watch, according to the National Weather Service in Tallahassee.
Widespread damage was reported in the Jackson, Tennessee, area as a tornado warning was in effect. “Significant damage” occurred to a nursing home near Jackson-Madison County General Hospital and the Madison County Sheriff’s Office in Jackson, said Madison County Emergency Management Director Jason Moore.
AP Photo/Rogelio V. Solis
A tree toppled by the storm rests on the roof of a gazebo at Battlefield Park in Jackson, Miss., following a severe weather outbreak in the state, Wednesday, March 30, 2022. About a dozen trees were felled by the storm in the park.
In Nashville, Tennessee, paneling fell five stories from the side of a downtown hotel Wednesday evening and onto the roof of a building below. The fire department warned that debris could become airborne as high winds continued, and some hotel guests were moved to other parts of the building due to concerns the roof would become unstable. No injuries were immediately associated with the collapse.
Daylight revealed widespread wind damage across Alabama.
One person was hurt when a storm hit the University of Montevallo campus south of Birmingham, damaging a dormitory, officials said, and a woman was injured when a manufactured home rolled over in rural Bibb County. A school bus was flipped at a high school in south Alabama, and part of the roof was missing from a church in northwest Alabama.
Elsewhere, a warehouse roof collapsed as the storms moved through Southaven, Mississippi, near Memphis, police said. The building had been evacuated and no injuries were reported.
The Mississippi Senate suspended its work Wednesday as weather sirens blared during a tornado watch in downtown Jackson. Some employees took shelter in the Capitol basement.
AP Photo/Rogelio V. Solis
The Mississippi Department of Transportation digital message board warns drivers along I-55 southbound in Jackson of a tornado warning during a rainstorm during the outbreak of severe weather in the state, Wednesday, March 30, 2022.
Rander P. Adams said he and his wife, Janice Delores Adams, were in their home near downtown Jackson when severe weather blew through during a tornado warning Wednesday afternoon. He said their lights flashed and a large window exploded just feet from his wife as she tried to open their front door.
“The glass broke just as if someone threw a brick through it,” he said. “I advised her then, ‘Let’s go to the back of the house.’”
Adams said the storm toppled trees in a nearby park, and a large tree across the street from their house split in half. “We were blessed,” he said. “Instead of falling toward the house, it fell the other way.”
Earlier Wednesday, a tornado that struck Springdale, Arkansas, and the adjoining town of Johnson, about 145 miles northwest of Little Rock, shortly after 4 a.m. injured seven people, two critically, according to Springdale Mayor Doug Sprouse.
Sprouse said in a statement that one of those critically injured had improved and was in stable condition and the other five were released from a hospital.
“Our first responders have completed door-to-door searches, and we believe everyone has been accounted for,” Sprouse said.
The National Weather Service in Tulsa said Thursday that the tornado has been rated an EF-3, up from an initial assessment of EF-2, with wind speeds between 136-165 mph. The tornado reached a peak speed of about 145 mph and 5 miles while on the ground for about eight minutes, according to the weather service.
In northwest Missouri, an EF-1 tornado with wind speeds around 90 mph struck St. Joseph on Tuesday night, damaging two homes.
A small tornado also touched down briefly on the eastern edge of Dallas, according to the National Weather Service in Fort Worth. The tornado struck just after 4:30 a.m. Wednesday near McClendon-Chisolm with top winds of about 100 mph and damaged homes, but no injuries were reported, according to the weather service.
The storms come a week after a tornado in a New Orleans-area neighborhood carved a path of destruction during the overnight hours and killed a man.
Strong winds in Louisiana overturned semitrailers, peeled the roof from a mobile home, sent a tree crashing into a home and knocked down power lines, according to weather service forecasters, who did not immediately confirm any tornadoes in the state.
Firefighters, meanwhile, have been trying to get handle on a wildfire spreading near Great Smoky Mountains National Park in Tennessee, amid mandatory evacuations as winds whipped up ahead of the approaching storm front.
The fire, which was not contained, had expanded to about 250 acres as of Wednesday afternoon. One person was injured, and a plume of smoke rose above one community not far from where 2016 wildfires ravaged the tourism town of Gatlinburg, killing 14 people and damaging or destroying about 2,500 buildings. | https://www.wbaltv.com/article/severe-storms-pummel-south/39597745 | 2022-03-31T16:38:39 | en | 0.978713 |
FRANKFORT, Ky. (AP) — Gov. Beshear appointed eight members Thursday to Kentucky State University's Board of Regents. Nominees include a former Kentucky governor, a former state auditor and several KSU alumni.
KSU, the state’s only public historically Black university, has remained under state oversight since last summer, when concerns about the school’s finances and lawsuits alleging misconduct by campus officials came to a head.
A state report, ordered by Beshear, later found evidence of poor financial management by university leadership.
Last week, the Democratic governor signed legislation that required him to appoint a new board by April 4. The board, which will have to be confirmed by the Senate, is tasked with steering the 136-year-old institution though a financial recovery and an extensive review of departments, programs, faculty and staff.
State lawmakers passed legislation Wednesday that mandated the evaluation. The bill also appropriated an extra $15 million for the school, in addition to the $23 million school officials had requested to stabilize the school’s finances.
If signed into law, the KSU Board of Regents would have the authority to fire any employee, including tenured employees, upon a 30-day notice. The board would also be required to suspend its search for a university president until April 15, 2023.
In a statement, Beshear said he was grateful that a group “of highly qualified individuals, with diverse backgrounds and expertise, has stepped up to serve KSU students, staff and alumni through their work on this board.”
“They are helping ensure the university’s long-term success, and when KSU succeeds, Kentucky succeeds," he added. "As the state’s only public HBCU, this university holds a unique place in our past, present and future, helping make higher education more accessible and inclusive.”
The nominees include:
Ernie Fletcher, a physician and former Republican governor of Kentucky from 2003-2007, who will serve for a term expiring on June 30, 2023.
Edward Hatchett, a former Democratic state auditor from 1995–2003, who will serve for a term ending on June 30, 2025.
Tammi Dukes, an automotive executive and KSU graduate, who will serve for term expiring June 30, 2027.
Charles Moyer, a professor and former dean at the University of Louisville College of Business, who will serve for a term expiring June 30, 2027. Moyer is also a graduate of Howard University.
Michael Adams Jr., a KSU graduate and a vice president at Independence Bank and a managing member of Urban Industries LLC, who will serve for a term expiring June 30, 2024.
Jason Moseley, a head basketball coach at Frederick Douglas High School in Lexington and KSU graduate, who will serve for a term expiring June 30, 2026.
Gerald Patton, a former director of assessment and educational effectiveness at California State University and KSU graduate, who will serve for a term expiring June 30, 2022.
Robert Ramsey, who served as Executive Branch Cabinet secretary during the Fletcher administration, who will also serve for a term expiring June 30, 2022. He is a graduate of Florida A&M University.
___
Hudspeth Blackburn is a corps member 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. | https://www.theheraldreview.com/news/article/Beshear-names-members-of-Kentucky-State-17048433.php | 2022-03-31T16:38:42 | en | 0.975208 |
The worldwide seafood industry is steeling itself for price hikes, supply disruptions and potential job losses as new rounds of economic sanctions on Russia make key species such as cod and crab harder to come by.
The latest round of U.S. attempts to punish Russia for the invasion of Ukraine includes bans on imports of seafood, alcohol and diamonds. The U.S. is also stripping “most favored nation status” from Russia. Nations around the world are taking similar steps.
Russia is one of the largest producers of seafood in the world, and was the fifth-largest producer of wild-caught fish, according to a 2020 report by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. Russia is not one of the biggest exporters of seafood to the U.S., but it’s a world leader in exports of cod (the preference for fish and chips in the U.S.). It’s also a major supplier of crabs and Alaska pollock, widely used in fast-food sandwiches and processed products like fish sticks.
The impact is likely to be felt globally, as well as in places with working waterfronts. One of those is Maine, where more than $50 million in seafood products from Russia passed through Portland in 2021, according to federal statistics.
“If you’re getting cod from Russia, it’s going to be a problem,” said Glen Libby, an owner of Port Clyde Fresh Catch, a seafood market in Tenants Harbor, Maine. “That’s quite a mess. We’ll see how it turns out.”
Russia exported more than 28 million pounds of cod to the U.S. from Jan. 1, 2020, to Jan. 31, 2022, according to census data.
The European Union and United Kingdom are both deeply dependent on Russian seafood. And prices of seafood are already spiking in Japan, a major seafood consumer that is limiting its trade with Russia.
In the U.K., where fish and chips are a cultural marker, shop owners and consumers alike are bracing for price surges. British fish and chip shops were already facing a squeeze because of soaring energy costs and rising food prices.
Andrew Crook, head of the National Federation of Fish Friers, said earlier this month that — even before the war — he expected a third of Britain’s fish and chip shops to go out of business. If fish prices shoot up even higher, “we are in real dire straits,” he said.
In mid-March, the U.K. slapped a 35% tariff hike on Russian whitefish, including chip-shop staples cod and haddock.
“We’re a massive part of U.K. culture and it would be a shame to see that go,” he told broadcaster ITV.
U.S. consumers are most likely to notice the impact of sanctions via price and availability of fish, said Kanae Tokunaga, who runs the Coastal and Marine Economics Lab at Gulf of Maine Research Institute in Portland.
“Because seafood is a global commodity, even if they are not harvested in Russia, you will notice the price hike,” Tokunaga said.
In the U.S., the dependence on foreign cod stems to the loss of its own once-robust Atlantic cod fishery that cratered in the face of overfishing and environmental changes. U.S. fishermen, based mostly in New England, brought more than 100 million pounds of cod to the docks per year in the early 1980s, but the 2020 catch was less than 2 million pounds.
Regulators have tried to save the fishery with management measures such as very low fishing quotas, and many fishermen targeting other East Coast groundfish species such as haddock and flounder now avoid cod altogether.
Seafood processors in Massachusetts are concerned about job losses due to loss of Russian products, Democratic U.S. Sen. Ed Markey, who does support sanctions on Russia, said.
“I have heard from seafood processors in my home state with concerns about potential sudden effects of a new, immediate ban on imports on their workforce, including hundreds of union workers in the seafood processing industry,” he said on the Senate floor in February.
For U.S. producers of seafood staples such as fish and chips, the lack of Russian cod could mean pivoting to other foreign sources, said Walt Golet, a research assistant professor at the University of Maine’s School of Marine Sciences.
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“We might be able to bring in more from Norway, a little more from Canadian fisheries,” Golet said. “It really is driven by the price of those imports.”
As an alternative, producers and consumers could try underutilized fish species caught domestically, such as Atlantic pollock and redfish, said Ben Martens, executive director of Maine Coast Fishermen’s Association.
“Maybe this is a time to use haddock or hake or maybe monkfish, something different,” Martens said. “If it’s going to disrupt supply chains it does present an opportunity for other species to fill that void.”
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Associated Press writer Jill Lawless in London contributed to this report. | https://www.pilotonline.com/business/vp-nw-seafood-industry-russia-fish-20220331-3c6sqbuiw5fzjohrwqdic52s5u-story.html | 2022-03-31T16:38:43 | en | 0.963544 |
Cute! Endangered blue-eyed black lemur born in Florida zoo
JACKSONVILLE, Fla. (Gray News) – The Jacksonville Zoo and Gardens in Florida has a new arrival – a baby blue-eyed black lemur.
The zoo said this is the second successful birth of a blue-eyed black lemur at the facility.
The Madagascar native is considered critically endangered, so every new blue-eyed black lemur born is said to be vital to the survival of the species.
They are one of only a few primates with blue eyes, according to the zoo.
Zookeepers haven’t announced a name yet and won’t know the gender until a health check. They want to give the new parents time to bond first.
“We have many reasons to celebrate this new infant. He or she will further enrich the social environment and experience of the zoo’s amazing mixed-species lemur group and strengthen the sustainability of the blue-eyed black lemur population,” said Tracy Fenn, Assistant Curator of Mammals.
The little primate will stay behind the scenes until it’s old enough to join the other lemurs in the zoo’s exhibit later this year.
Copyright 2022 Gray Media Group, Inc. All rights reserved. | https://www.wlbt.com/2022/03/31/cute-endangered-blue-eyed-black-lemur-born-florida-zoo/ | 2022-03-31T16:38:45 | en | 0.950149 |
DAKAR, Senegal (AP) — The French medical charity Doctors Without Borders, or MSF, says that five of its employees have been released in Nigeria after being kidnapped last month in neighboring Cameroon.
Armed men kidnapped the MSF employees on Feb. 24 from the group’s base in Cameroon’s Far North region in Fotokol, which is near Nigeria and Chad. Those kidnapped and subsequently released include a Senegalese, Chadian and Franco-Ivorian along with their two Cameroon security guards.
The organization said the workers were released Wednesday in Nigeria and have been “taken to a safe place.”
“We are happy to find our colleagues safe and sound,” said the director general of the organization, Stephen Cornish. “We share the deep relief of their parents and loved ones, who were impatiently awaiting this news."
The organization did not give details on the condition of the release.
Cheikh Ndiaye, the uncle of the Senegalese humanitarian who was taking hostages expressed his family’s relief.
”They are free. We were told they are in Nigeria. We rejoice and look forward with great relief to his return among us,” he said.
Islamic extremist groups Boko Haram and the Islamic State West Africa Province are known to carry out attacks in this region. | https://www.expressnews.com/news/article/Medical-charity-says-5-abducted-workers-are-freed-17048460.php | 2022-03-31T16:38:47 | en | 0.982833 |
WASHINGTON (AP) — CIA Director William Burns has tested positive for COVID-19, according to an agency statement Thursday.
The statement said Burns is experiencing mild symptoms and working from home, with plans to return to the office after five days and testing negative. The director is fully vaccinated and boosted.
Burns last met with President Joe Biden on Wednesday morning in a socially distanced meeting where the director wore an N-95 mask. The agency says Burns is not considered a close contact of the president by Centers for Disease Control and Prevention standards. The nature of the meeting was not disclosed by the CIA.
Biden is not known to have tested positive for the virus since the pandemic began. Several people in recent weeks have tested positive for the virus shortly after seeing the president, including press secretary Jen Psaki, deputy press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre and Irish Prime Minister Micheál Martin. | https://www.theheraldreview.com/news/article/CIA-director-tests-positive-for-COVID-19-has-17048488.php | 2022-03-31T16:38:48 | en | 0.954808 |
Here are our picks for upcoming events and happenings worth splurging time and money on:
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Tickets on sale
No fooling. April 1 is the day to stand in line or stand by your computer as the tickets for these shows go on sale:
- ’70s Soul Jam. The lineup May 29 includes The Stylistics (“You Make Me Feel Brand New”), Enchantment (“Gloria”), The Legendary Blue Notes (formerly Harold Melvin & The Blue Notes, as in “If You Don’t Know Me by Now”), and Heatwave (“Always and Forever”). Hosted by Jimmie “JJ” Walker of the 1970s sitcom “Good Times.” Atlantic Union Bank Pavilion, Portsmouth.
- Brad Paisley, one of country music’s most decorated male solo artists, is coming to Virginia Beach, June 11. A portion of sales will go to The Store, a nonprofit, referral-based grocery store that helps low-income people in the Nashville area. It was founded by Paisley and his wife, Kimberly Williams-Paisley. For more information go to thestore.org. Veterans United Home Loans Amphitheater, Virginia Beach.
- One of the most successful woman-led, hard rock bands around, Halestorm is including Portsmouth in its summer tour, Aug. 12. The all-female list of special guests includes The Pretty Reckless, The Warning and Lilith Czar. Atlantic Union Bank Pavilion, Portsmouth.
- The Demolition Man himself, Sting, hits Virginia Beach Aug. 31. This stop is part of his “My Songs” tour and will include the 17-time Grammy Award winner’s hits as a solo artist and member of The Police. Veterans United Home Loans Amphitheater, Virginia Beach.
All tickets are available at ticketmaster.com or venue box offices.
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‘From Field to Healed’: History of Hampton’s VA hospital
The future of the Hampton VA Medical Center has been in the news recently with a report from the Department of Veterans Affairs calling for the aged facility to close.
An evening lecture on April 4 at the Hampton History Museum, however, looks at its rich history, which goes back more than a century. It’s “From Field to Healed: Medical Care for Veterans in Hampton Roads from the Civil War and Beyond,” 7 to 8 p.m. The guest speaker is Ali Kolleda, archivist with Fort Monroe Authority. Free for museum members, $5 for nonmembers. Visit hamptonhistorymuseum.org.
The talk will be recorded and uploaded to the museum’s Facebook page, YouTube playlist and website.
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Fundraiser to keep the SS United States afloat
The SS United States has the fun motto of being “the most famous ship that didn’t sink.” It is longer, faster and bigger than the Titanic and, when it was launched 70 years ago, became a symbol of American innovation and engineering. It was built in Newport News and has been moored in Philadelphia for more than 25 years.
The Hampton Roads chapter of the SS United States Conservancy is hosting a fundraising Heritage Tour at The Mariners’ Museum and Park in Newport News, April 9. A variety of lectures, presentations and book signings will run from 10 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. Tickets start at $20. Proceeds go to the maintenance, restoration and ultimate reuse of the ship. Visit ssusc.org.
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Don’t sleep on ‘Sleeping Beauty’
Ballet Virginia presents the perennial classic “Sleeping Beauty,” April 9 and 10 at the Sandler Center for the Performing Arts in Virginia Beach. Tickets start at $22 for children, $32 for adults. Visit sandlercenter.org or call 757-385-2787. | https://www.pilotonline.com/entertainment/vp-db-entertainment-roundup-040122-20220331-6lfr57cdxfbcjkwxonhrktrigu-story.html | 2022-03-31T16:38:49 | en | 0.935091 |
'We can help them': Ukrainians in US mobilize to help 100,000 expected refugees
As the United States prepares to accept up to 100,000 Ukrainian refugees following Russia's invasion of their country, existing communities in cities like Sacramento and Seattle are already mobilizing to provide food, shelter and support to those fleeing the war.
The federal government hasn't said when the formal resettlement process will begin, but Ukrainian groups in the U.S. are already providing support to people entering the country through other channels, including on visas that will eventually expire or by flying to Mexico and crossing over the border.
“No refugee is waiting for you to be ready for them," said Eduard Kislyanka, senior pastor at the House of Bread church near Sacramento, which has been sending teams of people to Poland and preparing dozens of its member families to house people arriving in California.
Since the war began in late February over 4 million people are estimated to have fled Ukraine and millions more have been displaced within the country. President Joe Biden said last week that the U.S. would admit up to 100,000 Ukrainian refugees and provide $1 billion in humanitarian assistance to countries affected by the exodus.
The federal government has yet to provide a timeline for refugee resettlement — often a lengthy process — or details on where refugees will be resettled. It’s unlikely the United States will see a massive influx of Ukrainians on charter and military flights like happened with Afghan refugees last year.
Krish O’Mara Vignarajah, president of Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service, said the White House commitment of accepting up to 100,000 Ukrainians does not come with a minimum. Aside from the refugee resettlement program, their main avenues will be seeking humanitarian parole and appearing at the border with Mexico, she said.
Many who reach the United States will likely go to cities that already have strong Ukrainian communities.
The Sacramento region is home to the highest concentration of Ukrainian immigrants in the country, with about 18,000 people, according to census data analyzed by the Migration Policy Institute. The Seattle, Chicago and New York City areas are also hubs.
Word is spreading about the resources available in Sacramento, where churches like House of Bread are connecting Ukrainians who have already arrived with host families who can offer shelter and help access government resources and transportation. Kislyanka called the church's actions a “stop gap" measure designed to help as people await more clarity about the formal government resettlement process.
“Most of these people do not have any relations, like they don't know anybody here," said Kislyanka, who came to the U.S. as a child in the early 1990s. “Having somebody who can help them navigate the cultural shock and navigate the system. . . it just makes things a lot easier and smoother."
Sacramento has been a destination for Ukrainians since the late 1980s and early 1990s, when many of those arriving were Christians taking advantage of a U.S. law offering entrance to anyone escaping religious persecution in the former Soviet Union.
Another wave of refugees began arriving after Russia's initial invasion of Ukraine in 2014. Of the 8,000 Ukrainians resettled by the organization World Relief since then, 3,000 have come to Sacramento, said Vanassa Hamra, the group's community engagement manager in Sacramento.
Beyond the dozens of Slavic churches in the Sacramento region, there are schools that serve mainly Ukrainian and Russian students. Eastern European grocery stores and restaurants offer favorite foods like borscht, a type of beetroot soup, and varenyky, a boiled dumpling. Businesses started by Ukrainians try to hire others from their country.
All of that makes it easy for younger people to maintain a sense of connection to their heritage and for older immigrants to adapt without having to become fluent in a new language and culture.
“It's very easy when you come here. Every door, it's open for you," said Oleksandra Datsenko, who came to the U.S. six years ago and works as a waitress at Firebird Russian Restaurant, which serves Eastern European fare in a Sacramento suburb.
Valeriy Goloborodko, who immigrated to Southern California in 2006, wanted to return to Ukraine until he settled with his wife in the Seattle area. There, he found a thriving Ukrainian community and went on to become the country's honorary consul in Seattle in 2015, helping organize an annual festival where as many as 16,000 people a day would show up to feast on traditional food, listen to Ukrainian musicians and wear traditionally embroidered clothing.
“The Ukrainian community in Washington helped me to feel like I was at home — and this is my home now,” Goloborodko said. “We feel like this is a Little Ukraine.”
Since the invasion, Goloborodko and others in the Washington state Ukrainian community have lobbied hard for support from state officials. Democratic Gov. Jay Inslee has vowed that Washington will welcome Ukrainians fleeing the violence. The Legislature has set aside nearly $20 million to help pay anticipated costs of housing, job training, health care and legal aid for Ukrainian refugees. The Port of Seattle has promised to help welcome the refugees at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport, where they can begin to be connected with services.
In Sacramento, meanwhile, the state's housing crisis could prove challenging as resettlement and community organizations look for lodging for new arrivals. Like much of California, the region is facing a housing crunch with limited supply and rising rents.
“People are coming here; we can help them; we can provide something. But it’s going to get swamped so quick,” said Kislyanka, the head pastor at House of Bread.
The International Rescue Committee's Sacramento branch has an affiliated immigrant welcome center that's already assisting people who entered the country illegally, said Lisa Welze, director of IRC Sacramento. Many are nervous to engage with resettlement agencies but in need of resources — particularly housing — as well as help navigating the immigration system to see if they can find a legal path to stay.
As for when the more formal resettlement process will begin, “we've been told we just need to wait," Welze said. | https://www.wbaltv.com/article/ukrainians-in-us-mobilize-to-help-refugees/39598740 | 2022-03-31T16:38:49 | en | 0.97051 |
Fox News hires Caitlyn Jenner as contributor and commentator
NEW YORK (AP) — Fox News Channel says it has hired Caitlyn Jenner as a contributor, with her first appearance set for Thursday on Sean Hannity’s program.
Jenner, the former Olympic decathlete, ran an unsuccessful campaign for California governor last year. The network said she’ll offer commentary and analysis across various Fox News Media platforms.
“Caitlyn’s story is an inspiration to us all,” said Suzanne Scott, Fox News Media CEO. “She is a trailblazer in the LGBTQ+ community and her illustrious career spans a variety of fields that will be a tremendous asset for our audience.”
Jenner won the Olympic gold medal in the decathlon in 1976. She later came out as a transgender and identifies as a female.
She said in a statement she was “humbled by this unique opportunity” to speak directly to Fox’s audience.
Copyright 2022 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. | https://www.wlbt.com/2022/03/31/fox-news-hires-caitlyn-jenner-contributor-commentator/ | 2022-03-31T16:38:52 | en | 0.964961 |
SKOPJE, North Macedonia (AP) — Three men suspected of being part of an international drug smuggling ring were arrested in North Macedonia, where police seized about 150 kilograms (330 pounds) of marijuana believed destined for Turkey, authorities said Thursday.
Police said the drugs, with an estimated street value of half a million euros ($554,000) were found packed in plastic bags in the trunk of a car parked outside a restaurant in the eastern town of Shtip late Wednesday.
The three men, two of them Kosovo citizens and the third a Macedonian national, were arrested following a brief chase, police said in a statement. Authorities were searching for a Turkish truck driver whom police suspect was planning to take over the drug shipment.
If charged and convicted, the three men face a minimum of five years in prison.
Police said they also cracked a Macedonian-Bulgarian drug smuggling group on Wednesday, in cooperation with neighboring Bulgaria's department for organized crime and the Southeast European Law Enforcement Center.
Four men, two of them Macedonian nationals, were arrested in that case, and police seized several kilograms (pounds) of amphetamines and other chemicals during searches of their homes.
North Macedonia is at the crossroads of drug trafficking routes, and drug seizures are common there.
Last year, authorities said they disrupted two international drug smuggling groups in several separate operations that led to the arrests of 13 people and the seizure of more than 700 kilograms (1,543 pounds) of marijuana. | https://www.expressnews.com/news/article/N-Macedonia-Police-seize-150-kg-marijuana-17048570.php | 2022-03-31T16:38:53 | en | 0.977772 |
PIGEON FORGE, Tenn. (AP) — Firefighters from across Tennessee continued working Thursday morning to contain a wildfire near the Great Smoky Mountains National Park that spread overnight despite rain from storms that passed through the area, officials said.
The blaze, which began as a brush fire Wednesday morning in the Hatcher Mountain area of Wears Valley, had spread to more than 3,700 acres (1,497 hectares) and had impacted more than 100 structures, Sevier County Mayor Larry Waters said during a press conference. Around 11,000 homes in the area had been evacuated. Three injuries were reported during the blaze, but Waters said no fatalities or missing people had been reported.
He said a coordinated response from emergency personnel, firefighters, forestry officials and others helped mitigate damage in the area.
“This fire could have been much more devastating had we not had this team in place. They were able to, even with the winds and the low humidity, they were able to stay ahead of it as much as possible,” he said.
Officials had warned early Wednesday that warm temperatures, low humidity and strong winds increased the risk of fire danger. Waters said the conditions were similar to those in 2016 when wildfires ravaged the tourism town of Gatlinburg, killing 14 people and damaging or destroying about 2,500 buildings.
Firefighters from more than 70 agencies helped respond to the blaze and many worked through the night in an effort to keep it from spreading. It was only 5% contained, but fire lines drawn overnight helped keep the blaze from spreading into the city of Pigeon Forge, Waters said.
Rain early Thursday from storms passing through did not put the fire out, but officials said it helped the situation and the current weather conditions were more favorable for containing the fire.
Evacuation orders remain in effect until the fire is under control. Schools in the area were closed Thursday as a precaution, officials said.
The fire was in what the state Agriculture Department described as steep and difficult terrain. The cause is still undetermined.
At least three shelters were established for those evacuated, authorities said. More than 100 people stayed overnight at the Pigeon Forge Community Center, Sharon Hudson, executive director of the Eastern Tennessee chapter of the American Red Cross. told the Knoxville News Sentinel.
A line of severe storms packing isolated tornadoes and high winds ripped across the Deep South overnight, killing at least two in the Florida Panhandle, toppling trees and power lines and leaving homes and businesses damaged as the vast weather front raced across several states. | https://www.theheraldreview.com/news/article/Crews-work-to-contain-wildfire-near-Smoky-17048448.php | 2022-03-31T16:38:54 | en | 0.983194 |
State lawmakers will head back to Richmond on Monday to finish outstanding matters from the recent legislative session — most notably the state budget.
Del. Barry Knight, a member of the budget conference committee, told The Virginian-Pilot he expects a lengthy process.
“We are in no big rush,” said the Virginia Beach Republican. “We would rather get it right than rush it along.”
Despite unresolved issues, the legislative session ended March 12. Gov. Glenn Younkin announced last week that the General Assembly would convene for a special session April 4 to hash out remaining differences.
The House and Senate’s proposed budgets were nearly $3 billion apart at the end of the session — primarily due to differences over tax relief, with the GOP-controlled House favoring more extensive cuts.
Knight said the House and Senate are still “a little bit at odds” over tax cuts. But he pointed out that the General Assembly once took until mid-June to reach a budget agreement.
“We were able to make that work, so we just need it before July 1,” he said. “(But) it would be helpful to have earlier than that because some of the localities are putting their budgets together and they want to know what kind of resources they are getting from the state.”
Del. Marcia “Cia” Price, D-Newport News, said it should be expected that some extra time would be needed to work out differences.
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“This is the process; it doesn’t start getting dangerous until we start getting closer to the summer,” she said. “We will let the process work, and I am super hopeful that we will have an even better document before us when it comes time to vote.”
Price added that she’s preparing for the session by speaking with budget conferees and studying the analysis and comparisons from the Commonwealth Institute for Fiscal Analysis.
This week, the governor said he had faith a compromise will be reached.
“I am confident that next week they’re going to do the work,” the governor said Wednesday, according to his press secretary “... We have senior leadership on both sides of the Senate and the House (working on this) and I’m confident based on their experience, that they’re going to bring me a budget.”
Katie King, katie.king@virginiamedia.com, 757-835-1487 | https://www.pilotonline.com/government/virginia/vp-nw-politics-government-virginia-20220331-4a3ljwrykjbfzjrwpqtbhzthlq-story.html | 2022-03-31T16:38:56 | en | 0.973065 |
GOP lawmakers call out Rep. Cawthorn over ‘orgy’ remarks
(CNN) - Republican leaders have met with a GOP congressman who alleged drug use and orgies are taking place in Washington.
House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy and House Minority Whip Steve Scalise called Rep. Madison Cawthorn, R-N.C., into a meeting Wednesday.
The face-to-face was to address allegations Cawthorn made on a podcast that he was invited to an “orgy” and had seen cocaine use firsthand.
Cawthorn did not suggest any fellow lawmakers were involved in the actions but referenced people he “looked up to.”
GOP lawmakers complained during a closed-door party meeting Tuesday that they were receiving questions from constituents about it.
McCarthy said Cawthorn admitted in the meeting that his allegations were untrue or exaggerated.
“I just told him he’s lost my trust. He’s going to have to earn it back, and I laid out everything that I find is unbecoming,” McCarthy said. “And should - you can’t just say, ‘You can’t do this again.’ I mean, he’s got a lot of members very upset.”
Copyright 2022 CNN Newsource. All rights reserved. | https://www.wlbt.com/2022/03/31/gop-lawmakers-call-out-rep-cawthorn-over-orgy-remarks/ | 2022-03-31T16:38:58 | en | 0.985748 |
A National Security Agency employee has been charged with emailing classified national security information to somebody who wasn't authorized to receive it, according to a federal indictment unsealed Thursday.
Mark Robert Unkenholz, 60, of Hanover, Maryland, was arrested Thursday and scheduled to make his initial court appearance in Baltimore later in the day.
Unkenholz held “top secret” security clearance, giving him access to the information, according to a 26-count indictment. He worked for an NSA office responsible for the agency's engagement with private industry.
The indictment accuses Unkenholz of using his personal email address to send information classified as “secret” and “top secret” to somebody else's private company email addresses on several occasions between February 2018 and June 2020.
The recipient held “top secret” clearance from April 2016 until approximately June 2019, while employed at a company that isn't named in the indictment. However, from July 2019 until approximately January 2021, the person worked for a different company and wasn't authorized to access or receive classified information, the indictment says.
A grand jury indicted Unkenholz on Tuesday on 13 counts of willfully transmitting national defense information and 13 counts of willfully retaining national defense informaton. Each count carries a maximum prison sentence of 10 years. Federal sentencing guidelines typically recommend sentences far below the maximum.
Online court records don’t list an attorney for Unkenholz.
The FBI is investigating.
The case against Unkenholz is the latest prosecution from federal authorities in Maryland, home to some of the most secretive government agencies, alleging mishandling or improper storage of classified materials.
One of the more prominent federal cases involved Harold Martin, a former NSA contractor who was charged in 2016 with storing reams of classified records in his Maryland home, car and shed. The information spanned from the mid-1990s to the present and included personal details of government employees and “top secret” email chains, handwritten notes describing the NSA’s classified computer infrastructure, and descriptions of classified technical operations. He was sentenced in 2019 to nine years in prison.
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Associated Press writer Eric Tucker contributed from Washington, D.C. | https://www.expressnews.com/news/article/NSA-employee-charged-with-mishandling-classified-17048473.php | 2022-03-31T16:38:59 | en | 0.964902 |
COLUMBUS, Ohio (AP) — Lawyers representing an Ohio doctor accused in multiple hospital deaths wrapped up their case Thursday one day after calling only a single witness.
Dr. William Husel is accused of ordering excessive painkillers for 14 patients in the Columbus-area Mount Carmel Health System. He was indicted in cases involving at least 500 micrograms of the powerful painkiller fentanyl.
Prosecutors said ordering such dosages for a nonsurgical situation indicated an intent to end lives. Husel has pleaded not guilty to 14 counts of murder. His attorneys say he was providing comfort care for dying patients, not trying to kill them.
Jurors seated for the trial heard from 53 prosecution witnesses since the trial began Feb. 22, including medical experts, Mount Carmel employees, investigators, and family members of all 14 patients. Prosecutors took five weeks to present their case.
Defense lawyers called a Georgia anesthesiologist on Wednesday to testify that Husel's patients died from their medical conditions and not Husel's actions. The defense rested on Thursday, with closing arguments set for Monday.
Mount Carmel has reached settlements totaling more than $16.7 million over the deaths of at least 17 patients, with more lawsuits pending. | https://www.theheraldreview.com/news/article/Defense-rests-after-1-day-in-Ohio-doctor-s-murder-17048403.php | 2022-03-31T16:39:01 | en | 0.966267 |
Female leaders continue to pave new roads — and make history — in the transportation industry.
More than 30 participants heard career insight and wisdom from the new CEO of Elizabeth River Crossings, Anna Bonet, and President Kathleen Linehan of Dulles-based engineering and construction consulting firm Alpha Corp. during a virtual seminar called “Women Making History: Insights from Women Transportation Executives” on March 22. The Central Virginia chapter of WTS International, which aims to advance women in the transportation industry, hosted the talk.
Moderator Lorna Parkins, vice president of transportation planning for Michael Baker International, said the hourlong program’s theme came from an inspiration to look at how female executives are shaping the industry.
In her position, Bonet oversees the Elizabeth River Crossings facilities from Norfolk to Portsmouth including the Downtown and Midtown tunnels and the Martin Luther King Freeway extension.
Expressing her passion for work, Bonet, a mother of three, said it is essential to maintain a balance between her professional and personal lives.
She came to the U.S. from Spain six months ago and said she is highly motivated and eager to immerse herself in the community.
Linehan stepped into her role two years ago as the head of the woman-owned Alpha Corp. in Northern Virginia.
When asked which woman provided the most inspiration throughout their lives, both Bonet and Linehan, along with other participating female executives, put their mothers first.
“I lost my mom this year and so I’ve been reflecting a lot on how amazing she’s been and what an impact she had on me,” Linehan said.
Linehan also noted she thinks of Jacque Hinman, former CEO of CH2M Hill when it was acquired by Jacobs Engineering, because she wants be a genuine servant leader like her.
“I think of how authentic she was, how much she let us be part of her world and I try to emulate that,” Linehan said.
Bonet said her mother pushed her and her siblings to get what they want and deserve in their lives.
“She’s played a big part in the person and leader that I am today,” Bonet said.
Another question pondered how women leaders make a difference within the organizations they lead.
Miriam “Mimi” Kronisch, managing partner for engineering company RK&K, said it is crucial to listen to both positive and negative feedback.
“Stay humble and then act with confidence,” Kronisch said. “Challenge others in your organization to take on stretched positions and once in those stretched positions, it is so important as leaders to guide and mentor along the way.”
Linehan echoed Kronisch’s point to say how important it is for women to stretch their skills.
“That’s great advice for anybody, but I don’t think women say that to each other enough,” she said.
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Linehan also encouraged women to be who they are and bring their whole self to work. From an organizer of a PTA fundraiser to a coach for her children’s basketball and soccer teams, she said these are all invaluable experiences to the work she does.
“I encourage everybody to really look at your whole life and not feel like you need to compartmentalize,” she said. “I think that’s a strength that we really want to capture and leverage.”
Bonet said it’s important to break down bias, which means breaking the silence associated with it.
“I think both women and men need to work together,” she said. “… There are no department achievements to me, there are only teams working together to achieve company goals.”
Sandra J. Pennecke, 757-652-5836, sandra.pennecke@insidebiz.com | https://www.pilotonline.com/inside-business/vp-ib-women-execs-0404-20220331-fxezn7f3cvfrfinju4zivhl5dm-story.html | 2022-03-31T16:39:02 | en | 0.973825 |
GRAPHIC: Man gets 27 years in prison for hiring woman to create torture videos for his sexual pleasure
WARNING: The details in this story may be disturbing to readers.
(Gray News) – A Vermont man has been sentenced to 27 years in prison for a brutal murder-and-kidnap-for-hire scheme in which he paid a woman in Venezuela to make snuff videos of children and adults for his sexual pleasure.
The United States Department of Justice announced the sentencing Wednesday for 38-year-old Sean Fiore.
According to court documents, Fiore paid a woman in Venezuela $600 to make a video that showed the “sadistic abuse” of a young child. After Fiore received that video, he then paid the woman $4,000 for another video, this time involving an adult victim in which Fiore demanded the victim be killed.
The DOJ said for the second video, Fiore sent the woman a 600-word script with details of exactly what he wanted the video to show, including her hitting and kicking the victim, burning him with cigarettes, urinating and defecating on him, filling his mouth with feces, wrapping his head with plastic, and smothering him to death by sitting on his face. Fiore then received a 58-minute video, in which, at the end, the adult male victim appeared to be dead.
Court documents also show that Fiore possessed other videos and images depicting “sadistic sexual abuse” of young children.
Fiore pleaded guilty in October 2021 to conspiracy to kidnap and kill a person overseas, murder-for-hire, conspiracy to produce child pornography, and possession of child pornography. He was sentenced Wednesday to 27 years in prison.
“Fiore committed some of the darkest, most heinous deeds humanity can imagine,” said Special Agent in Charge Matthew Millhollin for HSI in New England. “Today’s sentence ensures that he will be locked away, unable to repeat the depraved crimes he has admitted to. We are grateful to our partners here in Vermont and around the world who worked tirelessly alongside us to investigate and prosecute this case.”
The woman in Venezuela, identified as Moraima Escarlet Vasquez Flores, 39, of Colombia, is charged with conspiracy to murder and kidnap a person in a foreign country, conspiracy to produce child pornography, production of child pornography, and aiding and abetting the receipt of child pornography. She was arrested in Colombia in September 2020, and Colombia recently approved her extradition to the U.S.
Copyright 2022 Gray Media Group, Inc. All rights reserved. | https://www.wlbt.com/2022/03/31/graphic-man-gets-27-years-prison-hiring-woman-create-torture-videos-his-sexual-pleasure/ | 2022-03-31T16:39:04 | en | 0.962227 |
WASHINGTON (AP) — Federal officials have revoked the license of a Nevada-based gun manufacturer that was accused of illegally selling guns and went bankrupt but then rebranded itself.
The revocation comes after a lawsuit that alleged the Justice Department didn’t conduct proper oversight before issuing the license.
The decision to revoke the license of JA Industries was spelled out in a court filing late Wednesday as part of the lawsuit brought by Illinois; Kansas City, Missouri; and gun control advocacy group Everytown for Gun Safety.
The lawsuit alleged that the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, a law enforcement agency in the Justice Department, awarded the license to JA Industries, renamed from Jimenez Arms, after it violated federal firearms law. The suit also alleged that the company’s guns were contributing to rising violent crime rates in Chicago and Kansas City.
Kansas City and Everytown had sued Jimenez Arms and several gun dealers previously, alleging they contributed to surging gun violence in the Kansas City region by ignoring evidence that guns were being sold illegally in the area. Jimenez Arms filed for bankruptcy about a month after the suit was filed.
That suit contended that Jimenez Arms every year made tens of thousands of cheap handguns that turned up at crime scenes in Kansas City and Chicago “at a rate disproportionate to the company’s market share.”
The plaintiffs alleged in their suit against the ATF that the company’s owner, Paul Jimenez, applied for a new license under the name JA Industries and that it took the ATF less than a month to award the license. The suit alleged that company officials had made false statements to the ATF and had unlawfully shipped guns to a firearms trafficker, which should’ve made the company and its officials ineligible for holding a federal firearms license.
A message seeking comment from JA Industries on Thursday was not immediately returned.
Everytown for Gun Safety heralded the decision to revoke the company's license.
“We can only hope this decision marks the beginning of a new era at ATF, one that is consistent with President Biden’s commitment to holding rogue and reckless members of the gun industry accountable for breaking the law and putting lives in danger,” said John Feinblatt, Everytown's president.
In a statement, Kansas City Mayor Quinton Lucas said it was a “bold action to stop the flow of illegal firearms into Kansas City.”
An ATF spokesperson, Erik Longnecker, declined to comment specifically, citing the ongoing case. But he said the agency “revokes Federal firearms licensees who are found to have committed willful violations of the Gun Control Act and have an adverse impact on public safety.” | https://www.expressnews.com/news/article/Nevada-gun-manufacturer-s-license-is-revoked-17048346.php | 2022-03-31T16:39:05 | en | 0.962427 |
BERLIN (AP) — Germany's independent vaccination advisory panel is recommending a booster shot with a messenger RNA vaccine for people who have had a full course of four Chinese, Indian and Russian COVID-19 vaccines that aren't currently approved for use in the European Union.
In a draft recommendation Thursday, the panel, known by its German acronym STIKO, said the advice applies to people given a full course and also a booster of the Chinese Sinovac and Sinopharm vaccines, the Indian-made Covaxin and Russia's Sputnik V.
It said that the new booster shot should be administered at least three months after the previous vaccination.
The German panel said that people who have received only a single shot of the four vaccines should start a new vaccination series.
And it added that recipients of other vaccines not cleared by the EU should in general start a new series with a vaccine European authorities have approved.
Scientists believe that mixing and matching vaccines prompts a better immune response.
The BioNTech-Pfizer and Moderna mRNA vaccines have been the mainstay of Germany's vaccination program. Three other vaccines using different technologies have been cleared for use in the 27-nation EU — the AstraZeneca, Johnson & Johnson and Novavax products.
The mRNA vaccines have shown to be better than others at protecting against newer variants like omicron.
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Follow AP’s pandemic coverage at https://apnews.com/hub/coronavirus-pandemic | https://www.theheraldreview.com/news/article/German-panel-recommends-booster-for-recipients-of-17048251.php | 2022-03-31T16:39:07 | en | 0.949293 |
WASHINGTON — Federal prosecutors have substantially widened their Jan. 6 investigation to examine the possible culpability of a broad range of figures involved in former President Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election, people familiar with the inquiry said Wednesday.
The investigation encompasses the possible involvement of other government officials in Trump’s attempts to obstruct the certification of President Joe Biden’s Electoral College victory and the push by some Trump allies to promote slates of fake electors, they said.
Prosecutors are also asking about planning for the rallies that preceded the assault on the Capitol, including the rally on the Ellipse on Jan. 6, 2021, just before a pro-Trump mob stormed the Capitol.
The federal investigation initially focused largely on the rioters who entered the Capitol, an effort that has led to more than 700 arrests. But the Justice Department appears to have moved into a new phase, seeking information about people more closely tied to Trump. This development comes amid growing political pressure on Attorney General Merrick Garland to move more aggressively on the case.
A grand jury sitting in Washington is investigating the rallies that preceded the storming of the Capitol, a person familiar with the matter said.
One of the subpoenas, which was reviewed by The New York Times, sought information about people “classified as VIP attendees” at Trump’s Jan. 6 rally.
It also sought information about members of the executive and legislative branches who had been involved in the “planning or execution of any rally or any attempt to obstruct, influence, impede or delay” the certification of the 2020 election.
And it asked about the effort by Trump supporters to put forward alternate slates of electors as Trump and his allies were seeking to challenge the certification of the Electoral College outcome by Congress on Jan. 6.
Another person briefed on the grand jury investigation said at least one person involved in the logistics of the Jan. 6 rally had been asked to appear.
In pursuing Jan. 6 cases, prosecutors have been assembling evidence documenting how defendants have cited statements from Trump to explain why they stormed the Capitol. And prosecutors have cited in some cases a Twitter post from Trump weeks before Jan. 6 exhorting his followers to come to Washington, a call that motivated extremist groups in particular.
The expanded criminal inquiry is unfolding as a separate investigation by the House select committee on the Capitol riot is gathering evidence about Trump’s efforts to hold onto power and weighing the possibility of making a criminal referral of Trump to the Justice Department.
On Monday, a federal judge in California, in a civil case involving the House committee, concluded that Trump likely engaged in criminal conduct, including obstructing the work of Congress and conspiring to defraud the United States.
Garland has given little public indication of whether the Justice Department would consider prosecuting Trump, saying only that the department will follow the facts wherever they lead.
But the expanded inquiry, elements of which were reported earlier by The Washington Post, suggests that prosecutors are pursuing a number of lines of inquiry. Those include any connections between the attack on the Capitol and the organizers and prominent participants in the rally on the Ellipse, and potential criminality in the promotion of pro-Trump slates of electors to replace slates named by states won by Biden.
The Justice Department previously said it was looking into the slates of electors that had falsely declared Trump the victor in seven swing states won by Biden.
Even as election officials in the seven contested states sent official lists of electors who had voted for Biden to the Electoral College, the fake slates claimed Trump was the winner in an apparent bid to subvert the election outcome.
Lawmakers, state officials and the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 riot had asked the Justice Department to look into the role played by those fake electors and the documents they submitted to the National Archives on Dec. 14, 2020. The grand jury subpoenas suggest that prosecutors are seeking to gather evidence of whether submitting the documents to a federal agency amounted to a crime.
Allies of Trump had been thinking about trying to put in place their own slates of electors at least as far back as 15 days after Election Day. The House select committee is also investigating the fake electors scheme.
The House committee’s investigators, like the federal prosecutors, have also been interested in the planning and financing of the Jan. 6 rally on the Ellipse and key figures involved in it. Ali Alexander, a prominent figure in the pro-Trump “Stop the Steal” movement and an organizer of the rally, has been cooperating with the House committee. Alexander marched to the Capitol from the rally with Alex Jones, a conspiracy theorist and Infowars host.
The House panel has also been seeking information from Amy Kremer, chair of Women for America First, which helped plan the rally.
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The committee has also sent subpoenas seeking information from Katrina Pierson, Trump’s former national campaign spokesperson; Kylie Jane Kremer, daughter of Amy Kremer and director of Women for America First; Lyndon Brentnall, owner of a Florida-based security company who was the “on-site supervisor” for the rally; Maggie Mulvaney, a niece of former top Trump aide Mick Mulvaney who is listed on the permit for the event; Megan Powers, an operations manager; and Tim Unes, whose company was listed as the stage manager for the gathering.
The criminal charges against rioters so far have ranged from misdemeanors to obstructing Congress in its duty to certify the Electoral College result. The committee has also lodged conspiracy charges against leaders of two of the extremist groups who figured prominently in the Capitol attack, the Oath Keepers and the Proud Boys.
Enrique Tarrio, former leader of the Proud Boys, was charged this month with conspiring with other top lieutenants of the far-right nationalist group to disrupt the certification of the election.
In January, prosecutors charged Stewart Rhodes, founder and leader of the Oath Keepers militia, with seditious conspiracy for what the government has described as a plot to violently disrupt the work of Congress.
c.2021 The New York Times Company | https://www.pilotonline.com/nation-world/ct-aud-nw-nyt-justice-department-jan-6-20220331-g4zs75imp5fixki6vvwehp4bsi-story.html | 2022-03-31T16:39:09 | en | 0.965403 |
(The Hill) — Milk cartons filled with hand sanitizer were given to children at a preschool and kindergarten center in New Jersey on Wednesday.
Officials announced in a tweet that an investigation into a “possible contamination of milk” at the Early Childhood Development Center in Camden showed that milk cartons were filled with the sanitizer used to clean the machines that fill the cartons and were shipped out before anyone noticed.
At about 9 a.m. Wednesday, staff at the school called 911 after 25 children drank the milk from cartons that reportedly had an antiseptic odor, according to WPVI Philadelphia.
Eleven students were taken to Virtua Our Lady of Lourdes Hospital for examination and discharged shortly thereafter. Twenty-one additional students were taken to Cooper Medical Center, where they were also discharged a couple of hours later, according to WPVI.
“This was a scary situation but thankfully, everyone who was exposed to the milk is in stable condition and either back at school or home,” Camden County Health Officer Paschal Nwako said. “This investigation is ongoing, and our department will get to the bottom of this situation.
The Camden City School District said that the sanitizer is not toxic, and the students were sent to the hospital for precautionary purposes. Emergency teams were also dispatched to the school, officials said.
“We pulled all milk today and NO milk will be served until the investigation is completed.” | https://www.ktsm.com/news/local-news/milk-cartons-filled-with-hand-sanitizer-given-to-children-at-nj-preschool-a-kindergarten-center/ | 2022-03-31T16:39:11 | en | 0.986414 |
Judge says Jackson City Council must present minutes to mayor by April 4
Published: Mar. 31, 2022 at 10:26 AM CDT|Updated: 1 hour ago
JACKSON, Miss. (WLBT) - Jackson Mayor Chokwe Antar Lumumba has been handed a victory in his battle to get the city council to produce minutes dating back to late last year.
Thursday, Hinds County Circuit Judge Faye Peterson granted Lumumba’s writ of mandamus, saying the council should approve all unapproved minutes dating back to November 23, 2021, and present them to the mayor by April 4.
Peterson said if the council does not produce the minutes, a hearing will be held by April 22, to determine if the council should be held in contempt.
This is a developing story.
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Copyright 2022 WLBT. All rights reserved. | https://www.wlbt.com/2022/03/31/judge-says-jackson-city-council-must-present-minutes-mayor-by-april-4/ | 2022-03-31T16:39:11 | en | 0.9626 |
BLUFFTON, Ohio (AP) — A police officer in Ohio was struck and killed by a fleeing car on Interstate 75 during a high-speed chase through multiple counties Wednesday, authorities said.
The officer, Dominic Francis of the Bluffton police department, was struck around 2:30 a.m. while he was setting up stop sticks, which flatten tires, said Sgt. Brice Nihiser of the Ohio State Highway Patrol. The chase had reached speeds up to 120 mph (193 kph).
Three suspects inside the car drove away for a short distance before they jumped out and ran. One was found nearby while a second one was arrested in a stolen car in Elyria, about 100 miles (161 kilometers) northeast of Bluffton, Nihiser said.
Authorities were continuing to look for the third suspect.
The search caused schools in the nearby village of Bluffton to cancel classes, and Bluffton University told students to stay in their rooms and advised employees to stay home. I-75 also was shut down while authorities looked through barns, farm fields and around houses.
The chase first began near Marion when authorities saw the car going more than 100 mph and continued across several counties, Nihiser said.
Francis, 41, had been an officer in Bluffton the past nine years, said Police Chief Ryan Burkholder. He also worked as a school teacher, bus driver and as a football and softball coach with Cory-Rawson schools.
“He had a heart of gold,” Burkholder said. | https://www.expressnews.com/news/article/Ohio-officer-killed-trying-to-stop-fleeing-car-on-17048443.php | 2022-03-31T16:39:12 | en | 0.990298 |
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