Researchers at the University of Alabama used 16 different factors including the geographic hazards, the population and infrastructure exposed and the vulnerability of people living there. They then brought in past damages from the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s database and applied three different artificial intelligence tools to figure out flood risks from Texas to Maine, calculating that 17.5 million people were at “very high” risk and an additional 17 million were at “high” risk, the next level.

The authors looked at all sizes of flooding and examined separately what FEMA considers the most extreme, which are the top 1% of events. The study found 4.3 million people along the coasts to be at the highest level of risk of extreme flooding, but 20.5 million to be at high risk, the second highest level.

They found a lot of vulnerability, highlighting eight different cities from Houston, which flooded in 2017’s Hurricane Harvey, to New York, which was inundated in 2012’s Superstorm Sandy.

Wednesday’s study in the journal Science Advances found that New York City has 4.75 million people at the two highest risk levels for all flooding, with more than 200,000 buildings likely to be damaged.

And while the number of people at risk in New Orleans is far lower, about 380,000, it involves 99% of the city’s population. That doesn’t mean 99% of the people will be affected in the next hurricane or nontropical flood, but that they might be depending on the storm’s individual path and rain pattern, said study co-author Wanyun Shao, a climate scientist at the University of Alabama.

“Just look at the magnitude,” Shao said. “Those numbers are shocking, are alarming.”

The elderly and poor are most at risk

“When the next big storm hits New York City, when the next Hurricane Katrina -like hurricane makes landfall in New Orleans, people will get hurt, especially those socially vulnerable populations,” Shao said referring to the poor, the elderly, children and the uneducated.

Shao and outside experts said the numbers stunned them even though they were familiar with the worsening effects of climate change.

“New York is known to be susceptible to floods and it has the largest population. But the fact that New York has nearly an order of magnitude more flood-exposed population than any other city is surprising,” said Alex de Sherbinin, a geographer who directs Columbia University’s Center for Integrated Earth System Information. He wasn’t part of the study.

Flood problems are becoming more frequent in New York and New Orleans because of human-caused climate change, the study said.

Other cities are also threatened

Jacksonville has 679,000 people at high or very high risk of flooding, while Houston is just behind at just under 600,000. Other cities highlighted include Miami, Norfolk, Virginia, Charleston, South Carolina, Mobile, Alabama.

Shao and outside experts said what separates her study from others is the sheer comprehensiveness of all the factors it considers, including sinking land and pavement that doesn’t allow water to seep into the ground, as well as incorporating human social vulnerability such as poverty and age.

“This could be applied to other places in the world, such as Manila,” said University of Virginia engineering professor Venkataraman Lakshmi, who heads the hydrology section of the American Geophysical Union, referring to the capital of the Philippines. He wasn’t part of the study, but said the flooding problems it highlights will get more frequent and intense due to human-caused climate change.

Columbia University’s Marco Tedesco, who wasn’t part of the study, said “it reinforces the crucial concept that future flood disasters are not just about water—they are about where people live, how cities are built, and who is least protected.”

Actions can lessen the risk

De Sherbinin said, “the analysis of the flood risk factors is important for local planners, emergency managers, and even highway crews and utility providers. We all know that low lying areas are more flood prone, but the data they have assembled provide more insights into flood risk, particularly for flash floods.”

Study lead author Hemal Dey, a geospatial scientist, said he hopes local officials look at not just building more dams and levees, but more natural infrastructure such as wetlands, grasslands, rain gardens and estuaries.

“The research is solid confirmation of what emergency managers have been saying for years. Realtors will hate it,’’ said Craig Fugate, a former FEMA director who wasn’t part of the study. “The harder question is what we’re actually going to do about it.”

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The Associated Press’ climate and environmental coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org.

But the most serious charges against the pair accused of putting Atilio Diego Bellanza through the ordeal did not stick.

According to Miami Beach police, officers responded to the 1400 block of Ocean Drive at about 9:14 p.m. Tuesday where Bellanza dropped off the suspects, identified as Ashton Montanez, 22, of Orlando, and Jefferson Mesidor, 25, of Miami.

Bellanza said he picked the two men up near 98th Street and Bay Harbor Terrace. He says on approach, he saw police on scene and two men racing away from them and towards his van.

“One laid down. And the other laid in the back. And they were yelling at me to hurry up,” Bellanza said in Spanish. “He kept touching my face and I told him to stop doing that. And he was screaming and screaming like a crazy person.

“I tried throwing myself from the van multiple times but I could never find the right time. And I thought about what could happen. That maybe they’d shoot me.”

Bellanza said, “A lot of things went through my head. I have kids. That’s why I’m working so much.”

He said when he got out, he took their photos and called 911.

“Thank god this happened to me and not someone else. I have a lot of experience on the street dealing with people. And I took it all very calmly,” Bellanza said. “I think if it were someone else ― if they had been aggressive, they could’ve hurt that person or shot him.“

The two men got out of the car near 1446 Ocean Drive, a three-story property with several tourists and short term rental guests inside. Police found one of the suspects quickly. The other barricaded himself inside, and wasn’t taken into custody until 1 a.m.

Montanez and Mesidor appeared in bond court on Wednesday afternoon after being arrested on kidnapping and resisting arrest charges.

The judge, after reviewing the arrest report, did not find that it contained probable cause for kidnapping.

Even prosecutors believed there was not enough evidence in their arrest forms to support a kidnapping charge.

“If they hired the driver, I don’t know if it’s kidnapping or if it turned into one, if there was a gun,” Judge Mindy Glazer said.

At his bond hearing, Mesidor said he’s on disability.

“I live with my mom, my girlfriend, my brothers and sisters, three dogs and my daughter,” he said.

He wept before his mother spoke to the judge.

“I didn’t sleep last night,” Mesidor’s mother said.

After the most serious charges were dropped, the pair only faced resisting arrest charges and each was being held on a $500 bond as of Wednesday afternoon.

Hoyos, who had been serving as club’s sporting director, took over coaching duties after Javier Mascherano unexpectedly left the club due to personal reasons. Mascherano led Inter Miami to the 2025 MLS Cup title in his only full season with the club.

Messi, who opened the scoring when he converted a penalty kick in the 13th minute, scored the go-ahead goal in 79th minute. After a Colorado turnover near midfield, Messi cut back near the right corner of the penalty box and flicked a rising shot that split a pair of defenders and slipped inside the back post.

Messi has seven goal this season, tied with Sam Surridge and Petar Musa for most in MLS.

Miami (4-1-3) hasn’t lost since a season-opening 3-0 defeat to Los Angeles FC.

Yannick Bright was shown a straight red car in the 87th minute and Miami played a man down the rest of the way.

The Rapids (4-4-0) had won back-to-back games and three of their last four

Bright drew a penalty conceded by Josh Atencio and Messi converted from the spot to open the scoring.

Mateo Silvetti, along the right end line, played an arcing cross to the back post where Berterame slammed home a header to make it 2-0 in the fifth minute of first-half stoppage time.

Bertarame made his first career start and scored his first goal in MLS last time out in a 2-2 tie with the New York Red Bulls.

Rafael Navarro scored in the 58th minute for the Rapids. The 26-year-old forward scored two goals in a 6-2 win over Houston last time out and has six goals this season.

Darren Yapi subbed on for Hamzat Ojediran and, moments later, scored on the counter-attack to make it 2-2 in the 62nd minute.

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AP soccer: https://apnews.com/soccer

At the moment, no one in baseball is shining brighter.

“To be honest with you,” said Astros shortstop Carlos Correa, “2026 Yordan is the closest thing I’ve seen to Barry Bonds.”

Whoa.

Alvarez hit his major league-leading 11th homer, a two-run shot in the first inning, as the Astros, who have been ravaged by injuries during the season's first month, defeated the Guardians 2-0 to take two of three from the defending AL Central champions.

While the Astros have stumbled out of the gate, Alvarez has been at full stride.

The beefy 6-foot-4 designated hitter leads the majors in homers, RBIs (26), hits (33), extra-base hits (19), total bases (74), on-base percentage (.466), slugging percentage (.779) and OPS (1.245).

No wonder Correa is reminded of the peerless Bonds.

“Aaron Judge has a 1.200 OPS, but Yordan has done it a different way,” Correa said. “He’s not swinging and missing much. He’s not striking out a lot. He's walking a lot, that’s what Barry did.

“Yordan is getting the intentional-walk treatment every time first base is open. I don’t see any other player in the league they do that for.”

Alvarez went 3 for 4 in the series finale, extending his hitting streak to nine games and his on-base streak to 18. He's homered in four of the past six games, and he's become one of the few things manager Joe Espada can count upon.

“He stays within himself and he knows how important it is for him to do damage,” Espada said. “He's a presence and he's carrying us right now.”

After Correa doubled leading off the first against Tanner Bibee, Alvarez followed by yanking a curveball from the right-hander 422 feet over the wall in right field to give the Astros a 2-0 lead that held up for nine innings.

Bibee missed catcher Bo Naylor's target and Alvarez made him pay.

“It was the right pitch in that spot if I threw it where Bo wanted me to throw it,” Bibee said. “It was supposed to be in the dirt, threw it up and that guy, as good as he is and how hot he is right now, it’s going to happen. Just can’t make the mistake.”

Alvarez pulled singles to the right side in his next two at-bats and was retired on a hard groundout to first in the eighth that he thought was foul. Alvarez stood in the batter's box almost stunned that he had made an out.

It's been like that all season.

“At some point you're expecting him to get out because the game is supposed to be so hard,” Correa said. “When he's going that good, you're like, OK he's due to get out here. And he just keeps raking. It's incredible. It's so much fun.

“I haven't missed one swing of his all year because he's must-watch TV.”

Alvarez isn't making too much of his blistering start. After playing in just 48 games last season due to injuries, he's not taking anything for granted while also appreciating how well it's going.

“I just want to find a good pitch and connect on the pitch and things are turning out for me right now,” said Alvarez, who joined Lance Berkman (2002) as the only Astros to hit 11 homers in the first 26 games. “I’m not surprised with my results. That’s why I work so hard. Every at-bat that I have, I go aggressive.”

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AP MLB: https://apnews.com/hub/mlb

The stock soared. The business never took off.

On Tuesday, the parent company of the once hoped-for social media giant announced it was shaking up its leadership. Out is its long time CEO, former farmer turned Republican congressman Devin Nunes, replaced by seasoned digital executive, Kevin McGurn.

He has his work cut out for him.

Trump Media & Technology, which owns Truth Social, has diversified far away from its original social media mandate into cryptocurrency, finance, even nuclear power. Investors are still fleeing. The stock is down more than 60% since Donald Trump was reelected president in November 2024, wiping out $6 billion in shareholder wealth.

Born in anger — and controversy

Trump launched the social media platform in early 2022 after being banned by Twitter and Facebook from posting on their sites after the January 6, 2021, riots that aimed to overturn the election.

It was angry beginning for a business, and a messy one.

A publicly traded shell company that Truth Social merged with so it could tap stock traders for money was investigated by federal regulators for misleading investors, culminating in a multimillion-dollar penalty. A board member was even sentenced to prison for insider trading.

Then Trump got allowed back on Facebook and Twitter, a seeming victory for the then ex-president. But it also undercut his new business, as platforms — particularly X, the new name for Twitter — scaled back moderation, weakening the case for Truth Social as a refuge from censorship.

Heavy losses

Years later, Truth Social is still struggling to attract users beyond the president's core supporters despite his using it for major political announcements — a practice criticized by government ethics experts as a conflict of interest with the presidency. Truth Social’s monthly audience declined both on the web and on its mobile app year-over-year in March, according to digital market analysis firm Similarweb.

Trump Media has lost more than $1 billion in the past two years and the stock has reflected those financial struggles. After closing at about $62 shortly after it went public in 2024, the stock has plunged into the single digits.

Enter crypto

As the platform has languished, the company has branched into other businesses.

In August, Trump Media said it was starting a new cryptocurrency business by teaming up with partners, including a company called Crypto.com. The idea was to hold massive amounts of a Crypto.com token called Cronos to create a Trump Media “digital ecosystem" in which users could use them instead of dollars to make payments, earn rewards and pay for services.

Trump Media is also betting on another alternative currency, raising $2.5 billion last year to load up on bitcoin. In this way it was echoing moves by MicroStrategy, a software developer that transformed itself into a bitcoin holding company by buying up the currency.

Whether the Trump company's new ventures will work out is unclear, but MicroStrategy's story could be a cautionary tale. The value of its bitcoin has cratered in the past several months, sinking MicroStrategy's holdings, along with Trump Media's. Since July, stock in the once soaring MicroStrategy has dropped nearly 60%.

Going Nuclear

In December, Trump Media announced it was moving in another direction by merging with a nuclear fusion company, a promising but far-off energy technology.

The appeal is that fusion someday could offer a way of powering the data centers needed to build and run AI research and services that are suddenly all the rage — and also threatening higher electricity bills.

The move has drawn criticism because nuclear energy is heavily regulated and Trump is not only a major Truth Social shareholder. As U.S. president, he has power to help his companies and hurt their rivals through rules, laws and government funding.

And the Trump administration isn't taking a hands-off approach. In October, the U.S. Department of Energy released a “road map” showing how it could help the “burgeoning fusion private sector industry” to scale up on a ”rapid timeline.”

“There’s a huge conflict of interest,” said Richard Painter, the chief White House ethics lawyer in the George W. Bush administration. “The United States government is going to get all involved in it.”

Brave face

The new CEO, Kevin McGurn, has worked at NBC Universal, Hulu and DoubleClick, among other companies and so has plenty of business experience that Nunes lacked.

McGurn said Tuesday in a statement that the company was “poised to take off."

“In carrying President Trump’s unique, singular vision and message, Truth Social stands for the most powerful brand and voice in history of social media and beyond,” he said.

But investors are still not convinced. On Wednesday afternoon, even with the news that McGurn was coming aboard, the stock fell sharply, down 3.5% to $9.48.

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Technology Writer Barbara Ortutay in San Francisco contributed.

Now that it’s been approved by voters, the new Virginia map will have to clear additional legal hurdles. On Wednesday, the state attorney general’s office said it would immediately appeal a ruling earlier in the day from a judge in rural southern Virginia who ordered that the results of Tuesday’s vote not be certified.

Ultimately, the Virginia Supreme Court will decide whether Democratic lawmakers violated procedural rules when they referred a constitutional amendment to the ballot authorizing the new U.S. House districts that could help Democrats win as many as four additional seats in the state. If so, that could invalidate the map voters narrowly approved Tuesday.

What happens next in Florida also will matter.

The state’s Republican-controlled Legislature is to meet in a special session next week that GOP Gov. Ron DeSantis called in part to draw a new map to expand the party’s congressional majority there. The U.S. Supreme Court is scheduled to issue an opinion by the end of June in a Louisiana case that could overturn a key provision of the Voting Rights Act and lead to redrawn political maps across the South, though almost all of those could not happen until 2028.

After voters passed the Virginia amendment, Democrats could tentatively claim that they netted 10 seats nationally from the mid-decade redistricting, compared with the nine that Republicans claim. Even if things swing again in the GOP’s favor, the net result of Trump’s campaign would be at best an incremental increase in the number of GOP-leaning House seats at a time when his approval rating is dropping and Republican anxiety over losing control of Congress in November is rising.

“We have successfully blunted Trump’s attempt to completely hijack the midterms,” said John Bisognano, president of the National Democratic Redistricting Committee.

Many Republicans agreed.

“The GOP will now lose net seats across the country. If you’re going to pick a fight, at least win it,” Ari Fleischer, who was a spokesman for President George W. Bush, posted on the social media site X after the Virginia vote. “All this was foreseeable and avoidable. We should not have started this fight.”

Adam Kincaid, executive director of the National Republican Redistricting Trust, argued that it is too soon to declare one party a victor.

“It’s an ongoing process with many legal challenges pending, and it’s far too early for sweeping statements on the final outcome,” he said.

Trump on Wednesday tried to undermine the Virginia result by leveling groundless accusations of fraud similar to ones he made after losing the 2020 presidential election. He called the Virginia vote “RIGGED” and “Crooked” in a post on his social media site and added, “Let’s see if the Courts will fix this travesty of ‘Justice.’”

Redistricting spread from Texas to other states

Redistricting is typically done every 10 years after each census, unless ordered by a court. But last summer, Trump pushed a redrawing in Texas, prodding the state’s Republican-controlled Legislature to add up to five winnable House seats for his party. Trump then began pressuring other Republican-run states to follow. Missouri, North Carolina and Ohio have since created more GOP-leaning seats in addition to Texas.

Democrats began to fight back, even though they were more constrained because several Democratic-controlled states had maps drawn by independent commissions rather than lawmakers and governors.

To counter Texas, California’s Democratic governor, Gavin Newsom, pushed the Democratic-controlled Legislature to place a redistricting initiative on last fall’s ballot. After voters overwhelmingly approved it, the measure will replace a commission-approved map with one that could gain Democrats five seats.

Democrats reclaimed the Legislature and governor’s office in November in Virginia and swiftly moved to replicate California’s move with an even more aggressive redistricting plan. It replaces a congressional map imposed by a court after the last census that had resulted in a 6-5 edge for Democrats with one that could allow Democrats to win as many as 10 seats.

“We are not going to let anyone tilt the system without a response,” state Senate President L. Louise Lucas said at a news conference Wednesday.

Courts could still have a say on redistricting

In Washington, U.S. House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries of New York warned Florida Republicans, who have been openly nervous about redrawing their district boundaries and potentially spreading their core voters too thin before an election that appears to be trending against them.

“Our message to Florida Republicans right now is, ‘F around and find out,’” Jeffries said.

House Majority Forward, the nonprofit arm of the super political action committee aligned with House Democrats, has spent nearly $60 million to push back against Republicans’ redistricting efforts. Some $40 million of that was on the Virginia campaign.

Another obstacle in Florida is an anti-gerrymandering constitutional amendment that was approved by state voters in 2010. It is likely that any new Florida map would trigger significant litigation, although six of the state Supreme Court’s seven justices were appointed by Republicans.

Nicholas Stephanopolous, a Harvard law professor, said a challenge for DeSantis is that the Florida amendment forbids drawing lines for purely partisan purposes, so he has to find some other excuse for revising the map. “Even with that sort of acquiescent state supreme court, I don’t think it’s a done deal,” Stephanopolous said.

The Virginia move comes with its own legal issues. Republicans have challenged the process that Democrats used to place the measure on the ballot and the state Supreme Court opted to wait for the vote before even scheduling arguments in the case. It is unclear when a ruling could come.

Wednesday’s ruling stopping certification came from a separate case that Republicans filed with the same lower court judge, whose initial ruling against the initiative was put on hold by the state supreme court.

“The ballot box was never the final word here,” Terry Kilgore, the Virginia House Republican leader, said in a statement after Tuesday’s vote. “Serious legal questions remain about both the wording of this referendum and the process used to put it before voters.”

The biggest legal wild card is held by the U.S. Supreme Court. Its conservative majority could throw out a requirement under the Voting Rights Act that in areas with a large minority population, mapmakers draw districts that are more favorable to the election of minority candidates.

That provision has led to the creation of several majority-minority congressional seats, especially in the South. Without it, Republicans in conservative states could shrink the number of U.S. House seats winnable by Democrats even further.

But it’s unlikely that any state other than Louisiana, which brought the lawsuit the high court will rule on, would be able to adjust its congressional lines in time for November even if the court eliminates that provision, known as Section Two. That’s because the November election is already officially underway in most states and candidate filing deadlines — and, in some cases, primary elections — have already passed.

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AP Congressional Correspondent Lisa Mascaro and Associated Press writer Leah Askarinam in Washington contributed to this report.

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As a teen growing up in Miami’s Liberty City, records show arrests for a school bus stop shooting, stolen guns, a restaurant burglary, and a park robbery.

“The court system has failed my son. I begged for help, that my son is incompetent,” Crystal Morales said during a court hearing in 2022 after the school bus stop shooting. “He is unstable, and I begged for help, and nobody has offered me any help.”

According to inmate records, Morales has been in the custody of the Miami-Dade Corrections and Rehabilitation Department since he was 16 years old at the Juvenile Assessment Center.

According to court records, Miami-Dade County Circuit Judge Cristina Miranda has been presiding over his cases. Some have been pending since September 2022.

Earlier this year, Miranda signed a court order directing a qualified mental health professional to determine if Morales was mentally capable of standing trial after a public defender’s motion.

On Wednesday, as a 19-year-old inmate, he faced new accusations of repeated violence — some involving makeshift weapons and gang-related conflicts — at the Pre-Trial Detention Center.

Violence at PTDC

On Tuesday, Morales waited for his cellmate to be in handcuffs to use a “makeshift shank” to cause his cellmate “a superficial cut to the back of his neck,” according to a M-DSO deputy’s report.

A Miami-Dade corrections officer reported using a self-defense spray to subdue Morales during the attack shortly before 12:15 a.m. Tuesday at PTDC’s 10th floor, according to the deputy’s report.

Miami-Dade prosecutors filed the case on Wednesday, and he faced a new charge of aggravated battery by a prisoner. His bond was $15,000.

Gang-related violence at PTDC

On March 20, Morales and four other inmates attacked a victim after corrections placed him in their cell, and there was an argument about “The Blood gang,” according to a deputy’s report.

“Surveillance cameras depict the victim standing in the dayroom when suddenly all of the cameras within the cell were covered by unknown inmates,” a deputy wrote, according to the report.

The victim suffered “several puncture wounds to the back, neck, and hand” and was treated at Jackson Memorial Hospital’s Ryder Trauma Center, according to the deputy’s report.

Corrections searched the cell and found two more “shanks,” according to the deputy’s incident report. Morales faced a charge of aggravated battery by a prisoner. His arraignment is on April 24.

More violence at PTDC

On Feb. 19, Morales got into a fight with an inmate in a cell while “other inmates in the cell covered all cameras,” according to a deputy’s report.

Prosecutors filed the battery by detainee on detainee case on Feb. 20, and the case was dropped on March 23, according to court records.

On Nov. 10, Morales and another inmate used paper to cover a surveillance camera in a cell before two other inmates got into a fight, according to a deputy’s report.

Prosecutors filed the case on Nov. 11, and the case was closed on Dec. 19, according to court records.

School bus stop shooting

Shortly after 7:55 a.m., on Sept. 8, 2022, Morales, then 16 years old, used a black firearm with an extended magazine to shoot and wound two students while trying to rob them of their phones, according to a deputy’s report.

Miami-Dade deputies responded to the shooting at the boys’ school bus stop at Northwest 10 Avenue and 109 Street in the Pinewood neighborhood, according to the deputy’s report.

The two wounded boys survived, Morales ran away, and when Miami Shores police officers arrested him, they found him in possession of three stolen firearms, according to the deputy’s arrest report.

Morales had a Glock 26 that had been reported stolen in Miami in his waistband; an Olympic Arms K23B that had been reported stolen in Miami-Dade in his backpack; and a Glock 23, 40 Smith & Wesson caliber, that he had been accused of stealing in Miami, also in his backpack, according to the police report.

Prosecutors filed the case on Sept. 30, 2022. He faced 19 charges: Three counts of attempted murder with a firearm, three counts of possession of a firearm by a minor, three counts of using a weapon to commit a felony, three counts of carrying a concealed firearm, two counts of armed robbery, armed burglary, aggravated assault with a firearm, possession of a short-barrel gun, third-degree grand theft of a vehicle, and resisting arrest without violence.

The case remained pending on Wednesday afternoon, according to court records.

Stealing a gun

On July 19, 2022, Morales stole the G23 40 S&W caliber from a black GMC SUV that a driver he knew had parked by a gas pump at the Marathon station at Northwest 12th Avenue and 54 Street, according to police.

“The victim stated that he has known the defendant for many years, as he went to high school with the defendant’s mother,” a police officer wrote, according to the arrest report.

The victim heard his car alarm, saw Morales, then 16 years old, running away with the G23, and he drove to Morales’s house to talk to his mother and call the police for help, according to the report.

Prosecutors filed the case on Oct. 30 on charges of burglary of an unoccupied conveyance, third-degree grand theft of a firearm, carrying a concealed firearm, and possession of a firearm by a minor. His arraignment was on Oct. 6, 2022. The case remains pending.

Park robbery

On Feb. 27, 2022, Morales, then 15 years old, took a man’s sports bag and stole AirPods at the Charles Hadley Park in Miami’s Liberty City neighborhood, according to a police report.

Morales faced a charge of third-degree grand theft. Prosecutors filed the case on Oct. 3, 2022, and it remained pending on Wednesday afternoon, according to court records. His next hearing is June 15.

Restaurant burglary

On Jan. 16, 2022, surveillance video showed Morales, then 15, stealing $450 in cash and three cash registers from a Church’s Chicken in Miami’s Liberty City neighborhood, according to police.

Morales faced charges of burglary of an unoccupied structure, petit theft, and criminal mischief. Records show he was at JAC when prosecutors filed the case on Sept. 30, 2022. It remained pending on Wednesday.

Local 10 News Assignment Editor Mercedes Cevallos contributed to this report.

Related stories

• Prosecutors plan to charge teen accused of shooting 2 Miami-Dade students as adult
• Miami-Dade’s new $50M mental health facility remains closed
• Deferred but not defeated: Local judge says he will continue to fight for a mental health center

According to MDSO, the shooting happened in the area of Southwest 92nd Avenue and 168th Street.

A Miami-Dade Fire Rescue spokesperson said medics responded to “a medical call involving reports of someone shot” and directed further inquiries to MDSO.

Authorities have not provided any information about anyone involved.

Village officials put out a notice to residents to “be aware of significant police activity in the area” and to anticipate “potential road closures” in the area.

According to MDSO, an agency spokesperson was set to provide an update at around 6:30 p.m.

The Republican governor defined DEI at a news conference as “an ideological construct that is designed to promote a particular political agenda, particularly to the detriment of disfavored groups.”

“The disfavored groups, No. 1, obviously, would be white males, and I think they’ve been discriminated against,” DeSantis said in Jacksonville. ”And it’s it’s like a lot of people are, ‘Oh that’s fine. That’s fine.’ No, it’s not fine. It’s wrong.”

While the governor is entitled to his opinion, his views differ from “everyone else’s,” said Evelyn Foxx, president of the NAACP branch in Gainesville.

“If you talked to 100 white men, they wouldn’t feel the same way” as DeSantis, Foxx said when asked Wednesday about his comments. “The governor is out of touch with people, and that is the bottom line.”

Supporters say the purpose of DEI is to remedy the effects of long-term discrimination against certain groups. A nationwide push by conservatives to limit diversity programs has led many companies, schools and governments to pull back on those initiatives, particularly during the current Trump administration, and DEI has been a frequent target for the governor.

DeSantis also said Wednesday that Asian Americans had faced discrimination in university admissions and that people should be judged on their merits not their demographic backgrounds. If people still face barriers because of discrimination, there should be policies to “even the playing field,” he said.

“But that is not the same as trying to socially engineer certain outcomes to the detriment of groups that some of the intellectual elite disfavor,” DeSantis said.

During his two terms in office, DeSantis’ administration has championed legislation which prohibits public colleges and universities from spending money on DEI programs and promoted the “Stop WOKE Act,” which restricts how race and sex are taught in schools.

Democratic lawmakers have warned that the legislation was overbroad and potentially unconstitutional.

Under the legislation, residents can sue local governments for violations. If local officials are found to have funded DEI initiatives in violation of the law, they can be removed from office.

“When people know there is accountability they are much more apt to toe the line,” DeSantis said.

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Follow Mike Schneider on the social platform Bluesky: @mikeysid.bsky.social.

The child’s parent, Rose Inessa-Ethington, a transgender woman, is accused of taking the child to Cuba without permission of the biological mother. Federal and state authorities sought the return of the child after a family member expressed concern that Inessa-Ethington went to Havana to get the child gender transition surgery.

Inessa-Ethington was arrested along with her partner, Blue Inessa-Ethington, and charged in the U.S. with international parental kidnapping.

The couple traveled with the child to Canada ostensibly for a camping trip in late March with Blue’s 3-year-old child. However, the two adults turned off their phones after telling the older child’s mother they’d arrived in Canada. They flew from Vancouver to Mexico and then to Cuba on April 1, according to a criminal complaint filed Monday in federal court in Utah.

The charges don’t say if the couple actually planned on getting the child gender-affirming surgery in Cuba or how they would get it because that surgery isn’t legal for children in Cuba.

The FBI said that Blue Inessa-Ethington withdrew $10,000 from her checking account before leaving. Agents also found at their home a note with instructions from a mental health therapist in Washington, D.C., “to send the therapist the $10,000.00 and instructions on gender affirming medical care for children.” That note didn’t mention Cuba.

The use of the Department of Justice plane in a parental kidnapping investigation comes after President Donald Trump’s administration has sought to block access to gender-affirming care for minors and pressured health care providers over the issue.

The Associated Press left a voice message seeking comment from the federal public defender in Richmond who represented Rose and Blue Inessa-Ethington. They will be returned to Utah to face one count each of international parental kidnapping, authorities said.

Search began after child wasn’t returned as scheduled

The search for the child began on April 3 when they were not returned to the mother in Utah as scheduled, court documents show. The 10-year-old’s mother, who was divorced from Rose Inessa-Ethington and had shared custody of the child, filed a missing person report with police in Logan City, Utah, about 70 miles (115 kilometers) north of Salt Lake City.

Logan City Police Chief Jeff Simmons said his department’s initial focus was on the custodial interference allegations in the case, and he said investigators did not learn until later about the concerns over gender-affirming surgery.

Logan police spokesperson Sgt. Brandon Bevan said those concerns were raised by one family member. He declined to say who.

“They just had the concern about it, no actual physical evidence” Bevan said.

A Utah state judge ordered the return of the 10-year-old to the child’s mother on April 13. Three days later, a federal magistrate judge issued an arrest warrant for the Inessa-Ethingtons. On the same day, Cuban law enforcement located the group. They were deported to the U.S. aboard the government plane Monday and arraigned in federal court in Richmond, Virginia.

The 10-year-old was returned to the child’s biological mother, First Assistant U.S. Attorney Melissa Holyoak in Utah indicated in a statement. Representatives of the FBI and U.S. attorneys office in Utah declined to say what happened to the 3-year-old child who had been with the group.

Parents engaged in custody dispute

The custody dispute between the parents does not appear to be a new development. An online fundraiser created five years go by Blue Inessa-Ethington titled “Help a Trans Mother Keep Custody of Her Child” raised $9,766.

“Last week, Rose’s ex relocated several counties away, negatively impacting Rose’s parent-time with the child,” she wrote in the fundraiser. She said the money would be used to seek a court order that would keep the child “safe and stable throughout this process.”

Anyone who has spent time with Rose knows “how much care and thought she puts into parenting her gender open child,” she wrote.

She later continued, “While her ex is not making an issue of Rose’s gender, as a trans woman, Rose is at a disadvantage against her cishet ex-wife. Rose also lacks the family resources and connections to face this litigation on her own.”

Family members said the child was assigned male at birth but identifies as a girl because of what they believed to be “manipulation” by Rose Inessa-Ethington, according to an April 16 affidavit from FBI Special Agent Jennifer Waterfield.

Gender-affirming care for minors has been limited

The Trump administration moved in December to cut off gender-affirming care for minors, prompting a third of states to sue.

It was the latest in a series of clashes between an administration that says transgender health care can be harmful to children and advocates who say it’s medically necessary.

Gender-affirming surgery is rare among U.S. children, research shows. And fewer than 1 in 1,000 U.S. adolescents receive gender-affirming medications.

In February, the nation’s largest professional organization for plastic surgeons recommended gender-affirming surgeries be delayed until patients turn 19, diverging from several other major medical organizations’ guidance.

In Cuba, gender-affirming surgeries are banned for minors and only performed for adults through the public health system under strict supervision in designated public hospitals for Cuban citizens. They must be authorized by a medical commission after a comprehensive review of the patient’s file. That process often takes years because it requires a wide range of medical and psychological evaluations.

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Associated Press journalists Eric Tucker in Washington, Cristiana Mesquita in Havana and Devi Shastri in Milwaukee contributed to this report.

Rivas Hernandez did not live long enough to study there. She was killed before her 15th birthday. An autopsy report released Wednesday said she still had braces when she died.

Her brief life unfolded in this unassuming community with a population of more than 70,000 and a sprawling lake at the center of town that is home to a lively water sports scene.

Almost eight months have passed since her decomposed and dismembered body was discovered in the trunk of a Tesla registered to the singer D4vd. The 21-year-old musician, whose legal name is David Burke, was charged with first-degree murder and other offenses in connection with the death and his relationship with Rivas Hernandez. He pleaded not guilty this week.

Little is known about teen's relationship with singer

Little is known about how the young girl entered Burke's orbit or what their relationship looked like. She grew up roughly 80 miles (129 kilometers) from the Hollywood Hills rental home where Burke lived and near where his car was abandoned with her body inside.

Their lives unfolded in contrasting environments. The street where Rivas Hernandez grew up has chain-link fences and small front yards. The street where Burke lived had security gates at nearly every driveway and privacy hedges interspersed between palm trees.

Rivas Hernandez's home has a white picket fence around the front yard and plants and flowers lining a walkway. Two rosary beads hang on the front door, and a painted rock nearby says “You Matter.”

More than half of the town's residents are Hispanic or Latino, according to the latest census data. The streets are dotted with fast food chains and local businesses.

Several neighbors on the family's street and other Lake Elsinore residents said they did not personally know the family or Rivas Hernandez and that the family tended to keep to themselves. Even the neighbor who set up a sprawling memorial in her honor, Kayleigh Cortez, said she did not know her.

Seventh grader was reported missing in 2024

Rivas Hernandez was a 13-year-old seventh grader when her family reported her missing in 2024. Authorities said she had run away, and several residents remembered seeing flyers with her photo around town when she was missing.

“I didn’t know her personally, but she was a girl with a normal life. She had friends at school,” Elizabeth Davalos, a Lake Elsinore resident, said in Spanish.

Her parents, Jesus Rivas and Mercedes Martinez, issued a statement Tuesday through their attorney that marked the first time they publicly commented on the case or their daughter. They described her as “a beautiful, strong girl who loved to sing and dance.”

“Every Friday night was movie night, and we spent wonderful times together,” the statement said. “We love her very much, and she always told us that she loved us. We miss her deeply. All we want is justice for Celeste.”

Some neighbors declined to be interviewed, citing fatigue from the media attention that has followed the case.

Town is a tight-knit community

Katie Favreau, a local business owner and longtime Lake Elsinore resident, said the town is a tight-knit, supportive community. Her appliance repair shop is a few doors down from where Hernandez grew up, but Faverau did not know her or her family.

“It’s just a really good, old-fashioned place to live. It’s like small towns in the Midwest. It’s just stuck in the middle of Southern California instead,” Favreau said. “If somebody is in need in this town, the whole town will rally.”

Favreau said the community has been supportive of Rivas Hernandez's family, and the majority of residents respect their privacy and grief. Conversations about the young girl's life and death are now “sporadic,” she said.

The memorial honoring Hernandez's memory showed signs of recent visitors this week, with fresh flowers mixed in with ones that had wilted long ago. There was an Easter bunny mixed in with a plush Hello Kitty toy that appeared to have been there for months.

Artificial tea candles spell out Celeste at the base of a sign that says “Justice for Celeste Rivas” and has handwritten notes from friends and mourners. Many included Bible verses or wishes that she is now at peace.

“God looked around his garden. He put his arms around you and lifted you to rest," one note read. "God's garden is beautiful, he always takes the best.”

___

Associated Press journalists Leslie Ambriz and Damian Dovarganes in Lake Elsinore, California, and Andrew Dalton in Los Angeles contributed to this report.

DeBoer is getting a $2 million raise — up to $12.5 million — and a two-year contract extension after leading the Crimson Tide to the quarterfinals of the College Football Playoff, where Alabama lost to eventual national champion Indiana.

Oats is getting a $1.2 million raise — up to $7.2 million — and a two-year contract extension after leading Alabama to the NCAA Tournament's Sweet 16, where the Crimson Tide lost to eventual national champion Michigan. Oats' new deal had been agreed to earlier this month.

Alabama announced both deals Wednesday during a board of trustees meeting.

DeBoer had been scheduled to make $10.5 million during 2026. His salary was set to increase $250,000 annually. He is now under contract through the 2033 season.

Oats had been scheduled to make $6.02 million in 2026-27. He made $5.5 million this past season. He is now under contract through the 2032 season.

DeBoer, courted by Michigan to replace fired coach Sherrone Moore, now has a $10 million buyout through January 2027. It drops to $8 million the following year and $6 million through January 2029.

“We are excited about the opportunity to continue our time in Tuscaloosa with this contract extension,” DeBoer said in a statement. "This university has become a special place to us, and I look forward to working to ensure that Alabama football remains at the forefront of college football.

"This program has a long history of success and an unmatched tradition that I was eager to be a part of two years ago, and I cannot wait to keep coaching our guys and bring more championships to Alabama.”

DeBoer is entering his third season in Tuscaloosa since replacing legendary coach Nick Saban. The Tide are 20-8 in his tenure, with a Southeastern Conference title game appearance and a first-round CFP victory over Oklahoma.

But he also has blowout losses to Indiana in the Rose Bowl and Georgia in the SEC title game on his Alabama resume as well as regular-season upsets to Oklahoma, Vanderbilt and Florida State.

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AP college sports: https://apnews.com/hub/college-sports

Eve Samples of Friends of the Everglades and Elise Bennett of the Center for Biological Diversity are the plaintiffs in the landmark environmental law case at the intersection of the remote immigration detention facility in the Florida Everglades.

The pair are disappointed, but not deterred, by the federal appeals court ruling overturning a district court’s order which temporarily hit pause on the facility.

“It does feel like a setback, of course, because we’ve lost that preliminary injunction,” said Bennett. “But what I would say, especially with today being Earth Day, is that we are more motivated than ever to get back to district court.”

The case was aimed at compelling state and federal defendants to comply with the National Environmental Policy Act and conduct an environmental impact study.

“The government is supposed to study the impacts of its actions on the environment before it takes action,” said Samples. “NEPA is a look-before-you-leap law, and in this case the government took action before it looked.”

But in a 2-1 ruling, the appeals court said there was no federal action trigging the underpinning federal law in part because “to qualify as a major federal action - it must receive more than minimal federal funding” and “when the district court entered its injunction,” which was in August, “Florida has received no federal funding.”

Back in October, a spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security told Local 10 News Florida did submit an application to the Federal Emergency Management Agency and was awarded the full amount the state applied for, $608 million, which was money officials said could be applied to ‘Alligator Alcatraz’ or a second site opened dubbed the ‘Deportation Depot.’

At the time, the state was also working to bring online a third, to be called the “Panhandle Pokey,” in July. DHS officials estimated the total cost for that site would be $450 million for one year.

Samples said since the district judge’s order in August, they have learned this from documents obtained in a separate public records lawsuit.

She said the records showed that the state originally applied for a $1.4 million federal grant and that FEMA approved a $608 million grant, which she said is “a lot more evidence about the federal government’s commitment to fund ‘Alligator Alcatraz’.”

“There’s more evidence that the site is under federal control,” Samples said. “And we’re eager to get back to the district court to prove that.”

Bennett said the government “set up this project to try to avoid accountability.”

“They may have won this round,” she said. “But there are many more rounds in the legal fight.”

In a statement, a spokesperson for the DHS said in the agency’s view, the lawsuit was about, “open-borders activists,” a phrase which stunned the environmental advocates.

“If someone believes that the Friends of the Everglades and the Center for Biological Diversity don’t care about the environment, then I’ve got a few acres of swampland to sell them in South Florida,” said Bennett.

That’s because what the facility does was not at issue in this environmental law case and the same goes for immigration policy.

“It has nothing to do with it,” said Samples.

Instead, she said the case is about whether the government followed the law.

“Any individual person, if they were to build like this in the middle of the Everglades, would have to get a permit,” said Bennett. “Why is it that the federal and state government don’t? Are they above the law? I don’t think so.”

Samples added, “We have a strong case to build. We also have filed notice of intent to sue under other laws. There are real impacts to endangered species and now that we have this opinion from the appeals court, we can get back, amend our original lawsuit to incorporate those claims and make our case even stronger.”

Durante su adolescencia en Liberty City, Miami, los registros muestran arrestos por un tiroteo en una parada de autobús escolar, robo de armas, robo en un restaurante y robo en un parque.

“El sistema judicial le ha fallado a mi hijo. Supliqué ayuda, dije que mi hijo es incompetente”, declaró Crystal Morales durante una audiencia judicial en 2022 tras el tiroteo en la parada del autobús escolar. “Es inestable, supliqué ayuda y nadie me la ha ofrecido”.

Según los registros penitenciarios, Morales ha estado bajo la custodia del Departamento de Correcciones y Rehabilitación de Miami-Dade desde que tenía 16 años en el Centro de Evaluación Juvenil.

Según los registros judiciales, la jueza del circuito del condado de Miami-Dade, Cristina Miranda, ha estado a cargo de sus casos. Algunos están pendientes desde septiembre de 2022.

A principios de este año, Miranda firmó una orden judicial que instruía a un profesional de la salud mental calificado a determinar si Morales era mentalmente capaz de ser juzgado, tras una moción del defensor público.

El miércoles, a sus 19 años y aún recluido, se enfrentó a nuevas acusaciones de violencia reiterada —algunas relacionadas con armas improvisadas y conflictos entre pandillas— en el Centro de Detención Preventiva.

Violencia en PTDC

El martes, Morales esperó a que su compañero de celda estuviera esposado para usar un “arma improvisada” y causarle “un corte superficial en la nuca”, según el informe de un agente del M-DSO.

Según el informe del agente penitenciario de Miami-Dade, este utilizó un aerosol de defensa personal para someter a Morales durante el ataque ocurrido poco antes de las 12:15 de la madrugada del martes en el décimo piso del PTDC.

Los fiscales del condado de Miami-Dade presentaron la denuncia el miércoles, y el acusado enfrenta un nuevo cargo de agresión agravada por parte de un recluso. Su fianza se fijó en 15.000 dólares.

Violencia relacionada con pandillas en PTDC

El 20 de marzo, Morales y otros cuatro reclusos atacaron a una víctima después de que el personal penitenciario lo trasladara a su celda, y se produjo una discusión sobre “la pandilla Blood”, según el informe de un agente.

Según el informe, un agente escribió: «Las cámaras de vigilancia muestran a la víctima de pie en la sala común cuando, de repente, todas las cámaras dentro de la celda fueron tapadas por reclusos desconocidos».

Según el informe del agente, la víctima sufrió “varias heridas punzantes en la espalda, el cuello y la mano” y fue atendida en el Centro de Traumatología Ryder del Hospital Jackson Memorial.

Según el informe del agente, los funcionarios penitenciarios registraron la celda y encontraron dos armas blancas más. Morales enfrenta un cargo de agresión agravada por parte de un recluso. Su comparecencia ante el juez está programada para el 24 de abril.

Más violencia en PTDC

El 19 de febrero, Morales se peleó con un recluso en una celda mientras “otros reclusos en la celda tapaban todas las cámaras”, según el informe de un agente.

Según los registros judiciales, la fiscalía presentó la denuncia por agresión entre detenidos el 20 de febrero, y el caso fue desestimado el 23 de marzo.

Según el informe de un agente, el 10 de noviembre, Morales y otro recluso cubrieron con papel una cámara de vigilancia en una celda antes de que otros dos reclusos se pelearan.

Según los registros judiciales, la fiscalía presentó la denuncia el 11 de noviembre y el caso se cerró el 19 de diciembre.

Tiroteo en parada de autobús escolar

Poco después de las 7:55 de la mañana del 8 de septiembre de 2022, Morales, que entonces tenía 16 años, utilizó un arma de fuego negra con un cargador extendido para disparar e herir a dos estudiantes mientras intentaba robarles sus teléfonos, según el informe de un agente.

Según el informe del agente, los alguaciles del condado de Miami-Dade respondieron al tiroteo ocurrido en la parada del autobús escolar de los niños, en la intersección de la 10.ª Avenida Noroeste y la Calle 109, en el barrio de Pinewood.

Los dos chicos heridos sobrevivieron, Morales huyó y, cuando los agentes de policía de Miami Shores lo arrestaron, le encontraron en posesión de tres armas de fuego robadas, según el informe de detención del agente.

Según el informe policial, Morales llevaba en la cintura una Glock 26 que había sido reportada como robada en Miami; una Olympic Arms K23B que había sido reportada como robada en Miami-Dade en su mochila; y una Glock 23, calibre 40 Smith & Wesson, que había sido acusado de robar en Miami, también en su mochila.

Los fiscales presentaron la denuncia el 30 de septiembre de 2022. Se le imputaron 19 cargos: tres cargos de intento de asesinato con arma de fuego, tres cargos de posesión de arma de fuego por un menor, tres cargos de uso de arma para cometer un delito grave, tres cargos de portación de arma de fuego oculta, dos cargos de robo a mano armada, allanamiento de morada con arma de fuego, agresión agravada con arma de fuego, posesión de arma de cañón corto, hurto mayor de vehículo en tercer grado y resistencia al arresto sin violencia.

Según los registros judiciales, el caso seguía pendiente el miércoles por la tarde.

Robar un arma

Según la policía, el 19 de julio de 2022, Morales robó una pistola G23 calibre 40 S&W de una camioneta GMC negra que un conductor conocido suyo había estacionado junto a un surtidor de gasolina en la estación Marathon ubicada en la intersección de la Avenida 12 Noroeste y la Calle 54.

“La víctima declaró que conocía al acusado desde hacía muchos años, ya que había ido al instituto con la madre del acusado”, escribió un agente de policía, según el informe de detención.

Según el informe, la víctima escuchó la alarma de su coche, vio a Morales, que entonces tenía 16 años, huyendo con el G23, y condujo hasta la casa de Morales para hablar con su madre y llamar a la policía para pedir ayuda.

El 30 de octubre, la fiscalía presentó cargos contra el acusado por robo en un vehículo desocupado, hurto mayor de un arma de fuego en tercer grado, portación de arma de fuego oculta y posesión de arma de fuego por un menor de edad. Su comparecencia ante el juez tuvo lugar el 6 de octubre de 2022. El caso sigue pendiente.

robo en el parque

El 27 de febrero de 2022, Morales, que entonces tenía 15 años, cogió la bolsa de deporte de un hombre y robó unos AirPods en el parque Charles Hadley, en el barrio de Liberty City de Miami, según un informe policial.

Morales enfrentaba un cargo de hurto mayor en tercer grado. La fiscalía presentó la denuncia el 3 de octubre de 2022, y el caso seguía pendiente el miércoles por la tarde, según consta en los registros judiciales. Su próxima audiencia está programada para el 15 de junio.

Robo en un restaurante

Según la policía, el 16 de enero de 2022, un video de vigilancia mostró a Morales, que entonces tenía 15 años, robando 450 dólares en efectivo y tres cajas registradoras de un restaurante Church’s Chicken en el barrio Liberty City de Miami.

Morales enfrentaba cargos de robo con allanamiento de morada, hurto menor y daños a la propiedad. Los registros muestran que se encontraba en JAC cuando la fiscalía presentó la denuncia el 30 de septiembre de 2022. El caso seguía pendiente el miércoles.

La editora de noticias de Local 10, Mercedes Cevallos, contribuyó a este reportaje.

Historias relacionadas

• Los fiscales planean procesar como adulto al adolescente acusado de disparar a dos estudiantes de Miami-Dade.
• El nuevo centro de salud mental de Miami-Dade, con un costo de 50 millones de dólares, permanece cerrado.
• Aplazado pero no derrotado: Juez local afirma que seguirá luchando por un centro de salud mental.

In a statement posted to social media, Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell said Phelan was “departing the administration, effective immediately.”

Navy Undersecretary Hung Cao will become acting secretary of the Navy, Parnell said.

The sudden departure comes just a day after Phelan addressed a large crowd of sailors and industry professionals at the Navy’s annual conference in Washington, D.C., and spoke with reporters about his agenda.

Phelan’s departure also comes just weeks after Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth fired the Army’s top officer, Gen. Randy George. Hegseth also has fired several top generals, admirals and other defense leaders since taking office last year. As with many of those other firings, Pentagon officials did not offer a reason for Phelan's departure.

Phelan is leaving just as the U.S. Navy has imposed a blockade of Iranian ports and is targeting ships linked to Tehran around the world during a tenuous ceasefire in the Iran war.

Phelan had not served in the military or had a civilian leadership role in the service before President Donald Trump nominated him for secretary in late 2024.

Phelan was a major donor to Trump’s campaign and founded the private investment firm Rugger Management LLC. According to his biography, Phelan’s primary exposure to the military came from an advisory position he held on the Spirit of America, a non-profit that supported the defense of Ukraine and the defense of Taiwan.

The Associated Press could not immediately reach Phelan’s office for comment.

Cao ran a failed U.S. Senate bid in Virginia to try to unseat Democratic Sen. Tim Kaine in 2024. He had Trump’s endorsement in the crowded Republican primary.

Cao is a 25-year Navy veteran who served in combat zones. His biography includes fleeing Vietnam with his family as a child in the 1970s. In a campaign video for his Senate bid, he compared Vietnam’s communist regime during the Cold War to the administration of President Joe Biden.

“We are losing our country,” Cao said in video during the campaign, which blamed Biden for the criminal cases against Trump and showed footage of border crossings and store lootings. “You know it. But you also know that you can’t say it. We’re forced to say that wrong is right. We’re forced to lie.”

Leer en español

Police on Wednesday said Deauna Wooley has since reunited with her family.

Authorities have not said what led to her disappearance.

Leer en español

Cameras caught the criminal using a beer keg to break into Smoke and More, located along US-41 in North Fort Myers, just after midnight Wednesday morning.

Video shows the man throw the keg through a glass door of the smoke shop.

Officials said the suspect stole several Raz brand vapes from the business.

Anyone with information is urged to call Southwest Florida Crime Stoppers at 1-800-780-TIPS.

Cámaras captaron al delincuente usando un barril de cerveza para entrar a Smoke and More, ubicada a lo largo de la US-41 en North Fort Myers, poco después de la medianoche del miércoles.

El video muestra al hombre lanzar el barril contra una puerta de vidrio de la tienda.

Las autoridades dijeron que el sospechoso robó varios vapeadores de la marca Raz del negocio.

Cualquier persona con información debe llamar a Southwest Florida Crime Stoppers al 1-800-780-TIPS.

Carter Page asserted in a 2020 lawsuit that he was the victim of “unlawful spying” by an FBI agency that was investigating whether Trump's 2016 campaign had conspired with Russia to affect the outcome of the election. The lawsuit alleged a series of omissions and errors made by FBI and Justice Department officials in applications they submitted in 2016 and 2017 to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to eavesdrop on Page on suspicion that he was an agent of Russia.

Page vigorously denied any claim of improper ties to Russia and was never charged with any wrongdoing.

Page appealed to the Supreme Court after lower courts tossed out his suit, with appellate judges saying last year that he had waited too long to file his complaint. But as the appeal was pending, the Trump administration informed the Supreme Court on Wednesday that it had reached a settlement with Page on his claims against the federal government. The settlement does not cover claims Page had made against former FBI officials he had also sued.

The court filing to the Supreme Court did not reveal a dollar figure, but a person familiar with the matter who insisted on anonymity to discuss non-public information said the amount of the deal was $1.25 million.

Page's lawsuit followed a harshly critical Justice Department inspector general report that found significant problems with the four surveillance applications. Former FBI and Justice Department leaders who were involved in signing off on the surveillance have since said they wouldn’t have done so had they known of the extent of the issues, and the FBI has said it had initiated more than 40 corrective steps aimed at improving the accuracy and thoroughness of applications.

Despite the problems with the warrant applications, the scrutiny of Page accounted for only a narrow portion of the overall investigation into ties between the Trump campaign and Russia.

An investigation by special counsel Robert Mueller concluded that Russia had interfered on Trump's behalf during the 2016 campaign and that the campaign welcomed the assistance. Mueller's team said it did not find sufficient evidence to establish a criminal conspiracy between the campaign and Russia.

The Justice Department in March settled a separate lawsuit with another figure from the Trump-Russia probe, reaching a roughly $1.2 million settlement with Michael Flynn, the former Trump national security adviser who pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about his conversations with a top Russian diplomat and was later pardoned.

The pair with deep Arkansas roots shared a few thoughts and laughs with reporters at the Cowboys' annual pre-draft news conference Wednesday.

A reporter was in the middle of a question when Jones looked through the glass wall of the media interview room at club headquarters and saw Clinton coming into the building.

After a first interruption, the reporter tried to finish the question as Clinton came through a side door into the interview room. Jones gave everyone in the room a brief scare as he stumbled trying to get off the stage and shake hands with Clinton.

Once Jones steadied himself and joined Clinton, the focus was squarely on the 42nd U.S. president and the man who also carries the titles of president and general manager of the Cowboys.

“He’s been a wonderful, not only president, but a friend over the years,” said Jones, who was born in Los Angeles but was an oil and natural gas wildcatter in Arkansas when he bought the Cowboys in 1989. “And I’m really happy to have you here today.”

A smiling Clinton responded with, “Have a good draft day,” before each had a story to tell.

One of the pictures on the wall of the media interview room is of Clinton greeting the Cowboys at the White House following one of their three Super Bowl victories in the 1990s. At that point, Jones was only a few years removed from leaving Arkansas.

“And when I said hello to him on a personal basis, he listed, three-deep, every player ... on the Arkansas Razorback national championship team,” said Jones, who played for that 1964 team. “He was a young guy that was following the Hogs feverishly, mainly over the radio. So he’s a good man to have as a fan.”

Clinton, who was born in Hope, Arkansas, and at 79 is four years younger than Jones, then shared some of that old knowledge.

“Tell ’em again the position you played,” Clinton said.

“Well, I was a guard. I was a pulling guard,” Jones answered.

“And how much did you weigh?” Clinton asked.

“About 185 pounds,” Jones responded.

“And a couple of years before him we had a guard named Wayne Harris who weighed the same thing Jerry did, and he made first-team All-America,” Clinton said. “They were great guards, and it’s a different world now.”

When Jones said he would hate to be a pulling guard in today's NFL, with offensive linemen averaging more than 300 pounds, Clinton retorted, “Yeah, you’d be the late Jerry Jones.”

Clinton and Jones left the room, and the news conference continued for another 25 minutes without the omnipresent Cowboys owner. The stage belonged to executive vice president of personnel Stephen Jones, coach Brian Schottenheimer and scouting director Will McClay.

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AP NFL: https://apnews.com/hub/nfl

The electric vehicle maker said it earned $477 million in the quarter, up 17% from a year ago. Earnings per share totaled 13 cents. Adjusted for certain items, per share earnings were 41 cents, topping Wall Street estimates of 36 cents.

Revenue rose to $22.39 billion, led by a 16% increase in automotive revenues.

CEO Elon Musk has repeatedly emphasized that Tesla’s future lies less in selling cars than getting people to t ake rides in them a s self-driving taxis, and in the robots that the company makes for homes and businesses. Tesla said robotaxi miles doubled in the first quarter compared to the fourth quarter of last year.

Tesla hopes to expand its robotaxi services in major cities this year. It also has begun making its so-called Cybercabs without pedals or wheel.

Shares rose nearly 4% in after-hours trading.

The incident occurred just before 3:30 p.m. at a Publix located at 15771 SW 152nd St. in the county’s Country Walk area, according to the Miami-Dade Sheriff’s Office.

Deputies said the suspect, Julio Rodriguez, is accused of accelerating his vehicle toward a man who was attempting to cross the parking lot to retrieve a shopping cart, nearly striking him.

The victim, David Guzman, told Local 10’s Rosh Lowe that a verbal argument followed, during which Rodriguez reached into his vehicle’s center console, retrieved a bottle of pepper spray, exited the car and sprayed Guzman, his wife and his uncle while Guzman’s 2-year-old was with him.

Deputies said Rodriguez then got back into his vehicle and fled the scene.

Guzman was able to provide officers with a photo of the vehicle’s license plate, according to the report.

“They washed all of our eyes out,” said Guzman. “My face was burning because he literally sprayed me three feet away from him. Never in my life did I think that would ever happen for me.”

“He opens the door on me, and my wife sees that he’s coming out, so she gets scared. She gets in the car and pushes it toward him, telling him to stay back,” Guzman added. “At that time, he maced me again, then maced my wife and my uncle. He then started macing random people.”

Local 10 News exclusively obtained video in which Guzman’s wife can be heard complaining about the pepper spray in her eyes.

Authorities later located Rodriguez, who lives near the Publix where the incident occurred, and took him into custody without further incident, the report states.

Deputies said Miami-Dade Fire Rescue transported Rodriguez to Jackson South Medical Center before he was taken to jail.

Jail records show he is facing one count of aggravated battery on a person 65 years or older and two counts of battery.

As of Wednesday, he was being held at the Turner Guilford Knight Correctional Center, where his bond was listed at $3,000. He was also ordered to stay away from the victims.

After pulling over a pickup truck that was driving without headlights, Sarasota police officers discovered some unusual passengers.

Inside the truck’s bed were a mother possum and her babies.

Officers briefly took the animals into custody before safety releasing them into the wild.

Scott Nelson Nida, de 55 años, de Pompano Beach, fue arrestado el martes y enfrenta cargos que incluyen privación ilegal de la libertad, robo sin arma de fuego o arma, agresión doméstica y robo mayor de auto, según los registros de la cárcel.

Los agentes dijeron que poco antes de las 9:30 a.m. del martes respondieron a la intersección de Southeast 54th Street y 19th Terrace en Pompano Beach después de que un testigo llamara al 911 reportando que Nida había agredido a la víctima y tomado su vehículo.

Cuando los agentes llegaron, hablaron con la víctima, quien “parecía tener el rostro ensangrentado y con moretones, y no llevaba zapatos,” según el informe.

El informe indica que la víctima dijo a los agentes que quería presentar cargos contra Nida.

Los investigadores dijeron que la víctima y Nida han tenido una relación durante unos 16 años y anteriormente vivían juntos. No tienen hijos en común.

Según los agentes, el incidente comenzó más temprano esa mañana cuando la víctima llevó a su hija a la escuela en Boca Ratón.

Antes de salir, dijeron que ella hablaba con Nida, quien le había pedido imprimir un documento de manutención infantil relacionado con un hijo de otra relación. Ella aceptó y planeó reunirse con él después de dejar a su hija en la escuela.

Durante el trayecto, los agentes dijeron que la víctima recibió múltiples llamadas de Nida exigiendo saber su ubicación.

Cuando giró cerca de la casa de él en Pompano Beach, lo vio de pie cerca y luego se detuvo tras decirle que estaba hablando por teléfono con su padre, según el informe.

Una vez dentro del vehículo, Nida se volvió “muy alterado” y le indicó que condujera hasta su casa, señala el informe.

Después de que ella le entregó los documentos, los agentes dijeron que él comenzó a cuestionarla sobre la noche anterior y la acusó de infidelidad.

Mientras la víctima conducía hacia el oeste por Southeast 15th Street, los agentes dijeron que Nida “la agarró por la parte posterior de la cabeza y comenzó a golpearla en el rostro y la cabeza múltiples veces.”

La víctima tocó la bocina en un intento de llamar la atención e intentó escapar, pero los agentes dijeron que Nida agarró el volante e intentó quitarle el teléfono.

Poco después, dijeron que Nida la jaló de nuevo hacia el vehículo y continuó la agresión.

La víctima finalmente logró escapar, corrió por Southeast 54th Street y detuvo a un conductor que pasaba, quien llamó al 911 tras ver a Nida irse en su vehículo con sus pertenencias y teléfono dentro, según el informe.

Las autoridades dijeron que Nida no tenía permiso para llevarse el vehículo. La víctima luego dijo a los agentes que estaba “extremadamente asustada” de Nida y temía por su vida, indica el informe.

Tras el arresto del martes, los agentes dijeron que Nida admitió que ocurrió un incidente de violencia doméstica dentro del vehículo, pero negó haber golpeado a la víctima, afirmando que ella estaba “errática.”

Reconoció que ella estaba sangrando, pero no pudo explicar cómo sufrió las lesiones. También negó haber tomado su teléfono o vehículo, aunque los agentes dijeron que admitió haberse ido conduciendo el auto de la víctima y haberla escuchado pedir ayuda.

En un arresto previo en enero, Nida enfrentó cargos de agresión doméstica por estrangulamiento y privación ilegal de la libertad después de que los agentes dijeron que atacó a la misma víctima durante una discusión por infidelidad.

Según los agentes, la víctima dijo que Nida la agarró por el cuello y el rostro, la empujó al suelo, la arrastró por el césped y la obligó a subir a un vehículo antes de irse conduciendo.

La víctima posteriormente retiró la acusación y la orden de no contacto fue desestimada. Dijo a los investigadores que “se sintió coaccionada para retirar los cargos” porque Nida presuntamente dijo que “perdería su trabajo y pensión.”

El sheriff del condado Broward, Gregory Tony, emitió una declaración a Local 10 News en enero sobre el primer arresto de Nida.

“La violencia doméstica es inaceptable, especialmente de alguien que ha jurado hacer cumplir la ley,” escribió Tony en ese momento. “Cuando un miembro juramentado es acusado de este tipo de delito, se le aplican los mismos estándares que a cualquier miembro del público.”

Las autoridades dijeron que Nida fue contratado por BSO el 18 de enero de 2005. Luego fue colocado en licencia administrativa investigativa sin sueldo.

Un portavoz de BSO respondió al arresto más reciente de Nida en un comunicado a Local 10 News el miércoles.

“El sargento Scott Nida se encuentra actualmente en licencia administrativa investigativa con sueldo, y fue colocado por primera vez en licencia administrativa tras su arresto el 7 de enero de 2026. La investigación interna de BSO continúa. Fue contratado el 18 de enero de 2005,” indica el comunicado.

Hasta el miércoles, permanecía detenido con una fianza de $47,500 USD en la cárcel principal del condado Broward. También se le ordenó usar un monitor GPS, no tener contacto con la víctima, mantenerse alejado de los lugares que ella frecuenta, no poseer armas ni municiones, y entregar cualquier arma a un tercero dentro de 24 horas tras su liberación.

Las víctimas de violencia doméstica pueden contactar a BSO Victim Services al 954-321-4200, Women in Distress al 954-761-1133 o la línea directa de violencia doméstica de Florida al 1-800-500-1119.

Leer en español

Authorities said the suspect, Mauricio Jimenez, conducted at least 4,500 separate unauthorized orders totaling around $55 million worth of merchandise.

According to an arrest form, Jimenez, 48, of Hialeah, worked as a manager at the Home Depot located at 7899 W Flagler St. in west Miami-Dade and previously worked as a manager at the Home Depot located at 13895 W. Okeechobee Road in Hialeah Gardens.

Miami-Dade Sheriff’s Office deputies said that Jimenez, over 28 months, “engaged in a deliberate, systematic and ongoing scheme to defraud Home Depot” by “applying unauthorized markdowns to merchandize, significantly reducing retail prices beyond permissible limits.”

According to deputies, the Home Depot Assurance & Advisory Management Program was alerted to orders by Jimenez, prompting an investigation in December.

It was then revealed that Jimenez had several sales in which “highly excessive markdowns” were “conducted to repeated customers,” according to official documents.

Further investigation by Home Depot Central Investigations found that Jimenez only provided the discounts to “a core of accounts” and that the “high markdown activity” at his old store stopped once he left, and “took a dramatic upturn” at his new store once he arrived, according to an arrest form.

Investigators also determined that “the merchandise was of the quantity and nature of that typically purchased by re-seller accounts” and that Jimenez placed and structured the orders in a deceptive way in order to try and conceal his actions.

In addition, deputies said Jimenez was “creating, registering or otherwise utilizing additional business entitles, shell companies or aliases to place orders and receive discounted merchandise,” according to his arrest form.

Authorities said Jimenez was spoken to by a regional vice president and district manager and told “to no longer sell to seven of his affiliated business” while he was “questioned about these types of sales and how they were not to be made,” but authorities said he “continued to conduct said fraudulent transactions after receiving said warnings.”

Of the $55 million in gross sales that Jimenez discounted, authorities said the net sales were around $30 million following markdowns of approximately $24 million, leading to a negative sales margin for Home Depot of $4.3 million.

According to an arrest form, “not only was no money made on these sales, but it cost the Home Depot over $4 million dollars to sell to these accounts.”

Jimenez was taken into custody on Tuesday at the Home Depot location on Flagler Street in Miami.

He is facing charges of organized fraud of $50,000 or more and first-degree grand theft.

As of Wednesday morning, Jimenez was being held at the Turner Guilford Knight Correctional Center on a $15,000 bond.

Leer en español

Scott Nelson Nida, 55, of Pompano Beach, was arrested Tuesday and is facing charges including false imprisonment of a person, robbery without a firearm or weapon, domestic violence battery and grand theft auto, according to jail records.

Deputies said just before 9:30 a.m. Tuesday, they responded to the intersection of Southeast 54th Street and 19th Terrace in Pompano Beach after a bystander called 911 reporting that Nida had battered the victim and taken her vehicle.

When deputies arrived, they spoke with the victim, who “appeared to have a bloody and bruised face, and was not wearing any shoes,” according to the report.

The report states that the victim told deputies she wanted to press charges against Nida.

Investigators said the victim and Nida have been in a relationship for about 16 years and previously lived together. They have no children in common.

According to deputies, the incident began earlier that morning when the victim took her daughter to school in Boca Raton.

Before leaving, they said she was speaking with Nida, who had asked her to print a child support document related to a child from another relationship. She agreed and planned to meet him after the school drop-off.

During the drive, deputies said the victim received multiple calls from Nida demanding to know her location.

As she turned near his Pompano Beach home, she saw Nida standing nearby, then pulled over after telling him she was on the phone with her father, according to the report.

Once inside the vehicle, Nida became “very agitated” and instructed her to drive to his home, the report states.

After she provided the documents, deputies said he began questioning her about the previous night and accused her of infidelity.

While the victim was driving westbound on Southeast 15th Street, deputies said Nida “forcibly grabbed the back of her head and began to punch her face and head multiple times.”

The victim then honked the horn in an attempt to get attention and tried to escape, but deputies said Nida grabbed the steering wheel and tried to take her phone.

Shortly after, they said Nida then pulled her back into the vehicle and continued the attack.

The victim eventually escaped, ran down Southeast 54th Street and flagged down a passerby, who called 911 after seeing Nida drive away in her vehicle with her belongings and cellphone inside, according to the report.

Authorities said Nida did not have permission to take the vehicle. The victim later told deputies she was “extremely in fear” of Nida and feared for her life, the report states.

After Tuesday’s arrest, deputies said Nida admitted that a domestic violence incident occurred inside the vehicle but denied striking the victim, claiming she was “erratic.”

He acknowledged she was bleeding but could not explain how she sustained her injuries. He also denied taking her phone or vehicle, though deputies said he admitted driving away in the victim’s car and hearing her call for help.

In a prior January arrest, Nida faced charges of domestic battery by strangulation and false imprisonment after deputies said he attacked the same victim during an argument over infidelity.

According to deputies, the victim said Nida grabbed her by the neck and face, pushed her to the ground, dragged her across a lawn and forced her into a vehicle before driving away.

The victim later waived prosecution, and the no-contact order was dismissed. She told investigators she “felt coerced into dropping the charges” because Nida allegedly said he would “lose his job and pension.”

Broward County Sheriff Gregory Tony released a statement to Local 10 News back in January in regard to Nida’s first arrest.

“Domestic violence is unacceptable especially from someone who is sworn to uphold the law,” Tony wrote at the time. “When a sworn member is accused of this type of crime, they are held to the same standards as any member of the public.”

Authorities said Nida was hired by BSO on Jan. 18, 2005. He was then placed on administrative investigative leave without pay.

A BSO spokesperson responded to Nida latest arrest in a statement to Local 10 News on Wednesday.

“Sgt. Scott Nida is currently on administrative investigative leave with pay, and he was first placed on administrative leave following his arrest on Jan. 7, 2026. The BSO internal investigation is ongoing. He was hired on Jan. 18, 2005,” the statement read.

As of Wednesday, he was being held on a $47,500 bond at the Broward County Main Jail. He was also ordered to wear a GPS monitor, have no victim contact, must stay away from anywhere the victim frequents, no firearms, weapons, or ammunition, and must have a third party surrender any guns within 24 hours of release.

Domestic violence victims can contact BSO Victim Services at 954-321-4200, Women in Distress at 954-761-1133 or the Florida Domestic Violence Hotline at 1-800-500-1119.

With a runner on third in the first inning, the Athletics' Carlos Cortes belted a line drive at the Seattle Mariners right-hander and the ball somehow lodged itself in Gilbert's jersey.

Gilbert grabbed at his stomach and turned to locate the ball as Cortes made his way down the first-base line, only to find he in fact caught it — well, kind of — in his shirt.

Cortes was credited with a single as the play was considered dead, but Nick Kurtz remained at third base. Shea Langeliers advanced to second base.

The line drive was clocked by the broadcast at 107.8 mph.

Gilbert was briefly checked out by Mariners head athletic trainer Kyle Torgerson, but he remained in the game and made it through the inning. He ended up allowing two earned runs on a sacrifice fly by Tyler Soderstrom and an RBI single by Jeff McNeil.

Gilbert returned to the mound for the second inning.

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AP MLB: https://apnews.com/mlb

“El Estado (boliviano) va a tomar las medidas que deben tomar para realizar el pago… Se van a tomar algunas medidas. No podemos adelantarlas”, dijo el viceministro de Pensiones Horacio Valencia en conferencia de prensa conjunta con el procurador el Estado Hugo César León y el subprocurador Roger Marcelo Longaric, entre otras autoridades.

Este arbitraje se suma a más de 20 que la nación andina perdió frente a más de una decena de empresas en el sector de los hidrocarburos, la electricidad y los fondos de pensiones, entre otros, por las nacionalizaciones que emprendió el gobierno del presidente Evo Morales (2006-2019).

Sobre el monto aproximado que el gobierno del presidente Rodrigo Paz debe pagar por el resultado de esos arbitrajes, el viceministro Valencia afirmó que se estima que están alrededor de los 800 millones de dólares y acotó que "están en proceso y en curso algunos de ellos”.

Las autoridades señalaron que esta deuda la heredaron de los gobiernos de izquierda de Morales y su sucesor Luis Arce (2020-2025) y anunciaron auditorías por los manejos “políticos”.

En la víspera se conoció la ratificación del fallo favorable a BBVA que consideró que Bolivia vulneró estándares internacionales, como el trato justo y equitativo y la prohibición de medidas arbitrarias, luego de la nacionalización de la administración de los fondos de pensiones de esa entidad financiera.

El Tribunal Supremo de los Países Bajos desestimó la última apelación de Bolivia en contra del fallo del Centro Internacional de Arreglo de Diferencias Relativas a Inversiones (CIADI) que ya había fallado a favor de BBVA.

La nacionalización del fondo de pensiones se dio en 2010 pero la transición duró 12 años y en 2023 pasó a la administración estatal mediante la creación de una gestora pública.

El fondo de pensiones estaba administrado en dos partes por la suiza Zurich South America Invest y por BBVA, que demandaron a Bolivia. El caso de la primera demandante se sigue por otros rieles.

El país sudamericano debe hacer esos pagos en momentos en que busca salir de la peor crisis económica en 40 años.

The result condemned American-owned Burnley to relegation after one season back in the top flight.

Haaland ran onto Jeremy Doku's pass to convert a deft finish in the fifth minute for his league-high 24th goal of the campaign, which allowed City to back up its 2-1 victory over Arsenal on Sunday that, for many, turned Pep Guardiola’s team into the title favorite.

However, with goal difference potentially coming into play, City might regret not putting more past Burnley at Turf Moor.

Winning by a one-goal margin left City and Arsenal tied on both points (70) and goal difference (+37). City only leads courtesy of more goals scored (66 to Arsenal's 63).

“I was not frustrated, why would I be?" Guardiola said. “We won three points, we are top of the league.”

Haaland and Rayan Cherki struck the goal frame and Nico O'Reilly had a weak shot saved with the net at his mercy as City's players threw everything at Burnley — they finished the game having had 28 shots — in an effort to rack up the goals.

“In these types of games, if you score the second or third that you deserve, everything’s more fluid and natural,” Guardiola said.

“But,” he added, “the main target was winning the game.”

City was nine points adrift of Arsenal after drawing with West Ham on March 14. Three straight wins, combined with back-to-back losses for Arsenal, has seen the title race turn on its head.

Relegation was inevitable for Burnley

For next-to-last Burnley, a third relegation from the Premier League in the last five seasons has been an inevitability for weeks.

Scott Parker's team slipped to its 22nd loss of the campaign and is 13 points from safety with four games left.

Burnley will be going down with last-place Wolverhampton, whose fate was sealed at the weekend, and one other team.

Leeds edges further clear of relegation

In the other match Wednesday, Leeds scored in the seventh minute of stoppage time to draw 2-2 at Bournemouth and edge nine points clear of third-to-last Tottenham, which occupies the other place in the relegation zone.

Sean Longstaff's late equalizer denied Bournemouth a win that would have lifted the team to sixth place, four points off the Champions League qualification positions.

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Steve Douglas is at https://twitter.com/sdouglas80

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AP soccer: https://apnews.com/hub/soccer

In his testimony to various committees in both the Senate and the House over multiple days this week and last, Kennedy was tasked with defending President Donald Trump’s proposed 2027 budget, which would boost defense spending while cutting more than 12% of funding from Kennedy’s Department of Health and Human Services.

With lawmakers of both parties raising concerns about programs and research funding being reduced or eliminated, Kennedy acknowledged the cuts were “painful” but said they were necessary to address the federal government’s record $39 trillion deficit.

When Democrats came out swinging, Kennedy became more defiant, even at times screaming his rebuttals — though some of them didn’t align with the facts. He accused multiple Democratic lawmakers of grandstanding, making things up and seeking sound bites over meaningful responses.

Here are takeaways from Kennedy’s gauntlet of budget hearings:

Kennedy deflects blame for Americans not vaccinating

One of the central fights shaping Kennedy’s interactions with Democratic lawmakers was over who bears responsibility for the decline in childhood vaccination rates and measles outbreaks that have ripped across the country over the past year, threatening the country’s measles elimination status. Kennedy’s refrain was consistent: It’s not my fault.

“It has nothing to do with me,” Kennedy said Tuesday of the uptick in measles across the country over the past year. He noted there is a global rise in measles cases, including in other countries like Canada, Mexico and the United Kingdom.

Kennedy, who spent years as an anti-vaccine crusader before entering politics and in 2021 said he urged people to “resist” CDC guidelines on when kids should get vaccines, disputed accusations that he is anti-vaccine, saying he is “pro-science.”

Throughout the hearings, he sought to focus on HHS’s initiatives unrelated to vaccines — part of a broader administration pivot toward less controversial health topics like nutritious eating.

Kennedy argued that fewer Americans are vaccinating because they lost trust in government recommendations during the COVID-19 epidemic. He said he was working to restore that trust. In fact, surveys show trust in federal health agencies has continued to decline during Kennedy’s tenure.

Rep. Kim Schrier, a Democrat from Washington, argued Kennedy’s vaccine views have caused a “spillover effect” that has led to mothers not giving their babies vitamin K injections common at birth to prevent brain bleeding.

“I’ve never said anything about vitamin K,” Kennedy said.

“That’s exactly the point,” Schrier replied.

Kennedy did get credit, however, from Republican Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina, who said his work was crucial in helping the state manage a troubling measles outbreak over the past year.

“We would not be on the right side of this outbreak without your leadership,” Scott told Kennedy.

Kennedy forcefully denies there are Medicaid cuts – a claim experts call political spin

Nearly every time Democrats brought up the nearly $1 trillion in Medicaid cuts over the next decade largely being created through new work requirements for enrollees, Kennedy lashed back to argue there are no cuts to Medicaid.

“Only in Washington is it considered a cut,” Kennedy told New Mexico Sen. Ben Ray Luján, a Democrat, on Wednesday.

Kennedy cited a Congressional Budget Office report showing that Medicaid outlays are estimated to increase by about 47% over the next decade. But experts say his analysis of that report is disingenuous, politicized framing and that the increased spending reflects factors like inflation and a growing population.

“This is an old, sort of tired argument that’s been used by conservatives to justify spending cuts by saying, well, if spending is still growing in nominal terms, somehow there wasn’t a cut,” said Edwin Park, a research professor at Georgetown University. “The federal government is spending nearly a trillion dollars less than it otherwise would have in the absence of the legislation.”

Lawmakers of both parties are concerned about affordability

A major concern for voters in the 2026 midterm elections is affordability — including skyrocketing costs for health care and health insurance. That wasn’t lost on those questioning Kennedy, as lawmakers from both parties raised the issue.

On Tuesday, Rep. Cliff Bentz, a Republican from Oregon, shared the story of his brother who pays $26,000 per year for his health coverage.

“What in the world can I go back to him and say? ‘Hey, the administration is working on trying to drive these prices down?’” he asked Kennedy.

Kennedy, for his part, cited several Trump administration initiatives to lower prices, including the White House's TrumpRx website for discounted drugs and Trump’s so-called most favored nations deals with pharmaceutical companies.

Pressed by senators, Kennedy pledged to provide details of those deals that didn’t include proprietary information or trade secrets. Some Democrats wanted him to do more.

“Why don’t you do an agreement yourself? he said in a jab to Sen. Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat. “You’ve had power to do that for 20 years and haven’t done it.”

Kennedy acknowledges some HHS cuts are ‘painful’

To achieve a more than 12% cut of the more than $100 billion HHS budget, the Trump administration is proposing slashing some $5 billion from the National Institutes of Health and cutting a bevy of other programs and initiatives, including a low-income home energy assistance program.

Several senators asked Kennedy why different areas were being cut. NIH cuts, in particular, raised bipartisan outcry.

“There’s an argument to be made that we’re handing China our lunch,” said Republican Sen. Thom Tillis of North Carolina.

Kennedy was candid that neither he nor others at his agency wanted to see the cuts, which he called “painful.”

“There’s a lot of cuts to the agency that nobody wants,” he said.

Police officers first responded to a car burglary, arrested an armed suspect, and searched for a second suspect in the area, according to the Florida City Police Department.

Miami-Dade Sheriff’s Office deputies with the Priority Response Team responded to arrest three suspects who were in an apartment near Northwest Seventh Avenue and 14 Street near Homestead.

A witness with Homestead Crimes shared two videos showing when a FCPD officer lifted crime scene tape to allow M-DSO patrol cars to get through.

Three of the four suspects arrested had been involved in an armed robbery on Tuesday night in the area, according to FCPD.

Detectives did not release the identities of the suspects as they continued to investigate the crimes.

Local 10 News Senior Assignment Editor Frine Gomez contributed to this report.

Location

A warming trend starts Friday with afternoon temperatures reaching the middle 80s this weekend. Into early next work week, the hottest air of the year is on the way with the low 90s in the forecast starting Tuesday.

In terms of rain, we could get a stray shower or two off the water on Thursday. A weak disturbance will pass by the Florida Keys on Friday with a high chance of downpours down there. Meanwhile, any showers around Miami-Dade or Broward Counties are expected to remain spotty.

“Good Neighbors” will be published next year, W.W. Norton & Company told The Associated Press on Wednesday.

“Last winter, Minnesotans from all walks of life showed up for one another with compassion, courage and resilience,” Walz, a Democrat, said in a statement.

“Here in Minnesota, it’s simple — we call it being a good neighbor. I’ve always been fascinated by the ways in which we keep community in America, and how we interweave our lives.”

Walz, 62, became a national figure in 2024 after Vice President Kamala Harris chose him as her running mate in what was eventually a losing effort against President Donald Trump and Sen. JD Vance. A Norton spokesperson declined to comment on whether Walz will write about the campaign, saying no additional information beyond the press release was currently available.

Walz was a prominent critic of ICE’s actions, including the fatal shootings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti in January. The state of Minnesota is suing the federal government, alleging that ICE cost the local economy more than $600 million in damages.

The Jacksonville, Florida-based railroad said Thursday that it earned $807 million, or $0.43 per share, as it continued to improve efficiency. That's up from $646 million, or $0.34 per share, a year ago.

CSX easily topped the expectations of the analysts surveyed by FactSet Research who predicted earnings per share of 39 cents.

The railroad said it cut expenses by 6% to $2.2 billion in the quarter as CEO Steve Angel, who took over last fall, continued to improve operations. At the same time, the railroad's revenue grew 2% to $3.48 billion.

“CSX performed well this quarter by providing reliable and efficient service to our customers through changing market conditions, while improving our expense profile,” Angel said.

The railroad’s executives said many of its efforts to cut costs across the board started to pay off even quicker than expected, and the bottom line was helped by a $44 million gain on real estate sales in the quarter.

The railroad, which is one of the nation's biggest, said it now expects revenue growth in the mid single digits this year. Previously, CSX predicted growth in the low single digits.

CSX will soon be able to haul metal shipping containers stacked two high across its network after completing a major tunnel renovation project in Baltimore. But it will take time for traffic to grow as the railroad signs up new customers once the line is fully open.

The Lufthansa Group said the cancellation of less profitable routes, focused largely on its hub airports in the German cities of Frankfurt and Munich, would save the equivalent of approximately 40,000 metric tons of jet fuel.

The company last week shut down one of its regional subsidiaries, CityLine, to cut costs. It said a “planned consolidation” within its European network also would involve Lufthansa Airlines, Austrian Airlines, Brussels Airlines, SWISS and ITA Airways, and hubs in Brussels, Rome, Vienna and Zurich.

The price of jet fuel has more than doubled in some markets since late February, when the war began with U.S. and Israeli strikes on Iran. Airlines are particularly vulnerable to fuel price shocks because jet fuel typically accounts for one of their largest operating expenses.

For travelers, that is already translating into fewer flight options on some routes and higher fees and fares heading into the peak summer season, with many airlines raising checked bag fees or adding fuel surcharges.

Fighting around the Strait of Hormuz, a waterway off Iran's coast where a fifth of the world's oil typically passes, has disrupted fuel prices and supplies around the world.

The head of the International Energy Agency estimated on April 16 that Europe had about 6 weeks' worth of jet fuel remaining and said airlines would start to cut routes from their schedules without more.

Lufthansa said it secured enough jet fuel “for the coming weeks” and was “pursuing a range of measures” to keep its fuel supply stable for the summer, “including the physical procurement of jet fuel.”

The airline is not alone in scaling back operations.

All but one of the world’s 20 largest airlines have canceled scheduled May flights spanning every major region, according to aviation analytics firm Cirium.

Besides Lufthansa, the carriers include Delta Air Lines, United Airlines, American Airlines, Air Canada, Emirates, Qatar Airways, Air China, British Airways and Air France-KLM, Cirium said.

Last week, Switzerland-based carrier Edelweiss Air announced it is dropping service to Denver and Seattle this summer and reducing flights to Las Vegas through the early autumn.

Air New Zealand is consolidating about 4% of its schedule in May and June.

“Like airlines globally, we're experiencing jet fuel prices that are more than double what they would usually be,” the carrier said.

The global price of jet fuel increased from about $99 per barrel at the end of February to as high as $209 a barrel at the beginning of April.

But for Wall Street, everything eventually comes back to a different, basic question: How much money are companies making? And at the moment, they're earning so much that investors are willing to pay higher prices than ever for a piece of ownership of U.S. companies.

It's been a jarring ride for investors, many of whom may have felt the urge to dump their stock investments last month when the S&P 500 fell nearly 10% below its prior record. But as it has every time so far in its history, the index at the heart of many 401(k) accounts rewarded investors who remained patient by not only recovering all its losses but also forging to new heights. On Wednesday, the index closed at a record 7,137.90.

Here's a look at what's been behind the market's surprising strength:

What sets a stock's price

Stock prices flitter up and down every second for myriad reasons, many of which no one can explain. But at its heart, and over the long term, a stock's price depends on two things: how much money a company is making and how much an investor is willing to pay for each $1 of that.

More fear

The latter part of that formula tends to swing up and down with interest rates and how much greed investors are feeling versus fear.

When fear prevailed in the early days of the war, stock prices dove. The worry was that a long-term surge for oil prices because of the war could send a debilitating wave of inflation crashing into the global economy.

Interest rates also rose, further undercutting stock prices, as investors worried the threat of high inflation would prevent the Federal Reserve and other central banks worldwide from cutting the short-term interest rates they control. While lower interest rates can give the economy a boost, they can also worsen inflation.

Less fear

Since late March, expectations have built that the United States and Iran will avoid a worst-case scenario for the global economy. It would be in both countries' economic interests to do so, and for Iran's leadership, an end to the war would also likely mean survival.

The ceasefire that the two sides agreed to earlier this month is still holding, though it's tenuous.

The market's shift away from abject fear has also shown itself in oil prices. The price for a barrel of Brent crude oil, the international standard, went from roughly $70 before the war to $119 when worries reached their heights. It has since pulled back and was bouncing around $100 on Wednesday.

Much of the focus has been on the Strait of Hormuz, which oil tankers use to exit the Persian Gulf. If Iran keeps the strait closed, and if the U.S. Navy continues to blockade Iranian ships, everyone will get hurt. Customers worldwide will not get oil, and Iran will not get revenue from selling its own crude.

“By denying Iran its oil-related revenue, traders may be thinking that the economic war may be more effective in getting concessions from Iran’s regime than was the kinetic war only, and that this will end the war sooner, rather than later,” according to Thierry Wizman, a strategist at Macquarie Group.

Traders on Wall Street are also betting again on a chance that the Fed could resume its cuts to interest rates later this year. They see a much lower probability than they did before the war, according to data from CME Group. But they're no longer worried about the possibility of hikes to rates.

Profit strength

As fear has eased, investors have been able to turn their focus more to the first part of the equation making up stock prices: profits. And those have been coming in strong.

A little more than 15% of S&P 500 companies have already reported how much profit they made during the first three months of 2026, and the vast majority have topped analysts' expectations. That includes everyone from Citigroup to J.B. Hunt Transport Services to UnitedHealth Group.

If the rest of the companies in the index just match analysts' estimates, earnings for S&P 500 companies will end up being roughly 14% higher than a year earlier, according to FactSet.

Those results include a month of wartime, and while companies say they're still wary about potential risks because of the fighting, they're not showing many signs of it hurting their earnings.

Bank of America's chief executive officer, Brian Moynihan, said last week that “we saw healthy client activity, including solid consumer spending and stable asset quality, indicating a resilient American economy.”

That's even though many U.S. households are feeling nervous about more expensive gasoline and higher prices broadly due to tariffs, as shown in recent surveys.

Expectations for more

Analysts have actually raised their expectations for upcoming profits for S&P 500 companies since the war began. They're forecasting growth for S&P 500 profits to accelerate to 20% in the second quarter, and companies aren't giving them many reasons to reconsider.

Delta Air Lines said earlier this month that it's seeing strong demand from people flying both for business and for vacations. PepsiCo last week stuck by its forecast for profit over 2026, which it initially gave before the Iran war began, and CEO Ramon Laguarta said he's encouraged by how resilient its international business has been. GE Vernova on Wednesday said demand is soaring for power from AI data centers, and it raised its revenue forecast for the year.

All is still not clear

Of course, the U.S. stock market can easily return to falling. Wall Street's mood could swing quickly back to fear if U.S.-Iran talks break down and the oil market looks to be facing shortages.

And if oil prices stay high for long enough, it would erode some of those profits for companies. Not only would it raise costs for businesses, it would also weaken the spending power for U.S. households and other customers.

What's worse, Buffalo hasn't been able to take advantage of their power plays when Boston pushes back.

The Sabres are 0-for-9 with a man advantage in the first two games of the playoff series against the Bruins, which is tied 1-1 as it shifts to Boston for Game 3 on Thursday night. That's after finishing the season without scoring on their last 22 power plays over the final seven games.

“It’s always a concern, for sure,” said Sabres coach Lindy Ruff, who last celebrated a power-play goal in March. “I think we’ll have to tweak some things."

The Sabres came into the series offended by a comment that Bruins coach Marco Sturm made about being the bigger and stronger team. Neither team backed down on Tuesday night, when they had several fights and a combined 94 penalty minutes.

"It’s a seven-game series so you see those guys all the time and there’s game inside the game, obviously,” Bruins defenseman Nikita Zadorov said. “Emotions are really high, everybody wants to win, everybody is competitive on the ice, so sometimes you just ended up in the scrums and the fights like that.”

Buffalo Sabres at Boston Bruins

When/Where to Watch: Game 3, Thursday, 7 p.m. ET (TNT)

Series: Tied 1-1.

Ruff wouldn’t rule out the possibility of a goalie change after Ukko-Pekka Luukkonen was pulled 16 seconds into the third period in Game 2 after his fourth goal of the game — one of them on a lofted dump-in from center ice. Alex Lyon stopped all seven shots he faced the rest of the way.

The two goalies shared the starting role this season, but Luukkonen won the No. 1 job by closing the season 12-2-1; Lyon was out the final week with an unspecified lower-body injury. Lyon went 20-10-4 for the season.

Ruff refused to blame Luukkonen’s spotty play for the Game 2 loss by saying “we win together, we lose together.”

But he also said: ”(Lyon) may play next game.”

Slow starts have also been an issue. The Sabres have fallen behind in both games — 2-0 in the first one, and 4-0 in the second, failing to score in each until the final eight minutes of the third period. They came back to win 4-3 in Game 1 but rallied too late while losing 4-2 in Game 2.

“It’s been two games. It’s nothing to freak out about, and we know that,” Sabres forward Zach Benson said. “And we know we've got to be better, and we will be.”

Carolina Hurricanes at Ottawa Senators

When/Where to Watch: Game 3, Thursday, 7:30 p.m. ET (TBS)

Series: Hurricanes lead 2-0.

The Hurricanes have pushed through two tough home wins as the Eastern Conference’s top seed, the second being a double-overtime win that saw Carolina have an apparent winning score waved off in the first overtime because of an offsides review.

But two areas stood out for the Senators: the goaltending by Linus Ullmark, and their clear advantage in faceoffs.

Ottawa was No. 2 in the regular season in faceoff percentage (54.5%) while Carolina was 16th (50.1%). But the Senators have won 60.7% of faceoffs (82 of 135) through two games, including 9 of 14 in Game 1 when on the penalty kill -- a hit for a Hurricanes team that likes to get possession, maintain the puck in the offensive zone and pressure opponents.

“Obviously our percentage isn’t great,” said Carolina’s Logan Stankoven, who has scored in each game so far but went just 6 of 17 on faceoffs in Game 2. “I’ve got to try and keep winning as many draws and stay in the battle as much as possible. They have a lot of different guys that can take faceoffs ... righty, lefty, so they usually try and put out guys that can win it on their strong side.”

The Senators appear close to getting back defenseman Tyler Kleven, who hasn’t played since taking a puck to the face against Buffalo in early April. He’s been skating and coach Travis Green didn’t rule out the possibility he might play Thursday.

That would be a boost for the Senators, who saw top-pairing defenseman Artem Zub leave Game 1 with an unspecified injury and miss Game 2. Green told reporters Wednesday that Zub still has yet to skate since the injury to leave the Senators thinner on the blue line, which led to big ice-time totals for Jake Sanderson (43:06) and Thomas Chabot (40:50) in Game 2.

“I feel like our group, we were a bounce away from it being tied coming back here,” forward Drake Batherson said.

Colorado Avalanche at Los Angeles Kings

When/Where to Watch: Game 3, Thursday, 10 p.m. ET (TNT)

Series: Avalanche lead 2-0.

The Los Angeles Kings wouldn’t change much about the way they’re playing against the Presidents’ Trophy-winning Avalanche.

Except, of course, a few more goals.

Sure, they’re down 2-0 in the series, but their physical, clog-up-the-neutral-zone style has slowed down the highest scoring team in the league. Colorado won both games 2-1, including Game 2 in overtime on Tuesday.

“Play the same way we’re playing, just a little harder,” Kings forward Trevor Moore said. “Just try to take the positives and get to LA and play a good game.”

Los Angeles went 5-1-1 at home down the stretch of the regular season.

“We’re right there playing well, fighting, fighting hard,” goaltender Anton Forsberg said. “Just (have) to stick with it and turn this around.”

Colorado was a league-best 29-7-5 on the road in the regular season.

“I feel like we’re doing a lot of good things,” Avalanche forward Nathan MacKinnon said. “Everyone’s been really good so far.”

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AP Hockey Writer John Wawrow and AP Sports Writers Pat Graham and Aaron Beard contributed to this report.

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AP NHL: https://apnews.com/hub/nhl

Shawn VanDiver, a Navy veteran who heads a coalition that supports Afghan resettlement efforts called #AfghanEvac, said Wednesday that U.S. officials informed him and other groups of discussions between the United States and Congo about taking the Afghan refugees who have been in limbo at a U.S. base in Doha for the past year.

The 1,100 refugees at Camp As-Sayliyah include Afghans who served as interpreters and with Special Operations Forces as well as the immediate families of more than 150 active duty U.S. military members.

The State Department said Wednesday that it is working to identify options to “voluntarily” resettle the refugees in a third country, but it did not confirm which nations were being discussed.

An alternative provided to the refugees, VanDiver said, is to return to Afghanistan, where they face likely reprisal or even death at the hands of the Taliban for working alongside the U.S. during the two-decade war.

“You cannot call a choice voluntary when the two options are Congo and the Taliban, civil war or an oppressor who wants to kill you,” VanDiver said at a virtual press conference. “That is not a choice. That is a confession extracted under duress.”

The discussions — which were reported earlier by The New York Times — come more than a year after President Donald Trump paused his predecessor’s Afghan resettlement program as part of a series of executive orders cracking down on immigration.

That policy left thousands of refugees who fled war and persecution, and had gone through a sometimes yearslong vetting process to start new lives in America, stranded at places worldwide, including the base in Qatar.

From one war-torn country to another

Negotiations between the U.S. and several other countries, including Botswana and Malaysia, started months ago, according to an executive at a refugee resettlement agency who was briefed by U.S. officials. The executive, who spoke on condition of anonymity to share private negotiations, said Botswana was seen by many refugee advocates as the most promising option but that talks between senior U.S. officials and the country’s leadership fell through. In early April, the executive was briefed that Congo was now the main option being discussed.

A person familiar with the matter who was not authorized to comment publicly and spoke on condition of anonymity said they had heard from State Department personnel that the U.S. was looking at sending the Afghans at the base in Qatar to countries in sub-Saharan Africa. The person said the Afghans were told Wednesday that there was no final deal on where to send them.

The base in Doha “was always intended as a transit platform. It was never designed to hold families for months or years, which is the situation that people are currently in,” said Jon Finer, who was deputy national security adviser to then-President Joe Biden. “What I want to emphasize is that this was intended to honor a wartime commitment.”

Finer and other former U.S. officials and refugee advocates warned of the risk of resettling Afghans in Congo, a country that U.N. officials say is facing “one of the most acute humanitarian emergencies in the world."

The African country has been battered by decades-long fighting between government forces and Rwanda-backed rebels in its eastern region.

Congolese authorities did not immediately respond to AP’s request for comment on the discussions, which did not come as a surprise to some there. Congo is one of at least eight African nations that were paid millions in controversial deals with the Trump administration to receive migrants deported from the U.S. to countries other than their own.

Like most other African nations involved in the deportation program, Congo is also among the worst hit by the Trump administration’s policies on aid and trade. At least 70% of the country’s humanitarian aid came from the U.S. before Trump's second term, and aid workers say American aid cuts have led to avoidable deaths in the conflict-hit region.

Sean Jamshidi — an Afghan American who served in the U.S. military, including a stint in Congo — said he was deeply concerned about his brother possibly being sent from the Doha base to the war-torn country.

“I saw the security situation and what it looked like there. I saw the displacement camps. ... I stood in places where the United Nations has counted the dead,” Jamshidi said. “I’m telling you, as someone who has been in uniform, the Democratic Republic of the Congo is not a place you send vetted Afghan allies and their children to live.”

Refugees are in the dark as they await their fate

Negina Khalili, a former prosecutor in Afghanistan who fled during the 2021 U.S. withdrawal, has been waiting to hear about the resettlement status of her father, brother and stepmother since they arrived at the Doha base in January 2025. That was just days before Trump suspended the refugee program soon after he returned to the White House.

Khalili told The Associated Press on Wednesday that she spoke to her family about reports that they could be sent to Congo.

“They are not giving them any information or updates regarding which countries they will go to,” she said. “They were so stressed and worried about it and said that Congo is not a safe place either. They don’t know if it’s a temporary location for them there or a permanent location. They are worried.”

She said U.S. officials at the camp have been suggesting to refugees that they go back to Afghanistan and offering them money to do so.

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Amiri reported from New York and Asadu from Abuja, Nigeria. Associated Press writer Matthew Lee contributed to this report.

The Buenos Aires Sports Security Committee issued a “preventive” ban on the use of confetti in stadiums in the district on Wednesday, following the fire that broke out during last Sunday's match between River Plate and Boca Juniors at the Monumental Stadium.

Firefighters had to intervene to extinguish the flames that damaged several stadium seats and caused spectators to flee.

City authorities said that “even though the home club had previously approved contingency protocols and the necessary resources for their implementation, an incident occurred that clearly demonstrates the potential ignition risk that these materials pose in contexts with high concentrations of people.”

The day before the game, River Plate’s supporters’ subcommittee called on the fans to cut thousands of confetti pieces to give the “Millionaires” a colorful welcome. Boca won 1-0 with a penalty by Leandro Paredes.

The tradition of throwing confetti from the stands became popular during the 1978 World Cup hosted by Argentina and was later imitated by fans around the globe.

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AP soccer: https://apnews.com/hub/soccer

For the Kennedy Center’s new leadership, it’s a gargantuan structure corroded by water damage so severe that steel in some places is tissue-thin.

Away from the political controversy that has consumed the iconic performing arts venue for the better part of Trump’s second term, Matt Floca, the Kennedy Center’s new executive director and chief operating officer, guided a group of journalists through the building on Wednesday. They viewed the outdoor terrace overlooking the Potomac River, along with parking decks, loading docks, an electrical vault and the Opera House stage.

A theme emerged at virtually every stop: The water damage was real, apparent in some places through discoloration and pooling. Some pieces of equipment, including several 800-ton chillers that help cool the building, are decades old and in need of replacement.

And the building is so massive — sprawling across more than 1.5 million square feet — that repairs will require time to finish.

Two years of time, in fact.

Trump plans to shutter the building for a massive renovation slated to begin in July, supported by nearly $257 million provided by Congress to fund repairs. The institution is expected to turn to private donors to help support refurbishing some of the building's more exclusive areas, such as lounges.

The Kennedy Center is hardly the first fixture of the Washington skyline to undergo lengthy renovations. The Smithsonian Castle, one of the most recognizable buildings along the National Mall, has been closed for renovations since 2023. The Washington Monument was shrouded in scaffolding from 1998 to 2001 and covered again at points in 2013 and 2014 to repair earthquake damage.

None of those changes, however, were guided so closely by a sitting president.

The president is hands-on with this renovation

Trump, who is also trying to build a ballroom on the grounds of the former East Wing of the White House and is pushing for the construction of a triumphal arch near Arlington Cemetery, is deeply involved in the Kennedy Center plans. That's in line with the far more hands-on approach he's taken to the institution during his second term, ousting its previous leadership and replacing it with a handpicked board that named him chairman.

His name is now bolted to the building's facade along with that of John F. Kennedy, the slain president that the venue memorializes.

“It’s a public building, and I completely acknowledge that, but the president is really great at this, and I think his input is invaluable,” Floca said. “He’s in the details, and it’s amazing. I really respect the input he’s given.”

As Trump tightened his grip on the building, artists abandoned the institution in droves, prompting concern that the closure is more of an effort to cover for plunging sales. The Kennedy Center hasn't released sales figures.

Floca considered doing the repairs individually but insisted it was his recommendation to Trump to close the building and move forward with the renovation all at once.

“When the President asked: ‘How do you make these projects the best? How do you make them really excellent and deliver them efficiently?’ my recommendation was you close the building and you do everything over a definite period of time, two years,” he said.

He acknowledged that once the building is closed, staffing will be “pretty bare bones.”

“We’re working on all of those plans now and exactly what those numbers will be after July,” he said. "And we will staff up before reopening.”

Still, the tour offered the institution something of a reset opportunity after more than a year of tumult, demonstrating the need for repairs while easing some fears. A bipartisan group of lawmakers and their staff, along with representatives for Washington Mayor Muriel Bowser and some corporate and individual donors, have received a similar walk-through.

There will be scaffolding around the building but the construction won't be so dramatic that someone could see through the building. That's notable considering Trump has suggested the steel supporting the structure could be “ fully exposed.”

It's not entirely clear how much change will be apparent to the general public once the Kennedy Center reopens. Much of the structural repair, which will unfold during the renovation's first year, will happen in the building's private core.

The venue's more public elements, including the red-on-red decor of the Opera House, are expected to be maintained, though with some updating. There aren't plans at the moment to change the presidential boxes.

Quotes attributed to Kennedy will stay on the building's walls and the famous bust of the former president that sits outside the Opera House will be there again when the building reopens.

“I can’t think of any JFK changes,” Floca said.

It’s unclear, however, whether there will be additional tributes to Trump, who will be in the final months of his presidency when the public can return to the building.

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The Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office identified the suspect in an arrest report obtained by Local 10 News on Wednesday as 47-year-old Thomas Christopher Ball, of Coral Springs.

Deputies said the investigation began on March 10 after receiving a harassment complaint that involved AI-generated images.

The report states the victim, a 17-year-old girl, told deputies Ball contacted her through Instagram months earlier and their conversations escalated into inappropriate messages.

Investigators said Ball allegedly made sexual comments during a phone call while intoxicated and offered her money in exchange for oral sex.

According to the report, the victim later distanced herself, prompting Ball to send repeated messages questioning why she stopped speaking with him.

On March 8, 2026, Ball allegedly sent multiple messages, including one offering money and asking her to continue communicating with him, the report states.

Deputies said Ball then sent an AI-altered image depicting the victim nude, which was created using a prior social media post. According to the report, he threatened to “expose her if she did not resume being friendly with him.”

The report states Ball acknowledged the victim was a minor and continued messaging her, including statements investigators described as “grooming tactics,” such as offering money, expressing affection and attempting to manipulate her.

After the victim blocked him, deputies said Ball contacted her from another phone number asking if she had called police.

Investigators said they reviewed messages, images and financial transactions from the victim’s phone as evidence. The report states the AI-generated image showed the victim’s face on a nude adult body without her consent.

The victim later provided a sworn statement confirming her account and identifying Ball as the suspect, according to deputies. She told investigators the incident caused her significant fear and emotional distress.

According to the report, investigators also reviewed a separate incident in which a third party told police Ball had made threats while intoxicated, including statements about wanting to harm the girl. The report states Ball denied making those comments.

Deputies said a review of the victim’s phone showed messages in which Ball attempted to “groom” the minor, including offering money, making emotional appeals and continuing to contact her after being told to stop.

The report states detectives also documented AI-generated images and message exchanges, along with financial transactions sent by Ball.

Based on the victim’s sworn statement and the evidence collected, investigators said they established probable cause for arrest.

Jail records show Ball is facing one count each of transmission of harmful material to a minor, unlawful use of a two-way communication device and altered sexual depiction.

As of Wednesday, he was not listed as an inmate in Palm Beach County jail records after posting a $75,000 bond.

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It’s not clear whether he knew that Jarmane Samuel Bradwell Jr. was wearing it after getting probation for a violent armed carjacking, but it apparently did not dissuade him from traveling to Bradwell’s street in the city’s Wynwood neighborhood to try to seal the deal Tuesday afternoon.

According to an arrest report from the Miami Police Department, things did not end well for the would-be seller.

Police said the victim had listed the diamond-encrusted Cartier watch on Facebook Marketplace for $1 to receive inquiries. Authorities said the victim agreed to sell Bradwell the watch for $2,700: $1,000 in cash and $1,700 by Zelle.

Authorities said Bradwell sent the seller an address on Northwest 31st Street, near Third Avenue ― a few houses down from where Bradwell lives.

“The victim asked (Bradwell) if he was able to meet him closer to which (Bradwell) sent thew victim a photograph of a leg with an ankle monitor on it and stated he wasn’t able to,” an MPD detective wrote in the report.

According to court records, Bradwell was donning the less-than-stylish leg accessory because he took part in a 2023 armed carjacking in North Miami Beach when he was 16. He was charged as an adult, but ultimately got classified as a “youthful offender” and received community control, probation and withheld adjudication.

Records show he’s also been accused in various criminal cases in North Miami, Miami Shores and Miami.

On Tuesday, police said the victim in the latest case pulled up at the location just before 3 p.m. and set up his cellphone to record the transaction.

The two communicated through Google Translate as the victim allowed Bradwell to try on the watch and view additional links that came with it, police said.

“The victim then asked (Bradwell) to remove the watch until he paid for it. While the victim was holding onto the watch, (Bradwell) lifted his shirt and brandished a black object, which appeared to be a weapon according to the victim,” the report states. “(Bradwell) then said something to the victim and snatched the watch from (his) hand and (left).”

Police said the victim called 911 and an officer saw Bradwell and tried to stop him, but he ran.

Authorities said they were able to identify the suspect as Bradwell and went to his house to detain him.

The MPD report said officers serving a search warrant at his home ultimately found the links, though it doesn’t state whether they found the watch itself.

Bradwell is now back in jail on an armed robbery charge with a bond listed as “to be set.” His Miami-Dade jail roster listing also includes several additional other charges related to those varying past cases.

No está claro si sabía que Jarmane Samuel Bradwell Jr. lo llevaba tras recibir libertad condicional por un violento robo de auto a mano armada, pero aparentemente eso no lo disuadió de viajar hasta la calle de Bradwell en el vecindario Wynwood para concretar la venta el martes por la tarde.

Según un informe de arresto del Departamento de Policía de Miami, las cosas no terminaron bien para el vendedor.

La policía dijo que la víctima había publicado el reloj Cartier con diamantes en Facebook Marketplace por $1 USD para recibir consultas. Las autoridades indicaron que la víctima acordó venderle el reloj a Bradwell por $2,700 USD: $1,000 USD en efectivo y $1,700 USD por Zelle.

Las autoridades dijeron que Bradwell envió al vendedor una dirección en Northwest 31st Street, cerca de Third Avenue, a pocas casas de donde vive.

“La víctima le preguntó si podía encontrarse más cerca, a lo que Bradwell envió una fotografía de una pierna con un monitor de tobillo y dijo que no podía,” escribió un detective en el informe.

Según registros judiciales, Bradwell llevaba ese dispositivo debido a que participó en un robo de auto a mano armada en 2023 en North Miami Beach cuando tenía 16 años. Fue acusado como adulto, pero finalmente fue clasificado como “infractor juvenil” y recibió control comunitario, libertad condicional y adjudicación retenida.

Los registros muestran que también ha sido acusado en varios casos criminales en North Miami, Miami Shores y Miami.

El martes, la policía dijo que la víctima llegó al lugar poco antes de las 3 p.m. y colocó su teléfono celular para grabar la transacción.

Ambos se comunicaron a través de Google Translate mientras la víctima permitió que Bradwell se probara el reloj y revisara eslabones adicionales incluidos, dijo la policía.

“La víctima luego le pidió que se quitara el reloj hasta que lo pagara. Mientras la víctima sostenía el reloj, Bradwell levantó su camisa y mostró un objeto negro que parecía un arma, según la víctima,” indica el informe. “Bradwell luego dijo algo a la víctima, le arrebató el reloj de la mano y se fue.”

La policía dijo que la víctima llamó al 911 y un agente vio a Bradwell e intentó detenerlo, pero este huyó.

Las autoridades dijeron que pudieron identificar al sospechoso como Bradwell y acudieron a su casa para detenerlo.

El informe indica que los agentes que ejecutaron una orden de registro en su vivienda encontraron los eslabones del reloj, aunque no especifica si recuperaron el reloj.

Bradwell está nuevamente en la cárcel enfrentando un cargo de robo a mano armada con fianza “por establecer”. Su registro en la cárcel de Miami-Dade también incluye varios cargos adicionales relacionados con casos anteriores.

Según la policía, Annette Saddler fue vista por última vez el 3 de abril en el vecindario Little Haiti de la ciudad.

La policía describió a Saddler como una mujer afroamericana de 5 pies 5 pulgadas de estatura y aproximadamente 175 libras de peso. Tiene cabello negro y ojos marrones.

Cualquier persona con información sobre su paradero debe llamar al Departamento de Policía de la Ciudad de Miami al 305-603-6300 o enviar un correo electrónico a SVU@Miami-Police.org.

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According to police, Annette Saddler was last seen April 3 in the city’s Little Haiti neighborhood.

Police described Saddler as a Black female who is 5 feet, 5 inches tall and weighs about 175 pounds. She has black hair and brown eyes.

Anyone with information about her whereabouts is asked to call the City of Miami Police Department at 305-603-6300 or email SVU@Miami-Police.org.

Her death was ruled a homicide in the report from the Los Angeles County Medical Examiner's Office that had been blocked from release for months.

The autopsy was limited by “extensive postmortem changes” to the body that was dismembered and decomposing when it was found in two bags in the trunk of a Tesla parked in the Hollywood Hills in September.

The examination revealed “two penetrating wounds of the torso with smooth edges that may represent sharp force injuries.” One wound on the upper abdomen penetrated the liver. Another on the left chest damaged her ribs. A tube top she was wearing appeared to be cut in three places.

A judge had ordered the report sealed late last year at the request of law enforcement, but prosecutors agreed this week to allow its release.

The 21-year-old alt-pop singer D4vd, whose legal name is David Burke, was charged in the killing Monday. He pleaded not guilty to first-degree murder, lewd and lascivious acts with a person under 14 and mutilating a dead body. Burke’s attorneys said he did not cause Rivas Hernandez’s death and they will vigorously defend his innocence.

The girl's parents made their first public comments on Tuesday night, thanking investigators for their work and the people of their hometown of Lake Elsinore, California, for their support. Lake Elsinore is about 70 miles (112 kilometers) southeast of Los Angeles.

“Celeste was a beautiful, strong girl who loved to sing and dance. Every Friday night was movie night and we spent wonderful times together,” Jesus Rivas and Mercedes Martinez said. "We love her very much and she always told us that she loved us. We miss her deeply. All we want is justice for Celeste.”

Prosecutors allege Burke killed Rivas Hernandez because she threatened to report they had a sexual relationship that began when she was 13 years old and he feared it would ruin his rising career.

A criminal complaint alleges he killed her with a sharp object and dismembered the body about two weeks later.

Medical Examiner's investigators called to the scene where the body was found discovered her torso and head in a black, zippered body bag in the Tesla's trunk, with arms and legs in a separate trash bag.

Her body had so degraded that examiners couldn't even determine her eye color. She had braces at the time of her death, and a tattoo that read “Shhh....” on the inside of a finger, according to the report. Two other fingers were missing — as were parts of her arms and legs.

Toxicology tests on the liver showed a low level of alcohol, but it may have been due to postmortem chemical changes and didn't appear to be a factor, the report said.

LA County's Chief Medical Examiner Dr. Odey C. Ukpo has sought to emphasize his agency's independence from law enforcement and to make its work as public as possible since he took over the job three years ago. He has said he does not believe sealing reports of his office's work helps investigations and has said he would only put holds on releasing the reports if compelled by a court order.

“After several months, I am grateful this information can now be released, not only to the public, but also to the grieving family enduring loss,” Ukpo said in a statement Wednesday. “It is unfathomable they have had to wait this long to learn what happened to their daughter.”

D4vd, pronounced “David,” gained popularity among young fans for his blend of indie rock, R&B and lo-fi pop. He went viral on TikTok in 2022 with the hit “Romantic Homicide,” which peaked at No. 4 on Billboard’s Hot Rock & Alternative Songs chart. He released his debut EP “Petals to Thorns” and a follow-up, “The Lost Petals,” in 2023.

His debut full-length album, “Withered,” was released one year ago, two days after the date prosecutors estimate that Rivas Hernandez was killed.

Suicide deaths among 15- to 23-year-olds were 11% lower than what researchers expected between July 2022 — when the lifeline launched — and December 2024, researchers wrote in a study published Wednesday in JAMA.

“The 988 program is one of the largest federal investments in suicide prevention in U.S. history — roughly $1.5 billion cumulative — and our findings suggest that investment has translated into measurable reductions in young adult suicide deaths,” said Dr. Vishal Patel, a clinical fellow at Harvard Medical School and the paper's lead author.

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EDITOR’S NOTE: This story includes discussion of suicide. If you or someone you know needs help, the national suicide and crisis lifeline in the U.S. is available by calling or texting 988.

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The researchers used nationwide death certificate records from 1999 to 2022 to model what the suicide mortality would have been had the 988 line not launched. They then compared the estimates to the actual number of deaths.

The researchers can't say for certain that 988 was the sole cause of the decline, and the U.S. suicide rate is down overall. But they ran several other comparisons to “gut check” their overall findings, Patel said.

They found the 10 states that had the largest increases in call volumes following the launch of 988 also saw significantly larger gaps in expected vs. actual suicide deaths. The reductions were also greater in younger people than people older than 65, who are less likely to use the lifeline. And they saw no similar changes when looking at suicide deaths in England, where no comparable lifeline existed during the study period.

The results are in line with previous research.

“Studies show that after speaking with a trained crisis counselor, most people who contact the 988 Lifeline are significantly more likely to feel less depressed, less suicidal, less overwhelmed and more hopeful,” a spokesperson for the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, which funds the hotline, said in response to the study.

Research results 'very heartening,' expert says

Jill Harkavy-Friedman, who leads the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention's research program and was not involved in the study, said the results were “very heartening and very positive." She wants to see more research replicating the results, but she said the authors did a “great deal of work” to weed out other possible factors for the decline.

The entire mental health system is key to lowering suicide rates, Harkavy-Friedman said. 988's power to navigate that system, helping callers make safety plans, connecting them to local crisis intervention teams and referring people to longer-term care, has led to “extraordinary” impact, she said. And simply having someone to call in a moment of crisis can also be lifesaving.

“That is the strength of the crisis line," Harkavy-Friedman said. "When you call, it de-escalates the crisis so the person has greater capacity to address whatever it is that's driving their emotions at the moment."

Experts say the overall patchwork of federal and state funding for call centers remains insufficient to meet the true level of need.

Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s federal budget request maintains stable 988 funding at $534.6 million for fiscal year 2027, in anticipation of 11 million contacts next year.

The hotline “is not a panacea for preventing suicide death,” but the number of lives it has saved "is a really big deal and underscores the need for sustained investment in 988 from federal, and especially state, lawmakers,” said Jonathan Purtle, a New York University mental health policy researcher.

Specialized line for LGBTQ+ youth

In a Capitol Hill hearing Tuesday, Sen. Tammy Baldwin pressed Kennedy to follow through on a “legal requirement” to restore 988's specialized line for LGBTQ+ youth. The administration abruptly cut the program last summer, despite evidence that the population faces disproportionately high suicide rates.

“Yes, we are working on getting it up now,” Kennedy told the Wisconsin Democrat. Spokespeople for the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration and the Department of Health and Human Services did not immediately provide The Associated Press with any timeline or details of that restoration.

Patel said the specialized services for high-risk groups — including the LGBTQ+ line — are part of what makes the program work.

“Our findings should be read as evidence that this is a program worth preserving and expanding, not one to scale back,” he said.

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The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

The leak occurred at the Catalyst Refiners plant in Institute as workers were preparing to shut down at least part of the facility, Kanawha County Commission Emergency Management Director C.W. Sigman said.

A chemical gas reaction occurred at the plant involving nitric acid and another substance, Sigman said at a news briefing. He added that there was "a violent reaction of the chemicals and it instantaneously overreacted.”

“Starting or ending a chemical reaction are the most dangerous times,” Sigman said.

The chemical reaction that was believed to have occurred during a cleaning process produced toxic hydrogen sulfide, Kanawha County Commission President Ben Salango said.

Among the injured were seven ambulance workers responding to the leak, officials said.

Other people were taken to the hospitals in private cars or even in one case a garbage truck, Sigman said.

One person was in critical condition, Salango said.

Vandalia Health Charleston Area Medical Center, one of several hospitals in the area, was treating multiple patients, some brought by ambulance, while members of the community were arriving Wednesday afternoon asking to be checked, hospital spokesman Dale Witte said.

Witte said patients were experiencing respiratory symptoms including cough, shortness of breath, sore throat and itchy eyes. They were being evaluated in the emergency room.

WVU Medicine Thomas Memorial Hospital in South Charleston said in a statement it has cared for a dozen patients, including eight who arrived by personal vehicle and were not at the scene but were in the area at the time. It said those injuries were not considered life-threatening.

A shelter-in-place order was issued for the surrounding area and lifted more than five hours later. Officials said all the deaths occurred on the plant site.

“You had to get really close to the facility to smell it,” Sigman said.

The leak required a large-scale decontamination operation in which people had to remove their clothes and be sprayed down, authorities said.

Catalyst Refiners works to remove silver from what remains of chemical processes and can find thousands of dollars of the precious metal just by vacuuming the floors in a plant's offices, Sigman said.

Ames Goldsmith Corp., the owner of Catalyst Refiners, said it is saddened by the deaths and its thoughts were with all those impacted and their families.

“This is an unfathomably difficult time,” company President Frank Barber said in a statement released at the briefing. “Our thoughts and prayers are with our colleagues and their families.”

Ames Goldsmith promised to work with local, state and federal officials as they investigate the leak. The federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration has opened an investigation into what happened, a spokesperson said, adding that the agency has six months to complete its examination.

Silver is in a number of items ranging from circuit boards and other electronics, photographic and X-Ray films and jewelry. Nitric acid is used to dissolve materials, leaving behind silver nitrate that can be processed to recover pure silver. Recovery businesses can also crush or sandblast items with silver and use magnets or differences in density to sort out the precious metal.

Sigman said Ames Goldsmith recovers silver from the various plants at the Institute complex "and they'll use it again. When they vacuum their carpets in their office, they recover so many thousands of dollars’ worth of silver out of it just vacuuming their carpets.”

The plant is located near Institute, a community about 10 miles (16 kilometers) west of Charleston, the state capital. The plant is in a region known as West Virginia’s “chemical valley,” although many plants that lined the area along the Kanawha River and produced hazardous materials have closed or changed ownership in the past several decades.

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Jeffrey Collins in Columbia, South Carolina, and Gary Robertson in Raleigh, North Carolina, contributed to this report.

Multiple videos from bystanders show a masked agent grabbing and pulling Franci Stagi across the street during a protest in October against the detention of three Colombian asylum-seekers in Durango, Colorado. She said he grabbed her by the hair and put her in a chokehold. The state is among several that prohibited or severely limited police officers from using chokeholds and neck restraints since George Floyd’s death in 2020.

The Colorado Bureau of Investigations launched an investigation into the officer's actions against Stagi at the request of Durango Police Department Chief Brice Current, who raised concerns about possible violations of state law — an unusual if not unprecedented request.

A spokesperson for U.S. Customs and Border Protection, which launched its own investigation, acknowledged a request Wednesday seeking comment but didn’t immediately respond to questions about the charges. Court documents didn’t list any attorney as representing the officer, Nicholas Rice.

Stagi said she was standing close to the officer and filming him outside the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility in Durango, a college town popular for outdoor recreation, when he hit her hand hard, causing her to lose her cellphone. Stagi, a retired hypnotherapist, said she then reached for the officer's shoulder to get his attention. After she said he put her in a chokehold, she said he threw her down an embankment next to the street. She said she still experiences pain in her arm doing normal everyday activities, like putting on her jacket.

Court documents allege that Rice committed third-degree assault by causing bodily injury to Stagi, but the documents don’t describe how she was injured or make mention of a chokehold. Rice also is charged with criminal mischief for allegedly damaging Stagi’s cellphone.

Stagi said Wednesday she was disappointed Rice was charged with less serious crimes. The assault charge, a misdemeanor, carries a maximum sentence of just under a year in jail. But she hopes the prosecution sends a message that immigration officers can't tackle people indiscriminately and use excessive force.

“It did open my eyes to how quickly I can be under someone else's control, and it's frightening,” said Stagi, whose legal name is Anne Francesca Stagi.

Federal law enforcement officers have broad legal protections when acting in the course of their official duties, and the Justice Department has in recent months taken a hard line against state efforts to arrest or prosecute federal agents. Late last year, U.S. Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche said arrests of federal officers performing their duties would be “illegal and futile,” citing the Constitution’s Supremacy Clause and federal law. Legal experts say those protections are significant but not absolute and the Supremacy Clause does not provide blanket immunity.

Chokeholds have been at the center of public discourse and state legislative initiatives about what constitutes an unreasonable use of force since Eric Garner died in New York in 2014 after he was put in a chokehold by a white police officer.

Garner’s dying words, “I can’t breathe,” became a rallying cry for the Black Lives Matter movement.

While some states have banned chokeholds and other tactics, sweeping changes were met with resistance.

A federal package of reforms that would have banned chokeholds nationwide passed the U.S. House in 2021 but failed to reach then-President Joe Biden’s desk. The bill was named in honor of Floyd, who died in Minneapolis after a white police officer pressed his knee to his neck.

Within a month of Floyd’s death, Colorado lawmakers approved a ban on chokeholds as part of broader police reform legislation. The law overrode more limited chokehold restrictions that were put in place four years earlier.

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Slevin reported from Denver. Lee contributed to this report from Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Pickens hasn't signed the one-year deal worth $27.3 million, which means the 25-year-old would face no financial penalties if he didn't report to mandatory minicamp in June. The rest of the offseason program, which starts Monday, is voluntary.

“We’ve made a decision that we’re going to have George play under the franchise tag, which won’t be a first for us,” Stephen Jones said. “So there won’t be negotiations on a long-term deal. But that’s certainly not a first for this organization and certainly won’t be a first in the league in terms of this decision as we move forward.”

Stephen Jones said he hasn't talked to Pickens recently, but said owner Jerry Jones and coach Brian Schottenheimer met with him recently.

“It was good,” Schottenheimer said during the Cowboys' news conference leading into the NFL draft, which starts Thursday night. “The thing that George knows about Jerry and myself is we’re very upfront and we’re honest. We had great conversation. We informed him. We think that’s important because that’s the way we handle all of our players and coaches.”

David Mulugheta, Pickens' agent, didn't immediately respond to a request for comment.

Pickens, acquired last offseason in a trade with Pittsburgh, had career highs in catches (93), yards receiving (1,429) and touchdowns (nine) for one of the best offenses in the NFL last season. Dallas had one of the worst defenses in the league and finished 7-9-1, missing the playoffs for the second year in a row.

The 2022 second-round pick out of Georgia thrived alongside CeeDee Lamb, who is going into the second year of a $136 million, four-year contract that currently ranks him third among NFL receivers with an average annual value of $34 million.

Lamb missed the entire offseason and training camp in 2024 holding out for the deal he signed about two weeks before the season opener.

The Cowboys couldn’t use the tag on Lamb because he was going into the fifth year of his rookie contract. The fifth year is a team option that goes with all deals for first-round picks. Second-rounders have four-year deals, and Pickens earned $6.8 million on his rookie contract.

Pickens’ talent was on display during three seasons with the Steelers, but so were enough instances of petulant or indifferent behavior for then-coach Mike Tomlin to question his maturity.

Schottenheimer never took issue with Pickens publicly in his first season as a head coach after a quarter-century as an NFL assistant. But Pickens and Lamb were benched for the first series in Las Vegas after missing curfew following a casino visit the night before the game.

“There’s a lot of things that go into that,” Stephen Jones said of the decision not to go forward on a long-term deal this offseason. “Let’s start with the fact that it’s not easy having two receivers being paid top of the market. A quarterback that’s been here, being the highest-paid player in this league for many years now.”

“The other thing is the newness of George being here,” Stephen Jones said. “I think George has just done an amazing job. I mean he’s exceeded all expectations. And a lot of those things, they make their way toward a long-term deal, but that’s the biggest part of it — between the business and newness of it, I think that’s a big part of it."

The Cowboys have until July 15 to reach a long-term deal with Pickens, who could stay away from the team well into the season without signing the offer under the franchise tag.

Quarterback Dak Prescott and defensive end DeMarcus Lawrence played a season under the franchise tag within the past eight years for Dallas before reaching long-term deals. Tight end Dalton Schultz and running back Tony Pollard also played under the tag before leaving in free agency the next year.

The Cowboys are a year removed from contentious negotiations with Micah Parsons that ended with the star pass rusher getting traded to Green Bay. Mulugheta was also Parsons' agent.

“I expect that he’ll be around. I really do,” Schottenheimer said of Pickens. “The one thing that I love about George is George likes honesty and that’s who we are. That’s not just because his name is George Pickens and he’s a great player. We do that to undrafted free agents, and that gives you the best chance to make sure you’re all on the same page.”

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The attacks unfolded just a day after U.S. President Donald Trump said he would extend the two-week ceasefire with Iran. The Islamic Republic said it fired on three outbound ships and seized two, calling it retaliation for the American naval blockade of Iranian ports and for the U.S. firing on and seizing an Iranian ship that did not stop when hailed by a vessel enforcing the blockade.

Attacks on shipping dwindled starting in mid-March as Iran imposed effective control over the strait. The mere risk of attack was enough to deter ships from trying to get through, while a few ships used an Iranian-approved lane near the coast. Iran demanded details on cargo, ownership and crew and, on at least some occasions, imposed a $1 per barrel tax on oil and oil products — or $2 million for a large tanker.

Here is a look at what’s known, and not known, about the situation in the strait:

After a pause, attacks on shipping have resumed

Iran’s semiofficial news agencies reported that the paramilitary Revolutionary Guard attacked a third ship Wednesday in the strait. Nour News, Fars and Mehr all reported the attack by the Guard on a vessel called the Euphoria. They said the vessel had become “stranded” on the Iranian coast, without elaborating. The Guard seized the other two ships that were attacked, Iranian state television separately reported.

That incident followed two ship attacks on Saturday that ended a lull that began in mid-March.

The seized ships were the Liberia-flagged Epaminondas and the Panama-flagged MSC Francesca, both container ships. It was not clear under what terms the ships were trying to pass the strait. The MSC shipping company did not answer an email asking about the vessel.

The attacks follow a sudden reversal in the Iranian stance over the weekend, as the Iranian foreign minister announced Friday that the strait was open, only to be contradicted the next day by the Revolutionary Guard. Six cruise ships stuck in the Persian Gulf since late February took advantage of the narrow window and slipped through the strait. But since then, traffic has dried up.

The resumption of attacks reflects in part “genuine confusion ... about when passage is permitted," said Torbjorn Soltvedt, principal Middle East analyst at risk intelligence company Verisk Maplecroft.

Conflicting statements emerged from Trump about a full reopening and from the Iranian foreign minister about a limited reopening. Then things “shifted very quickly” Saturday when the Guard said the strait was closed.

Additionally, Soltvedt said, it's in Iran's interest to keep insurance premiums high with sporadic attacks. “Their main leverage in negotiations with the U.S. is being able to restrict shipping through the Strait of Hormuz, and insurance is a big part of that.”

Some vessels have passed the Iranian vetting system, and some have relied on diplomatic requests from home governments. But hundreds of ships and thousands of crew members are still stuck.

The US is enforcing a blockade, but some Iranian oil gets through

The U.S. Navy boarded and seized a large tanker carrying Iranian oil south of the Bay of Bengal in the Indian Ocean, some 2,000 miles from the strait. That underlined the U.S. power to seize vessels that violate the blockade well after they have left the vicinity of the strait.

The U.S. military, which is enforcing the blockade in the Gulf of Oman and the Arabian Sea, well way from Iranian drones and speedboats, says it has turned around 20 Iran-linked vessels.

However, shipping intelligence companies say that a number of ships carrying Iranian oil have passed the blockade. Lloyd’s List Intelligence says “a steady flow of shadow fleet traffic” has passed in and out of the gulf, including 11 tankers with Iranian cargo that have left the gulf outside the strait since April 13.

“The dilemma for the U.S. is: The tighter the blockade, the greater the pain is in the global oil market, so there are conflicting priorities there, and it seems there is a policy of not intercepting every single shipment of Iranian oil,” Soltvedt said.

Additionally, almost all that oil is going to China, and the U.S. has to manage that relationship as well, with Trump planning to visit from May 14 to 15.

Capt. Tim Hawkins, the spokesman for U.S. Central Command, confirmed Wednesday that the military blockade is against all Iranian ships entering or leaving Iranian ports. However, he said humanitarian shipments, including food, medical supplies and other goods essential for civilians, are being permitted subject to inspection.

Hawkins pushed back on outside reports of ships getting past the U.S. dragnet and pointed to remarks by the head of U.S. Central Command, Adm. Brad Cooper, who claimed Friday that “no ship has evaded U.S. forces.”

Reopening the strait will take time

Ship owners and insurers will need more than a simple announcement of a peace deal to venture through the strait as they did before the war.

Even when the war ends, analytical and data firm Rystad Energy says, it will take six to eight weeks just to reposition the world’s tanker network. Ship owners and insurer would need two to five weeks to get comfortable with a new operating environment and to resume normal activity.

Ship owners will want “something that's a bit more concrete than what we have now,” Soltvedt said. “What is needed is something more comprehensive” than an informal truce with the two sides far apart on key issues such as Iran's nuclear and ballistic missile programs.

“Even then, shipping companies will have the long-term threat hanging over them" given Iran's missile and drone capabilities, he said. “They can play this card again in the future."

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Associated Press Writer Konstantin Toropin contributed to this report.

“Are you 21 yet?” George turned and asked Edgecombe on the dais during their postgame news conference.

“No, 20,” Edgecombe responded with a smirk.

Nobody’s laughing about the elite company that the 76ers’ third overall pick in last June’s draft put himself into during just his second career playoff game.

“I just try not to overthink it,” Edgecombe said. “I try not to put pressure on myself. Everybody’s already putting pressure on us to perform. ... Plus, I’m around a great group of guys. That also helps me. Just keep instilling confidence in me. Just to keep going, keep going. Regardless of who’s on the floor, who’s not on the floor.”

Edgecombe finished with 30 points and 10 rebounds to become the first rookie to record at least 30 points and 10 rebounds in a playoff game since Tim Duncan on May 5, 1998.

He also became the first rookie in NBA history to post five 3-pointers and 10 rebounds in a playoff game. It was a bounce-back performance after a Game 1 in which he finished with just 13 points on 6-of-16 shooting.

George said it’s the culmination of something they first saw glimpses of in the Bahamas native when Edgecombe scored 34 points in his first pro game in Philadelphia’s one-point opening night win in Boston.

“When you think about it how he started his first NBA game in this building, I’m sure he was in a small percentage or small group of players that what he did on that opening night,” George said.

Edgecombe’s opening-night performance was the third-most points for an NBA player in his first game. Wilt Chamberlain scored 43 points in his debut in 1959 for the Philadelphia Warriors and also had 28 rebounds that night against New York. Frank Selvy scored 35 points for the Milwaukee Hawks against Boston in 1954.

Allen Iverson held the Sixers’ record with 30 points in his debut in 1996.

Edgecombe’s 14 first-quarter points on opening night were also the most ever for a player’s first NBA quarter. That record had been set by LeBron James in 2003.

Edgecombe finished the regular season averaging 16.0 points in 75 games.

And he’s done it with a flair that is in some ways reminiscent of the fun-loving style that Iverson exuded during his 76ers’ tenure.

In Tuesday’s win, after knocking down his final basket of the night — a deep 3-pointer over Payton Pritchard to put Philadelphia in front 105-92 after Boston had gotten within 91-89 — Edgecombe winked at the camera as he jogged back down the court.

George said it’s just a taste of what's to come from Edgecombe.

“To put a whole season together and get to a point where he’s showcasing who he is and his abilities. I’ve been saying all year long he’s far past a rookie,” George said. “It’s just impressive, man. (Edgecombe had) 30 and 10, but it’s just what we needed in the moments throughout the game when he took over, and kind of just put us at ease.”

Tuesday wasn’t all fun for Edgecombe, though. He did take a hard fall on his back early in the game that resulted in him limping to the locker room in both the first and third quarters.

But Edgecombe shrugged off any notion that his fall will hinder him going forward in this series.

“I just landed on my back, but I’m good. I was able to finish the game so I’m good,” he said. “That’s all I’ve got for you. I’m good, ain’t nothing wrong with me. I’m good.”

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AP NBA: https://apnews.com/hub/nba

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According to Miami Beach police, officers responded to the 1400 block of Ocean Drive at about 9:14 p.m. Tuesday where the driver dropped off the suspects.

The suspects have been identified as Ashton Montanez, 22, of Orlando, and Jefferson Mesidor, 25, of Miami.

According to Montanez’s arrest report, he is an influencer who is currently living on the streets of Miami.

Police said the driver told them that he is a Lyft driver who was picking up a fare Tuesday night on Bay Harbor Terrace in Bay Harbor Islands when he noticed a large police presence.

He said he then saw two men running toward his car and then opening the door to his vehicle.

According to the report, Montanez and Mesidor laid down in the vehicle in an attempt to conceal themselves before Montanez passed what the driver believed was a gun to Mesidor.

Police said the duo then forced the victim to drive them to Miami Beach.

The victim told police that he considered jumping out of his moving car at one point, but was scared they would shoot him.

According to the report, both suspects exited the vehicle in the 1400 block of Ocean Drive and entered a residential building.

Witnesses told Local 10 that the building is filled with short-term rentals, including Airbnbs.

“We come back around 1 o’clock and the whole road is blocked off, tons of cops. They kept saying, ‘Oh, it’ll be another 40 minutes,’” Andrew Galizia, who is visiting from Boston, said. “They said that like four times and then we waited. There was a lot of action going on down here, so we moved to this side, and then all of a sudden you see the SWAT team fully armed, dogs, and infrared googles ... I was like, ‘Damn, what is really going on?’”

Authorities said Mesidor then exited the building and was quickly located by police in the 1500 block of Ocean Drive while Montanez remained barricaded inside.

One person staying in one of the rental units said he spent hours waiting in the lobby of a nearby hotel.

“We were staying at an Airbnb and I think there were a lot of people in Airbnbs there, so it was an inconvenience for a lot of people,” he said.

Montanez was eventually taken into custody at about 1:08 a.m. Wednesday, police confirmed.

Families staying at the building said they were caught off guard by the police presence.

“They didn’t get too close to the building, but they had surrounded the building, and then all of a sudden, they had gotten in here and came in, and then they were knocking on the door, saying we had to evacuate,” Tierra Esquerre said.

Detectives were seen collecting evidence, trying to piece together exactly what led up to the driver being held at gunpoint.

“I was pretty scared,” Esquerre said. “I called my grandfather. I cried because when they pulled up with the guys in the truck, that was pretty intense, so it was scary.”

Miami Beach police said the investigation remains ongoing and is being led by the Bay Harbor Islands Police Department.

“MBPD will continue to support BHPD as needed,” a MBPD spokesman said in an email to Local 10 News.

Both Montanez and Mesidor face kidnapping charges.

As of Wednesday afternoon, both were being held at the Turner Guilford Knight Correctional Center. Online jail records listed their bond as “to bet set.”

“This behavior is unacceptable, and we are grateful that the driver is safe,” a Lyft spokesperson said in a statement to Local 10 News. “The rider involved has been permanently removed from the Lyft platform, and we have been in touch with the driver to provide support. We stand ready to assist law enforcement.”

La policía indicó que la menor, cuya identidad no fue revelada, fue vista por última vez aproximadamente a las 7:30 p.m. del martes y vestía una camisa blanca y pantalones cortos rosados.

La familia de la niña explicó que esta es la primera vez que se escapa, ya que no hubo ningún disturbio en el hogar.

La policía emitió de inmediato una alerta BOLO para la menor.

Los agentes dijeron que hablaron con un testigo que afirmó haber visto a la niña con un sujeto masculino que vestía una sudadera roja con capucha, conversando en McTyre Park, ubicado en 3501 SW 56th Ave., en West Park.

La policía indicó que testigos señalaron que luego los vieron caminando hacia el norte por Southwest 56th Avenue.

Dijeron que el parque fue revisado nuevamente, con la ayuda de personal del distrito de la Oficina del Sheriff de Broward, pero la niña no fue localizada.

Los investigadores indicaron que el área fue recorrida continuamente, incluyendo plazas locales, tiendas, parques y gasolineras, sin resultados.

Cualquier persona con información debe llamar a Broward Crime Stoppers al 954-493-8477 o al Departamento de Policía de Pembroke Park al 954-374-8639.

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The police dog named Appie remained under veterinary care on Wednesday afternoon after undergoing surgery to repair a broken bone on Tuesday in Broward County.

“He is expected to make a full recovery,” Dr. Sagen Woolery, the emergency medicine vet caring for Appie, told Local 10 News.

Woolery said luck was on Appie’s side since the bullet that wounded him on Saturday night could have caused more damage than it did.

“We are excited to help him get back on his feet and back working again,” Woolery said.

On Monday, police officers identified the burglary suspect accused of shooting Appie in Lauderdale Manors as Christian Q. Bouie.

Appie’s K9 colleague helped police officers arrest Bouie, 30, after the shooting, and Bouie remained at the Broward County Main Jail on Wednesday.

Bouie faced four charges: Use of a deadly weapon on a police animal, interfering with law enforcement with violence, possession of a weapon or ammunition by a convicted felon, and resisting arrest without violence.

Related stories

• Burglary suspect accused of shooting police dog faces charges in Broward
• Police: Burglary suspect shoots police dog during pursuit in Fort Lauderdale

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El perro policía llamado Appie permanecía bajo cuidado veterinario la tarde del miércoles después de someterse a una cirugía para reparar un hueso roto el martes en el condado Broward.

“Se espera que tenga una recuperación completa,” dijo a Local 10 News el Dr. Sagen Woolery, veterinario de medicina de emergencia que atiende a Appie.

Woolery dijo que la suerte estuvo del lado de Appie, ya que la bala que lo hirió el sábado por la noche pudo haber causado más daño del que provocó.

“Estamos emocionados de ayudarlo a volver a ponerse de pie y regresar a trabajar,” dijo Woolery.

El lunes, los agentes identificaron al sospechoso de robo acusado de dispararle a Appie en Lauderdale Manors como Christian Q. Bouie.

Un compañero K-9 de Appie ayudó a los agentes a arrestar a Bouie, de 30 años, después del tiroteo, y Bouie permanecía en la cárcel principal del condado Broward el miércoles.

Bouie enfrenta cuatro cargos: uso de un arma mortal contra un animal policial, interferencia con la aplicación de la ley con violencia, posesión de arma o municiones por un delincuente convicto y resistencia al arresto sin violencia.

Historias relacionadas

• Acusan a sospechoso de robo por disparar a perro policía en Broward
• Policía: Sospechoso de robo dispara a perro policía durante persecución en Fort Lauderdale

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The Trump administration filed a lawsuit in November challenging the law, arguing that it would threaten the safety of officers who are facing harassment, doxing, and violence and that it violated the constitution because the state was directly seeking to regulate the federal government.

A three-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals issued an injunction pending appeal. It had already granted a temporary administrative injunction to block the implementation of the law while the appeal took place.

The measure was one of two major pieces of legislation enacted last fall aimed at reining in federal immigration agents after a sweeping crackdown on illegal immigration in Southern California in June. Advocates have raised concerns about masked agents conducting workplace raids or arresting people on the street, often without showing identification.

The other law would have banned most law enforcement officers from wearing masks, neck gaiters, and other facial coverings. It was blocked by a federal judge in February, who said that it discriminated against the federal government because it did not apply to state troopers. The law made exceptions for undercover agents, protective equipment like N95 respirators or tactical gear, and other situations where not wearing a mask would jeopardize the operation.

At a hearing March 3, Justice Department lawyers argued that the California identification requirement law sought to regulate the federal government, violating the Supremacy Clause of the Constitution.

The appeals court agreed unanimously, saying the law “attempts to directly regulate the United States in its performance of governmental functions,” in an opinion written by Judge Mark J. Bennett. The panel was composed of two Trump appointees, Bennett and Daniel P. Collins, and Obama appointee Jacqueline H. Nguyen.

California lawyers argued that the law applied equally to all law enforcement officers without discriminating against the U.S. government, and that states could apply “generally applicable” laws federal agents. They also argued that the law was important to address public safety concerns.

People are more likely to attack officers in self-defense if there's no visible identification letting the public know they are law enforcement, California lawyers said in a brief opposing the injunction.

“This confusion has resulted in federal law enforcement officials being mistaken for criminals and vice versa, creating serious risk of harm to peace officers and members of the public,” they wrote.

In October 2025, the Federal Bureau of Investigation issued a report warning that the increase in U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement activity had spurred “criminal actors impersonating ICE agents to commit violent crime," California attorneys noted.

The appeals court judges said they did not consider the public safety factors because the federal government has demonstrate its constitutional rights would be violated by the legislation, and “all citizens have a stake in upholding the Constitution,” it ruled, quoting previous case law.

First Assistant U.S. Attorney Bill Essayli called it a “huge legal victory” in a post on X.

California Attorney General Rob Bonta's office said they are reviewing the order.

“Transparency and accountability are the foundation of good law enforcement,” the office said in a statement. “The Trump Administration has stepped well outside the boundaries of normal practice, deploying masked and unidentified agents to carry out immigration enforcement, despite the risks these tactics pose to public safety and basic civil liberties.”

Giolito is guaranteed $2,775,401 in the deal, which includes a 2027 mutual option, a person familiar with the agreement told The Associated Press. The person spoke on condition of anonymity because terms were not announced.

A Southern California native, the 31-year-old Giolito went 10-4 with a 3.41 ERA over 26 starts last year for the Boston Red Sox, earning $19 million under a player option. He bounced back solidly after missing the 2024 season because his right ulnar collateral ligament was repaired with an internal brace that March.

He gets a $1.5 million salary from San Diego — which comes to $1,275,401 for the final 159 days of the 187-day season. Giolito's contract includes an $8 million mutual option for 2027 with a $1.5 million buyout.

Giolito's buyout can escalate by up to $3 million for starts this year: $250,000 for eight, $500,000 each for 12 and 16, $750,000 for 20 and $1 million for 2024.

He also can earn bonuses for his finish in Cy Young Award voting: $2 million for finishing among the top five and $1 million for sixth through 10th.

Giolito has played parts of nine seasons in the major leagues for Washington, the Chicago White Sox, the Los Angeles Angels and Cleveland, going 71-66, with a 4.30 ERA and a 1.26 WHIP.

He has been durable and dependable for most of his career while earning an All-Star selection in 2019 and throwing a no-hitter in 2020. Despite missing a season because of injury, he ranks in the top five among AL pitchers from 2018-25 in innings pitched (1,092), strikeouts (1,153), wins (68) and complete games (5).

But Giolito remained on the free agent market nearly one month into the regular season before landing with the Padres, who are pitching superbly despite major upheaval and injury problems in their rotation.

Opening day starter Nick Pivetta went on the injured list last week with a right elbow flexor strain that could keep him out for months, while Joe Musgrove has yet to make his season debut after a slower-than-expected return from Tommy John surgery. Yu Darvish already is out for the season with an elbow injury, and Dylan Cease left last fall for a $210 million free-agent deal with Toronto.

Yet the Padres' team ERA is the second lowest in the majors at 3.22 after they beat Colorado 1-0 on Tuesday night for their 11th victory in 12 games. San Diego (16-7) is even with the back-to-back champion Los Angeles Dodgers for the best record in the majors.

General manager A.J. Preller figured out a way to fit Giolito under his budget even while his team is in ownership transition. The family of late Padres owner Peter Seidler is nearing a sale of the team to billionaire Jose E. Feliciano and his wife, Kwanza Jones.

Giolito will slot immediately into a rotation that currently includes Michael King, Randy Vásquez, Germán Márquez and former Dodgers star Walker Buehler. Right-hander Matt Waldron took a start last week after Pivetta's injury but struggled in a loss to the Angels.

Giolito agreed to a $38.5 million, two-year contract with Boston in January 2024. He will attempt to build on his strong work with the Red Sox in 2025, when he went 9-1 with a 2.26 ERA in 15 starts from June 10 to Aug. 31 after a slower start. Opponents hit .194 (25 for 129) against his changeup and .200 (3 for 15) against his curveball.

He was left off Boston’s postseason roster after experiencing some elbow discomfort in mid-September, but there was no structural damage — something he said was “a small relief in a very unfortunate situation.”

“As it was described to me in layman’s terms, my flexor is very irritated and at this point it’s hard for me to describe,” Giolito said after Game 1 of Boston’s AL Wild Card Series against the New York Yankees. “It’s like weird stuff going on with my bone. It’s one of those things I was told you got to stop throwing and let it calm down.”

Giolito hasn't pitched in the postseason since 2021, when he made his second career playoff appearance for the White Sox.

San Diego transferred right-hander Bryan Hoeing to the 60-day disabled list to make room for Giolito on the 40-man roster.

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AP Baseball Writer Jay Cohen contributed to this report.

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AP MLB: https://apnews.com/MLB

Microsoft founder Bill Gates reportedly spoke “candidly” about his relationship to Epstein in a February town hall meeting of the influential foundation he started with his ex-wife Melinda French Gates. But the external probe marks the nonprofit's plainest attempt yet to address associations that have cast a pall over its concentrated efforts to end preventable maternal/child deaths and control key infectious diseases.

"In March, with the support of our chair, Bill Gates, and our independent Governing Board members, Gates Foundation CEO Mark Suzman commissioned an external review to assess past foundation engagement with Epstein, and our current policies for vetting and developing new philanthropic partnerships,” the Gates Foundation said in a statement. The Wall Street journal first reported news of the staff memo detailing the review.

The philanthropic giant has already undergone a period of change. The Gates Foundation shared plans in January to cap operating costs and incrementally cut as many as 500 positions, or about 20% of its staff, by 2030. The move follows last year’s announcement that the foundation would close in 2045, earlier than previously expected.

The Justice Department's files include email correspondence between Gates and Epstein about philanthropic projects, calendar entries documenting dates they held meetings and photos of Gates at events attended by the two men. Gates has not been accused of any wrongdoing regarding their connection, denies knowledge of Epstein's crimes and claims they met only to discuss philanthropy.

The foundation acknowledged that “a small number” of employees met with Epstein based on his “claims that he could mobilize significant philanthropic resources for global health and development” in a February statement. They never created a fund together and the foundation made no financial payments to Epstein, according to the previous release.

“The foundation regrets having any employees interact with Epstein in any way,” the statement read.

The files' disclosures are being closely followed by one of the Gates Foundation's earliest and most ardent supporters. Investor Warren Buffett, who donates a portion of his annual Berkshire Hathaway shares to the nonprofit, told CNBC's “Squawk Box” last month that it's clear “there was a lot I didn't know."

Buffett, who resigned as the foundation's trustee in 2021, has completed his donation every year around the end of June. But he said he will “wait and see what unfolds” in the Justice Department's documents and congressional hearings on their contents. He noted the foundation is “sitting” on a large endowment, which totals $86 billion, and said Gates has “plenty of his own money.”

“So, in any event, I’ll just wait and see. And there’s three and a half million, or whatever it is pages – I mean, it is astounding,” Buffett said of the Epstein files.

A Gates Foundation spokesperson described Buffett as “an extraordinarily generous partner” for nearly two decades in a statement Wednesday to the Associated Press.

“We are deeply grateful for his support, which has enabled us to accelerate progress on some of the world’s toughest challenges that would not otherwise have been possible,” the spokesperson said.

The Gates Foundation expects its board and management will receive an update on the Epstein review this summer. The third-party investigators have not been publicly named.

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The Associated Press receives financial support for news coverage in Africa from the Gates Foundation and for news coverage of women in the workforce and statehouses from Melinda French Gates’ organization, Pivotal Ventures. ___

Associated Press coverage of philanthropy and nonprofits receives support through the AP’s collaboration with The Conversation US, with funding from Lilly Endowment Inc. The AP is solely responsible for this content. For all of AP’s philanthropy coverage, visit https://apnews.com/hub/philanthropy.

La Guardia Nacional se unió al Servicio Forestal de Florida y a Broward Sheriff Fire Rescue en el combate del fuego.

“Esto es los Everglades, es algo difícil de operar, tienes que mantenerte en los diques … Estamos haciendo lo mejor que podemos,” dijo Kevin MacEwen, gerente del distrito Everglades del FFS y supervisor del área forestal.

Las cuadrillas habían contenido alrededor del 50% del incendio el miércoles, según el Servicio Forestal de Florida. El viento está alejando el humo del condado Broward.

El incendio masivo ocurre mientras una sequía histórica tiene al Servicio Forestal de Florida combatiendo más incendios forestales de lo habitual en todo el estado.

Weather Authority a las 12 p.m.

Historia relacionada: Incendios forestales se unen cerca de la autopista U.S. 27 en Broward

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The National Guard joined the Florida Forest Service and Broward Sheriff Fire Rescue in the firefight.

“This is the Everglades, it’s kind of hard to operate in, you have to stay on the levees ... We are doing the best we can,” said Kevin MacEwen, the FFS Everglades District manager and forest area supervisor.

The crews had contained about 50% of the fire on Wednesday, according to the Florida Forest Service. The wind is blowing the smoke away from Broward County.

The massive fire comes as a historic drought has the Florida Forest Service fighting more brush fires than usual statewide.

Weather Authority at 12 p.m.

Related story: Brush fires join near U.S. Highway 27 in Broward

El presidente de Brasil, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, está acelerando su apuesta por la reelección a los 80 años al mostrarse fornido en entrenamientos que, según sus críticos, son más populares que el propio mandatario.

Mientras los brasileños están divididos sobre si debería postularse para un cuarto mandato no consecutivo, existe un inusual consenso respecto de su compromiso de correr en una cinta todos los días.

“Es un poco mayor para hacer campaña otra vez. Sería mejor que se postulara otra persona. Pero sus entrenamientos sí son un buen ejemplo para gente como yo”, comentó Marcela Peres, de 63 años, mientras se ejercitaba en el gimnasio de un hotel en Brasilia el miércoles.

El intento de Lula de mostrarse lleno de energía ha llevado a su principal rival, el senador Flávio Bolsonaro, hijo del expresidente Jair Bolsonaro, a exhibir también sus movimientos.

Algunos votantes han expresado preocupación de que Lula pudiera seguir el camino del expresidente de Estados Unidos Joe Biden, quien se retiró de la contienda de 2024 por dudas sobre su salud y su edad. Pero Lula está ejercitando los músculos para desafiar a sus simpatizantes a que vuelvan a acompañarlo.

“Uno de estos idiotas dijo que no era yo, que era un clon”, declaró Lula en marzo, días después de que su esposa, Rosângela da Silva, publicó un video de su rutina de entrenamiento. “Vayan al gimnasio. Prepárense. Beban menos y trabajen para ver qué pasa. Quiero vivir 120 años”.

Su principal rival tiene casi la mitad de su edad

El presidente jugó fútbol con frecuencia durante sus dos primeros mandatos, mantuvo una rutina de ejercicios durante sus 580 días en prisión y ha defendido el ejercicio desde que se postuló en 2022 para derrotar al entonces presidente Bolsonaro, un excapitán del Ejército con mala salud.

Si Lula gana en octubre, superará su propio récord como el hombre de mayor edad en ser elegido presidente de Brasil.

Su principal rival tiene casi la mitad de su edad.

Bolsonaro, el hijo de 45 años del expresidente, se burló recientemente de Lula al compararlo con un viejo Chevrolet Opala que está “todo al revés” y “bebe mucho (combustible)”.

Lula, que ha aparecido en casi todas las boletas presidenciales desde el fin de la dictadura militar en 1985, restó importancia al insulto al describirse, en cambio, como un “auto turbo”.

“Está haciendo esto para alejarse del efecto Joe Biden”, señaló Carlos Melo, profesor de ciencia política en la universidad Insper, en Sao Paulo. “Flávio Bolsonaro intenta decir que en realidad él es el joven. Esto es un juego de imagen”.

La población votante de Brasil está envejeciendo

Bolsonaro hijo también está dando señales de que está en buena forma al compartir videos de él corriendo distancias cortas hacia reuniones y bailando en el escenario.

Este lado de su personalidad se hizo evidente recién en diciembre, cuando su padre lo ungió como candidato presidencial desde la cárcel en la capital, Brasilia, donde cumplía una condena de 27 años por liderar un intento de golpe de Estado antes de pasar a arresto domiciliario.

El consultor Felipe Soutello, quien dirigió varias campañas para políticos en Brasil, afirmó que hoy las postulaciones a cargos públicos deben mostrar a los candidatos en movimiento, sin importar la edad.

“La oposición usará cierto edadismo, un poco de prejuicio contra las generaciones mayores, como herramienta para perjudicar el desempeño del presidente”, manifestó Soutello.

Pero señaló que Brasil atraviesa un cambio demográfico, en el que los votantes mayores de 60 años representan una cuarta parte del electorado. “Ellos tienen más peso político que los jóvenes”, sostuvo.

La cantidad de brasileños mayores de 60 años habilitados para votar creció de 20,8 millones en 2010 a 36,2 millones en marzo de este año, según el investigador Nexus, que citó cifras del máximo tribunal electoral de Brasil.

El músico Antonio Moreira, de 50 años, ama entrenar en la playa en Rio de Janeiro, luciendo sus músculos, su bronceado y sus tatuajes. Forma parte de un grupo pequeño e influyente que podría decidir la elección: los votantes que aún no se comprometen ni con Lula ni con Bolsonaro.

En la última elección, Lula ganó con apenas el 50,9% de los votos, el margen más estrecho en la historia del país.

“Nadie quiere votar por un presidente que va tropezando”, dijo Moreira, y añadió que los entrenamientos de Lula también animan a las personas mayores a mantenerse activas.

Sobre los movimientos de Bolsonaro, Moreira afirmó que “un pequeño baile puede definir toda una carrera política” en Brasil. Pero eso no alcanza.

“Está bien hacerlo como lo hacen para buscar votos, pero para llegar a otro tipo de votante tiene que haber propuestas más reales, ¿no?”.

________

Lucas Dumphreys contribuyó a este reportaje desde Río de Janeiro.

________

Esta historia fue traducida del inglés por un editor de AP con la ayuda de una herramienta de inteligencia artificial generativa.

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Hudson, of Titusville, is charged federally as an adult in the death of Anna Kepner, 18.

Her body was found under a bed in a Carnival Horizon room that she was sharing with him and another teen during a family trip in November. The ship was in international waters and bound for Miami.

The Miami-Dade Medical Examiner’s Office determined the the cause of her Nov. 6 death to be mechanical asphyxia, which is when an object or force stops someone from breathing.

Hudson is charged with murder and aggravated sexual abuse. He has been free in the care of an uncle since his arrest in February, though prosecutors now want a judge to lock him up while the case unfolds. That issue is unsettled.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Alejandra Lopez said, “Sorry. No comment. You can call our public affairs officer,” when asked about the case.

Records and hearings in the case were closed to the public for weeks because Hudson was initially charged as a minor. But U.S. District Judge Beth Bloom granted the government’s request to have him prosecuted as an adult. The case was unsealed on April 10.

Hudson, as of Wednesday, was in the custody of his uncle. Prosecutors have said that they’d like to see him behind bars, but that matter was not addressed in court.

Hudson, de Titusville, enfrenta cargos federales como adulto por la muerte de Anna Kepner, de 18 años.

Su cuerpo fue encontrado debajo de una cama en una habitación del Carnival Horizon que compartía con él y otro adolescente durante un viaje familiar en noviembre. El barco estaba en aguas internacionales y se dirigía a Miami.

La Oficina del Médico Forense de Miami-Dade determinó que la causa de su muerte el 6 de noviembre fue asfixia mecánica, lo que ocurre cuando un objeto o fuerza impide que alguien respire.

Hudson enfrenta cargos de asesinato y abuso sexual agravado. Ha permanecido en libertad bajo el cuidado de un tío desde su arresto en febrero, aunque los fiscales ahora quieren que un juez ordene su detención mientras avanza el caso. Ese asunto sigue sin resolverse.

La fiscal federal adjunta Alejandra Lopez dijo: “Lo siento. Sin comentarios. Puede llamar a nuestro oficial de asuntos públicos,” cuando se le preguntó sobre el caso.

Los registros y audiencias del caso estuvieron cerrados al público durante semanas porque Hudson fue acusado inicialmente como menor. Pero la jueza federal Beth Bloom aprobó la solicitud del gobierno para que fuera procesado como adulto. El caso fue desclasificado el 10 de abril.

Hasta el miércoles, Hudson permanecía bajo la custodia de su tío. Los fiscales han dicho que desean verlo tras las rejas, pero ese tema no fue abordado en el tribunal.

Según la policía de Miami Beach, los agentes respondieron a la cuadra 1400 de Ocean Drive alrededor de las 9:14 p.m. del martes, donde el conductor dejó a los sospechosos.

Los sospechosos han sido identificados como Ashton Montanez, de 22 años, de Orlando, y Jefferson Mesidor, de 25 años, de Miami.

Según el informe de arresto de Montanez, es un influencer que actualmente vive en las calles de Miami.

La policía dijo que el conductor les indicó que es conductor de Lyft y que recogía un viaje el martes por la noche en Bay Harbor Terrace, en Bay Harbor Islands, cuando notó una gran presencia policial.

Dijo que luego vio a dos hombres corriendo hacia su vehículo y abriendo la puerta.

Según el informe, Montanez y Mesidor se recostaron dentro del vehículo en un intento de ocultarse antes de que Montanez le pasara lo que el conductor creía que era un arma a Mesidor.

La policía dijo que el dúo obligó a la víctima a conducirlos hasta Miami Beach.

La víctima dijo a la policía que en un momento consideró saltar del vehículo en movimiento, pero temía que le dispararan.

Según el informe, ambos sospechosos salieron del vehículo en la cuadra 1400 de Ocean Drive y entraron a un edificio residencial.

Testigos dijeron a Local 10 que el edificio está lleno de alquileres a corto plazo, incluidos Airbnbs.

“Regresamos alrededor de la 1 en punto y toda la calle estaba bloqueada, muchos policías. Seguían diciendo: ‘Oh, serán otros 40 minutos,’” dijo Andrew Galizia, quien visita desde Boston. “Dijeron eso como cuatro veces y luego esperamos. Había mucha acción aquí, así que nos movimos a este lado, y de repente ves al equipo SWAT completamente armado, perros y gafas infrarrojas … yo estaba como, ‘¿Qué está pasando realmente?’”

Las autoridades dijeron que Mesidor salió del edificio y fue localizado rápidamente por la policía en la cuadra 1500 de Ocean Drive, mientras Montanez permanecía atrincherado dentro.

Una persona que se hospedaba en una de las unidades de alquiler dijo que pasó horas esperando en el vestíbulo de un hotel cercano.

“Nos hospedábamos en un Airbnb y creo que había muchas personas en Airbnbs allí, así que fue una inconveniencia para mucha gente,” dijo.

Montanez fue finalmente detenido alrededor de la 1:08 a.m. del miércoles, confirmó la policía.

Familias que se hospedaban en el edificio dijeron que fueron tomadas por sorpresa por la presencia policial.

“No se acercaron demasiado al edificio, pero lo habían rodeado, y de repente entraron aquí y comenzaron a tocar las puertas diciendo que teníamos que evacuar,” dijo Tierra Esquerre.

Detectives fueron vistos recolectando evidencia, tratando de reconstruir exactamente qué llevó a que el conductor fuera amenazado con un arma.

“Estaba bastante asustada,” dijo Esquerre. “Llamé a mi abuelo. Lloré porque cuando llegaron con los hombres en la camioneta, eso fue bastante intenso, así que fue aterrador.”

La policía de Miami Beach dijo que la investigación continúa y está siendo liderada por el Departamento de Policía de Bay Harbor Islands.

“MBPD continuará apoyando a BHPD según sea necesario,” dijo un portavoz de MBPD en un correo electrónico a Local 10 News.

Tanto Montanez como Mesidor enfrentan cargos de secuestro.

Hasta la tarde del miércoles, ambos permanecían detenidos en el Centro Correccional Turner Guilford Knight. Los registros en línea de la cárcel indicaban que su fianza estaba “por establecer.”

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In the video, the suspect, Eduardo Rivero, is seen ramming a police car and then taking off in a vehicle with children inside.

The incident happened in October of last year.

Miami police said they noticed a driver in a car they had been searching for.

When police tried to pull him over, they noticed a woman and two children inside.

That’s when they say Rivero placed the car in reverse and intentionally rammed a detective in an unmarked police unit.

Police said Rivero then put the car in drive and hit two other police vehicles multiple times.

But when he couldn’t get the vehicle out of the area, he got out and started running, authorities said.

Police said when officers searched his car, they found two guns and a stolen license plate with Velcro on the back in order to quickly attach or remove it from different vehicles.

The video also shows the woman, who was in the car with her kids, talking to police.

Police said Rivero was identified as a sex offender and was already on probation until 2029 after being convicted of sexually battering a victim under the age of 12.

Because of that conviction, he’s not supposed to be within 1,000 feet of children.

Police said Rivero’s driver’s license had also been expired since 2023.

He faces numerous charges, including battery against a law enforcement officer and child abuse.

En el video, el sospechoso, Eduardo Rivero, es visto chocando contra una patrulla y luego huyendo en un vehículo con niños dentro.

El incidente ocurrió en octubre del año pasado.

La policía de Miami dijo que detectaron a un conductor en un vehículo que estaban buscando.

Cuando los agentes intentaron detenerlo, notaron que había una mujer y dos niños dentro.

En ese momento, según la policía, Rivero puso el vehículo en reversa y embistió intencionalmente a un detective en una unidad policial sin identificar.

La policía dijo que luego Rivero puso el vehículo en marcha y chocó contra otros dos vehículos policiales múltiples veces.

Pero cuando no pudo sacar el vehículo del área, se bajó y comenzó a correr, dijeron las autoridades.

La policía indicó que al revisar el vehículo encontraron dos armas y una placa robada con velcro en la parte trasera para poder colocarla o quitarla rápidamente de diferentes vehículos.

El video también muestra a la mujer, que estaba en el auto con sus hijos, hablando con la policía.

La policía dijo que Rivero fue identificado como agresor sexual y ya estaba en libertad condicional hasta 2029 tras ser condenado por agresión sexual contra una víctima menor de 12 años.

Debido a esa condena, no puede estar a menos de 1,000 pies de niños.

La policía dijo que la licencia de conducir de Rivero también estaba vencida desde 2023.

Enfrenta múltiples cargos, incluyendo agresión contra un agente del orden y abuso infantil.

El imputado fue identificado como Brayan Ferney Cruz Castillo, quien quedó detenido a disposición de un juzgado federal que intervendrá en el proceso de extradición, informó el miércoles Ministerio Público Fiscal de Argentina en un comunicado.

Cruz Castillo tenía una notificación roja de Interpol y un pedido de captura internacional emitido por Colombia por su presunta colaboración “en aspectos logísticos” del crimen del senador colombiano. Fue arrestado la víspera en la capital argentina por agentes de la división de investigación federal de fugitivos y extradiciones.

Uribe Turbay fue baleado en junio de 2025 cuando daba un discurso en un parque de Bogotá y falleció casi dos meses después a causa de las heridas. Tenía 39 años.

El ataque, que quedó grabado en video, conmocionó a un país que recordó las oscuras épocas en las que candidatos presidenciales y figuras de alto nivel eran secuestrados o asesinados por cárteles del narcotráfico y grupos insurgentes en las décadas de 1980 y 1990.

La justicia colombiana determinó que el magnicidio del senador fue ordenado por miembros de la Segunda Marquetalia, una disidencia de la antigua guerrilla Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (FARC), y perpetuado en complicidad con una red delictiva urbana.

La fiscalía a cargo del caso sostuvo que el asesinato de Uribe Turbay estuvo orientado a “generar un impacto sobre la democracia y los procesos políticos del país”.

Una decena de personas fueron capturadas, incluido el tirador que aceptó los delitos y que, por ser menor de edad, recibió una sanción en un centro especial, además de presuntos cómplices que ayudaron en la logística y la planeación.

Según la Dirección Nacional de Migraciones de Argentina, Cruz Castillo se encontraba en situación irregular en el país y tenía una orden de expulsión vigente por haber estado implicado en una causa por robo en la capital argentina.

Según un informe de arresto, Vanessa Caridad-Rodriguez fue detenida el martes tras una investigación sobre entregas desaparecidas entre el 16 y el 23 de febrero en el complejo Quantum on the Bay, ubicado en 1900 N. Bayshore Dr., en el vecindario Edgewater de Miami.

Los residentes comenzaron a reportar paquetes desaparecidos del cuarto de paquetes del edificio, lo que llevó al supervisor a revisar las cámaras de vigilancia tras múltiples quejas, indica el informe.

Los investigadores dijeron que el video del 16 de febrero muestra bolsas naranjas de entrega de Amazon dejadas fuera del cuarto de paquetes porque estaba “lleno” y colocadas cerca de una puerta trasera de carga que estaba defectuosa y no asegurada correctamente.

Según el informe, las cámaras de vigilancia muestran una camioneta pickup Ford blanca entrando al área de carga.

Una mujer, posteriormente identificada por la policía de Miami como Caridad-Rodriguez, salió del lado del conductor, mientras un pasajero masculino, identificado luego como Jose Luis Perez, salió del vehículo.

El informe indica que Perez, de 50 años, abrió una puerta de acceso trasera y retiró una bolsa de entrega naranja que contenía paquetes, colocándola en la caja de la camioneta, mientras Caridad-Rodriguez retiraba paquetes adicionales. Ambos luego abandonaron el lugar en la camioneta.

La administración del edificio informó a los investigadores que ninguno de los sospechosos tenía permiso para tomar los paquetes.

Caridad-Rodriguez fue identificada después de que los investigadores vincularan el vehículo a una parada de tráfico ese mismo día en West Miami, donde fue arrestada por conducir sin una licencia válida y la camioneta fue incautada, según el informe. La policía indicó que Perez era el pasajero durante esa parada.

Posteriormente, los investigadores recuperaron una peluca rubia del vehículo durante un registro, la cual, según dijeron, era “consistente con la peluca utilizada por la sospechosa durante el incidente.”

Un análisis de huellas latentes también vinculó a Caridad-Rodriguez con una huella recuperada de una caja de Grey Goose encontrada dentro del vehículo, según su informe de arresto.

Perez, quien fue arrestado anteriormente en la investigación, admitió tras Miranda que él y Caridad-Rodriguez ingresaron a la propiedad y retiraron paquetes “sin permiso,” según el informe.

También la identificó como su novia en ese momento y dijo que ella estaba familiarizada con la distribución del edificio debido a un empleo previo en un consultorio dental en ese mismo complejo.

Caridad-Rodriguez enfrenta cargos que incluyen robo a una estructura desocupada y hurto menor entre $150 y $750 USD, según los registros de la cárcel.

Hasta el miércoles, permanecía detenida en el Centro Correccional Turner Guilford Knight, donde su fianza figuraba como “por establecer,” mientras que Perez permanecía detenido en el Centro de Detención Metrowest con una fianza de $10,100 USD.

Scott, who was seeking his 13th term in Congress despite challenges from within his party, was once a leading voice for Democrats on issues related to farm aid policy and food aid for consumers and a prominent Black member of the party’s moderate Blue Dog caucus. But he faced criticism and concerns in recent years because of declining health, enduring a primary challenge in 2024 and facing another one at the time of his death.

Democrats on Capitol Hill praised the longtime lawmaker.

“The news of Congressman Scott’s passing is deeply sad,” House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries told reporters on Wednesday.

“David Scott was a trailblazer who served the district that he represented admirably, rose up from humble beginnings to become the first African American ever to chair the House Ag Committee,” Jeffries said. “He cared about the people that he represented. He was fiercely committed to getting things done for the people of the great state of Georgia, and he’ll be deeply missed.”

News of Scott’s death came during the Congressional Black Caucus’ weekly luncheon on Capitol Hill. The Black Caucus’ chair, Rep. Yvette Clarke, told lawmakers at the outset of the meeting.

The White House lowered its flags to half-staff after Scott’s death.

Death creates another vacancy

Scott’s death slightly widens Republicans’ narrow House majority going into the thick of this midterm election year The GOP began the current Congress with a 220-215 advantage, but the margin has fluctuated. Scott is the fourth House Democrat to die in office during this Congress.

Scott had been mostly absent from the campaign trail in 2024 and 2026 and had become a noted example of Democrats' aging leadership targeted by younger generations of the left. He dodged questions from reporters when he qualified for another term in March, but he earlier dismissed pressure to retire.

“Thank God I’m in good health, moving and doing the people’s work,” the congressman said in 2024.

His wife and campaign adviser Alfredia Scott was even more direct. “When the congressman decides to leave, he won’t be pushed out,” she said in 2024. “He will bow out.”

State officials will have to schedule a special election to fill out the rest of Scott’s term, which could overlap with elections to choose a representative for the next two-year term. Early in-person voting starts Monday for May 19 party primaries for the next full term.

Scott was a pioneering Black lawmaker

David Albert Scott was born in rural Aynor, South Carolina, on June 27, 1945, in the era of Jim Crow segregation. He spent part of his childhood in Scranton, Pennsylvania, along with stints New York and Florida. Scott graduated from Florida A&M University, one of the nation's largest historically Black college campuses — and in office he was an outspoken advocate for federal support of HBCUs. Scott also earned an MBA from the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School in 1969.

He settled in Atlanta, opened his own advertising business and got his start in politics as a staffer on Andrew Young's 1972 congressional campaign. Young would go on to be Atlanta mayor and United Nations ambassador under President Jimmy Carter, another Georgian.

The support of Young and baseball legend Henry “Hank” Aaron, who was the older brother of Scott's wife, helped launch Scott into Congress in 2002, said Democratic state Sen. Emanuel Jones. He was opposing Scott in the May 19 primary, although he called Scott "a good friend."

Scott was one of a pioneering generation of Black state lawmakers in Georgia, winning election to the state House in 1974 and the state Senate in 1982 before being elected to Congress. Once identifying as a moderate "Blue Dog" — Scott had sponsored a law mandating a moment of silent school prayer in the state Senate — he evolved into a more mainstream liberal.

An advocate for historically Black schools

Scott served decades in Congress while living outside his district after maps were redrawn. He maintained support, focusing intently on constituent service including hosting job and health fairs.

Among his notable achievements on Capitol Hill, Scott secured $80 million for historically Black land-grant schools as part of the 2018 Farm Bill. The money was steered to agriculture-related scholarships at 19 campuses. He helped author various housing and mortgage aid measures, and he pushed for better health care and other benefits for veterans and their families. On foreign policy, Scott was an outspoken advocate for NATO and post-World War II American alliances.

Scott's fellow Democrats ousted him from his post as ranking minority member on the Agriculture Committee in 2024 amid concerns about his age and health.

Scott is survived by Alfredia Scott, the couple's two adult daughters and grandchildren.

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Brown reported from Washington.

State-funded preschool enrollment in the U.S. rose to 1.8 million kids, reaching 37% of 4-year-olds and about 10% of 3-year-olds, according to an annual report published Wednesday by the National Institute of Early Education Research. In total, states added 44,000 students to their preschool enrollment. But the report's authors noted that the gains were smaller than the year prior and said preschool access remains wildly uneven from state to state. Some states even lost ground.

“If providing high-quality preschool education to all 3- and 4-year-olds were a race,” the authors wrote, “some states are nearing the finish line, others have stumbled and fallen behind, and a few have yet to leave the starting line.”

Free preschool has expanded in California

More than half the nation's public preschool enrollment gain — some 25,000 students — came in California, which this year made every 4-year-old eligible for its “ transitional kindergarten ” program, or “TK.” The rapid rollout has had its tradeoffs. The national institute outlines 10 quality benchmarks for preschools, related to teacher training, class size and curriculum. California met just two of them last school year. And private preschool owners say the rush of 4-year-olds joining public schools threatens to cripple their businesses.

“Universal TK ... is a real win, but it’s also just the start of the work and not the end of it,” said Jessica Sawko of Children Now, which advocates on early childhood issues in California. She noted that the state will hit two more quality benchmarks in next year's report, by lowering its student-teacher ratio to 10-to-1 and by requiring lead teachers to have early education training.

The report illustrates some of the difficult tradeoffs states face when they scale up programs quickly or have limited funding. Hawaii is one of six states that meet all the institute's benchmarks. Its state preschool program also only serves 10% of 4-year-olds.

Evidence is mounting that the impact of high-quality preschool can follow children into adulthood, making them better prepared for kindergarten, more likely to graduate high school and more likely to find work. And it is increasingly seen as essential for success in kindergarten and beyond. Educators now also expect youngsters to start their first year of school already equipped to navigate kindergarten.

“We have a lot of kids who still do not fulfill their potential,” said Steven Barnett, founder and director of the early education institute. “We have evidence — very strong evidence — that preschool programs substantially improved the foundation for later success.”

Some states also recognize that free prekindergarten can make a difference for the wider economy, allowing parents to return to work at a time when private child care is becoming less affordable.

Preschool means confident kindergartners

Heather Sufuentes witnessed the impact of preschool when she was principal of Parkview Elementary in Chico, California, as it began its transitional kindergarten program. She said students who attended the program, which has a play-based curriculum and runs the length of a workday, arrived with more confidence and often volunteered to be class leaders.

“They're well prepared to transition into that big elementary school setting,” said Sufuentes, now director of elementary education for Chico Unified School District. Chico has more than doubled the number of TK seats it offers since 2022.

Marisol Márquez, a secretary who works for the state, sends her daughter to transitional kindergarten at 1st Street Elementary in Los Angeles. She had been sending her for free to a learning center underwritten by COVID-19 relief funding. But she would have had to start paying tuition this year, and she's not sure how she and her husband, a UPS driver, would have made it work. She was elated to hear 1st Street Elementary was offering free transitional kindergarten.

Educators there quickly discovered her daughter was bright and began sending her to kindergarten for math and reading lessons.

“If it hadn’t been for this program, we would have never found that out," Márquez said.

In some states, preschool is expensive. In others, it's free

Despite the raised expectations for 5-year-olds, no state mandates that children attend preschool, and only some cities and states make it accessible to every 4-year-old. Preschool offerings differ vastly. A family living in Wyoming, which has no state-funded preschool, could move to Colorado, where every parent can send their 4-year-old to part-time preschool without paying a dime in tuition. In the District of Columbia, even affluent families have access to two full years of prekindergarten, while neighboring Virginia has a far less robust program.

The uneven access across states can exacerbate disparities. Wealthier families can often afford private preschool tuition, regardless of what their state offers. In 2024, private child care centers, which often use preschool curriculum, averaged annual tuition of more than $12,000 for 4-year-olds, according to Child Care Aware of America.

For families that can't afford preschool tuition, the options can be limited. State-funded preschool programs often have waitlists.

If a family's earnings are low enough, they can qualify for programs like Head Start, which provides early education for the neediest Americans. But the number of children in Head Start is falling, in part due to staff shortages. Lower-income families may also qualify for state or federal child care subsidies that can help with private preschool, but those have growing waitlists, too.

Trump says states should pay

Federal support for expanding early education funding is sparse and shrinking. Recently, President Donald Trump said the federal government couldn’t afford to support child care while it was waging a war with Iran.

“We’re fighting wars. We can’t take care of day care,” Trump said. States, he added, “should pay for it. ... They’ll have to raise their taxes.”

The map of states that offer the highest-quality public preschool programs would surprise some partisans. Republican-led states have pioneered universal prekindergarten, with Oklahoma introducing it in the late 1990s. Alabama and West Virginia also have preschool-for-all programs that receive top marks. Wealthier, Democratic-led states have lagged behind, even as many blue-leaning cities have moved ahead with their own initiatives. New York state lost enrollment last school year, even as New York City, which already has universal prekindergarten, is charging ahead with a plan to make all child care free for younger children.

And Georgia, another state with Republican leadership, is the first to have a universal preschool program that meets all quality benchmarks set by the National Institute of Early Education Research.

Rebecca Ellis's son John Patrick, 5, attends the private Capitol Hill Child Enrichment Center in Atlanta free of charge, thanks to the state's preschool-for-all program. She said it saved her family a huge amount of money, and she is impressed by how much her son has grown socially and emotionally.

“They focus so much on just helping kids learn how to calm down, to make friends, to regulate their feelings, to solve problems,” Ellis said.

John Patrick and her older son, who attended the same preschool, have even given their parents advice. When they become agitated, the children urge them to take deep breaths.

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The Associated Press’ education coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org.

Mario Bustamante Leiva did not recognize Noem when he grabbed her Gucci handbag from the floor of a restaurant where she was eating with her family in April 2025, according to the U.S. attorney's office. Noem’s purse had credit cards and about $3,000 in cash. Police recovered it from Leiva's motel room.

Bustamante Leiva, a 50-year-old native of Chile, is facing deportation after his sentence imposed by U.S. District Judge Trevor McFadden.

“Bustamante Leiva came to Washington illegally to prey on citizens of the district,” said Jeanine Pirro, U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, in a statement. “His pattern of theft ends here.”

Noem, who is identified only by her initials in court filings, acknowledged the incident in a statement last year that referred to Bustamante Leiva as a “a career criminal who has been in our country illegally for years.”

He pleaded guilty in November to three counts of wire fraud and one count of first-degree theft. He was charged and convicted of robbing two other people and charging fraudulent purchases to their credit cards.

Bustamante Leiva was charged along with a second suspect, Cristian Montecino-Sananza, who was sentenced in March to 13 months of incarceration for his role in one of the other thefts.

Investigators said they identified Bustamante Leiva as a suspect in the thefts after he used a stolen gift card to make a purchase.

Event organizers said the five-day camps focus on skill development, teamwork and leadership.

Campers will also receive giveaways and have opportunities to meet Heat players and team alumni.

Locations include SLAM Miami High School, Cooper City High School, the Kaseya Center, Nova Southeastern University and a new site at Deerfield Beach’s Pick-A-Ball Sports Complex.

Camp prices start at $520, with an early-bird rate of $420 available through April 24. More information is available at HEAT.com/JrHEAT.

Read the full summer schedule here:

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According to an arrest report from the Miami-Dade Sheriff’s Office, deputies responding to the crash at Northwest 72nd Avenue and 47th Street around 6 a.m. on Dec 30, 2025, found Martin “unsteady on his feet, with (bloodshot) watery eyes and slurred speech” and detected the odor of alcohol.

Local 10 obtained video that shows MDSO deputies arriving to the crash scene.

A garbage truck can be seen pushed off to the side of the road following the collision.

Ahead of it is Martin’s truck, with visible front-end damage as investigators work to determine what led up to the crash.

In the video, deputies can be seen speaking with Martin, 45, and asking if he is OK. He then informs them he is a Hialeah police officer.

The next video shows an interaction between a witness and investigators, who ask whether the witness saw Martin driving the truck.

Another clip shows Martin in handcuffs as he is placed into the back of an MDSO patrol car.

Authorities said Martin had been involved in a crash with a trash truck and was later handcuffed after becoming “belligerent” toward fellow law enforcement officers.

Deputies said medics transported Martin to Jackson West Medical Center, where a DUI investigator attempted to interview him.

According to the report, Martin was “uncooperative” and repeatedly responded “I don’t know” when asked basic questions, including whether he knew what was going on or if he had been in a crash.

Deputies said he refused field sobriety tests and also declined a blood draw, prompting investigators to seize his driver’s license under Florida’s implied consent law.

Martin had been placed on administrative leave following the crash.

A Hialeah Police Department spokesperson on Wednesday told Local 10 News that he “remains on administrative duties.”

Sheinbaum's comments came after days of contradictions by authorities following the death of two U.S. officials in a vehicle crash over the weekend as they returned from destroying a clandestine drug lab in northern Mexico. The CIA’s involvement was confirmed Tuesday to The Associated Press by a U.S. official and two other people familiar with the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive intelligence matters.

“There cannot be agents from any U.S. government institution operating in the Mexican field,” Sheinbaum said during her morning news briefing. She said that such activities aren't part of the current security protocols or the formal understanding between Mexico and the United States.

Two Mexican investigators also were killed in the crash, which Mexican authorities said occurred while the convoy was returning from an operation to destroy drug labs of criminal groups. There have been discrepancies in the public accounts of what happened from U.S. and Mexican officials, which experts say underscores heightened U.S. involvement in security operations in Mexico and across the region.

Sheinbaum acknowledged Wednesday that the Mexican army participated in the operation — as its mandate includes supporting individual states. However, she emphasized that the federal government was unaware of the U.S. agents’ presence.

Sheinbaum ruled out the possibility that the incident constitutes a new strategy by the Trump administration, which has demanded greater action from Mexico in the fight against drug cartels.

Later in the day, Security Secretary Omar García Harfuch said at a news conference that while Mexico's federal government constantly exchanges information with the U.S., foreign “agents have never been in the field with us."

Sheinbaum said that she sent a letter to the U.S. ambassador requesting that he provide all available information regarding the incident. She also said that she plans to speak with Chihuahua Gov. María Eugenia Campos.

“It is very important that something like this not be allowed to go unaddressed,” she said.

U.S. President Donald Trump has repeatedly proposed to take action on Mexican cartels — an intervention that Sheinbaum has said is “unnecessary.”

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David Klepper and Aamer Madhani in Washington, and Fabiola Sánchez in Mexico City, contributed to this report.

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Follow AP’s coverage of Latin America and the Caribbean at https://apnews.com/hub/latin-america

Royals owner John Sherman was joined by Hallmark chairman Don Hall Jr., Missouri Gov. Mike Kehoe and Kansas City Mayor Quinton Lucas, along with other local and state dignitaries, in making the announcement Wednesday near Hallmark headquarters.

While the finalized master plan has yet to be complete, Sherman said the $1.9 billion stadium would break ground next year in the middle of Crown Center as part of the first phase of an 85-acre project. Two-thirds of the funding will come from private sources and the remaining one-third from public partners, including money earmarked by the state for stadium projects.

“This is a partnership between two treasured Kansas City institutions,” Sherman said. “We are committed to creating a vision which honors our history, the rich past of both organizations, while reinvigorating and reimagining what our future can be together.”

The announcement came about a week after Kansas City officials passed an ordinance authorizing City Manager Mario Vasquez to negotiate a $600 million deal to help the Royals move downtown. Most believed the stadium would sit on Washington Square Park, which is next to Union Station, but it will instead be located just south of it, with the park featured in the development.

Hallmark intends to build a new headquarters in the area, which is connected by a streetcar to the Power & Light District, where the T-Mobile Center serves as its anchor. That part of downtown Kansas City will provide the backdrop beyond the outfield fence.

Officials touted the availability of public parking already in the area and convenient traffic flow from nearby highways.

Missouri's contribution comes from a law enacted last year that authorized bonds covering up to 50% of the cost of new or renovated stadiums in the state, plus up to $50 million of tax credits for each stadium and unspecified aid from local governments.

“We think it's a great investment for our Missouri taxpayers, because this does not affect existing programs,” Kehoe said. “The ripple effect from this facility will truly be far-reaching into rural Missouri and other parts of the state.”

The Royals have insisted they would leave Kauffman Stadium when their lease expires at the Truman Sports Complex in 2031, and the intention of Sherman ever since purchasing the club in 2019 was to build a downtown ballpark as its replacement.

Yet reaching Wednesday's announcement did not come without plenty of pitfalls.

The biggest stumbling block came in April 2024, when the Chiefs joined the Royals in a plan to renovate Arrowhead Stadium and replace Kauffman Stadium. The plan hinged on the extension of a sales tax that had been paying for stadium upkeep, and voters in Jackson County, Missouri, overwhelmingly rejected the proposal, forcing the franchises to go their own way.

The legislature in neighboring Kansas aggressively pursued the Chiefs, committing last December to issuing $2.4 billion in bonds to cover 60% of the cost of a new $3 billion domed stadium in Kansas City, Kansas. The NFL franchise ultimately decided to move across the state line, where it also will build a new training facility in the nearby suburb of Olathe, Kansas.

Officials in Kansas briefly pursued the Royals, too, but their interest in the MLB franchise had always been lukewarm.

The Royals had been weighing several options in recent months. But they ultimately rejected an option in the suburb of Overland Park, Kansas, and allowed a deadline to pass for a site north of downtown and across the Missouri River in Clay County, Missouri.

Economists have long concluded that subsidizing stadiums isn’t worth the cost for communities because the venues pull economic activity away from other parts of the area, rather than expanding the overall economy. Yet states and cities continually provide money to renovate stadiums or build new ones — 49 of the 60 used by MLB or NFL teams are publicly owned or sit on public land.

One of the stadiums that Sherman has cited as an example of what's possible in Kansas City is Truist Park in Atlanta.

The stadium was a public-private partnership in which the Cobb-Marietta Coliseum & Exhibit Hall Authority issued up to $397 million in bonds, the county raised millions more from transportation taxes and businesses added millions in cash. The Braves contributed the remaining money for the park and The Battery, a mixed-used development, with a total cost of more than $1.1 billion.

“There are many great ballpark neighborhoods in Major League Baseball,” Sherman said, “but this is a bigger project with more land in downtown and in the heart of the city. We are bringing a modern, state-of-the-art ballpark experience to our fans, closer to our public transportation and where more people work and live.”

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AP MLB: https://apnews.com/mlb

Chelsea confirmed his departure on Wednesday, less than four months into the job and just four days before it plays in an FA Cup semifinal at Wembley.

Assistant Calum McFarlane will take charge on an interim basis until the end of the season.

“This has not been a decision the club has taken lightly, however recent results and performances have fallen below the necessary standards with still so much more to play for this season,” Chelsea said in a statement.

The team that won the Club World Cup last year now looks likely to miss out on next season’s Champions League. That would mean a huge financial hit for a club that has spent billions of dollars under U.S. owners Clearlake Capital and Todd Boehly.

The five-game losing streak is its worst since 1912 — the same year the Titanic sank.

Tuesday’s 3-0 defeat to Brighton proved the last straw for Rosenior, an inexperienced coach at the highest level who was hired from Chelsea’s sister club Strasbourg in January. It was a seventh loss in eight games in all competitions.

Chelsea has won one of its last nine in the league, is seventh in the standings and seven points adrift of the top five, who all qualify for the Champions League.

Rosenior, 41, turned on his players following the Brighton match, saying the performance was “indefensible” and that “something needs to change drastically.”

The club’s hierarchy clearly agreed, despite saying Rosenior had “always conducted himself with the highest integrity and professionalism”.

Rosenior replaced Club World Cup-winning coach Enzo Maresca in January and only took charge of 23 games.

He started impressively with a run of six wins in seven games, but things unravelled quickly in recent weeks, including elimination from the Champions League at the hands of Paris Saint-Germain.

His tenure was brought to an end despite Chelsea preparing for its FA Cup semifinal against Leeds on Sunday.

Rosenior becomes the fifth permanent manager to lose his job since Clearlake and Boehly bought one of English soccer’s most storied clubs in 2022. Now the search is on for a sixth to try to bring sustained success.

“As the club works to bring stability to the head coach position, we will undertake a process of self-reflection to make the right long-term appointment,” Chelsea said.

Rosenior’s departure comes after fans of the two-time Champions League winner and six-time English champion began to protest against the U.S. owners.

While there have been trophies, the Club World Cup and Europa Conference League last season, this could be the third campaign out of four in which it has failed to qualify for the Champions League.

Under former owner Roman Abramovich, Chelsea was one of the most dominant teams in Europe, winning a full set of trophies, including two Champions Leagues and five Premier League titles.

It last won the Champions League in 2021, the year before Abramovich was forced to sell the club after being sanctioned by the British government in the wake of Russia’s war with Ukraine.

___

James Robson is at https://x.com/jamesalanrobson

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AP soccer: https://apnews.com/hub/soccer

The shooting happened on Feb. 18 in the area of Southwest 76th Street and 152nd Avenue.

Dashcam video released by officials shows a black Honda Civic that investigators said contained then-16-year-old Adrian Negron Vega and 17-year-old Camilo Buritica.

The video shows two other teens outside of the vehicle, and detectives said there was some kind of argument between the suspects and the victims.

As the two teenagers turned to walk away, a gun is seen sticking out of the passenger window and authorities said several shots were fired.

They said one of the teens was struck in the shoulder and ankle, and remains hospitalized in stable condition.

The alleged shooter, Negron Vega, is being charged as an adult with attempted murder.

Investigators said Buritica was behind the wheel of that Honda Civic.

He faced a judge on Wednesday at the Miami-Dade Children’s Courthouse and pled guilty to a felony charge of accessory after the fact.

Buritica faces up to 15 years in a state prison.

Bearman was traveling at around 190 mph (306 kph) when he veered off track and slammed into the barrier while trying to avoid Franco Colapinto's slower-moving car at last month's Japanese Grand Prix.

The difference in speed between the two was around 30 mph (50 kph) because of key features of the 2026 cars. Bearman was using his “boost” mode for extra electrical power while Colapinto was low on electrical charge.

“We’ve got sometimes cases when one car is deploying too little power because it’s charging up its batteries and another one is trying to overtake and approaching at quite a fast speed. That has been obviously a safety topic and we’ve been discussing how to resolve it,” Nikolas Tombazis, who's overseen the development and changes to the 2026 rules as single-seater director at the FIA, said in a video statement Wednesday.

Restricting the impact of the boost mode and cutting the maximum allowed electrical power on “specific parts of the circuits maybe where we have corners or where they’re a bit more twisty” could prevent a repeat, Tombazis argued. Bearman had been using the boost on a curved section as he approached Colapinto.

“So, in that respect, it means that the sort of problem we saw with Ollie Bearman’s crash in Suzuka should basically be avoided from the next race onwards.”

Bearman said on the “Up To Speed” podcast last week that the big difference in speed between him and Colapinto was an “unfortunate result of these regulations”, and that the Argentine driver should have left him more space because of that.

“I was lucky not to hit him. It would have been much, much worse if I did,” said the British driver.

Tombazis said the FIA would see how upcoming races go and push for more changes if needed. That usually needs the agreement of teams and engine manufacturers, but the FIA can intervene on its own on urgent safety grounds.

“It’s not now job done, we can all go on holiday," Tombazis said. "We will keep monitoring. We’ll keep reviewing and analyzing and so on. And, if there’s any further interventions needed, of course we won’t hesitate to take them.”

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AP auto racing: https://apnews.com/hub/auto-racing

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According to an arrest report, Vanessa Caridad-Rodriguez was taken into custody on Tuesday following an investigation into missing deliveries between Feb. 16 and Feb. 23 at the Quantum on the Bay condominium complex, located at 1900 N. Bayshore Dr., in Miami’s Edgewater neighborhood.

Residents began reporting missing packages from the building’s package room, prompting the supervisor to review surveillance footage after multiple complaints, the report states.

Investigators said video from Feb. 16 shows orange Amazon delivery bags left outside the package room because it was “full” and placed near a rear loading dock door that was malfunctioning and not properly secured.

According to the report, surveillance footage shows a white Ford pickup truck entering the loading dock area.

A woman, who Miami police later identified as Caridad-Rodriguez, exited the driver’s side while a male passenger, later identified as Jose Luis Perez, got out of the vehicle.

The report states Perez, 50, opened a rear access door and removed an orange delivery bag containing packages, placing it in the truck bed, while Caridad-Rodriguez removed additional packages. Both then left the scene in the pickup truck.

Building management told investigators neither suspect had permission to take the packages.

Caridad-Rodriguez was identified after investigators linked the vehicle to a traffic stop the same day in West Miami, where she was arrested for driving without a valid license and the truck was impounded, according to the report. Police listed Perez as the passenger during that stop.

Investigators later recovered a blonde wig from the vehicle during a search, which they said was “consistent with the wig used by the female suspect during the incident.”

A latent print analysis also matched Caridad-Rodriguez to a print recovered from a Grey Goose box found inside the vehicle, according to her arrest report.

Perez, who was arrested earlier in the investigation, admitted post-Miranda that he and Caridad-Rodriguez entered the property and removed packages “without permission,” according to the report.

He also identified her as his girlfriend at the time and said she was familiar with the building layout due to prior employment at a dental office in that same complex.

Caridad-Rodriguez is facing charges including burglary of an unoccupied structure and petit theft between $150 and $750, jail records show.

As of Wednesday, she was being held at the Turner Guilford Knight Correctional Center, where her bond was listed as “to be set,” while Perez was being held at the Metrowest Detention Center on a $10,100 bond.

This show is THE OFFICIAL Crypto.com Formula 1® Miami Grand Prix Kickoff Concert, launching one of the biggest race weeks of the year. Seminole Hard Rock Hotel & Casino Hollywood is a founding partner of the Formula 1® Crypto.com Miami Grand Prix.

Concert begins at 7:00 p.m.

Las autoridades dijeron que el sospechoso, Mauricio Jimenez, realizó al menos 4,500 órdenes no autorizadas por un total de alrededor de $55,000,000 USD en mercancía.

Según un informe de arresto, Jimenez, de 48 años, de Hialeah, trabajaba como gerente en el Home Depot ubicado en 7899 W Flagler St. en el oeste de Miami-Dade y anteriormente trabajó como gerente en el Home Depot ubicado en 13895 W. Okeechobee Road en Hialeah Gardens.

Agentes de la Oficina del Sheriff de Miami-Dade dijeron que Jimenez, durante 28 meses, “participó en un esquema deliberado, sistemático y continuo para defraudar a Home Depot” mediante la “aplicación de descuentos no autorizados a la mercancía, reduciendo significativamente los precios minoristas más allá de los límites permitidos.”

Según los agentes, el programa Home Depot Assurance & Advisory Management fue alertado sobre las órdenes de Jimenez, lo que provocó una investigación en diciembre.

Luego se reveló que Jimenez tenía varias ventas en las que “descuentos altamente excesivos” fueron “realizados a clientes recurrentes,” según documentos oficiales.

Una investigación adicional de Home Depot Central Investigations encontró que Jimenez solo proporcionaba los descuentos a “un grupo central de cuentas” y que la “alta actividad de descuentos” en su antigua tienda se detuvo una vez que se fue, y “tuvo un aumento dramático” en su nueva tienda cuando llegó, según el informe de arresto.

Los investigadores también determinaron que “la mercancía era de la cantidad y naturaleza típicamente comprada por cuentas revendedoras” y que Jimenez organizaba y estructuraba las órdenes de manera engañosa para intentar ocultar sus acciones.

Además, los agentes dijeron que Jimenez estaba “creando, registrando o utilizando entidades comerciales adicionales, compañías ficticias o alias para realizar órdenes y recibir mercancía con descuento,” según el informe de arresto.

Las autoridades dijeron que Jimenez fue advertido por un vicepresidente regional y un gerente de distrito y se le indicó “que no vendiera más a siete de sus negocios afiliados” mientras era “cuestionado sobre este tipo de ventas y cómo no debían realizarse,” pero las autoridades dijeron que “continuó realizando dichas transacciones fraudulentas después de recibir esas advertencias.”

De los $55,000,000 USD en ventas brutas que Jimenez descontó, las autoridades dijeron que las ventas netas fueron de alrededor de $30,000,000 USD tras descuentos de aproximadamente $24,000,000 USD, lo que resultó en un margen de ventas negativo para Home Depot de $4,300,000 USD.

Según el informe de arresto, “no solo no se obtuvo ninguna ganancia en estas ventas, sino que le costó a Home Depot más de $4 millones USD vender a estas cuentas.”

Jimenez fue detenido el martes en la tienda Home Depot en Flagler Street en Miami.

Enfrenta cargos de fraude organizado de $50,000 USD o más y hurto mayor en primer grado.

Hasta la mañana del miércoles, Jimenez permanecía detenido en el Centro Correccional Turner Guilford Knight con una fianza de $15,000 USD.

Gov. Dan McKee, a Democrat, signed off on the change earlier this week. The primary election had been scheduled for Sept. 8, which is the day after the holiday weekend.

State and local officials had requested the change after raising concerns about having enough time to set up polls for voters. However, under the legislation enacted, the filing deadlines will remain the same.

“We have to set up over 400 polling places around the state on the day before the election,” Nick Lima, the registrar and director of elections for the city of Cranston, told lawmakers at a hearing in January. "That's very difficult to do on a holiday because many of our polls are schools, social halls and churches."

It's not unusual for states to change their election day. Lawmakers in neighboring Massachusetts changed the state's 2026 primary election day from Sept. 15 to Sept. 1, arguing that doing so will help improve voter turnout.

Only four states hold their primary elections in September: Rhode Island, Massachusetts, New Hampshire and Delaware, which has the latest primary date in the U.S., taking place this year on Sept. 15.

Legislation seeking to move up Delaware's primary election by several months has been introduced in the statehouse, but previous attempts to do so have stalled.

“No puede haber agentes de alguna institución del gobierno de Estados Unidos operando en campo” mexicano, dijo el miércoles la mandataria durante su conferencia de prensa matutina. “Esto no es parte del protocolo de seguridad que hemos acordado, del entendimiento que tenemos con ellos”, agregó.

Los agentes de la CIA murieron el domingo cuando su camioneta supuestamente derrapó y cayó por un barranco al regresar de un operativo antidrogas en el que había participado el ejército. En el accidente también fallecieron dos funcionarios de la fiscalía de Chihuahua.

La confirmación de su participación llegó tras varios días de declaraciones cruzadas y contradicciones por parte de distintas autoridades sobre el papel que habían desempeñado los estadounidenses.

La presidenta reconoció el miércoles que la Secretaría de Defensa participó en el operativo, pero dijo que nadie del gobierno federal sabía de la presencia de los agentes estadounidenses, algo que sólo el Poder Ejecutivo puede autorizar.

“Defensa no sabía que había personas que estaban participando que no eran ciudadanos mexicanos y que no eran parte de las agencias de seguridad del estado de Chihuahua”, afirmó. “Cualquier relación que haya con el gobierno de los Estados Unidos en cualquier materia, y particularmente en la materia de seguridad, tiene que pasar necesariamente por el gobierno federal”.

Sheinbaum descartó que se trate de una nueva estrategia de la administración de Donald Trump —que ha reclamado más acción a México en el combate al narcotráfico—. No obstante, dijo que envió una carta al embajador estadounidense para que dé toda la información disponible sobre el evento y que prevé hablar con la gobernadora de Chihuahua, Maru Campos. “Es muy importante que no se deje pasar algo así”, sostuvo.

El hecho reabrió el debate sobre hasta dónde llega la actuación de Estados Unidos en territorio mexicano. Trump ha adoptado una postura más agresiva hacia América Latina que cualquier líder en la historia reciente de Estados Unidos, capturando al presidente de Venezuela, bloqueando envíos de petróleo a Cuba y lanzando operaciones militares conjuntas en Ecuador, un país también marcado por la violencia criminal.

Photos and video posted to social media Wednesday showed ice sitting inside living rooms after it busted through windows and doors. Homes, garages and sheds could also be seen surrounded by several feet of muddy, brown river and lake water.

Spring rains and winter snowmelt have swelled rivers and lakes, forcing torrents of water through Cheboygan County communities on its way to Lake Huron.

“Black Lake, Black River, Cheboygan River, Burt Lake, Mullett Lake, the Sturgeon River — and nearly every waterway in the county — have overflowed beyond their banks, swallowing docks, roads, yards, and in far too many cases, homes,” the Cheboygan County sheriff’s office told residents last week on its Facebook page. “What should be familiar shorelines are now unrecognizable expanses of water.”

Homes along Black Lake's west side were evacuated over the weekend, according to the sheriff's office.

“These are ice sheets. They’re massive,” said Christopher Narsesian, who took photos and video of the damage. “They’re mini glaciers, if you will. They just run down everything in their path. Nothing can stop that kind of weight.”

State and county officials are working to keep debris and ice from clogging the Cheboygan Lock and Dam Complex to allow water to flow on to Lake Huron.

If water levels were normal, lake ice would just break up in place as it melts, according to Patrick Bak, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Gaylord, Michigan.

The ice on Black Lake, more than likely, was pushed ashore by the wind, he added.

“The fact that the water was so high, the ice ... had more room to travel,” Bak said.

Ice chunks were also moving through nearby Mullett Lake. Both lakes feed into the Cheboygan River, with water flowing through the Cheboygan Dam.

“We've managed a little bit of ice issues on Mullett Lake,” said Patrick Ertel, a spokesman for the Michigan Department of Natural Resources Incident Management Team.

Last week, crews added pumps, and power was restored to an old hydroelectric station to increase water flow through the dam. Cranes also were used to remove gates that hold back water.

A large chunk of ice snapped the safety cable at the Cheboygan Lock and Dam Complex on April 9, forcing the natural resources department to close access points upstream and downstream of the dam.

“We can't have large chunks of ice flowing down blocking up the gates,” Ertel said. “Two marine vessels are kind of breaking up the chunks … on the Cheboygan River. The more water we can safely pass at the Cheboygan Dam, the faster we can bring relief to Mullet Lake. It's going as fast as it can. It is purely driven by gravity.”

The smaller Alverno Dam is between Black Lake and the Cheboygan River.

“Ice from Black Lake is not going to make it down to the Cheboygan River. It will be held up,” Ertel said.

Gov. Gretchen Whitmer has declared a state of emergency in Cheboygan and more than 30 other Michigan counties due to flooding and other severe weather this month.

Narsesian lives near Cheboygan and grew up along Black Lake.

Slabs of ice, which he described as a “several-mile-wide sheet,” continue to float in the lake. He said the ice is “smashing into homes and taking them out, just leveling them.” He said some ice was pushed as high as rooftops.

“We’ve never seen it that high,” Narsesian said. “Typically, the ice would just come over the break walls in front of houses, like a couple of feet. People’s homes don’t typically flood. The ice just melts.”

Water is receding, but Narsesian said levels are still high and the ice still is out there.

“As long as the wind doesn’t pick up and move that around again, we should be OK,” he said. “If that ice does come back, it’s going to do more damage.”

It’s the aftermath that concerns him most for the community where it’s “all friends and family” and “everybody knows everyone,” Narsesian said.

“Most people don’t have any help — coverage,” he added. “ Flood insurance was never necessary. No one’s ever seen this here. It’s a lot.”

La Oficina del Sheriff del Condado de Palm Beach identificó al sospechoso en un informe de arresto obtenido por Local 10 News el miércoles como Thomas Christopher Ball, de 47 años y residente de Coral Springs.

Los agentes indicaron que la investigación comenzó el 10 de marzo tras recibir una denuncia por acoso relacionada con imágenes generadas por inteligencia artificial.

El informe indica que la víctima, una joven de 17 años, declaró a los agentes que Ball la contactó a través de Instagram meses antes y que sus conversaciones derivaron en mensajes inapropiados.

Según los investigadores, Ball presuntamente hizo comentarios sexuales durante una llamada telefónica mientras estaba ebrio y le ofreció dinero a cambio de sexo oral.

Según el informe, la víctima se distanció posteriormente, lo que llevó a Ball a enviarle repetidos mensajes preguntándole por qué había dejado de hablarle.

Según el informe, el 8 de marzo de 2026, Ball supuestamente envió varios mensajes, incluyendo uno en el que le ofrecía dinero y le pedía que siguiera comunicándose con él.

Según los agentes, Ball envió una imagen manipulada con inteligencia artificial en la que aparecía la víctima desnuda, creada a partir de una publicación previa en redes sociales. De acuerdo con el informe, la amenazó con “exponerla si no volvía a ser amigable con él”.

El informe indica que Ball reconoció que la víctima era menor de edad y continuó enviándole mensajes, incluyendo declaraciones que los investigadores describieron como “tácticas de manipulación”, como ofrecerle dinero, expresarle afecto e intentar manipularla.

Después de que la víctima lo bloqueara, los agentes dijeron que Ball la contactó desde otro número de teléfono preguntándole si había llamado a la policía.

Los investigadores indicaron que revisaron mensajes, imágenes y transacciones financieras del teléfono de la víctima como prueba. El informe señala que la imagen generada por IA mostraba el rostro de la víctima sobre el cuerpo desnudo de una adulta sin su consentimiento.

Según los agentes, la víctima prestó posteriormente una declaración jurada confirmando su versión de los hechos e identificando a Ball como el sospechoso. Declaró a los investigadores que el incidente le causó un gran temor y angustia emocional.

Según el informe, los investigadores también revisaron un incidente aparte en el que un tercero declaró a la policía que Ball había proferido amenazas estando ebrio, incluyendo declaraciones sobre su deseo de hacerle daño a la niña. El informe indica que Ball negó haber hecho esos comentarios.

Los agentes dijeron que una revisión del teléfono de la víctima mostró mensajes en los que Ball intentó “manipular” a la menor, incluyendo ofrecerle dinero, hacerle apelaciones emocionales y continuar contactándola después de que se le dijera que se detuviera.

El informe indica que los detectives también documentaron imágenes generadas por inteligencia artificial e intercambios de mensajes, junto con transacciones financieras enviadas por Ball.

Basándose en la declaración jurada de la víctima y en las pruebas recabadas, los investigadores afirmaron que existían motivos suficientes para la detención.

Los registros penitenciarios muestran que Ball enfrenta un cargo por cada uno de los siguientes delitos: transmisión de material dañino a un menor, uso ilegal de un dispositivo de comunicación bidireccional y alteración de una representación sexual.

Hasta el miércoles, no figuraba como recluso en los registros de la cárcel del condado de Palm Beach tras pagar una fianza de 75.000 dólares.

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Monroe County Sheriff’s Office deputies said George Henry Balboni, 61, hatched a plan to kill his roommate, whom he described as a “parasite,” after the 69-year-old “went through his trash” and “found vodka” two days prior to the Sept. 16 murder attempt in the 700 block of Largo Road.

Prosecutors said Wednesday that he pleaded no contest to attempted first-degree murder.

Investigators said Balboni “formulated a plan in advance and used a false medical complaint to lure the victim into a vehicle before carrying out the attack.”

“Once the victim was seated in the vehicle, Balboni fired a crossbow bolt at close range, striking the victim near the ear,” prosecutors said in a news release. “The victim sustained a head injury but survived the attack.”

The victim was able to disarm Balboni.

In the release, Monroe County Chief Assistant State Attorney Joseph Mansfield called the attack a “calculated and premeditated attempt to execute another person using a crossbow, carried out through deception and aimed directly at the victim’s head.”

“The only reason we are not discussing a homicide is because the defendant failed in his attempt and the victim fought back,” Mansfield said.

Balboni received a 78-month sentence with credit for 213 days served.

Agentes de la Oficina del Sheriff del condado Monroe dijeron que George Henry Balboni, de 61 años, ideó un plan para matar a su compañero de cuarto, a quien describió como un “parásito”, después de que el hombre de 69 años “revisó su basura” y “encontró vodka” dos días antes del intento de asesinato el 16 de septiembre en la cuadra 700 de Largo Road.

Los fiscales informaron el miércoles que se declaró no culpable mediante acuerdo (no contest) de intento de asesinato en primer grado.

Los investigadores dijeron que Balboni “formuló un plan con anticipación y utilizó una falsa queja médica para atraer a la víctima a un vehículo antes de llevar a cabo el ataque”.

“Una vez que la víctima estaba sentada en el vehículo, Balboni disparó un perno de ballesta a corta distancia, impactando a la víctima cerca de la oreja”, dijeron los fiscales en un comunicado. “La víctima sufrió una lesión en la cabeza, pero sobrevivió al ataque”.

La víctima logró desarmar a Balboni.

En el comunicado, el fiscal estatal adjunto principal del condado Monroe, Joseph Mansfield, calificó el ataque como “un intento calculado y premeditado de ejecutar a otra persona utilizando una ballesta, llevado a cabo mediante engaño y dirigido directamente a la cabeza de la víctima”.

“La única razón por la que no estamos hablando de un homicidio es porque el acusado falló en su intento y la víctima se defendió”, dijo Mansfield.

Balboni recibió una sentencia de 78 meses con crédito por 213 días cumplidos.

Balcázar había declarado a radios locales que decidió postergar la operación porque al ser presidente interino no tenía “legitimidad” para endeudar a la próxima gestión, que asumirá a fines de julio, por 3.500 millones de dólares.

En desacuerdo con la decisión, Carlos Díaz renunció al Ministerio de Defensa y Hugo de Zela al de Relaciones Exteriores.

En una nueva muestra de la inestabilidad institucional en Perú, Díaz afirmó el miércoles en conferencia de prensa que, pese a la negativa del presidente, el lunes militares dependendientes de la cartera de Defensa firmaron el contrato. La embajada de Estados Unidos en Perú confirmó en un comunicado que la firma entre las partes autorizadas se realizó esa fecha “con pleno conocimiento de los más altos niveles del gobierno peruano”.

Díaz aseguró que los detalles del acuerdo no se conocen porque son secreto militar. Añadió que pese a que el presidente es jefe supremo de las fuerzas armadas, no tiene injerencia y “nadie puede paralizar un procedimiento de selección solamente de palabra”, tal como fue la decisión del mandatario.

El ahora exministro Díaz indicó que la compra es “estratégica” y que fue una decisión política de Estado tomada durante el breve mandato de cuatro meses de José Jerí (2025-2026), destituido en febrero luego de que la prensa revelara citas no registradas con empresarios chinos. Balcázar sucedió a Jerí el 18 de febrero.

Tras las declaraciones del presidente interino sobre la postergación, el embajador estadounidense en Perú, Bernie Navarro, publicó en su cuenta de X que “si negocian de mala fe con Estados Unidos y socavan los intereses estadounidenses, tengan la certeza de que como representante de la administración Trump utilizaré todas las herramientas disponibles para proteger y promover la prosperidad y la seguridad de nuestro país y la región”.

El gobierno señaló luego en un comunicado que están cumpliendo con “todos los compromisos asumidos, de acuerdo con el cronograma planteado en el contrato de compraventa de aviones F-16" para evitar incumplimientos contractuales y penalidades onerosas.

La embajada de Estados Unidos dijo el miércoles que se había acordado el viernes pasado una firma técnica por la mañana y otra firma ceremonial por la tarde entre funcionarios del gobierno peruano y representantes de Lockheed Martin. Pero que se enteraron de que la firma fue pospuesta tras entrevistas radiales del presidente. “Hay una manera correcta de hacer negocios serios y creíbles con una de las empresas líderes del mundo, y esta no lo es”, indicó la embajada.

En 2024, durante la gestión de la impopular presidenta Dina Boluarte (2022-2025), se anunció que Perú había decidido destinar 3.500 millones de dólares a la compra de los aviones de combate mediante un “endeudamiento interno” de 2.000 millones de dólares en 2025 y 1.500 millones de dólares en 2026. Entre las compañías que presentaron ofertas estaban, además de Lockheed Martin, la sueca Saab y la francesa Dassault Aviation.

Tres candidatos presidenciales se disputan el pase a la segunda vuelta programada para el 7 de junio. El conteo de las actas de la primera vuelta presidencial muestra primera a la conservadora Keiko Fujimori, seguida del progresista Roberto Sánchez y el ultraconservador Rafael López Aliaga.

Tanto Fujimori como López Aliaga se han mostrado de acuerdo con la compra de los aviones. Sánchez no ha opinado sobre el tema.

Las compras precedentes de aviones de caza en la década de 1980 y 1990 estuvieron manchadas por escándalos de corrupción por los que fueron sancionados funcionarios y militares.

His death was confirmed by Mason's publicist Melissa Dragich. A cause was not immediately revealed. He had canceled his remaining tour dates last summer and announced his retirement months later, citing health issues stemming from an infection for “closing the curtain on 60 remarkable years of rock n’ roll.”

Mason was born May 10, 1946, in Worcester, England, and founded Traffic in 1967 with singer/multi-instrumentalist Steve Winwood, drummer Jim Capaldi and keyboardist/saxophonist Chris Wood. The psychedelic band became celebrated for its pioneering and inventive spirit, along with Mason's songwriting and intricate guitar solos.

Mason wrote and performed many of Traffic's biggest singles. And even though “Feelin' Alright?” was not an immediate hit, it became one thereafter, covered by the likes of Joe Cocker, the Jackson 5, Gladys Knight, Paul Weller and Grand Funk Railroad.

Mason's relationship with the band was tenuous; he left and returned multiple times. In 1969, he launched a solo career that resulted in three albums certified gold by the Recording Industry Association of America (1970’s “Alone Together,” which produced his hit "Only You Know and I Know," 1974’s “Dave Mason” and 1978’s “Mariposa de Oro”) as well as one platinum title: 1977’s “Let It Flow.”

In addition, Mason played on a number of all-star sessions, The Rolling Stones’ “Beggars Banquet,” George Harrison’s “All Things Must Pass,” Paul McCartney and Wings’ “Venus and Mars" and Jimi Hendrix’s “Electric Ladyland” among them.

Mason was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2004 for his work with Traffic. His old bandmate shared a tribute to him Wednesday.

“Dave was part of Traffic during its earliest chapter, and played an important role in shaping the band’s sound and identity during that time," Winwood wrote on Instagram. "His songwriting, musicianship and distinctive spirit helped create music that has lasted far beyond its era, and continues to mean so much to listeners around the world.”

"Those years remain a special part of the band’s story, and Dave’s contribution to them is not forgotten. His place in that history will always be remembered, and through the music, his presence endures. At this sad time, our thoughts are with his family, his friends, and all those who loved him and his music,” Winwood wrote.

Survivors include his wife Winifred Wilson, daughter Danielle, nephew John Leonard, niece Michelle Leonard and his brothers in law, Sloan Wilson and Walton Wilson.

SpaceX said that, alternatively, it could pay $10 billion to “work together” with Cursor.

SpaceX announced the deal Tuesday on the social platform X, which along with the AI chatbot Grok is part of a constellation of properties that Musk has merged into his rocket company.

Cursor, made by San Francisco startup Anysphere, is a popular AI coding assistant. What SpaceX describes as Cursor's wide “distribution to expert software engineers” is likely part of what makes it attractive to Musk's company, giving it access to a new customer base.

Cursor said its new partnership with SpaceX subsidiary xAI will enable it to build future AI products using xAI's massive AI data center complex Colossus, based in Memphis, Tennessee.

“We’ve wanted to push our training efforts much further, but we’ve been bottlenecked by compute,” Cursor said in a statement on X, which didn't mention the possibility of being acquired. “With this partnership, our team will leverage xAI’s Colossus infrastructure to dramatically scale up the intelligence of our models.”

Cursor, which started in 2022, helped sparked a trend called “vibe coding” as AI coding assistants have become increasingly capable of doing the work of computer programming.

Cursor competes with other coding tools like Anthropic's Claude Code and OpenAI's Codex but also has relied heavily on partnerships with those larger AI research companies for the foundations of its technology.

It was Cursor’s Composer, combined with Anthropic’s Claude Sonnet, that a prominent AI researcher was playing with for weekend projects when he coined the phrase “vibe coding" in early 2025.

Japanese electronics giant Sony built the robotic arm it calls Ace and pitted it against professional athletes. Ace proved a worthy adversary, though one with some non-human attributes: nine camera eyes positioned around the court and an uncanny ability to follow the ball's logo to measure its spin.

The robot learned how to play the sport using the AI method known as reinforcement learning.

“There’s no way to program a robot by hand to play table tennis. You have to learn how to play from experience,” said Sony AI researcher Peter Dürr, co-author of the study published Wednesday in the science journal Nature.

To conduct the experiments, Sony built an Olympic-sized table tennis court at its headquarters in Tokyo to give professional and other highly skilled athletes a “level playing field” with the robot, Dürr said in an interview with The Associated Press. Some of the athletes said they were surprised by Ace's prowess.

Sony calls it a first for a common competitive sport

Sony says it is the “first time a robot has achieved human, expert-level play in a commonly played competitive sport in the physical world — a longstanding milestone for AI and robotics research.”

The custom-built robot has eight joints that direct its movements, or degrees of freedom, enabling it to position the racket, execute shots and swiftly respond to its opponent's rallies.

“Speed is really one of the fundamental issues in robotics today, especially in scenarios or environments that are not fixed," said Michael Spranger, president of Sony AI, in an interview.

“We see a lot of robots that are in factories that are very, very fast,” Spranger said. “But they’re doing the same trajectory over and over again. With this technology, we show that it’s actually possible to train robots to be very adaptive and competitive and fast in uncertain environments that constantly change.”

Spranger said such technology could play a role in manufacturing and other industries. It's also not hard to imagine how such high-speed and highly perceptive hardware could be used in war.

Building parity with humans is a challenge

A humanoid robot ran faster than the human world record in a half-marathon race for robots in Beijing on Sunday, but getting a machine to interact and compete at split-second speeds with skilled human athletes is in some ways a more difficult challenge.

Spranger said it was important for researchers to not give the robot too unfair of an advantage and make its speed, arm’s reach and performance comparable to a skilled athlete who trains at least 20 hours a week. It plays by official table tennis rules on a typically sized court.

“It’s very easy to build a superhuman table tennis robot,” Spranger said. “You build a machine that sucks in the ball and shoots it out much faster than a human can return it. But that’s not the goal here. The goal is to have some level of comparability, some level of fairness to the human, and win really at the level of AI and the level of decision-making and tactics and, to some extent, skill.”

That means, he said, that “the robot cannot just win by hitting the ball faster than any human ever could, but it has to win by actually playing the game.″

AI researchers have long used board games like chess as benchmarks for a computer’s capabilities. They later moved into more open-ended video game worlds. But moving AI from simulated environments to the physical world has long been the gold standard for robot makers.

The past year has marked a ″kind of ChatGPT moment for robotics,” Spranger said, with new, AI-driven approaches to teach robots about their real-world environments and task them with physically demanding activities, like backflips.

‘Ace’ pulled off shots pros thought were impossible

Sony is hardly the first to tackle robots in table tennis. John Billingsley helped pioneer such contests in 1983 in a paper titled “Robot Ping-Pong.” More recently, Google's AI research division DeepMind has also tackled the sport.

And while impressive, Billingsley said Sony’s all-seeing computer vision and motion detection capabilities make it hard for a two-eyed human to stand a chance.

“I would not want to belittle the achievement, but they have gone at the task mob-handed, and used sledgehammer techniques,” Billingsley, a retired mechatronics professor at the University of Southern Queensland in Australia, said in an email to the AP.

He added, however, that it adds to the lesson that “true progress comes out of contests, whether they involve hitting a ball or setting foot on Mars.”

Japanese professional players Minami Ando and Kakeru Sone were among those who competed against Sony's robot. Two umpires from the Japanese Table Tennis Association judged the games.

After submitting the paper to peer review ahead of its publication in Nature, Sony researchers kept experimenting and said Ace accelerated its shot speeds and rallies and played even more aggressively and closer to the table edge. Competing against four high-skill players, Sony said Ace defeated all but one of them in December.

Another expert player, Kinjiro Nakamura, who competed in the 1992 Barcelona Olympics, told researchers after observing Ace play a shot that “no one else would have been able to do that. I didn’t think it was possible.”

But the robot now having done it “means that there is a possibility that a human could do it too,” he said, in remarks published in the Nature paper.

___

AP journalists Yuri Kageyama and Javier Arciga contributed to this report.

Some of the biggest blazes were near Georgia’s coast while others were popping up in northern Florida, a state facing one of its worst fire seasons in decades.

It was not yet clear how the wildfires started, but the bottom half of Georgia is perilously dry and the conditions prompted the state's forestry commission to issue a burn ban for the first time in its history. Southeastern Georgia has seen just 11 inches (28 centimeters) of rain since the beginning of September — almost 15 inches (38 centimeters) below normal, the National Weather Service said.

The fires spread so quickly in southern Georgia that residents received no warnings or alerts.

“I wish that I had knew something more,” said Brianna Elliott, who left home Tuesday only to find her route back blocked by the fires 90 minutes later. “I would have turned around in that moment and gone home and got my animals before anything.”

She now fears that her home and her dogs are gone.

Georgia’s two biggest wildfires together have burned more than 31 square miles (80 square kilometers), and at least four other smaller fires have been reported in the state.

Dry timber feeds Georgia fires

The fast-moving Brantley County fire was threatening roughly 1,000 homes Wednesday after destroying almost 50 a day earlier.

That fire grew by roughly six times in just a half day Tuesday, said Joey Cason, the county manager. There were fires erupting “in the backyard and people taking off in the front yard,” he said Wednesday.

So far, no major injuries have been reported, Cason said.

The rural county is roughly midway between Georgia's coastal beaches and the Okefenokee Swamp and is dotted with livestock and fruit farms as well as thick stands of planted pines grown for timber.

Crews were working to create fire breaks and stop flames from reaching populated areas. The biggest concern was the gusting winds that could easily spread embers.

Authorities said rain was desperately needed. The area with the worst fires is in exceptional or extreme drought, the most dire levels, according to the U.S. Drought Monitor.

“If you could start praying for that right now, we’d be grateful,” Cason said.

Pine and hardwood forests in the region are helping charge the fires, said Seth Hawkins, a spokesperson for the Georgia Forestry Commission. Swampy lowlands with thick layers of leaves and woody debris are “super flammable” when they dry out, he said.

The commission's 30-day burn ban is for the southern part of the state.

More residents are told to evacuate

Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp declared a state of emergency for more than half of the state's counties.

More people were told to evacuate from Brantley County on Wednesday afternoon, on top of the 800 evacuations that had already taken place there. Another large fire that started in nearby Clinch County also prompted evacuations.

Mike Reardon and his wife packed family photos and their dog, Molly Rose, along with new e-bikes before leaving their Brantley County home.

The fire was about a mile away and a shift in the wind would put flames “in our backyard in a matter of minutes,” he said.

The couple just built the home two years ago.

“It’s more than our house. It’s land that my dad bought years ago,” said Liz Reardon, fighting back tears. “It’s the most beautiful place in the world to me.”

Florida's sees its worst wildfire season in decades

In Florida, firefighters were battling 131 wildfires that had burned 34 square miles (88 square kilometers), mostly in the state’s northern half.

“Florida has got one of the worst fire seasons in maybe the last 30 or 40 years or it’s turning out to be that way,” Florida Commissioner of Agriculture Wilton Simpson said. “We’ve been in drought for 18 months now all across the state.”

A wildfire disrupted Amtrak train service Monday in the northeast part of the state. Service was back to normal Wednesday, according to Amtrak spokeswoman Beth Toll.

Wildfire smoke blows into Atlanta and Jacksonville

A dangerous combination of low humidity and breezy winds will keep the fire danger elevated Wednesday, the National Weather Service said.

Smoke drifted to Atlanta, Savannah, Georgia, and Jacksonville, Florida. The air quality in parts of south Georgia declined to the unhealthy category Wednesday, meaning all residents might feel health effects.

Smoky conditions were expected to linger throughout the Atlanta area on Wednesday, according to the Atlanta-Fulton County Emergency Management Agency. The worst fires were burning more than 200 miles (322 kilometers) southeast of the city.

The high fire risk was expected to continue each afternoon through Friday due to the very dry conditions, the weather service said.

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Martin reported from Atlanta. Associated Press reporters Jeff Amy and Kate Brumback in Atlanta, Mike Schneider in Orlando, Florida, and John Seewer in Toledo, Ohio, contributed.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote for a unanimous court that the Enbridge energy company waited too long to try to move the case to federal court.

The case is part of a messy legal dispute about a pipeline that has moved crude oil and natural gas liquids between Superior, Wisconsin, and Sarnia, Ontario, since 1953.

Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel sued in state court in June 2019 seeking to void the easement that allows Enbridge to operate a 4.5-mile (6.4-kilometer) section of pipeline under the Straits of Mackinac, which link Lake Michigan and Lake Huron. Nessel, a Democrat, won a restraining order shutting down the pipeline from Ingham County Judge James Jamo in June 2020, although Enbridge was allowed to continue operations after meeting safety requirements.

Enbridge moved the lawsuit into federal court in 2021, arguing it affects U.S. and Canadian trade. But a three-judge panel from the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals sent the case back to Jamo in June 2024, finding that the company missed a 30-day deadline to change jurisdictions.

The pipeline at issue is called Line 5. Concerns over the section beneath the straits rupturing and causing a catastrophic spill have been growing since 2017, when Enbridge engineers revealed they had known about gaps in the section’s protective coating since 2014. A boat anchor damaged the section in 2018, intensifying fears of a spill.

The Michigan Department of Natural Resources under Gov. Gretchen Whitmer revoked the straits easement for Line 5 in 2020. Enbridge filed a separate federal lawsuit challenging the revocation.

Enbridge won a ruling from a federal judge blocking the move, but Whitmer, a Democrat, has appealed to the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. In March, the Supreme Court rejected Whitmer’s appeal claiming that she couldn't be sued in federal court.

It was unclear how the federal ruling blocking Whitmer’s revocation attempt would affect Nessel’s case in state court. The company said in a statement that the judge in the Whitmer case has already decided federal regulators, not the state, are responsible for Line 5 safety and they have found no issues that would warrant shutting it down.

But Nessel said the case is far from over. “This unanimous ruling from the United States Supreme Court makes emphatically clear that our lawsuit against Enbridge belongs before the state court, where we’ve argued since 2019 that Line 5 does not have a legal right to the Straits bottomlands,” she said in a statement.

Enbridge also is seeking permits to encase the section of pipeline beneath the straits in a protective tunnel. The Michigan Public Service Commission granted the relevant permits in 2023, but a coalition of environmental groups and Michigan tribes has filed a lawsuit seeking to void state permits for the tunnel. The state Supreme Court is weighing that case.

Enbridge also needs approval from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the Michigan Department of Environment, Great Lakes and Energy.

The pipeline is at the center of a separate legal dispute in Wisconsin as well. A federal judge in Madison last summer gave Enbridge three years to shut down part of Line 5 that runs across the Bad River Band of Lake Superior’s reservation. The company has appealed the shutdown order to the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, but it started work in February to reroute the line around the reservation.

The Bad River and environmental groups have filed a state lawsuit seeking to halt the work, arguing regulators have underestimated the damage the reroute construction will cause. That case also is pending.

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Associated Press writer Todd Richmond contributed to this report from Madison, Wisconsin.

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Follow the AP's coverage of the U.S. Supreme Court at https://apnews.com/hub/us-supreme-court.

“We don’t really get to experience this kind of energy and fandom in person very often,” Tierney told The Associated Press just after their joint appearance, a highlight of the weekend gathering of (mostly) young book fans. “It’s been a bit more of an amorphous online thing.”

Since the first episode of “Heated Rivalry” dropped last November, Tierney's adaptation of Reid's “Game Changer” series featuring star-crossed hockey greats Shane Hollander and Ilya Rozanov has become a phenomenon that boosted the sport's popularity, made Reid a leader of the thriving genre of sports romance fiction and made Olympic torchbearers out of lead actors Hudson Williams (Shane) and Connor Storrie (Ilya). Tierney expects to begin filming the second season this summer, based in part on the second of Reid's novels about Shane and Ilya, “The Long Game.” The author, meanwhile, is working on a third Shane and Ilya book, “Unrivaled.” Both are scheduled for 2027 releases.

“Heated Rivalry” fans know well the story of how the HBO Max show was born, and of Reid's jarring swing from despair to exhilaration. In August 2023, she learned that she had early onset Parkinson's disease. Days later, she received an Instagram message from a man she had never met, but would soon change her life in a very different way: Tierney.

The 46-year-old Tierney is a Montreal native, former child star and award-winning filmmaker whose credits include the TV series “Letterkenny.” In October, Little, Brown and Company will release a collection of Tierney's annotated scripts, “I'll Believe in Anything: The Making of Heated Rivalry Season 1.”

Reid, 44, is a longtime hockey fan. Born Rachelle Goguen in Halifax, Nova Scotia, she chose her pen name for the practical reason that it's easier to pronounce and remember. She's been open about the impact of fame and her health, posting an Instagram announcement in February that she was pushing back the release date of “Unrivaled” from this fall to next summer. Onstage, she acknowledged it had been “tricky” to write since the series took off.

“I'm in a place where the whole world seems to care about what happens next to these characters,” she said. “I'm still determined to stick to what I've always done when I was writing, just kind of pretend I'm writing for me and I hope other people like it.”

During their AP interview, Reid and Tierney spoke of the joy of sex on the page and screen and how Shane and Ilya just won't leave them alone. The conversation has been edited for clarity and brevity.

AP: Writers talk about writing the books they want to read, and filmmakers making the movies they want to see. With these books, it comes out of that?

REID: I really like a forbidden romance. I really like the rivals-to-lovers element. I just also like a queer love story with a happy ending. And I really like hockey, so I think there’s just a lot of elements in it that are just very much what I personally would like. I think if this show had come out and had nothing to do with me, I would be obsessed with it still.

TIERNEY: I did not grow up with stories like this. We don’t as gay men, as queer people. We do not get to have happy endings in media very often. I would definitely have watched it (even if he didn't direct it), that’s for sure. I’m sure I would have had notes. I'm a little picky.

AP: At what point for either of you did you realize that you had something big here?

TIERNEY: It was a kind of a series of increasingly surreal and overwhelming moments. And by the time the sixth episode aired, it really did feel like we were kind of at the center of a strange maelstrom. But I also was like, “Am I making this up? Is this actually happening?”

REID: I did a bookstore event the day after the trailer came out. They showed the trailer at the event, and everybody in the audience knew every word of the trailer and was saying it along with the trailer. So that was when I was like, “OK, this is going to be nuts.”

AP: Writers and filmmakers have talked about the difficulty of writing or filming sex scenes. Was that a challenge for either of you?

REID: Honestly, I love writing them and I’ve never found that to be the difficult part. I think it might be the easiest part for me. I actually really enjoy it. Not to praise myself too much, but I think maybe that’s why people like the scenes. They weren’t hard for me. It’s not a scary thing. It’s not the part that I have to close my eyes and write or anything. It's my favorite part.

TIERNEY: Sex is a language in this show, sex is a way that we watch this couple evolve over the course of a fairly long amount of time in terms of the story, eight years. And so the sex is different every time, a way of watching them evolve both separately and together. I think sex reveals a lot about yourself that you don’t even intend to reveal. And I find that quite fascinating as a storyteller.

AP: How real are Ilya and Shane for you? Do they live on in your heads?

REID: Yeah. That’s why I keep writing books about them, because they just keep talking. With other characters, I’ve written the books and they’ve left. But these guys just stick around.

AP: What is it about them that makes it that way?

REID: They're fun to write. I love it.

AP: You've talked about your struggles with getting the next book done. Any updates on that?

TIERNEY: It's a coloring book now.

REID: It’s 20 pages.

TIERNEY: Don’t tell the truth.

REID: The thing that hasn’t changed is how much fun they are to write. I find their voices very easy to put on the page. More than any other characters I’ve created, they arrived fully formed. They kind of just appeared one day.

AP: Were they based on anybody, at least loosely, who you know?

REID: There’s a lot of myself in Ilya, for sure. There’s a lot of, kind of hockey player archetypes — the flashy, cocky European superstar, that’s definitely a type. The uptight, very serious good boy-captain. And there’s been plenty of NHL players from decades of hockey. And I’ve been a fan for decades. And obviously there have been some really great rivalries. And we’re getting probably to the end of the (Sidney) Crosby-(Alex) Ovechkin rivalry right now. But that rivalry at its peak was so fun.

AP: What do you see of yourself in Ilya?

REID: A sense of humor, mostly. It's a little bit mean. I also kind of like to use humor to cover up emotions, you know, things like that. I think I also notice things about people a bit, but maybe stay quiet about it.

AP: I've heard a lot of writers talk about writing a book that gets made into a film. And the actors are just so good that when the writer comes back to writing about those characters, they’re seeing those actors in their head. Is it going that way for you?

REID: I told Jacob I wish I had never met them. (Laughing) It is challenge writing without thinking about somebody having to actually say or do what I’m writing, for sure. I’m trying to just block that out. I just need to pretend it definitely will never happen, because I think that’s the only way I can do it.

AP: And you still hope to have the next book out at some point next year?

RR: Yeah. That book will come out June 1. Hell or high water, it's coming out.

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This story has been updated to corrected Reid's first name at birth was spelled ‘Rachelle,’ not

‘Rachel.’

The court ruled 6-3 in favor of former Army Spc. Winston Hencely, who was wounded when he stopped a man on his way to detonate an explosive vest at a Veterans Day weekend 5K race at Bagram Airfield in 2016.

Ahmad Nayeb instead blew himself up when he was confronted, killing five people and wounding more than a dozen, according to court documents.

The projectiles fractured Hencely's skull and tore through his brain, leaving him without the full use of much of the left side of his body. He also has abnormal brainwaves, seizures and traumatic brain injury, his lawyers wrote.

An Army investigation faulted the company’s failure to supervise Nayeb, an Afghan employee who built the vest on the job site inside the base, court documents say.

Hencely sued Fluor Corporation in South Carolina, where two of its subsidiaries are based, and made claims under the state's law for negligent supervision, negligent entrustment of tools and negligent retention of an employee.

The Irving, Texas-based engineering construction company argued that it could not be sued because it was working during wartime for the federal government, which is generally immune to lawsuits.

The high court disagreed. The majority said companies are protected when they are fulfilling government contracts, but that Fluor allegedly failed to carry out its duties in supervising Nayeb.

Justice Clarence Thomas wrote the opinion, joined by Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, Neil Gorsuch, Amy Coney Barrett and Ketanji Brown Jackson.

Justices Samuel Alito, John Roberts and Brett Kavanaugh dissented. Alito wrote that Hencely's lawsuit may intrude on the government's wartime powers and decisions, including a policy requiring contractors to maximize employment of Afghans.

Kevin MacEwen, gerente del Distrito Everglades y supervisor de área forestal del Servicio Forestal de Florida, dijo que había tres equipos todoterreno trabajando en el terreno. Señaló que los equipos y un helicóptero estaban trabajando para mantener el fuego alejado del tráfico en los carriles en dirección norte y sur de la autopista U.S. 27. “Afortunadamente, el viento sopla hacia el este y está empujando el fuego lejos de nosotros”, dijo MacEwen, y agregó que las ráfagas superaban las 20 mph en medio de una “sequía histórica”.

Un helicóptero de Broward Sheriff Fire Rescue respondió para arrojar agua sobre puntos calientes remotos al oeste de Weston, según el jefe de batallón Michael B. Kane.

BSFR solicitó asistencia del Servicio Forestal de Florida mientras las llamas ardían bajo líneas eléctricas al oeste de la autopista 27 y la milla 45, según Kane.

Florida ha estado enfrentando una de las peores sequías en 15 años, por lo que el Servicio Forestal de Florida ha tenido que lidiar con más incendios forestales de lo habitual.

“Probablemente todavía tengamos entre seis y nueve semanas más de esto”, dijo MacEwen.

Esta es una historia en desarrollo. El editor de asignaciones de Local 10 News, Carson Merlo, contribuyó a este informe.

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On Tuesday, commissioners were set to vote on whether to sign an interim agreement with the developer behind their proposed new building.

Ultimately, commissioners deferred the item until a meeting scheduled for June 2.

The reason why is because the project’s developer came up with a futuristic design that came with a hefty price tag.

The big question for city leaders is whether to spend $268 million on new construction or spend less on an older existing building in the city.

Commissioner Ben Sorensen told Local 10’s Aaron Maybin that the new building will cost taxpayers $24 million a year, adding up to around $724 million over the next three decades.

He wanted to delay Tuesday’s vote to find other options.

Commissioner Steven Glassman, meanwhile, said he supports building a new City Hall.

“The choice tonight is really whether or not we are going to move forward with something that meets our needs, and we have them really buttoned down,” said Glassman. “Or are we just going to go into the future and guess what those costs are going to be? I’m not one to guess on what the future might bring us on this structure. I want to make sure that we know exactly what is going to happen.”

El martes, los comisionados tenían previsto votar si firmaban un acuerdo provisional con el desarrollador detrás del nuevo edificio propuesto.

Finalmente, los comisionados pospusieron el tema hasta una reunión programada para el 2 de junio.

La razón es que el desarrollador del proyecto presentó un diseño futurista que conlleva un alto costo.

La gran pregunta para los líderes de la ciudad es si gastar $268,000,000 USD en una nueva construcción o gastar menos en un edificio existente más antiguo en la ciudad.

El comisionado Ben Sorensen dijo a Aaron Maybin de Local 10 que el nuevo edificio costará a los contribuyentes $24,000,000 USD al año, sumando alrededor de $724,000,000 USD en las próximas tres décadas.

Él quería retrasar la votación del martes para encontrar otras opciones.

El comisionado Steven Glassman, por su parte, dijo que apoya la construcción de un nuevo ayuntamiento.

“La decisión esta noche es realmente si vamos a avanzar con algo que satisfaga nuestras necesidades, y las tenemos bien definidas,” dijo Glassman. “¿O simplemente vamos a avanzar hacia el futuro y adivinar cuáles serán esos costos? Yo no soy de adivinar lo que el futuro podría traernos con esta estructura. Quiero asegurarme de que sepamos exactamente qué va a suceder.”

“The end of smoking, and the devastating harm it causes, is no longer uncertain — it’s inevitable,” Hazel Cheeseman, chief executive of Action on Smoking and Health, said after a decades-long campaign in favor of legislation approved Tuesday.

Children born after Dec. 31, 2008 will be banned from ever buying cigarettes under the Tobacco and Vapes Bill.

The legislation that needs approval by King Charles III — a formality — before taking effect will also allow the government to regulate tobacco, vaping and nicotine products, including flavors and packaging.

It is currently illegal to sell cigarettes, tobacco products or vapes to people under 18. But most youths today will continue to face a ban their entire life as the minimum age to buy cigarettes rises each year.

The passage gives the U.K. one of the toughest antismoking measures in the world. The law is similar to one New Zealand lawmakers passed in 2022 but that was then repealed by a subsequent government.

The number of people who smoke in Britain has declined by two-thirds since the 1970s, but some 6.4 million people — or about 13% of the population — still smoke, according to official figures.

Authorities say smoking causes some 80,000 deaths a year in the U.K, and remains the number one preventable cause of death, disability and poor health.

“Children in the U.K. will be part of the first smoke-free generation, protected from a lifetime of addiction and harm,” Health Secretary Wes Streeting said.