In a preliminary response to a South African petition accusing Israel of genocide, the U.N.’s top court ordered Israel to do all it can to prevent death, destruction and any acts of genocide in Gaza. It stopped short of ordering an end to its military offensive that has triggered a humanitarian catastrophe in the tiny Palestinian enclave. Israel vehemently denies the charges against it, saying it is fighting a war in self-defense.

One month later and nearly five months into the war, preparations are underway for Israel to expand its ground operation into Rafah, Gaza’s southernmost town along the border with Egypt, where 1.4 million Palestinians have flooded into in search of safety.

Early Monday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office said the army had presented to the War Cabinet its operational plan for Rafah as well as plans to evacuate civilians from the battle zones. It gave no further details.

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The situation in Rafah, where dense tent camps have sprouted to house the displaced, has sparked global concern and Israel’s allies have warned that it must protect civilians in its battle against Hamas.

Also Monday, Palestinian Prime Minister Mohammed Shtayyeh said he was submitting his government’s resignation. The move, which still must be accepted by President Mahmoud Abbas, could open the door to U.S.-backed reforms in the Palestinian Authority, which the U.S. wants to rule postwar Gaza but in a revitalized shape.

In its ruling last month, the International Court of Justice ordered Israel to follow six provisional measures, including taking “immediate and effective measures to enable the provision of urgently needed basic services and humanitarian assistance to address the adverse conditions of life faced by Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.”

Under the orders, Israel also must submit a report on what it is doing to adhere to the measures within a month. While Monday marked a month since the court’s orders were issued, it was not immediately clear whether Israel had handed in such a report. The Israeli Foreign Ministry had no immediate comment.

Human Rights Watch said Israel was not adhering to the court’s order on aid provision, citing a 30% drop in the daily average number of aid trucks entering Gaza in the weeks following the court’s ruling. It said Israel was not adequately facilitating fuel deliveries to hard-hit northern Gaza and blamed Israel for blocking aid from reaching the north, where the World Food Program said last week it was forced to suspend aid deliveries because of increasing chaos in the isolated part of the territory.

“The Israeli government has simply ignored the court’s ruling, and in some ways even intensified its repression, including further blocking lifesaving aid,” said Omar Shakir, Israel and Palestine director at Human Rights Watch.

Israel denies it is restricting the entry of aid and has instead blamed humanitarian organizations operating inside Gaza, saying hundreds of trucks filled with aid sit idle on the Palestinian side of the main crossing. The U.N. says it can’t always reach the trucks at the crossing because it is at times too dangerous.

Netanyahu’s office also said Monday the War Cabinet had approved a plan to deliver humanitarian aid safely into Gaza in a way that would “prevent the cases of looting.” It did not disclose further details.

The war, launched after Hamas-led militants rampaged across southern Israel, killing 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and taking roughly 250 people hostage, has unleashed unimaginable devastation in Gaza.

Nearly 30,000 people have been killed in Gaza, two thirds of them women and children, according to the Health Ministry in Hamas-run Gaza which does not distinguish in its count between fighters and noncombatants. Israel says it has killed 10,000 militants, without providing evidence.

Fighting has flattened large swaths of Gaza’s urban landscape, displacing about 80% of the territory’s 2.3 million people who have crammed into increasingly smaller spaces looking for elusive safety.

The crisis has pushed a quarter of the population toward starvation and raised fears of imminent famine, especially in the northern part of Gaza, which was the first focus of Israel’s ground invasion and where starving residents have been forced to eat animal fodder and search for food in demolished buildings.

“We have to feed the children. They keep screaming they want food. We cannot find food. We don’t know what to do,” said market vendor Um Ayad in northern Jabaliya, who showed off a leafy weed that people pick from the harsh, dry soil and eat.

Philippe Lazzarini, commissioner general of the U.N. agency for Palestinians, said it has not been able to deliver food to northern Gaza since Jan. 23, adding on X, formerly Twitter, that “our calls to send food aid have been denied.”

Israel said that 245 trucks of aid entered Gaza on Sunday, less than half the amount that entered daily before the war.

But Human Rights Watch, citing U.N. figures, said that between Jan. 27 and Feb. 21, the daily average of trucks entering stood at 93, compared to 147 trucks a day in the three weeks before the world court’s ruling. The daily average dropped further, to 57, between Feb. 9 and 21, the figures showed.

United Nations agencies and aid groups say the hostilities, the Israeli military’s refusal to facilitate deliveries and the breakdown of order inside Gaza make it increasingly difficult to get vital aid to much of the coastal enclave. In some cases, crowds of desperate Palestinians have surrounded delivery trucks and stripped the supplies off them.

The U.N. has called on Israel to open more crossings, including in the north, and to improve the coordination process.

___

Goldenberg reported from Tel Aviv, Israel. Associated Press writer Josef Federman contributed to this report from Jerusalem.

Special counsel David Weiss’ office is pressing U.S. District Judge Otis Wright II to keep Alexander Smirnov in jail, arguing the man who claims to have ties to Russian intelligence is likely to flee the country.

A different judge last week released Smirnov from jail on electronic GPS monitoring, but Wright ordered the man to be re-arrested after prosecutors asked to reconsider Smirnov’s detention. Wright said in a written order that Smirnov’s lawyers’ efforts to free him was “likely to facilitate his absconding from the United States.”

In an emergency petition with the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, Smirnov’s lawyers said Wright did not have the authority to order Smirnov to be re-arrested. The defense also criticized what it described as “biased and prejudicial statements” from Wright insinuating that Smirnov’s lawyers were acting improperly by advocating for his release.

Smirnov is charged with falsely telling his FBI handler that executives from the Ukrainian energy company Burisma had paid President Biden and Hunter Biden $5 million each around 2015. The claim became central to the Republican impeachment inquiry of President Biden in Congress.

In urging the judge to keep Smirnov locked up, prosecutors said the man has reported to the FBI having contact with Russian intelligence-affiliated officials. Prosecutors wrote in court filings last week that Smirnov told investigators after his first arrest that officials associated with Russian intelligence were involved in passing a story to him about Hunter Biden.

Smirnov, who holds dual Israeli-U.S. citizenship, is charged by the same Justice Department special counsel who has separately filed gun and tax charges against Hunter Biden.

Smirnov has not entered a plea to the charges, but his lawyers have said they look forward to defending him at trial. Defense attorneys have said in pushing for his release that he has no criminal history and has strong ties to the United States, including a longtime significant other who lives in Las Vegas.

In his ruling last week releasing Smirnov on GPS monitoring, U.S. Magistrate Judge Daniel Albregts in Las Vegas said he was concerned about his access to what prosecutors estimate is $6 million in funds, but noted that federal guidelines required him to fashion “the least restrictive conditions” ahead of his trial.

Smirnov had been an informant for more than a decade when he made the explosive allegations about the Bidens in June 2020, after “expressing bias” about Joe Biden as a presidential candidate, prosecutors said. Smirnov had only routine business dealings with Burisma starting in 2017, according to court documents. No evidence has emerged that Joe Biden acted corruptly or accepted bribes in his current role or previous office as vice president.

While his identity wasn’t publicly known before the indictment, Smirnov’s claims have played a major part in the Republican effort in Congress to investigate the president and his family, and helped spark what is now a House impeachment inquiry into Biden. Republicans pursuing investigations of the Bidens demanded the FBI release the unredacted form documenting the unverified allegations, though they acknowledged they couldn’t confirm if they were true.

___

Richer reported from Boston.

Lisa Lopez-Galvan was one of about two dozen people who were shot when gunfire erupted Feb. 14 outside the city’s Union Station. She was remembered during the 90-minute service as a loving wife and mother whose smile could light up a room and who saw each day as a chance for excitement and laughter.

With her casket near the front of the Redemptorist Catholic Church in Kansas City, Missouri. mourners — some wearing Chiefs jerseys — also heard a mariachi band play and sing.

Along with her husband and young adult son, the 43-year-old had joined an estimated crowd of 1 million people for the parade and rally. As the festivities ended, a dispute over what authorities described as the belief that people in one group were staring at people in another group led to gunfire.

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Lopez-Galvan, a music lover who played at weddings, quinceañeras and an American Legion bar and grill, was caught in the middle of it. Everyone else survived.

Two men are charged in her death, and two juveniles face gun charges. Her family responded to the charges this week with a statement expressing thanks to police and prosecutors.

“Though it does not bring back our beloved Lisa, it is comforting,” the statement began.

Players and celebrities alike have reached out to her family. Pop superstar Taylor Swift, who is frequently in the stands during Chiefs games because she is dating tight end Travis Kelce, donated $100,000 to Lopez-Galvan’s family.

And because she was wearing a Chiefs kicker Harrison Butker jersey at the celebration, he responded to requests on social media seeking help in obtaining a similar jersey — possibly so the mother of two could be laid to rest in it.

“While the family is mourning their loss and grappling with their numerous injuries, I will continue to pray for their healing and the repose of Lisa’s soul,” Butker said in a statement.

Rosa Izurieta and Martha Ramirez worked with Lopez-Galvan for about a year at a local staffing firm but had known her since childhood. They remembered her as an extrovert and a staunch Catholic who was devoted to her family, passionate about connecting job seekers with employment and ready to help anyone.

And, they said, working part time playing music allowed her to share her passion as one of the area’s few Latina DJs.

“This senseless act has taken a beautiful person from her family and this KC Community,” the radio station KKFI-FM, where she was the co-host of a program called “Taste of Tejano,” said in a statement.

Izurieta and Ramirez said Lopez-Galvan’s Kansas City roots run deep. Her father founded the city’s first mariachi group, Mariachi Mexico, in the 1980s, they said, and the family is well known and active in the Latino community. Her brother, Beto Lopez, is CEO of the Guadalupe Centers, which provides community services and runs charter schools for the Latino community.

Lopez-Galvan and her two children went to Bishop Miege, a Catholic high school in a suburb on the Kansas side, and she worked for years as a clerk in a police department there.

“This is another example of a real loving, real human whose life was taken tragically with a senseless act,” Beto Lopez said in an interview last week on ABC’s “Good Morning America.”

BARCELONA — Samsung’s Galaxy Ring, its latest wearable, is launching with health-tracking features including heart rate and sleep monitoring while also giving users a score of their readiness for the day, a top executive told CNBC.

In a wide-ranging interview, Hon Pak, the head of the digital health team at Samsung Electronics, discussed the company’s first foray into the product category of rings, considerations for a subscription model for the Samsung Health app, and his vision for an artificial intelligence “coach.”

Samsung teased the Galaxy Ring in January during the press conference when it launched the S24 smartphone. The South Korean tech giant is putting it on display for the first time at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, which kicks off on Monday.

Samsung Galaxy Ring features

Pak said the ring, which is fitted with sensors, will be able to give readings on heart rate, respiratory rate, the amount of movement made during sleep, and the time it takes a person to fall asleep once in bed.

He also said the ring will be able to give a user a “vitality score” which “collects data about physical and mental readiness to see how productive you can be.”

All of that will be accessible through the Samsung Health app.

The ring is set to go on sale this year, but Pak did not give a timeline or the pricing.

Pak also said the company is considering adding a feature that would allow the Galaxy Ring to do contactless payments, as with smartphones.

“We have a whole … team that is looking at that. But I think clearly looking at multiple different use cases for the Ring beyond just health, for sure,” Pak said.

The Samsung executive also said the company is working on non-invasive glucose monitoring as well as a blood pressure sensing through its wearable devices.

“I think we have some ways to go,” Pak said of non-invasive glucose monitoring. Currently, people use devices that pierce the skin to check glucose levels. A non-invasive way to do that would be a huge step.

Samsung ecosystem play

Samsung is hoping that various devices will boost its positioning in health, an area it has been working on for several years.

Samsung has its smartphones and smartwatches. The Galaxy Ring is the newest product category in health. Samsung said the decision to launch a “smart ring” was driven by its customers.

“Our own customers told us, I want choice. I want the ability to have other forms of wearables to measure health,” Pak said. “And some want to wear the watch, some want to wear the watch and the ring and get benefit from both. Some just want more simplicity.”

Pak confirmed that when the smartwatch and Ring are worn together, users will be able to get different health insights.

Samsung is not the first company to launch smart rings. There are a handful of other players such as Oura.

Previous generations of Samsung’s flagship smartphone, such as the S7, have sensors that track things like heart rate. Users could put their finger on the sensor and it would give a reading. Samsung has done away with those sensors on its phones, especially since it has smartwatches that offer these features.

However, Pak did not rule out the possibility that future smartphones would have health sensors on them.

“Mobile is still very pervasive and so I think there are reasons why we may want to put a sensor on a mobile versus having it on a wearable,” Pak said.

AI ‘coach’

Pak discussed how artificial intelligence will play a role in Samsung’s health services. AI can help make sense of all of the data these devices are collecting. And ultimately, Pak’s goal is to get the AI to give deeper insights into a person’s health.

He said large language models, which are AI models trained on huge amounts of data and that underpin applications like chatbots, can help to give greater insights.

“Imagine that large language model, acting as my digital assistant, while looking at the context of my medical records, my physiological data, my engagement with a mobile device, the wearables during all of that … begins to bring greater insights and personalization opportunities,” Pak said.

“There’s a digital assistant coach in the future, because we think that’s absolutely needed,” the Samsung executive said.

Pak described a scenario in which a digital assistant offers health advice in the right tone and context, saying “our ability to change our behavior becomes much greater.”

Bixby, Samsung’s digital assistant, could have a part to play, Pak said.

“So we are exploring various different ways in which the human computer interface will change over time … And so we think Bixby with speech represents a significant part of that option. But we don’t think it’s the only option. But Bixby potentially combined with large language models can be a phenomenal game changer. And we’re obviously having that conversation,” Pak said.

The executive also said the company is “considering” a subscription service for its Samsung Health app, but that the capabilities and insights it offers need to be improved before that can happen. AI assistants can help.

“If you’re gonna really make me pay for something, you better give me something that’s more end to end that’s more comprehensive” in terms of health insights, Pak said.

This Wednesday, some of Idaho’s prison staffers will be asked to kill him. Barring any last-minute stay, the 73-year-old, one of the nation’s longest-serving death row inmates, will be executed by lethal injection for killing a fellow prisoner with a battery-filled sock in 1981.

Creech’s killing of David Jensen, a young, disabled man who was serving time for car theft, was his last in a broad path of destruction that saw Creech convicted of five murders in three states. He is also suspected of at least a half-dozen others.

But now, decades later, Creech is mostly known inside the walls of the Idaho Maximum Security Institution as just “Tom,” a generally well-behaved old-timer with a penchant for poetry. His unsuccessful bid for clemency even found support from a former warden at the penitentiary, prison staffers who recounted how he wrote them poems of support or condolence and the judge who sentenced Creech to death.

“Some of our correctional officers have grown up with Tom Creech,” Idaho Department of Correction Director Josh Tewalt said Friday. “Our warden has a long-standing relationship with him. … There’s a familiarity and a rapport that has been built over time.”

Creech’s attorneys have filed a flurry of last-minute appeals in four different courts in recent months trying to halt the execution, which would be Idaho’s first in 12 years. They have argued Idaho’s refusal to say where its execution drug was obtained violates his rights and that he received ineffective assistance of counsel.

A three-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals on Friday rejected an argument that Creech should not be executed because he was sentenced by a judge rather than a jury. His attorneys vowed to keep fighting to save him from execution and said Creech had become a friend over the last 25 years.

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“Ultimately, it will be impossible for the state to execute the Tom Creech of 1974,” said Deborah A. Czuba, the Federal Defender Services of Idaho attorney who leads the capital defense unit. “He died inside Tom a long time ago, replaced by a harmless, remorseful and compassionate man who evolved into a valued, respected and beloved member of the prison community in which he has lived and been punished for 50 years.”

It’s not clear how many people Creech, an Ohio native, killed before he was imprisoned in Idaho in 1974. At one point he claimed to have killed as many as 50 people, but many of the confessions were made under the influence of now discredited “truth serum” drugs and filled with outlandish tales of occult-driven human sacrifice and contract killings for a powerful motorcycle gang.

Official estimates vary, but authorities tend to focus on 11 deaths.

In 1973, Creech was tried for the murder of 70-year-old Paul Schrader, a retiree who was stabbed to death in the Tucson, Arizona, motel where Creech was living. Creech used Schrader’s credit cards and vehicle to leave Tucson for Portland, Oregon. A jury acquitted him, but authorities say they have no doubt he was responsible.

The next year, Creech was committed to Oregon State Hospital for a few months. He earned a weekend pass and traveled to Sacramento, California, where he killed Vivian Grant Robinson at her home. Creech then used Robinson’s phone to let the hospital know he would return a day late. That crime went unsolved until Creech later confessed while in custody in Idaho; he wasn’t convicted until 1980.

After he was released from the Oregon State Hospital, Creech got a job at a church in Portland doing maintenance work. He had living quarters at the church, and it was there he shot and killed 22-year-old William Joseph Dean in 1974. Authorities believe he then fatally shot Sandra Jane Ramsamooj at the Salem grocery store where she worked.

Creech was finally arrested in November 1974. He and a girlfriend were hitchhiking in Idaho when they were picked up by two painters, Thomas Arnold and John Bradford. Creech shot both men to death and the girlfriend cooperated with authorities.

While in custody, Creech confessed to a number of other killings. Some appeared to be fabricated, but he provided information that led police to the bodies of Gordon Lee Stanton and Charles Thomas Miller near Las Vegas, and of Rick Stewart McKenzie, 22, near Baggs, Wyoming.

Creech initially was sentenced to death for killing the painters. But after the U.S. Supreme Court barred automatic death sentences in 1976, his sentence was converted to life in prison.

That changed after he killed Jensen, who was serving time for car theft. Jensen’s life hadn’t been easy: He suffered a nearly fatal gun injury as a teen that left him with serious disabilities including partial paralysis.

Jensen’s relatives opposed Creech’s bid for clemency. They described Jensen as a gentle soul and a prankster who loved hunting and spending time outdoors, who was “the peanut butter” to his sister’s jelly. His daughter, who was 4 when he was killed, spoke of how she never got to know him, and how unfair it was that Creech is still around when her father isn’t.

Creech’s supporters, meanwhile, say decades spent in a prison cell have left him changed. One death row prison staffer told the parole board last month that while she cannot begin to understand the suffering Creech dealt to others, he is now a person who makes positive contributions to his community. His execution date will be difficult for everyone at the prison, she said, especially those who have known him for years.

“I don’t want to be dismissive of what he did and the countless people who were impacted by that in real significant ways,” said Tewalt, the corrections director. “At the same time, you also can’t be dismissive of the effect it’s going to have on people who have established a relationship with him. On Thursday, Tom’s not going to be there. You know he’s not coming back to that unit — that’s real. It would be really difficult to not feel some sort of emotion about that.”

Fed up with prices that remain about 19%, on average, above where they were before the pandemic, consumers are fighting back. In grocery stores, they’re shifting away from name brands to store-brand items, switching to discount stores or simply buying fewer items like snacks or gourmet foods.

More Americans are buying used cars, too, rather than new, forcing some dealers to provide discounts on new cars again. But the growing consumer pushback to what critics condemn as price-gouging has been most evident with food as well as with consumer goods like paper towels and napkins.

In recent months, consumer resistance has led large food companies to respond by sharply slowing their price increases from the peaks of the past three years. This doesn’t mean grocery prices will fall back to their levels of a few years ago, though with some items, including eggs, apples and milk, prices are below their peaks. But the milder increases in food prices should help further cool overall inflation, which is down sharply from a peak of 9.1% in 2022 to 3.1%.

Public frustration with prices has become a central issue in President Joe Biden’s bid for re-election. Polls show that despite the dramatic decline in inflation, many consumers are unhappy that prices remain so much higher than they were before inflation began accelerating in 2021.

Biden has echoed the criticism of many left-leaning economists that corporations jacked up their prices more than was needed to cover their own higher costs, allowing themselves to boost their profits. The White House has also attacked “shrinkflation,” whereby a company, rather than raising the price of a product, instead shrinks the amount inside the package. In a video released on Super Bowl Sunday, Biden denounced shrinkflation as a “rip-off.”

Consumer pushback against high prices suggests to many economists that inflation should further ease. That would make this bout of inflation markedly different from the debilitating price spikes of the 1970s and early 1980s, which took longer to defeat. When high inflation persists, consumers often develop an inflationary psychology: Ever-rising prices lead them to accelerate their purchases before costs rise further, a trend that can itself perpetuate inflation.

“That was the fear — that everybody would tolerate higher prices,” said Gregory Daco, chief economist at EY, a consulting firm, who notes that it hasn’t happened. “I don’t think we’ve moved into a high inflation regime.”

Instead, this time many consumers have reacted like Stuart Dryden, a commercial underwriter at a bank who lives in Arlington, Virginia. On a recent trip to his regular grocery store, Dryden, 37, pointed out big price disparities between Kraft Heinz-branded products and their store-label competitors, which he now favors.

Dryden, for example, loves cream cheese and bagels. A 12-ounce tub of Kraft’s Philadelphia cream cheese costs $6.69. The store brand, he noted, is just $3.19.

A 24-pack of Kraft single cheese slices is $7.69; the store label, $2.99. And a 32-ounce Heinz ketchup bottle is $6.29, while the alternative is just $1.69. Similar gaps existed with mac-and-cheese and shredded cheese products.

“Just those five products together already cost nearly $30,” Dryden said. The alternatives were less than half that, he calculated, at about $13.

“I’ve been trying private-label options, and the quality is the same and it’s almost a no-brainer to switch from the products I used to buy a ton of to just the private label,” Dryden said.

Alex Abraham, a spokesman for Kraft Heinz, said that its costs rose 3% in the final three months of last year but that the company raised its own prices only 1%.

“We are doing everything possible to find efficiencies in our factories and other parts of our business to offset and mitigate further price increases,” Abraham said.

Last week, Kraft Heinz said sales fell in the final three months of last year as more consumers traded down to cheaper brands.

Dryden has taken other steps to save money: A year ago, he moved into a new apartment after his previous landlord jacked up his rent by about 50%. His former apartment had been next to a relatively pricey grocery store, Whole Foods. Now, he shops at a nearby Amazon Fresh and has started visiting the discount grocer Aldi every couple of weeks.

Samuel Rines, an investment strategist at Corbu, says that PepsiCo, Kimberly-Clark, Procter & Gamble and many other consumer food and packaged goods companies exploited the rise in input costs stemming from supply-chain disruptions and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine to dramatically raise their prices — and increase their profits — in 2021 and 2022.

A contributing factor was that millions of Americans enjoyed solid wage gains and received stimulus checks and other government aid, making it easier for them to pay the higher prices.

Still, some decried the phenomenon as “greedflation.” And in a March 2023 research paper, the economist Isabella Weber at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, referred to it as “seller’s inflation.”

Yet beginning late last year, many of the same companies discovered that the strategy was no longer working. Most consumers have now long since spent the savings they built up during the pandemic.

Lower-income consumers, in particular, are running up credit card debt and falling behind on their payments. Americans overall are spending more cautiously. Daco notes that overall sales during the holiday shopping season were up just 4% — and most of it reflected higher prices rather than consumers actually buying more things.

As an example, Rines points to Unilever, which makes, among other items, Hellman’s mayonnaise, Ben & Jerry’s ice cream and Dove soaps. Unilever jacked up its prices 13.3% on average across its brands in 2022. Its sales volume fell 3.6% that year. In response, it raised prices just 2.8% last year; sales rose 1.8%.

“We’re beginning to see the consumer no longer willing to take the higher pricing,” Rines said. “So companies were beginning to get a little bit more skeptical of their ability to just have price be the driver of their revenues. They had to have those volumes come back, and the consumer wasn’t reacting in a way that they were pleased with.”

Unilever itself recently attributed poor sales performance in Europe to “share losses to private labels.”

Other businesses have noticed, too. After their sales fell in the final three months of last year, PepsiCo executives signaled that this year they would rein in price increases and focus more on boosting sales.

“In 2024, we see … normalization of the cost, normalization of inflation,” CEO Ramon Laguarta said. “So we see everything trending back to our long-term” pricing trends.

Jeffrey Harmening, CEO of General Mills, which makes Cheerios, Chex Cereal, Progresso soups and dozens of other brands, has acknowledged that his customers are increasingly seeking bargains.

And McDonald’s executives have said that consumers with incomes below $45,000 are visiting less and spending less when they do visit and say the company plans to highlight its lower-priced items.

“Consumers are more wary — and weary — of pricing, and we’re going to continue to be consumer-led in our pricing decisions,” Ian Borden, the company’s chief financial officer, told investors.

Officials at the Federal Reserve, the nation’s primary inflation-fighting institution, have cited consumers’ growing reluctance to pay high prices as a key reason why they expect inflation to fall steadily back to their 2% annual target.

“Firms are telling us that price sensitivity is very much higher now,” Mary Daly, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco and a member of the Fed’s interest-rate setting committee, said last week. “Consumers don’t want to purchase unless they’re seeing a 10% discount. … This is a serious improvement in the role that consumers play in bridling inflation.”

Surveys by the Fed’s regional banks have found that companies across all industries expect to impose smaller price increases this year. The New York Fed says companies in its region plan to raise prices an average of about 3% this year, down from about 5% in 2023 and as much as 7% to 9% in 2022.

Such trends suggest that companies were well on their way to slowing their price hikes before Biden’s most recent attacks on price gouging.

Claudia Sahm, founder of SAHM Consulting and a former Fed economist, said, “consumers are more powerful than President Biden.”

The mystery has sent shockwaves through the family of Kathleen Brandel and Ralph Hendry, and the sailing community.

The couple was last seen in Grenada in the eastern Caribbean last week. Their yacht, Simplicity, was discovered “anchored and abandoned” on the island of St. Vincent a few days later, but they were nowhere to be found, according to the nonprofit Salty Dawg Sailing Association, of which Brandel and Hendry are members.

A preliminary investigation suggests that three prisoners escaped their holding cell in Grenada on Feb. 18, and the next day hijacked the yacht from the capital, St. George’s. They made their way to St. Vincent and were eventually recaptured on Feb. 21, according to the Royal Grenada Police Force. 

Grenada police believe Brandel and Hendry may have been killed during the hijacking, but they cannot say so definitively.

Nick Buro and Bryan Hendry say what happened to their parents, a retired couple who sold their home in Alexandria, Virginia, years ago to be able to spend the rest of their days on Simplicity, is unimaginable.

“This is something that is completely unexpected,” Buro said. “And wrapping our brains around it and trying to understand a senseless act of violence against two people while they were just living their lives in their home, essentially, because Simplicity was their home. They didn’t have another home…. And having that safety and security taken away from them abruptly and have them attacked in where they live, it’s just, it’s unimaginable.”

The brothers say that though they hold onto some hope that their parents might still be alive, investigators said there were signs of a violent struggle aboard the vessel: the couples’ possessions were scattered around, and there was blood throughout. 

“Shock, despair, fear, sadness, hope, love – all of those emotions are going through our head at the same time,” Buro said.

The brothers are in the Caribbean as authorities continue the search. Kathleen Brandel and Ralph Hendry have been married for 27 years and have spent more than a decade sailing around the world.

“They loved immersing themselves in different cultures and meeting people and spreading their love wherever they could,” Bryan Hendry said.  

“You’ll never meet more beautiful people than Kathy and Ralph. They made everybody feel happy and so welcome. They consistently made you feel like you were part of their family,” Buro said. 

The Salty Dawg Sailing Association said the couple had sailed the yacht in last year’s Caribbean Rally from Hampton, Virginia, to Antigua, and were spending the winter cruising in the eastern Caribbean. 

Nick and Megan O’Kelly are fellow cruisers who knew the couple.

“There’s a real tight-knit fabric in this community. And so when this news came out, it spread like wildfire. People are just incredibly shocked and devastated by this,” Nick O’Kelly said.

The prisoners, ages 19, 25 and 30, were charged a couple of months ago with one count of robbery with violence. The eldest inmate also was charged with one count of rape, three counts of attempted rape and two counts of indecent assault and causing harm, police in Grenada said.

Authorities said they dispatched senior investigators and a forensic specialist to St. Vincent.

Johnny Hardwick, presiding judge of Montgomery County’s 15th Judicial Circuit, was allegedly assaulted and shot by his son, Khalfani A. Hardwick, 36, following a domestic dispute, according to the Montgomery County Sheriff’s Office.

“At approximately, 1:00 p.m., the Montgomery County Sheriff’s Office responded to Judge Johnny Hardwick’s residence in reference to a domestic incident,” police said.

“Upon arrival, deputies learned that Judge Hardwick had been assaulted, shot, and seriously injured by his son,” a press release states.

Police said his son fled the scene and abandoned his vehicle on Trotman Road. Shortly after, he was located on U.S. Highway 231 and taken into custody.

Khalfani Hardwick was charged with first-degree domestic violence and with certain persons forbidden to possess a pistol.

In 2014, Khalfani Hardwick pleaded guilty to second-degree assault after shooting family friend Clayton Riley in the head. He served no prison time.

Johnny Hardwick served in federal, state and Montgomery city positions before being appointed to the circuit court in 2001.

Last August, he was named president of the Alabama Association of Circuit Court Judges.

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Kramer expressed no remorse for creating the deepfake, in which an imitation of the president’s voice discouraged participation in New Hampshire’s Democratic presidential primary. The call launched several law enforcement investigations and provoked outcry from election officials and watchdogs.

“The evening of Sunday, January 20th, 2 days before the New Hampshire primary, I sent out an automated call to 5,000 most likely to vote Democrats. Using easy to use online technology, an automated version of President Joe Biden’s voice was created,” Kramer said in a statement shared first with NBC News.

Kramer said more enforcement is necessary to stop people like him from doing what he did.

“With a mere $500 investment, anyone could replicate my intentional call,” Kramer said. “Immediate action is needed across all regulatory bodies and platforms.”

Kramer did not say he was directed to make the call by his client at the time, the campaign of Biden’s long-shot primary challenger Rep. Dean Phillips, D-Minn. Phillips had paid Kramer over $250,000 around the time the robocall went out in January, according to his campaign finance reports.

Phillips and his campaign have denounced the robocall, saying they had no knowledge of Kramer’s involvement and would have immediately terminated him if they had known.

Phillips’ press secretary Katie Dolan said in response to Kramer’s statement Sunday, “Our campaign repeats its condemnation of these calls and any efforts to suppress the vote.”

Phillips’ team hired Kramer in December and January for ballot access work in New York and Pennsylvania, which involves collecting thousands of signatures from voters so a candidate can qualify for the ballot.

Kramer was first linked to the fake Biden robocall Friday by an NBC News report.

Paul Carpenter, a New Orleans street magician, said Kramer hired him to use AI software to create an audio file replicating Biden’s voice reading a script Kramer prepared and provided.

Carpenter was paid $150 for the work, according to Venmo transactions and text messages he shared with NBC News.

Until Carpenter came forward, it was unclear whether the world would ever know who was behind the first-known use of an AI deepfake in a presidential campaign.

Kramer, a get-out-the-vote specialist and president of his own small firm, has worked on dozens of federal, state and local campaigns over the past 20 years. He has worked mostly for Democrats and his career grew out of his involvement with the Young Democrats of America, though his most prominent client was likely Ye, the rapper formerly known as Kanye West, who hired Kramer for his brief 2020 independent presidential campaign.

Carpenter, a nomadic performer, said he met Kramer through a mutual acquaintance last year and was under the impression that Kramer was working for the Biden campaign when he asked Carpenter to create the audio file that eventually became the robocall.

Authorities in New Hampshire are investigating the robocall for potentially violating state laws against voter suppression. A multistate task force of state attorneys generals focused on robocalls is looking to crack down on the people involved in the Biden robocall in order to set an early example as the technology becomes more widespread. And the Federal Communications Commission sped up plans to outlaw AI robocalls in response to the Biden robocall.

In his statement, Kramer confirmed that to distribute the calls, he hired the Texas telemarketing company Life Co., which has been named by investigators as the originator of the calls.

“They had no knowledge of the content of this call prior to delivery,” Kramer wrote. “I’d use them again, but they are done with my business.”

He also confirmed Carpenter’s account that he directed the content of the fake Biden robocall, saying the call was created “using a script of my specific choosing.”

Kramer seems to be attempting to spin the situation by arguing his actions will have a positive benefit for society by provoking the implementation of stricter guardrails before this technology becomes widespread in campaigns. “Self-policing won’t work,” he wrote.

“Even individuals acting alone can quickly and easily use A.I. for misleading and disruptive purposes,” Kramer added.

This story first appeared on NBCNews.com. More from NBC News:

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Nex Benedict, a 16-year-old Oklahoma student who identified as nonbinary and used they/them pronouns, got into an altercation with three girls in an Owasso High School bathroom who were picking on Benedict and some friends. The girls attacked Benedict for pouring water on them, the teen told police in a video released Friday.

Benedict’s mother called emergency responders to the family home the day after the fight, saying Benedict’s breathing was shallow, their eyes were rolling back and their hands were curled, according to audio released by Owasso police.

Vigils for Benedict were held at locations including Boston, Minneapolis and Huntington Beach, California. Others were held or planned in several states including Washington, New Jersey, New York and Texas.

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Kanan Durham, executive director of Pride at the Pier, said during the Huntington Beach event on Friday that “this single moment cannot be the only way that we honor Nex.”

“This is a lot for all of us,” Durham said in a report by KABC-TV. “This community has experienced grief like this so many times before.”

At a vigil Saturday in Tahlequah, Oklahoma, the president of TahlEquality said Benedict’s death was traumatic and the rights group arranged for licensed therapists to be available at the event.

“It’s really hard being an LGBT community member in Oklahoma nowadays because suicide ideation and suicidal thoughts happen quite a bit,” Sanj Cooper told KOKI-TV, adding that the LGBT+ community also was moved to speak out after Benedict’s passing.

“If anything we are impassioned, the fire in our belly has been lit up again to continue to fight,” Cooper said. “If anything it doesn’t oppress or keep us from our voice from being heard. If anything it makes it louder.”

More than two dozen people gathered Friday at All Saints Episcopal Church in McAlester, Oklahoma, for a vigil organized by the McAlester Rainbow Connection.

Matt Blancett, who organized the vigil with the Rainbow Connection, an LGBTQ+ group, said it was important to hold a vigil in McAlester because of the murder of Dustin Parker, a transgender man, in 2020.

“It shows people that we have a community, we are here, we’re not going anywhere,” Blancett said.

All Saints Priest Janie Koch said it is important for people to reach out for support.

“It is very very important as the gamut of emotions are cycling to watch out for each other, to be mindful of one another,” Koch said.

In audio of the call to police, Benedict’s mother, Sue Benedict, said she wanted to file charges. The officer who responded can be heard in the hospital video explaining that the teen started the altercation by throwing the water and the court would view it as a mutual fight.

According to a police search warrant, Sue Benedict indicated to police on Feb. 7 that she didn’t want to file charges at that time. She instead asked police to speak to officials at Owasso High School about issues on campus among students.

The Feb. 9 search warrant, which was filed with the court on Feb. 21, also shows investigators took 137 photographs at the school, including inside the girl’s bathroom where the fight occurred. They also collected two swabs of stains from the bathroom and retrieved records and documents of the students involved in the altercation.

While the two-week-old warrant states that police were seeking evidence in a felony murder, the department has since said Benedict’s death was not a result of injuries suffered in the fight, based on the preliminary results of the autopsy.

The police department said it does not plan to comment further on the teen’s cause of death until toxicology and other autopsy results are completed.

Beginning Monday, participating McDonald’s locations around the world will be getting a mini-makeover inspired by anime lovers. The manga-inspired takeover, cheekily called “WcDonalds” — with upside-golden arches — alludes to how the chain is seen in some of anime’s most iconic movies and shows, according to a release from the Chicago-based burger giant.

“Anime is a huge part of today’s culture, and we love that our fans have been inviting us into the conversation for years,” McDonald’s USA Chief Marketing and Customer Experience Officer Tariq Hassan, said in the release. “The WcDonald’s universe is a reflection of what fans have created. It honors their vision and celebrates their creativity, while authentically bringing it to life in our restaurants for the first time ever.”

The temporary transformation will last through March 18.

While some folks might be skeptical, a number of anime enthusiasts are ecstatic, as evidenced on social media.

One user on the social media platform X, previously known as Twitter, said, “Idk ab y’all, but I’m so excited for this WcDonalds anime.”

Another said the anime packaging was “on point.”

For a third user, the transformation appeared to bring them back to childhood.

“McDonald’s embracing anime and manga brings a tear to my 90s child eyes,” the user commented.

As part of the transformation, McDonald’s teamed up with Japanese magna artist/illustrator Acky Bright, to create and design custom WcDonald’s packaging on menu items. For a limited time, customers will receive manga-inspired packaging featuring WcDonald’s Crew characters, sketched by Acky himself, the release said.

McDonald’s has also partnered with animation house Studio Pierrot to produce the first official WcDonald’s anime — four episodic shorts about WcDonald’s Sauce and WcNuggets.

Each Monday, starting Feb. 26 until March 18, the following shorts — which honor Action, Romance, Mecha and Fantasy, four of anime’s biggest subgenres — will drop on WcDonalds.com or via the code on the WcDonald’s bag:

Along with the change in packaging will come a few new menu items.

One is “Savory Chili WcDonald’s Sauce,” which is meant to be paired with WcNuggets (also known as Chicken McNuggets), the release said.

At one McDonald’s location, an “immersive dining experience” will be held, the release said, inspired by the “isekai anime subgenre.”

According to officials, the “WcDonald’s Immersive Dining Experience” will be held March 9 and 10 in Los Angeles. The dining experience will be “multi-sensory,” and “a genre-bending fusion of entertainment and food,” the release added.

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Defying calls from South Carolina Republicans to exit the race, Haley planned to travel Sunday to Michigan, which holds its primary on Tuesday.

With his win Saturday in the first-in-the South contest, Trump has now swept every primary or caucus on the GOP early-season calendar that awards delegates. His performances have left little maneuvering room for Haley, his former U.N. ambassador.

“I have never seen the Republican Party so unified as it is right now,” Trump said in a victory night celebration in Columbia.

Haley insists she is sticking around even with the growing pressure to abandon her candidacy and let Trump focus entirely on Democratic President Joe Biden, in a 2020 rematch.

In addition to the rally in vote-rich Oakland County, Michigan, northwest of Detroit on Sunday evening, she scheduled a Monday event in Grand Rapids, a western Michigan Republican hub.

“I’m grateful that today is not the end of our story,” Haley told supporters Saturday. “We’ll keep fighting for America and we won’t rest until America wins.”

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Asa Hutchinson, a Trump critic and former Arkansas governor who dropped out of the GOP presidential race after Iowa’s leadoff caucuses in January, said he thought Haley should stay in. “The challenge is that she did everything she could in South Carolina,” he said on CNN’s “State of the Union.”

Haley has pledged to keep going through at least the batch of primaries on March 5, known as Super Tuesday. “But it’s got to accelerate because you run into the delegate wall. And the delegate wall is March 5,” Hutchinson said. “So she’s got to prove herself.”

South Carolina’s most prominent Republicans stood with Trump, including U.S. Rep. Nancy Mace, who endorsed him this past week.

To U.S. Rep. Russell Fry, “this has always been a primary in name only” and that Trump was never in jeopardy of losing to Haley. Fry said Trump would be the GOP nominee and the latest election results were “just further validation of that.”

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, a Trump ally, said Trump was on “a pathway” to being able to clinch the nomination by mid-March. “I would say the wind is strongly” at his back, Abbott told CNN.

Not all voters in South Carolina want Haley to end her campaign.

Irene Sulkowski of Daniel Island said she hoped Haley would soldier on, suggesting the former governor would be a more appealing general election candidate than Trump despite his popularity among the GOP base that powers the primary season.

“They’re not thinking, ‘Who do you want to represent us in the general election?’” said Sulkowski, an accountant. “And they need to have a longer-term view.”

Beaumont reported from Des Moines, Iowa. Associated Press writer James Pollard in Columbia, South Carolina, contributed to this report.

Firefighters responded to a call for a person on fire just before 1 p.m. E.T. in the 3500 block of International Drive NW, D.C. Fire and EMS said.

When first responders arrived, they found that the blaze had been put out by the Secret Service, the fire department said.

The man was taken to the hospital with critical injuries after the fire was extinguished. It was not immediately clear how he came to be on fire.

The Secret Service officers responded to a report of a person experiencing a possible medical or mental health emergency, said Joe Routh, a U.S. Secret Service spokesman.

In a video posted online, a person can be heard saying, “Hi, sir, can I help you?” as the man approaches the gate to the embassy. The person again asks, “Can I help you, sir,” and then the man lights the fire.

An Air Force Spokesperson tells NBC News that the man involved in today’s incident is an active-duty Airman.

The individual burned for about a minute and collapsed on the ground, according to the video, before law enforcement began to extinguish the fire.

The police said an explosive ordinance disposal unit had also been called to the scene concerning a suspicious vehicle that may be linked to the individual. It later said that no hazardous material was found.

No additional information was immediately released.

Authorities on Sunday afternoon said they were still investigating.

If you or someone you know needs help, visit 988lifeline.org or call or text the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline at 988.

This is a developing story. Stay with News4 for more updates.

This story uses functionality that may not work in our app. Click here to open the story in your web browser.

“This is not about politics,” Sullivan told NBC News’ “Meet the Press.” “This is about national security. It is about a foreign country, a foreign adversary, seeking to manipulate the politics and democracy of the United States of America.”

He also said the Biden administration is going to be “vigilant” about preventing interference in elections, and that it will “engage the Congress on a bipartisan basis, because this should be above and beyond politics.”

His remarks come as top U.S. national security and intelligence officials warn that despite Russia’s war with Ukraine, the country will still try to interfere in U.S. elections.

In October, the U.S. released an intelligence analysis to countries around the world alleging that Russia was using spies, state-run media and social media to affect elections worldwide, not just in the U.S.

Russia is not the only country attempting to sow mayhem, an analysis by Microsoft found last year. Threat actors in Iran and China are also using artificial intelligence to try to coordinate cyberattacks, according to the company.

Yet despite the availability of the technology all these years, fewer than one percent of the 489,000 school buses in the U.S. were electric at the end of 2023.

That means nearly all the buses that get many of the nation’s children to school still run on a fuel that sends dangerous contaminants into the air and is carcinogenic.

But that may be changing. The number of electric school buses on the road or on order across the country has more than tripled in the last two years, according to the World Resources Institute’s Electric School Bus Initiative.

That’s meant ten times as many students riding on electric school buses — from around 20,000 in 2020 to 200,000 3 years later, according to the WRI. The number of states with electric bus legislation or goals also grew, from two to 14 between 2020 and last year.

Still, parents, advocates and organizations come up against a number of challenges in getting electric school bus buy-in elsewhere.

“It’s just a matter of breaking down these barriers,” said Alicia Cox, a mother of two in Jackson, Wyoming. Her state is the only to not have a single district with an electric bus operating or on order.

Cox’s son, a second-grader, often rides a diesel bus to school. As the executive director of Yellowstone-Teton Clean Cities, a nonprofit that focuses on sustainable transportation, she regularly calls on school districts, fleet managers, other nonprofit organizations and a variety of agencies to make the switch — so far, to no avail.

One of the biggest challenges is still the cost, parents, advocates, and districts say. Even with the fuel and maintenance savings of an electric bus, they cost two to three times more than diesel.

The Environmental Protection Agency is finally rolling out $5 billion in funds set aside for zero-emissions buses in the Biden administration’s bipartisan infrastructure law, passed in 2021. Nearly 440 grants and rebates totaling $1.8 billion have already been disbursed to replace thousands of buses across several hundred school districts in the U.S.

Demand for the money has been “heartening,” said Christine Koester, a director for the Clean School Bus Program at the EPA.

In addition to federal money, advocates have successfully pushed to get funds from sources like the Volkswagen emissions settlement allocated to electric buses.

For those districts that are not receiving funding, there are some options to lease electric buses from contracting companies that supply the buses and equipment, and lease them to districts at an affordable price.

STILL OUT OF REACH

Dearborn Public Schools — a metro Detroit district where 70% of families are lower-income — was ready to explore a new technology when it began operating its first electric bus in December 2022, said communications director David Mustonen.

Bought with a $300,000 federal grant, it’s been operational only about three of the twelve months since then, due to maintenance and a learning curve with charging. That’s not discouraging Dearborn from moving forward with adding 18 more, but it’s a risk others may be reluctant to take.

Other barriers in the transition to electric are that districts sometimes take a long time to approve electric buses; delivery can be delayed, and sometimes electric buses require beefing up the electrical supply for the chargers.

Wyoming turned down funding from the EPA over worries about how far the buses could go and storing them in cold temperatures.

“Even though diesel is not as clean, it’s getting the job done,” Cox said schools and fleet managers tell her.

Even where districts agree to buy electric school buses, many also continue to buy new diesel buses in parallel. And while the Clean School Bus Program requires recipients to replace their oldest buses first, some districts can’t guarantee that, because they don’t own their fleets, but contract for them.

Meanwhile, parents, advocates, and organizations said the switch to electric usually happens when there is a “champion” at schools, but that itself can be a hurdle, said Elizabeth Brandt, the mother of two children attending Montgomery County Public Schools in Maryland. Her children rode on the one electric school bus circulating in her area for about a year before its route was changed.

Parents dealing with their kids’ asthma are less likely to be able to advocate for change, Brandt said.

“If you’re saving your sick time to help your child see a pulmonologist,” Brandt said, “you just can’t necessarily be the one who’s always going to be there on a weekday talking with a lawmaker.”

___

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.

Have a look at some of the numbers, history and lore behind the (not quite) every four year phenom that adds a 29th day to February.

The math is mind-boggling in a layperson sort of way and down to fractions of days and minutes. There’s even a leap second occasionally, but there’s no hullabaloo when that happens.

The thing to know is that leap year exists, in large part, to keep the months in sync with annual events, including equinoxes and solstices, according to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory at the California Institute of Technology.

It’s a correction to counter the fact that Earth’s orbit isn’t precisely 365 days a year. The trip takes about six hours longer than that, NASA says.

Contrary to what some might believe, however, not every four years is a leaper. Adding a leap day every four years would make the calendar longer by more than 44 minutes, according to the National Air & Space Museum.

Later, on a calendar yet to come (we’ll get to it), it was decreed that years divisible by 100 not follow the four-year leap day rule unless they are also divisible by 400, the JPL notes. In the past 500 years, there was no leap day in 1700, 1800 and 1900, but 2000 had one. In the next 500 years, if the practice is followed, there will be no leap day in 2100, 2200, 2300 and 2500.

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The short answer: It evolved.

Ancient civilizations used the cosmos to plan their lives, and there are calendars dating back to the Bronze Age. They were based on either the phases of the moon or the sun, as various calendars are today. Usually they were “lunisolar,” using both.

Now hop on over to the Roman Empire and Julius Caesar. He was dealing with major seasonal drift on calendars used in his neck of the woods. They dealt badly with drift by adding months. He was also navigating a vast array of calendars starting in a vast array of ways in the vast Roman Empire.

He introduced his Julian calendar in 46 BCE. It was purely solar and counted a year at 365.25 days, so once every four years an extra day was added. Before that, the Romans counted a year at 355 days, at least for a time.

But still, under Julius, there was drift. There were too many leap years! The solar year isn’t precisely 365.25 days! It’s 365.242 days, said Nick Eakes, an astronomy educator at the Morehead Planetarium and Science Center at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill.

Thomas Palaima, a classics professor at the University of Texas at Austin, said adding periods of time to a year to reflect variations in the lunar and solar cycles was done by the ancients. The Athenian calendar, he said, was used in the fourth, fifth and sixth centuries with 12 lunar months.

That didn’t work for seasonal religious rites. The drift problem led to “intercalating” an extra month periodically to realign with lunar and solar cycles, Palaima said.

The Julian calendar was 0.0078 days (11 minutes and 14 seconds) longer than the tropical year, so errors in timekeeping still gradually accumulated, according to NASA. But stability increased, Palaima said.

The Julian calendar was the model used by the Western world for hundreds of years. Enter Pope Gregory XIII, who calibrated further. His Gregorian calendar took effect in the late 16th century. It remains in use today and, clearly, isn’t perfect or there would be no need for leap year. But it was a big improvement, reducing drift to mere seconds.

Why did he step in? Well, Easter. It was coming later in the year over time, and he fretted that events related to Easter like the Pentecost might bump up against pagan festivals. The pope wanted Easter to remain in the spring.

He eliminated some extra days accumulated on the Julian calendar and tweaked the rules on leap day. It’s Pope Gregory and his advisers who came up with the really gnarly math on when there should or shouldn’t be a leap year.

“If the solar year was a perfect 365.25 then we wouldn’t have to worry about the tricky math involved,” Eakes said.

Bizarrely, leap day comes with lore about women popping the marriage question to men. It was mostly benign fun, but it came with a bite that reinforced gender roles.

There’s distant European folklore. One story places the idea of women proposing in fifth century Ireland, with St. Bridget appealing to St. Patrick to offer women the chance to ask men to marry them, according to historian Katherine Parkin in a 2012 paper in the Journal of Family History.

Nobody really knows where it all began.

In 1904, syndicated columnist Elizabeth Meriwether Gilmer, aka Dorothy Dix, summed up the tradition this way: “Of course people will say … that a woman’s leap year prerogative, like most of her liberties, is merely a glittering mockery.”

The pre-Sadie Hawkins tradition, however serious or tongue-in-cheek, could have empowered women but merely perpetuated stereotypes. The proposals were to happen via postcard, but many such cards turned the tables and poked fun at women instead.

Advertising perpetuated the leap year marriage game. A 1916 ad by the American Industrial Bank and Trust Co. read thusly: “This being Leap Year day, we suggest to every girl that she propose to her father to open a savings account in her name in our own bank.”

There was no breath of independence for women due to leap day.

Being born in a leap year on a leap day certainly is a talking point. But it can be kind of a pain from a paperwork perspective. Some governments and others requiring forms to be filled out and birthdays to be stated stepped in to declare what date was used by leaplings for such things as drivers licenses, whether Feb. 28 or March 1.

Technology has made it far easier for leap babies to jot down their Feb. 29 milestones, though there can be glitches in terms of health systems, insurance policies and with other businesses and organization that don’t have that date built in.

There are about 5 million people worldwide who share the leap birthday out of about 8 billion people on the planet. Shelley Dean, 23, in Seattle, Washington, chooses a rosy attitude about being a leapling. Growing up, she had normal birthday parties each year, but an extra special one when leap years rolled around. Since, as an adult, she marks that non-leap period between Feb. 28 and March 1 with a low-key “whew.”

This year is different.

“It will be the first birthday that I’m going to celebrate with my family in eight years, which is super exciting, because the last leap day I was on the other side of the country in New York for college,” she said. “It’s a very big year.”

Eventually, nothing good in terms of when major events fall, when farmers plant and how seasons align with the sun and the moon.

“Without the leap years, after a few hundred years we will have summer in November,” said Younas Khan, a physics instructor at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. “Christmas will be in summer. There will be no snow. There will be no feeling of Christmas.”

What happened in Flaco’s final hours is top of mind for his fans across the city, who cheered him on as he defied the odds by fending for himself despite a life in captivity. Police are still seeking to arrest whoever let him out of his enclosure at the Central Park Zoo a year ago.

Flaco had been in good physical shape, the necropsy found, succeeding in catching prey even though he had no experience hunting because he came to the zoo as a fledgling 13 years earlier. According to the necropsy report released Saturday, the owl weighed 1.89 kilograms (4.1 pounds), just 2% less than when he was last measured at the zoo.

Flaco was found dead Friday on a sidewalk after apparently hitting a building on Manhattan’s Upper West Side.

“The main impact appears to have been to the body, as there was substantial hemorrhage under the sternum and in the back of the body cavity around the liver,” the report said.

The Central Park Zoo put the blame squarely on the person who cut open Flaco’s enclosure. But they’re investigating illness as a possible factor, and plan to release an update in around two weeks.

“This will include microscopic examination of tissue samples; toxicology tests to evaluate potential exposures to rodenticides or other toxins; and testing for infectious diseases such as West Nile Virus and Avian Influenza,” the zoo’s statement said.

Eulogies from his admirers poured in over the weekend. So did speculation about which of the many urban threats to wildlife may have contributed to his death.

Flaco fans who listened for his nightly hooting in on the Upper West Side reported he’d gone quiet in the days before his death, and theorized that he may have been ill.

First responders in Eagle Pass say they are overwhelmed and increasingly traumatized by what they see: parents drowned or dying, their children barely holding onto life after attempting to cross the Rio Grande.

The emotional strain on firefighters and EMTs has grown so great that city officials have applied for a state grant that would bring in additional mental health resources for front-line workers, NBC News reported.

“It’s an unprecedented crisis,” said Eagle Pass Fire Chief Manuel Mello. “It’s nothing close to what I experienced while I was on the line. It’s a whole different monster.”

Firefighters say the first calls for help usually blare through the three stations in Eagle Pass while crews are still sipping their morning coffee, bracing themselves for what the day will bring.

Parents with young children might be near drowning or trapped on islands somewhere between the United States and Mexico, surrounded by the fierce currents of the Rio Grande.

On some shifts, firefighters with the Eagle Pass Fire Department can spend three to five hours in the water, helping rescue migrants crossing the river or recovering their drowned bodies.

“It’s something we’ve never gone through,” said Eagle Pass native Marcos Kypuros, who has been a firefighter and EMT for two decades. “It’s been hard having to keep up with that on top of everything else we take care of.”

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Eagle Pass has become ground zero in recent months for an unrelenting border crisis that is equal parts political and humanitarian.

With hundreds of thousands of people attempting to cross the border illegally each year near Eagle Pass, city emergency personnel have increasingly been called upon to perform difficult and often dangerous rescues or to retrieve dead bodies, they said. They do this while juggling other emergencies in the city of 28,000 and throughout sparsely populated Maverick County.

“They see decomposing bodies, they see children that have drowned. Babies 2-months-old, with their eyes half-open, their mouths full of mud,” Mello said. “I know that when I signed up, they told me that I would see all of that, but not in the number that these guys are seeing now.”

Call volumes to the fire department surged last summer after Title 42, which set limits on asylum-seekers hoping to enter the United States, was lifted. On a typical day, the department might receive 30 calls, but the number has doubled in recent months, Mello said.

The added strain prompted one of his firefighters, who was still working through the required probationary period, to turn in his gear and switch careers entirely, he added.

After a record-breaking number of illegal crossings in December, federal authorities say the figure dropped by half in January. The most significant decrease was in the U.S. Border Patrol’s Del Rio sector, which includes Eagle Pass.

But the steady rise in crossings last year has taken a toll on first responders who did not sign up for this kind of work, Kypuros said.

“Those times where we recover four or five, six, up to seven bodies a day — it was just rough,” he said.

As the number of calls for emergencies on the border grew last fall, so did the number of sick days firefighters requested, according to the fire chief.

“I try and leave all this at work, not take it home with me, but it’s so hard,” Kypuros said. “Sometimes it’s hard to cope.”

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Fueled by unprecedented border crossings, a record 3 million cases clog US immigration courts

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s office did not respond to multiple requests for comment. It was not immediately clear when the funds the city applied for would be awarded.

After the record-breaking number of attempted border crossings last year, Abbott ramped up the state’s immigration enforcement efforts. Last week, he announced the deployment of 1,800 members of the Texas National Guard to Eagle Pass in an effort to curb illegal crossings.

Abbott, a Republican, installed razor wire near the Rio Grande at Eagle Pass as part of the enforcement operation, and previously placed buoys in the river to prevent crossings.

Firefighters have treated lacerations and open wounds from people trying to crawl through the concertina wire, Kypuros said. At times, local hospitals get so overwhelmed with patients from the border that wait times for a bed can stretch to two hours, Garcia added.

As thousands of people without pathways to U.S. citizenship wait in squalid, makeshift camps on the Mexico side of the border, others attempt dangerous river crossings across the Rio Grande, endangering their own lives and those of their loved ones.

Harish Garcia, who has worked as a firefighter EMT in Eagle Pass for three years, still cannot shake the memory of a drowning mother and her young daughter. Garcia’s crew, including a firefighter with a daughter around the same age as the little girl, loaded the two into an ambulance, he said, but it was too late.

When crews returned to the station, some called their families. Others went quiet, Garcia said.

“Unfortunately, calls are going to keep coming in after that, so we can’t hang on to that for too long,” he said months later. “We have to just let it go and move on to the next call.”

Garcia and Kypuros say they’ve lost count of how many bodies they’ve recovered in recent months. The majority are found after failed attempts to cross the river, but other calls have led fire crews into the rough brush of South Texas, where dehydration and exposure can prove just as deadly.

David Black, a psychologist who has worked with the California law enforcement community for more than 20 years, said witnessing the death of a child is often the most traumatizing event a first responder can experience. Without a strong support system both in and out of the workplace, that stress can eat away at them.

“We outsource our worst-case scenarios to first responders,” he said. “If you have your own children, that can really impact how you look at your own family.”

As Eagle Pass waits for the state grant to be approved, agents with U.S. Customs and Border Protection and other federal workers already have access to mental health resources internally.

The services, which include on-site clinicians and field psychologists, are part of a larger effort to “improve resiliency and encourage our colleagues to seek help when they need it,” said Troy Miller, acting CBP commissioner.

Mello said that despite the uncertain nature of the border crisis and the political tensions between the White House and the governor’s office, he is optimistic that help will come.

Until then, he knows the calls for help will keep coming.

Morgan Chesky reported from Eagle Pass, Texas, and Alicia Victoria Lozano from Los Angeles.

This story first appeared on NBCNews.com. More from NBC News:

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A statement posted to its website on Sunday morning apologized for the outage.

“We recognize the frustration this outage has caused and know we let many of our customers down,” the statement read. “We understand this may have impacted their ability to connect with family, friends, and others. Small business owners may have been impacted, potentially disrupting an essential way they connect with customers.”

AT&T said the credit will automatically be applied to customer accounts in one to two billing cycles and will amount to “the average cost of a full day of service.”

The fine print read, “One $5 credit per account on your AT&T Wireless^SM account. Offer does not apply to AT&T Business, AT&T Prepaid or Cricket.”

AT&T also said it is taking steps to prevent this from happening again in the future. 

The outage knocked out cellphone service for thousands of its users across the U.S. starting early Thursday before it was restored.

AT&T blamed the incident on an error in coding, without elaborating.

Outage tracker Downdetector noted that outages, which began at about 3:30 a.m. ET, peaked at around 73,000 reported incidents. AT&T had more than 58,000 outages around noon ET, in locations including Houston, Atlanta and Chicago. The carrier is the country’s largest, with more than 240 million subscribers.

By 9 p.m. ET, the reports on AT&T’s network were fewer than 1,000.

Cricket Wireless, which is owned by AT&T, had more than 9,000 outages at one point but the reports had also tailed off later in the afternoon. Users of other carriers, including Verizon and T-Mobile, also reported issues but those companies said their networks were operating normally and the problems were likely stemming from customers trying to connect to AT&T users.

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Artificial intelligence phones: these are the buzzwords you’ll likely hear this year, as smartphone players look to jump on the AI hype to boost sales of their devices after a difficult stretch of time.

OpenAI’s ChatGPT, released in late 2022, sparked huge interest in generative AI, specifically — models trained on huge amounts of data that are able to produce text, images and prompts from user videos. Since then, AI excitement has touched every industry and entered the popular imagination.

Smartphone makers see a chance to cash in and are going to be touting the tech at the Mobile World Congress (MWC), the biggest mobile industry trade show in the world, which kicks off on Monday in Barcelona, Spain.

“Nobody wants to be seen as being behind the curve, and AI is just the talk of the town. It is the buzzword this year that all the vendors are going to be jumping on,” Bryan Ma, vice president of client devices research at IDC, told CNBC.

What is an AI phone?

The gear is harder to define, and it depends on which manufacturer you ask.

Analysts who spoke to CNBC broadly agree on a few things — that these devices will have more advanced chips to run AI applications, and that those AI apps will run on-device rather than in the cloud.

Companies like Qualcomm and MediaTek have launched smartphone chipsets that enable the processing power required for AI applications.

But AI tech inside phones is not new. Some aspects of AI have been in devices for years and have allowed features such as background blur effects on smartphones and picture editing.

What is new is the introduction of large language models and generative AI. Large language models are huge AI models trained on vast amounts of data that underpin applications like the widely popular chatbots. These models unlock new features, such as the ability for chatbots to generate images or text from a user prompt.

“It is not just about having a chatbot, we have had these virtual assistants for a while. The difference is, it is generative now, so they can create a poem or summarize meetings. If it is about text to image creation, that was something that wasn’t done before,” Ma said.

The other big part of the AI smartphone puzzle is the term “on-device AI.” Previously, many AI applications on devices were actually partly processed in the cloud, then downloaded onto the phone. But advanced chips and the ability for large language models to effectively become smaller are likely to drive more AI applications to be run solely in the device, rather than in a data center.

“I think one of the big stories at MWC will be the ability of the AI models too run natively on the devices themselves and that is where it potentially starts to become a bit more of a gamechanger,” Ben Wood, chief analyst at CCS Insight, told CNBC.

Smartphone makers say on-device AI improves the security of gear, unlocks new applications and also makes them faster, since the processing is done on the handset.

This could unlock new applications that developers could create, both Ma and Wood said.

Eventually, Wood said, smartphone makers want to achieve “anticipatory computing” — the idea that AI “is smart enough to learn your behavior as a user and make the device so much more intuitive and predicting what you want to do next without you having to do much.”

But are AI phones a reality right now?

Sort of. AI has been used in devices for some time, but the new era of on-device AI with large language models is still in its early stages.

Device makers at MWC are going to show off lots of AI-powered features — and we are already seeing some of it. In January, Samsung launched its flagship Galaxy S24 smartphone range, touting its AI capabilities. One feature that drew attention was the ability to circle an image or text you’re looking at on any app, then immediately search that on Google.

MWC will likely include demonstrations of AI features, from camera apps to chatbots on phones.

But the reality is that a lot of these perks are not actually on-device and still rely on processing in the cloud, according to IDC’s Ma. He added that, even with AI capabilities on devices, it will take a “number of years” before third-party developers figure out a “killer use case or that compelling use case that consumer can’t do without.”

Wood said the danger is that smartphone manufacturers talk a lot about AI, rather than about the experiences that the technology can deliver for users.

“Consumers have no idea what an AI smartphone is, they need the use cases to go round it,” Wood said. The risk is that there is “AI fatigue.”

Ultimately, the lofty AI experiences smartphone makers are dreaming of could be a long way out.

“We are building an unbelievable foundational platform for AI on device. 2024 will be the year we look back on and say that’s where it all started to happen but it could be a long time before we start of these benefit of that in terms of game changing experiences,” Wood said.

Throughout the conference, racist extremists, some of whom had secured official CPAC badges, openly mingled with conference attendees and espoused antisemitic conspiracy theories, according to NBC News.

The presence of these individuals has been a persistent issue at CPAC. In previous years, conference organizers have ejected well-known Nazis and white supremacists such as Nick Fuentes.

But this year, racist conspiracy theorists didn’t meet any perceptible resistance at the conference where Donald Trump has been the keynote speaker since 2017.

At the Young Republican mixer Friday evening, a group of Nazis who openly identified as national socialists mingled with mainstream conservative personalities, including some from Turning Point USA, and discussed so-called “race science” and antisemitic conspiracy theories.

One member of the group, Greg Conte, who attended the deadly 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, said that his group showed up to talk to the media. He said that the group was prepared to be ejected if CPAC organizers were tipped off, but that never happened.

Another, Ryan Sanchez, who was previously part of the Nazi “Rise Above Movement,” took photos and videos of himself at the conference with an official badge and touted associations with Fuentes.

Other attendees in Sanchez’s company openly used the N-word.

For several years, CPAC and its supporters have attempted to temper the most extreme fringes of the conservative movement, and have welcomed the continued debate between Trump and more moderate conservatives.

This year, however, some attendees and former attendees have expressed frustration with the conference’s stronger association with Trump and his wing of the party.

In one of the most viral moments from this year’s conference, conservative personality Jack Posobiec called for the end of democracy and a more explicitly Christian-focused government. While Posobiec later said his statements were partly satire, many CPAC attendees embraced his and others’ invocations of the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection.

CPAC organizers did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

This article first appeared on NBCNews.com. More from NBC News:

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Defeat for former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley is a blow in her home state. A total of 50 delegates were on the line in Saturday’s contest, which are split between the statewide winner and the winner of each congressional district.

And Trump’s dominant performance in the exit polling and earliest results suggest he could pull off a clean sweep, with South Carolina’s Charleston-based 1st Congressional District offering the best potential for Haley to win delegates.

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ust after 10 p.m. ET, Trump was holding a statewide edge of more than 20 points over Haley.

With his victory on Saturday, the former president now looks to be cruising to the party’s presidential nomination despite being criminally charged in four separate jurisdictions and subject to hundreds of millions of dollars in civil penalties. He could reach the necessary 1,215 delegates to clinch by mid-March, with a number of states holding de facto winner-take-all primaries on Super Tuesday (March 5) and more following after that.

“There has never been a spirit like this,” Trump said at his election night party in Columbia. “I have never seen the Republican Party so unified.”

The NBC exit poll shows Trump and Haley fighting to a near-draw among Republican voters with college degrees: Trump with 51% to Haley’s 47%. But it was a blowout among the bigger group of primary voters without degrees: Trump 74%, Haley 26%.

Other figures in the exit poll illustrated the steep hill Haley had to climb here — and the massive advantage enjoyed by Trump. So much of Haley’s messaging painted her, as a much younger candidate, as having mental and physical fortitude that she said Trump lacks in his advanced age. Yet, exit polling showed that 38% of GOP primary voters think only Trump has the physical and mental strength needed for the presidency, while just 26% said only Haley did.

Haley has also been campaigning on polls showing she would be much more likely to defeat President Joe Biden in the fall. But the exit polling showed that while 57% of South Carolina primary voters think Haley would likely beat Biden, a whopping 83% said Trump likely would.

And when GOP primary voters who backed Haley were asked if Biden legitimately won the 2020 election, 79% said yes and just 11% said no. Among Trump voters, those numbers were flipped entirely, as just 11% said yes and 88% said no.

For Haley, who served as governor of South Carolina before she became Trump’s ambassador to the United Nations, the loss was particularly brutal. Trump’s victory could be the most lopsided in a contested South Carolina GOP primary since President George H.W. Bush defeated right-wing insurgent candidate Pat Buchanan, a former aide to multiple GOP presidents, by more than 40 points in 1992.

But Haley made clear that a loss in her home state on Saturday would not be pushing her out of the race any time soon, pledging to campaign through the Super Tuesday contests next month. Already, she’s planned a cross-country trip to those states set to begin on Sunday.

Speaking at her election night party in Charleston, Haley reiterated that she is fighting on, saying, “I’m grateful that today is not the end of our story.” Though she congratulated Trump on his victory, she said she does not believe he can defeat Biden.

“Today, in South Carolina, we’re getting around 40% of the vote,” she said, adding, “I’m an accountant. I know 40% is not 50%. But I also know 40% is not some tiny group. There are huge numbers of voters in our Republican primaries who are saying they want an alternative.”

“I said earlier this week that no matter what happens in South Carolina, I would continue to run for president,” she continued. “I’m a woman of my word.”

In a speech on Tuesday outlining why she planned to stay in the race regardless of results in the Palmetto State, Haley called Trump “a disaster” for the GOP who is “more unstable and unhinged” than when he first ran, adding she feels “no need to kiss the ring.” 

“And I have no fear of Trump’s retribution,” she said. “I’m not looking for anything from him.”

The pro-Trump super PAC Make America Great Again Inc., said in a statement following Haley’s election eve address that she “celebrated Saturday night for getting ‘around 40 percent of the vote’ in her home state.”

“Nikki Haley is moving the goal posts as she continues along with her doomed candidacy,” the release continued, noting that she did not grow her percentage of the vote following last month’s New Hampshire primary.

But a Haley ally, speaking on condition of anonymity as they were not authorized to speak publicly, told NBC News that the results in South Carolina actually showed danger ahead for Trump.

“South Carolina signaled a larger problem for Trump and Republicans supporting him — after losing 40-50 percent of the base in Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina, how can Trump and his allies make up that deficit in a general election match up with Joe Biden?” one Haley ally said. “He can’t.”

Trump, who held one major event in the state during the final days of the contest, paid little attention to Haley in the run-up to Saturday’s vote, though at a rally earlier this month he questioned where Haley’s husband was, as he is deployed overseas with the military. 

Haley and allies repeatedly targeted Trump for those comments over the last two weeks, also targeting his comments at the same South Carolina event that he once told NATO allies he would “encourage” Russia to “do whatever the hell they want” if those allies did not increase their defense spending.

“Nikki has actually gone very far left, she’s very rude,” Trump said at his rally in Rock Hill on Friday, during which he only briefly referenced his rival. “Do you notice that? I don’t like to say that, but she’s very rude.”

Trump maintained wide polling leads in the public surveys released before Saturday’s contest. But Rep. Ralph Norman, R-S.C., Haley’s lone congressional endorser, predicted ahead of Saturday that Haley would “outperform” those surveys.

“It’s not going to be 30 points,” he said. “We’ll see how this turns out, take this state by state. I admire her for doing this. All those who are asking her to get out, they’re not putting the work in.”

Haley and allies increasingly targeted independent and Democratic-leaning voters in the final days of the election, with any voter who did not vote in the Feb. 3 Democratic presidential primary here eligible to vote in Saturday’s contest. Turnout in the Democratic primary was just 130,000, a massive drop-off from recent election cycles.

And Haley and her main super PAC spent far more in advertising through Tuesday, outspending Trump in South Carolina about 10 to 1.

Still, the deficit Haley faced versus Trump was too much for her to overcome. And with Trump’s win seemingly in the bag for weeks, Trump’s family members like daughter-in-law Lara Trump, whom the former president has endorsed to serve as co-chair of the Republican National Committee, asked in Beaufort: “Why is she still in the race?”

During an exchange with reporters following the event, Trump’s daughter-in-law suggested that Haley must only be staying in the race because she is hopeful that a criminal conviction will knock the former president out before Election Day.

“I can only assume, and I think what a lot of people only assume, is that you would only stay in if you were banking on possibly the least democratic and least American thing happening in this situation, which is that potentially one of these indictments takes Donald Trump out,” she said.

At her Georgetown rally on Thursday, Haley said she did not care how her presidential bid would impact her political future.

“First they wanted to say that I wanted to be vice president,” she said. “I think I pretty much proved that is not what I’m trying to do. Then they were talking about my political future. I don’t care about a political future. If I did, I would have been out by now.”

Haley supporters who spoke with NBC News said they wanted to see her push on, suggesting something beyond the results could impact the race.

“Regardless of how she fares in South Carolina, I would like to see her run the course,” said Liz Hood, a Haley backer from Beaufort. “Because from Feb. 24 to November is a long time. And there are many things that can happen.”

“I’m glad she’s staying in,” added Bill Pittman, a Haley supporter from Beaufort. “And I think she’ll win, but a lot can happen on both sides between now and Election Day. It is an eternity away in politics. I like the idea of her being in the mix, still in the hunt.”

The core problem Haley ran into in her home state was simple: Voters for the most part liked her, but most who voted on Saturday simply liked Trump even more.

“She was pretty good,” David, a Trump supporter from Georgetown, said of her time as governor. “I think she’s a great person. But I think the Democrat Party would eat her up, spit her out in the first week. I don’t think she can handle it.”

“I don’t like the man,” he added of Trump. “But I think he is the only one that can bring us out of the hole we’re in.”

This article originally appeared on NBCNews.com. Read more from NBC News here:

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Rickey Lowe, 32 and resident of Manassas, was arrested for grand larceny and held on a $2,000 bond. 

Lowe was a passenger in a stolen Toyota Corolla that raced away from police before crashing along Route 50 towards the Interstate 66 exit in Fair Oaks, Virginia, on Feb. 19, police said. Officers recovered two guns and narcotics from the stolen vehicle.

Video shows a white vehicle speeding toward an exit, veering left into the grass and going airborne. The crash caused parts of the vehicle, including the top, to fly off.

Five people were taken to the hospital, including Lowe, Fairfax County police said. He then walked away from the hospital before getting discharged, and “jumped in a private transport ambulance and stole it,” authorities said.

Police said the suspect ditched the stolen ambulance in the 4200 block of Annandale Road in Annandale about 40 minutes later and fled on foot. 

It wasn’t until Friday that “detectives found Lowe near a hotel in Manassas where he was safely taken into custody,” authorities said in a release on Saturday.

The driver of the stolen Corolla, Xxeavius Romoance Marlow, 29 and resident of Manassas, was also charged with grand larceny and held without bond after the crash. Police have not announced other arrests. 

Broadbent’s father announced on Facebook that she had died “after living with Aids since birth,” but did not provide more details. The Clark County coroner’s office said Broadbent died Tuesday in Las Vegas.

“Despite facing numerous challenges throughout her life,” Loren Broadbent wrote, “Hydeia remained determined to spread hope and positivity through education around Hiv/AIDS.”

He did not immediately respond Thursday to messages seeking comment sent via Facebook and a GoFundMe page.

Broadbent became a fierce advocate for those living with the disease at a time when medications were not widely available to help manage HIV and the virus was considered a death sentence. HIV, or human immunodeficiency virus, attacks the body’s immune system and is the virus that causes AIDS.

Broadbent was adopted in Las Vegas by her parents Loren and Patricia Broadbent as a baby, but her health condition wasn’t known until she became seriously ill at age 3. By 5, Hydeia Broadbent had developed full-blown AIDS.

Her mother began giving talks to local groups about the hardship of raising a child with AIDS, and little Hydeia listened, soaking in all she heard.

Soon enough, the girl was speaking before the crowds.

She became a national symbol of HIV/AIDS advocacy at 7, when she joined Magic Johnson on a 1992 Nickelodeon television special, where the basketball legend talked about his own HIV diagnosis. The teary-eyed girl pleaded that all she wanted was for “people (to) know that we’re just normal people.”

In a post on X, formerly known as Twitter, Johnson said he was devastated by the news of her death and remembered Broadbent as an activist and hero who “changed the world with her bravery.”

“By speaking out at such a young age, she helped so many people, young and old, because she wasn’t afraid to share her story and allowed everyone to see that those living with HIV and AIDS were everyday people and should be treated with respect,” Johnson wrote. “Cookie and I are praying for the Broadbent family and everyone that knew and loved Hydeia.”

But a 1996 appearance on “The Oprah Winfrey Show,” when she was 11, propelled her path into activism.

In that tearful interview, Broadbent, wearing a silver nose ring and long earrings that swayed when she spoke, tried to smile through tears as she described the hardest part about living with AIDS — losing friends she loves to the disease. But she told the talk-show host that she didn’t spend her days feeling sorry for herself.

In a statement to The Associated Press on Thursday, Winfrey recalled how Broadbent moved her and millions of others with her refusal to sink into self-pity.

“She told me she could either feel sorry for herself or ‘try and make a difference…say, today’s another day, I can get up, I can do something, and make something positive,'” Winfrey said. “And that really is how she went on to live her life. Thirty-nine years was not enough for this bright light.”

Broadbent continued on the talk show circuit as a child, met the president and first lady, spoke at the 1996 Republican National Convention, and was featured on a segment on ABC’s “20/20.”

Her outspoken advocacy continued into adulthood. She spoke at events throughout the country, including a 2014 community forum in Los Angeles and a 2015 panel in Selma, Alabama, highlighting AIDS as a civil rights issue.

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Throughout the years, she also partnered with the AIDS Healthcare Foundation on awareness campaigns, including the organization’s “God Loves Me” billboard campaign that featured people living with HIV.

In a statement, AHF remembered Broadbent as a lifelong activist who “continued her fierce and outspoken advocacy throughout her youth and adulthood.”

Grazell Howard, board chair of the Black AIDS Institute, recalled meeting Broadbent when she was around 12 and said “her voice was as sweet as her spirit.” They kept in touch over the years, and Howard saw her grow into a woman who also cared about having a life apart from being a poster child for HIV/AIDS.

“She had what every Black woman has. She has to manage being responsible, courageous and a woman,” Howard said. “She carried a burden for us all. … We never talk about the plight of the heterosexual Black woman in the HIV movement in a real way. But we witnessed it with Hydeia up until these 39 years.”

Broadbent’s death comes two weeks after National Black HIV/AIDS Awareness Day and at a time when the virus continues to disproportionately impact Black communities. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found over 36,000 new HIV infections in the U.S. in 2021, a 7% drop from 2017. Black and African American people made up 40% of those new infections while being 12% of the population.

“Hydeia’s death is a highlight of all the work we still have to do in the HIV sector,” Howard said, “as well as a celebration of a young woman who was courageous, who was fearless, who was tireless, who was selfless.”

___ Associated Press writer Hillel Italie in New York contributed to this report. Tang reported from Phoenix.

Trump went into the primary with a huge polling lead and the backing of the state’s top Republicans, including Sen. Tim Scott, a former rival in the race. Haley, who served as U.N. ambassador under Trump, has spent weeks crisscrossing the state that twice elected her governor warning that the dominant front-runner, who is 77 and faces four indictments, is too old and distracted to be president again.

In all but one primary since 1980, the Republican winner in South Carolina has gone on to be the party’s nominee. But Haley has repeatedly vowed to carry on if she loses her home state, even as Trump positions himself for a likely general election rematch against President Joe Biden.

Trump’s backers, including those who previously supported Haley during her time as governor, seemed confident that the former president would have a solid victory on Saturday.

“I did support her when she was governor. She’s done some good things,” Davis Paul, 36, said as he waited for Trump at a recent rally in Conway. “But I just don’t think she’s ready to tackle a candidate like Trump. I don’t think many people can.”

Trump has swept into the state for a handful of large rallies in between fundraisers and events in other states, including Michigan, which holds its GOP primary Tuesday.

He has drawn much larger crowds and campaigned with Gov. Henry McMaster, who succeeded Haley, and Scott, who was elevated to the Senate by Haley.

Speaking Friday in Rock Hill, Trump accused Haley of staying in the race to hurt him at the behest of Democratic donors.

“All she’s trying to do is inflict pain on us so they can win in November,” he said. “We’re not going to let that happen.”

In some of those rallies, Trump has made comments that handed Haley more fodder for her stump speeches, such as his Feb. 10 questioning of why her husband — currently on a South Carolina Army National Guard deployment to Africa — hadn’t been campaigning alongside her. Haley turned that point into an argument that the front-runner doesn’t respect servicemembers and their families, long a criticism that has followed Trump going back to his suggesting the late Sen. John McCain, a prisoner of war in Vietnam, wasn’t a hero because he was captured.

That same night, Trump asserted that he would encourage countries like Russia “to do whatever the hell they want” against NATO member countries who failed to meet the transatlantic alliance’s defense spending targets. Haley has been holding out that moment as evidence that Trump is too volatile and “getting weak in the knees when it comes to Russia.”

After one of Haley’s events, Terry Sullivan, a U.S. Navy veteran who lives in Hopkins, said he had planned to support Trump but changed his mind after hearing Haley’s critique of his NATO comments.

“One country can say whatever it wants, but when you have an agreement, among other nations, we should join the agreements of other nations, not just off on our own,” Sullivan said. “After listening to Nikki, I think I’m a Nikki supporter now.”

Haley has made an indirect appeal to Democrats who in large numbers sat out their own presidential primary earlier this month, adding into her stump speech a line that “anybody can vote in this primary as long as they didn’t vote in the Feb. 3 Democrat primary.”

Some of those voters have been showing up at her events, saying that although they planned to vote for Biden in the general election, they planned to cross over to the GOP primary on Saturday as a way to oppose Trump now.

In any other campaign cycle, a home state loss might be detrimental to a campaign. In 2016, Sen. Marco Rubio dropped out shortly after losing Florida in a blowout to Trump, after his campaign argued the political winds would shift in his favor once the campaign moved to his home state.

And Haley’s campaign can’t name a state in which they feel she will be victorious over Trump. “The primary ends tonight and it is time to turn to the general election,” Trump spokesperson Steven Cheung said Saturday.

But in a speech this past week in Greenville, Haley said she would stay in the campaign “until the last person votes,” arguing that those whose contests come after the early primaries and caucuses deserved the right to have a choice between candidates.

Haley also used that speech — which many had assumed was an announcement she was shuttering her campaign — to argue that she feels “no need to kiss the ring,” as others had, possibly with prospects of serving as Trump’s running mate in mind.

“I have no fear of Trump’s retribution,” Haley reiterated. “I’m not looking for anything from him. My own political future is of zero concern.”

___

Weissert reported from Washington. Associated Press writer Jill Colvin in Columbia, South Carolina, contributed to this report.

The Royal Grenada Police Force said in a statement released on Friday that they were working on leads “that suggest” the two occupants of the yacht may have been killed.

“This investigation is in its infancy stage,” police said.

The nonprofit Salty Dawg Sailing Association identified the owners as Ralph Hendry and Kathy Brandel. It said they are “veteran cruisers” and longtime members of the association, calling them “warmhearted and capable.” A relative of Hendry didn’t immediately return a message seeking comment on Saturday.

The association said that a cruising skipper had contacted the association about a member’s yacht, Simplicity, that was found “anchored and abandoned” off a beach on the island of St. Vincent.

“The good Samaritan had boarded the boat and noted that the owners … were not onboard and found evidence of apparent violence,” the association said in a statement Thursday.

The association said Hendry and Brandel had sailed the yacht in last year’s Caribbean Rally from Hampton, Virginia, to Antigua, and were spending the winter cruising in the eastern Caribbean.

“This is a very upsetting event and details are still unconfirmed by the authorities, but this does appear to be a tragic event,” said Bob Osborn, the association’s president. “In all my years of cruising the Caribbean, I have never heard of anything like this.”

Authorities in Grenada said they have dispatched senior investigators and a forensic specialist to the nearby island of St. Vincent, where the escaped prisoners were arrested on Wednesday.

The prisoners, ages 19, 25 and 30, were charged a couple of months ago with one count of robbery with violence. The eldest inmate also was charged with one count of rape, three counts of attempted rape and two counts of indecent assault and causing harm, police in Grenada said.

The three men escaped from their holding cell on Feb. 18, according to police.

Authorities said a preliminary investigation suggests that the three men seized the yacht from Grenada’s capital, St. George’s, and traveled to St. Vincent. The owners of the yacht haven’t been identified.

The official, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the matter, asserted that the Hamas militant group ruling Gaza had relented on some demands, but gave no details.

A senior official from Egypt, which along with Qatar is a mediator between Israel and Hamas, said the draft deal offered to Israel’s delegation included the release of up to 40 women and older hostages held in Gaza in return for up to 300 Palestinian prisoners held by Israel, mostly women, minors and older people.

The Egyptian official said the proposed six-week pause in fighting would include allowing hundreds of aid trucks to enter Gaza every day, including the northern half of the besieged territory. He said that both sides agreed to continue negotiations during the pause for further releases and a permanent cease-fire. The official, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss the ongoing negotiations, said that mediators were waiting for Israel’s official response.

Negotiators face an unofficial deadline of the start of the Muslim fasting month of Ramadan around March 10.

Hamas political official Osama Hamdan noted that the group wasn’t at the talks, but asserted to reporters in Beirut on Friday that Israel had refused its main demands, including stopping the “aggression” and withdrawing from the Gaza Strip.

The Health Ministry in Gaza said Saturday that the bodies of 92 Palestinians killed in Israeli bombardments were brought to hospitals over the past 24 hours, raising the overall toll in nearly five months of war to 29,606. The total number of wounded rose to nearly 70,000.

The ministry’s death toll doesn’t distinguish between civilians and combatants, but it has said that two-thirds of those killed were children and women. Israel says its troops have killed more than 10,000 Hamas fighters, but hasn’t provided details.

An Israeli airstrike hit a house in Gaza’s southernmost city of Rafah, killing at least eight people. including four women and a child, health authorities said. An Associated Press journalist saw the bodies at Abu Youssef al-Najjar hospital.

“Enough, enough. Either the Israelis or us should stop. There should be a truce,” said neighbor Abdul-Qader Shubeir, who described feeling lost at not being immediately able to put out the fire burning the bodies.

NEW GENOCIDE ALLEGATIONS

Brazil’s president alleged Saturday that Israel is committing genocide against Palestinians, doubling down on harsh rhetoric after stirring controversy a week ago by comparing Israel’s military offensive in Gaza to the Nazi Holocaust in which 6 million Jews and others perished during World War II.

Israel-Hamas War Feb 21

United Airlines to restart flights to Israel for first time since start of Hamas war

Israel-Hamas War Feb 20

US vetoes UN resolution demanding an immediate humanitarian cease-fire in Gaza

Israel has pushed back against genocide claims made at the U.N.’s top court and elsewhere, saying its war targets the militant group Hamas, not the Palestinian people. It has held Hamas responsible for civilian deaths, arguing that the group operates from civilian areas.

“What the Israeli government is doing is not war, it is genocide,” Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva wrote on X, formerly Twitter. “Children and women are being murdered.”

In response to Lula’s initial comments, Israel declared him a persona non grata, summoned Brazil’s ambassador and demanded an apology. Lula recalled Brazil’s ambassador to Israel for consultations.

Last month, South Africa filed a landmark case with the International Court of Justice, accusing Israel of genocide against Palestinians. The court issued a preliminary order ordering Israel to do all it can to prevent death, destruction and any acts of genocide in Gaza.

Israel, created in part as a refuge for survivors of the Holocaust, has accused South Africa of hypocrisy. South Africa has compared Israel’s treatment of Palestinians in Gaza with the treatment of Black South Africans during apartheid, framing the issues as fundamentally about people oppressed in their homeland.

HUNGER AND DISEASES SPREAD

Israel declared war after the deadly Oct. 7 Hamas attack on southern Israel in which militants killed about 1,200 people and took around 250 hostages. More than 100 hostages remain in captivity in Gaza.

The rising civilian death toll and worsening humanitarian crisis in Gaza have amplified calls for a cease-fire. Hunger and infectious diseases are spreading and about 80% of Gaza’s 2.3 million people have been displaced, with about 1.4 million crowded into Rafah on the border with Egypt.

“There are choking, skyrocketing prices. It’s terrifying. There is no source of income. The area is very overcrowded,” said Hassan Attwa, a displaced man from Gaza City who now shelters in a tent on the sand in Mawasi in the south. “The garbage, may God bless you, is not collected at all. It stays piled up. It turns into a mess and clay when it rains. The situation is disastrous in every sense of the word.”

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has vowed to fight until “total victory,” but is under pressure at home to secure the release of the remaining hostages.

MORE SETTLEMENTS PLANNED

Meanwhile, Netanyahu and his conservative government drew an angry response from the United States, its closest ally, over plans to build more than 3,300 new homes in settlements in the Israeli-occupied West Bank.

Netanyahu’s firebrand finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, has said the plans were in response to a Palestinian shooting attack earlier in the week that killed one Israeli and wounded five.

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said Friday that he was “disappointed” to hear of the Israeli announcement and called new settlements “counterproductive to reaching an enduring peace” and “inconsistent with international law.”

The Biden administration also restored a U.S. legal finding dating back nearly 50 years that Israeli settlements in the occupied Palestinian territories are “illegitimate” under international law.

___

Samy Magdy reported from Cairo. Julia Frankel in Jerusalem contributed to this report.

Women who engaged in 2.5 hours of moderate physical activity, or 75 minutes of vigorous exercise, weekly were 24% less likely to die when compared to women who didn’t exercise regularly within that same time period, according to the paper published in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology.

In contrast, men who exercised for the same amount of time each week had only a 15% lower chance of dying than those who didn’t.

The study analyzed data of over 400,000 U.S. adults that spanned from 1997 to 2017. The exercise habits of those individuals were self-reported.

DON’T MISS: Exercise 2-4x more than the HHS recommends to achieve maximum benefit, says new study

Researchers also found that women were able to see greater health benefits with less exercise than their male counterparts.

Men who engaged in about five hours of moderate to vigorous exercise each week lowered their chances of dying by 18% in comparison to men who didn’t. Women were able to see the same reduction in their risk of death with only about 2.5 hours of the same level of exercise.

“I think what this study shows is that there is something to it, and this study helps open up doors for very specific research to understand why there is a difference,” according to Dr. Beteal Ashinne, a non-invasive cardiologist at the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine at UHealth, who wasn’t involved in the study.

The reason why women may have stronger benefits from regular exercise than men isn’t clear, though it’s possible it boils down to differences in anatomy, the study’s researchers told CBS News.

“They noted that men on average have proportionately larger hearts, wider lung airways, greater lung diffusion capacity and larger muscle fibers than women,” the publication wrote.

But there are some limitations to the study that people should keep in mind.

The study was observational, so researchers can’t confirm without a doubt that the lower risk of mortality was as a result of exercise. It also doesn’t consider lifestyle habits like eating choices or tobacco and alcohol use, says Dr. Nadish Garg, a cardiologist at Memorial Hermann in Houston who wasn’t involved in the study.

Exercising regularly is great for heart health in general

“I think the big message is physical activity helps to reduce cardiovascular mortality, period,” Garg tells CNBC Make It.

Garg and Ashinne emphasize that the biggest takeaway from the findings should be just how important it is to fit exercise into your weekly routine for optimal health.

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services suggests that Americans get at least 2.5 to 5 hours per week of moderate physical activity, 1 hour and 15 minutes to 2 hours and 30 minutes each week of vigorous physical activity or an equal amount of both, according to its 2018 physical activity guidelines.

These are the best exercises for heart health that Garg and Ashinne recommend:

• Aerobic exercises like running, biking, dancing or swimming
• Strength-training, which can include weight-lifting, push-ups and bodyweight squats

“It doesn’t have to be that they have to be on a treadmill all the time,” Garg says. “Whatever exercise they enjoy, and will reasonably increase their heart rate, is perhaps the best way to do it, because then they will [do it]. If they enjoy the activity, then they keep doing it.”

Want to land your dream job in 2024? Take CNBC’s new online course How to Ace Your Job Interview to learn what hiring managers are really looking for, body language techniques, what to say and not to say, and the best way to talk about pay. CNBC Make It readers can save 25% with discount code 25OFF.

Ivan Zhdanov, the director of Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation, made the announcement on his Telegram account and thanked “everyone” who had called on Russian authorities to return Navalny’s body to his mother.

Earlier on Saturday, Yulia Navalnaya, Navalny’s widow, accused President Vladimir Putin of mocking Christianity by trying to force his mother to agree to a secret funeral after his death in an Arctic penal colony.

“Thank you very much. Thanks to everyone who wrote and recorded video messages. You all did what you needed to do. Thank you. Alexei Navalny’s body has been given to his mother,” Zhdanov wrote.

Navalny, 47, Russia’s most well-known opposition politician, unexpectedly died on Feb. 16 in an Arctic penal colony and his family has been fighting for more than a week to have his body returned to them. Prominent Russians released videos calling on authorities to release the body and Western nations have hit Russia with more sanctions as punishment for Navalny’s death as well as for the second anniversary of its invasion of Ukraine.

Navalny’s mother, Lyudmila Navalnaya, is still in Salekhard, Navalny’s press secretary Kira Yarmysh said on X, formerly Twitter. Lyudmila Navalnaya has been in the Arctic region for more than a week, demanding that Russian authorities return the body of her son to her.

“The funeral is still pending,” Yarmysh tweeted, questioning whether authorities will allow it to go ahead “as the family wants and as Alexei deserves.”

Earlier on Saturday, Navalny’s widow said in a video that Navalny’s mother was being “literally tortured” by authorities who had threatened to bury Navalny in the Arctic prison. They, she said, suggested to his mother that she did not have much time to make a decision because the body is decomposing, Navalnaya said.

“Give us the body of my husband,” Navalnaya said earlier Saturday. “You tortured him alive, and now you keep torturing him dead. You mock the remains of the dead.”

Authorities have detained scores of people as they seek to suppress any major outpouring of sympathy for Putin’s fiercest foe before the presidential election he is almost certain to win. Russians on social media say officials don’t want to return Navalny’s body to his family, because they fear a public show of support for him.

Navalnaya accused Putin, an Orthodox Christian, of killing Navalny.

“No true Christian could ever do what Putin is now doing with the body of Alexei,” she said, asking, “What will you do with his corpse? How low will you sink to mock the man you murdered?”

Saturday marked nine days since the opposition leader’s death, a day when Orthodox Christians hold a memorial service.

People across Russia came out to mark the occasion and honor Navalny’s memory by gathering at Orthodox churches, leaving flowers at public monuments or holding one-person protests.

Muscovites lined up outside the city’s Christ the Savior Cathedral to pay their respects, according to photos and videos published by independent Russian news outlet SOTAvision. The video also shows Russian police stationed nearby and officers stopping several people for an ID check.

As of Saturday evening, at least 38 people had been detained in Russia for showing support for Navalny, according to the OVD-Info rights group that tracks political arrests.

They included Elena Osipova, a 78-year-old artist from St. Petersburg who stood in a street with a poster showing Navalny with angel wings, and Sergei Karabatov, 64, who came to a Moscow monument to victims of political repression with flowers and a note saying “Don’t think this is the end.”

Also arrested was Aida Nuriyeva, from the city of Ufa near the Ural Mountains, who publicly held up a sign saying “Putin is Navalny’s murderer! I demand that the body be returned!”

Putin is often pictured at church, dunking himself in ice water to celebrate the Epiphany and visiting holy sites in Russia. He has promoted what he has called “traditional values” without which, he once said, “society degrades.”

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov rejected allegations that Putin was involved in Navalny’s death, calling them “absolutely unfounded, insolent accusations about the head of the Russian state.”

Musician Nadya Tolokonnikova, who became widely known after spending nearly two years in prison for taking part in a 2012 protest with her band Pussy Riot inside Moscow’s Christ the Savior Cathedral, was one of many prominent Russians who released a video in which she accused Putin of hypocrisy and asked him to release Navalny’s body.

“We were imprisoned for allegedly trampling on traditional values. But no one tramples on traditional Russian values more than you, Putin, your officials and your priests who pray for all the murder that you do, year after year, day after day,” said Tolokonnikova, who lives abroad. “Putin, have a conscience, give his mother the body of her son.”

Lyudmila Navalnaya said Thursday that investigators allowed her to see her son’s body in the morgue in the Arctic city of Salekhard. She had filed a lawsuit at a court in Salekhard contesting officials’ refusal to release the body. A closed-door hearing had been scheduled for March 4.

Yarmysh, Navalny’s spokesman, said that Lyudmila Navalnaya was shown a medical certificate stating that her son died of “natural causes.”

When I first discovered the concept of “niksen,” or the Dutch art of doing nothing, I was fascinated. I even wrote a book about it. When I applied it to my own life, my perspective about happiness shifted in a significant way.

I believe niksen is one of the reasons why the Dutch are consistently ranked as some of the happiest people in the world. Niksen might seem selfish or boring at first glance, but it’s actually a service to you and your community.

Here’s how it make it work for you:

1. If you’re doing nothing, own it

When someone asks you what you’re doing during your niksen time, simply respond, “Nothing.”

Be unapologetic about taking breaks or holidays. Think of niksen not as a sign of laziness, but as an important life skill that might help you regain some composure, find calm, and prevent burnout.

Tony Crabbe, the author of “Busy,” says that resisting cultural pressures is easier when done with other niksen-minded people.

Or you can do what my mom does and hang a sign on your office door that reads: “I bite.” (She doesn’t bite, but it’s clear that she doesn’t want to be disturbed.)

2. Work and rest according to your natural rhythm

People have different chronotypes, which means they need to sleep and work at different times of the day to achieve maximum productivity. Some of us are at our best in the morning, while others feel the most productive in the afternoon.

“Every one of us should figure out when we’re at our most creative. Most productive. And niksen is part of this,” says Dutch psychoanalyst Manfred Kets de Vries. He suggests drawing a diagram like the one below:

Then look at your activities, tasks, and obligations and decide where they fit on the diagram.

3. Do nothing, together

I always thought of niksen as something you do alone in your home, by yourself. But those sweet nothing moments can become more special when they are shared.

For many parents, the best thing in the world can be reading to their children or playing with them. To me, it’s hugging. When I’m in a great mood, I’ll ask, “Who wants a hug?”

And if I’m lucky, at least one of my three kids will be willing to put their little arms around me and give me a cuddle. Sometimes, I’ll lie down with them on the floor and do nothing but put my arms around them.

When the kids are in bed, my husband and I often watch a TV series together. I’m usually snuggled into my husband because he is soft and warm, and I often think that the series is secondary. I’m simply niksening up against him.

4. Just be normal

In the Netherlands, people tend to steer clear of intense emotional outbursts, or what they consider to be overly dramatic behavior. It’s also generally not acceptable to complain or brag about working all the time. 

This attitude stems from a famous Dutch saying, “doe normal, dat is al gek genoeg,” which means “just be normal, that’s already crazy enough.” 

Meaning, that if you put in too many hours or too much effort into your job, you likely won’t get any accolades. Instead, you might be on the receiving end of some eye-rolls and sighs, while also being told to just be normal, go home, and take some time for yourself.

Olga Mecking is a writer, journalist, and translator based in the Netherlands. She is the author of “Niksen: Embracing the Dutch Art of Doing Nothing” and a regular contributor to The New York Times, The Guardian, The BBC, The Atlantic and other publications. Find her on Twitter and Instagram.

Want to land your dream job in 2024? Take CNBC’s new online course How to Ace Your Job Interview to learn what hiring managers are really looking for, body language techniques, what to say and not to say, and the best way to talk about pay. CNBC Make It readers can save 25% with discount code 25OFF.

There are dozens of in-demand, non-tech side hustles you can do remotely to earn extra cash — some of which can pay as much as $100 an hour.

FlexJobs, one of the most popular platforms for finding remote and hybrid work opportunities, has seen a steady increase in the number of remote, part-time listings for non-tech roles including virtual assistants, accountants and customer service representatives in recent months, FlexJobs lead career expert Toni Frana tells CNBC Make It.

To help people interested in pursuing a side hustle find the best remote opportunities, FlexJobs has identified seven in-demand side hustles that can be done from home, based on listings from more than 58,000 companies on its platform posted between July and December 2023. These jobs have dozens of active listings and offer remote, part-time opportunities. 

Here are seven in-demand side hustles that can be done from home, and how much they pay, according to FlexJobs, with salary estimates from Payscale:

1. Virtual assistant ($18 per hour)
2. Bookkeeper ($20 per hour)
3. Customer service representative ($16 per hour)
4. Accountant ($23 per hour)
5. Technical writer ($26 per hour)
6. Social media specialist ($19 per hour)
7. Video editor ($22 per hour)

While the total number of hours varies from role to role, most of the jobs on FlexJobs’ list ask for a commitment of 10-25 hours per week.

Some of these side hustles, including video editing, bookkeeping and customer service, don’t require a bachelor’s degree, says Frana. Instead, she adds, hiring managers will often evaluate candidates based on their previous work experience and soft skills. 

“There are core soft skills people look for across all of these roles: an ability to meet deadlines, strong communication skills both in writing and on the phone, being a self-starter, problem-solving and, of course, foundational technology skills,” Frana explains.

Some of these remote side hustles can pay upwards of $100 per hour, depending on your level of skill and the project. Bookkeepers on Upwork, for example, can charge as much as $175 an hour or, for some projects, $300 an hour. 

For virtual assisting roles that require more specialized skills — whether it’s building email campaigns or creating WordPress sites — “you’re often talking at least $100 [per hour] and up,” Angelique Rewers, founder of the consulting firm BoldHaus, previously told CNBC Make It.

The most salient benefit of pursuing one of these remote side hustles, says Frana, is the flexibility. You can choose to go freelance and set your own hours, or, if you apply to a part-time listing, Frana says many employers will let you adjust your schedule as needed.

Want to land your dream job in 2024? Take CNBC’s new online course How to Ace Your Job Interview to learn what hiring managers are really looking for, body language techniques, what to say and not to say, and the best way to talk about pay. CNBC Make It readers can save 25% with discount code 25OFF.

Khalfani-Cox boosted her credit score from the low 400s to a perfect 850 after spending three years paying down her debt. Now, the New York Times bestselling author teaches others how to do the same through her books, including the newly released “Bounce Back: The Ultimate Guide to Financial Resilience,” and her financial education platform, The Money Coach.

Although her credit score sits at 806 as of the last report date on Jan. 20, she says she still receives the same benefits as when she had a perfect 850.

That’s because Khalfani-Cox’s most recent score still places her in the “exceptional” credit score category. Here are the ranges Experian defines as poor, fair, good, very good and exceptional.

• Poor: 300 to 579
• Fair: 580 to 669
• Good: 670 to 739
• Very good: 740 to 799
• Exceptional: 800 to 850

But you don’t necessarily need to be in the 800 range to get the most favorable terms when you’re applying for something like a new credit card or personal loan, says Khalfani-Cox.

Over the past year, her score has fluctuated from 765 in February 2023 to 839 in August of that year to then 806 as of January 2024.

“My 800 or my 850 FICO score is not going to get me any better loan rates or terms than the person who has a 760 or 780 FICO score,” Khalfani-Cox tells CNBC Make It. “Once you’re in the perfect credit scoring range, banks are going to fall all over themselves to do business with you.”

How Khalfani-Cox stays in the ‘perfect’ credit score range

Since your payment history counts for 35% of how your credit score is calculated, Khalfani-Cox is sure to never miss a payment.

“I have a very long established credit history over 25 years,” she says. “I have an excellent payment track record and I never miss any payments.”

Additionally, Khalfani-Cox never uses up her entire credit limit, which helps her keep her credit utilization rate under 10%. Your credit utilization rate is the amount of your available credit you’re using and counts for another 30% of how your credit score is determined.

“So-called FICO high achievers who are in the 760 to 850 range generally have a 10% or less credit utilization rate, and I usually keep my stuff in that zone,” she says.

She also doesn’t apply for new credit cards or loans unless she “truly needs it.”

That’s because when you apply for a new line of credit, lenders perform what’s called a “hard inquiry,” in which they pull your credit report from one of the three main credit bureaus — Experian, Equifax or Transunion — to take a look at your credit history and get an idea of how risky it could be to lend funds to you.

How much a hard inquiry affects your credit score varies, and it only accounts for 10% of how your score is calculated. However, it can temporarily lower your score by a few points, according to FICO’s website.

That matters because a small drop in your credit score can make a big difference when it comes to getting the most favorable terms from lenders.

“If you were in the 760 point range, now you’re a 748 or 750, and now you just blew being able to get the best loan rates and terms on a mortgage or credit card,” Khalfani-Cox says.

On the upside, hard inquiries don’t stay on your credit report forever. Although they can remain on your credit report for two years, only inquiries from the past 12 months are considered when calculating your credit score, per FICO.

Ultimately, Khalfani-Cox credits maintaining her exceptional credit score to making on-time payments, keeping her balances low and not overusing her available credit.

“Just by following these three strategies, it really does help to keep me in that perfect credit scoring range of 760 to 850 points,” she says.

Want to land your dream job in 2024? Take CNBC’s new online course How to Ace Your Job Interview to learn what hiring managers are really looking for, body language techniques, what to say and not to say and the best way to talk about pay. CNBC Make It readers can save 25% with discount code 25OFF.

In it, he renders a tribute to his longtime friend and right-hand man Charlie Munger, who died late in 2023. He also discusses his outlook for the company. Check out the PDF below for the full letter:

Warren Buffett's 2024 a… by CNBC.com

Airlines are raising their prices to check a bag — again. Just how much you it will cost you, however, depends on when you pay for the service.

United Airlines, American Airlines and JetBlue Airways are among the carriers that have raised the price to check bags this year. Each of them charge customers more if they check their bags at the airport or close to their departure compared with paying to check a bag online in advance.

Carriers are encouraging customers to pay to check their bags ahead of their flight, an approach the airlines argue will free up employees at check-in areas and get travelers to their gates faster.

Earlier this week, American Airlines raised its checked bag fees for the first time in more than five years and adopted the two-tiered strategy that United, JetBlue and several budget airlines already have.

American Airlines customers traveling in coach will pay $35 to check a first bag for domestic flights if the service is booked online in advance, or $40 if they purchase the option at the airport, the carrier said Tuesday. American Airlines previously charged $30 for either service.

There are exemptions. Customers who have certain airline or other rewards credit cards, are traveling in a top-tier class or have elite frequent flyer status generally can check at least one bag for free on domestic or short international flights.

Why does it cost less to check a bag in advance?

“It allows our team members to spend more time with customers who require additional assistance with their travel journey,” an American Airlines spokeswoman told CNBC.

American this week also said it is reducing fees for slightly overweight bags, which used to force some travelers to remove items from their bags last-minute at the airport to meet the threshold.

The different fee tiers is an approach ultra-low-cost airlines already had to luggage fees.

“It incentivizes people to get the transaction out of way. It’s easier for them, and honestly, it’s easier for us,” said Frontier Airlines CEO Barry Biffle. “There are people who need legitimate assistance” at the airport.

The prices differ depending on demand and other factors. Most travelers who add on baggage pay the fee ahead of time, Biffle said.

United first started charging customers more for paying for checked bags at the airport in 2020. On Friday, the carrier said it was raising bag fees by $5 for most flights in North America to $35 if customers prepay online at least 24 hours before their flight, or $40 otherwise, starting with bookings made on Feb. 24. A second checked bag will cost $50, or $45 at least 24 hours in advance.

Why are airlines raising baggage fees?

Luggage fees are a big moneymaker for airlines. In the first nine months of 2023, U.S. airlines brought in more than $5.4 billion from baggage fees, up more than 25% from the same period of 2019, according to the Transportation Department’s latest data.

Airlines have argued that higher costs such as labor and fuel, their biggest expenses, mean they had to raise bag fees.

“While we don’t like increasing fees, it’s one step we are taking to get our company back to profitability and cover the increased costs of transporting bags,” JetBlue said in a statement about its latest increases. “By adjusting fees for added services that only certain customers use, we can keep base fares low and ensure customer favorites like seatback TVs and high-speed Wi-Fi remain free for everyone.”

Southwest Airlines is an outlier among the large U.S. airlines. It allows customers to check two bags for free. “That’s the way it’s going to stay,” Chief Operating Officer Andrew Watterson said.

“It does not cost us $35, $40 … to handle a bag,” Watterson said in an interview. Many customers on major airlines bring carry-on bags to avoid bag fees, but Watterson said that could slow down the operation, a big deal for Southwest, which he said tries to turn aircraft around for the next flight in 45 minutes, and even less for some of its smaller Boeing planes.

“It does smooth the operation for people to check it rather than bring it on,” he said. “Overall, we think the benefit is a combination of some efficiencies but also customers coming back to us. A repeat customer business cannot be overstated. And when you treat your customers well, give them a fair policy, they come back over and over again.”

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“I got indicted a second time and a third time and a fourth time, and a lot of people said that that’s why the Black people like me, because they have been hurt so badly and discriminated against, and they actually viewed me as I’m being discriminated against,” he said.

“I’m being indicted for you, the American people. I’m being indicted for you, the Black population. I am being indicted for a lot of different groups by sick people, these are sick sick people,” Trump said Friday night in a speech at the Black Conservative Federation’s annual gala, at which he received the “Champion of Black America” award.

Trump, throughout his nearly two-hour speech, suggested his support from Black Americans stem from their understanding of how corrupt systems can lead to “great evil.”

“Some of the greatest evils in our nation’s history have come from corrupt systems that try to target and subjugate others to deny them their freedom and to deny them their rights,” Trump said. “I think that’s why the Black people are so much on my side now because they see what’s happening to me happens to them.”

Trump said Black Americans showcased their support for him through their embrace of merchandize emblazoned with his mug shot.

“My mug shot — we’ve all seen the mug shot, and you know who embraced it more than anybody else? The Black population,” Trump said. “You see Black people walking around with my mug shot, you know, they do shirts and they sell them for $19 apiece. It’s pretty amazing — millions by the way.”

Trump appeared at the event with other Black Republican politicians, including Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina, Reps. Wesley Hunt of Texas and Byron Donalds of Florida, and Ben Carson, who was Trump’s Department of Housing and Urban Development secretary.

Adam Wasolis Sr., 33, from the Bronx, N.Y., said he agreed with Trump’s characterization of his appeal to Black voters.

“I definitely understand why some Black men may feel they resonate with his issues, because most of the issues that have plagued black men were legal issues,” said Wasolis, who is vice chair of New York Young Republican Black Caucus.

Ahead of the gala, Jasmine Harris, the Biden campaign’s Black media director, called Trump an “anti-Black tyrant” and “the proud poster boy for modern racism.”

“This is the same man who falsely accused the Central Park Five, questioned George Floyd’s humanity, compared his own impeachment trial to being lynched, and ensured the unemployment gap for Black workers spiked during his presidency,” Harris said.

“Donald Trump has been showing Black Americans his true colors for years: An incompetent, anti-Black tyrant who holds us to such low regard that he publicly dined with white nationalists a week after declaring his 2024 candidacy,” she added.

Trump, for his part, called Biden a “racist” Friday night.

“Joe Biden really has proven to be a very nasty and vicious racist. He’s been a racist,” Trump said. “Whether you like it or don’t like it. I happen not to like it. Joe Biden really has proven to be a very nasty and vicious racist. He’s been a racist. Whether you like it or don’t like it. I happen not to like it. … Biden spent years palling around with notorious segregationist you know that.”

The Biden campaign did not immediately return a request for comment on Trump’s remarks.

Biden served with segregationists like former South Carolina Sen. Strom Thurmond, and he has touted his ability to compromise with them. This week, Biden said he had served with “real racists” in in his long career but that the current Republican Party was worse.

“I’ve served with Strom Thurmond. I’ve served with all these guys that have set terrible records on race. But guess what? These guys are worse. These guys do not believe in basic democratic principles,” he said at a fundraiser in California.

Trump’s comments come as his allies prepare to launch an effort to deliver a historic chunk of the Black vote to Republicans in the 2024 elections.

“We have coalition groups across the country that are set to roll out initiatives very, very soon in those communities, that will focus on voter outreach and engagement and things like messaging in Black communities,” Darrell Scott, a Black Ohio-based pastor who is a Trump adviser and helping lead the effort, told NBC News.

Organizers for the Black Conservative Federation said during their event that they’re mobilizing groups nationwide in hopes of ensuring Trump wins the majority of the Black male vote in a general election match-up against Biden.

“I believe that President Trump is going to get 50% of the Black male vote,” Black Conservative Federation Diante Johnson said. “The Democratic Party has literally pushed Black men aside.”

This story first appeared on NBCNews.com. More from NBC News:

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It was a horrific head-on collision that Jamie Jarvis came up upon shortly after making a food delivery Thursday evening.

“I told myself, ‘Don’t do it,'” said Jarvis. “‘You’re pregnant, don’t get involved.’ But nobody was helping, I have to do something.”

She pulled over and approached the scene of the crash. Two men had come over to help as well, tending to the female driver of the SUV.

Jarvis checked on the ambulance crew and the patient inside, and all appeared OK.

“And that’s when I heard something about a child in the back seat,” said Jarvis. “I’m like, ‘Wait, what?'”

Good Samaritans were able to unlock the doors of the SUV. An 8-year-old girl was slumped over with her seatbelt still fastened.

“I said, ‘Are you OK? Can you move? Do you hurt? Tell me what are you feeling,'” said Jarvis. “She just kept saying, ‘I don’t know.'”

Jarvis helped her out of the car.

“The poor girl wanted her mom,” said Jarvis. “She kept saying, ‘I want my mommy.'”

That’s when Jarvis realized the girl had a very serious injury to her stomach.

“She wanted to touch her stomach,” said Jarvis. “I said, ‘Honey, you have a boo boo, you can’t do that right now, focus on me, squeeze my hand if it hurts.'”

Inside the ambulance, investigators say a 77-year-old patient was on his way home from rehab when the crash happened and is now in the hospital.

The ambulance crew was taken to the hospital for evaluation.

The 8-year-old was left in critical condition with life-threatening injuries.

“Right before they had taken her, she looked at me and was like, ‘who are you?'” said Jarvis. “I said, ‘honey, I’m just a mom who’s seen an accident, I had to make sure you all were OK.'”

The child’s mom, who was driving the SUV, was also injured and remains hospitalized.

Jarvis says she wishes more people had stopped to help out.

“You don’t have to get involved, but check, ‘Are you guys OK? Do you need help? Can you move?'” said Jarvis. “We’re all human beings, we all could use a hand once in a while.”

The cause of the crash is under investigation, but sources tell NBC10 Boston it looks like the SUV crossed over the median.

Thursday night’s arrest of Miles Harford, 33, comes in connection with the latest in a series of offenses by Colorado funeral home owners, including the discovery of nearly 200 decomposing bodies in a bug-infested funeral home facility last year. The finds have underscored the laxness of state funeral home regulations and have brought pressure on lawmakers to try to strengthen the laws.

A grisly scene of urns stashed around the Harford property, from a crawl space to inside the hearse where the 63-year-old woman’s body lay, was uncovered in early February during a court-ordered eviction at Harford’s home, police said.

While searching the property, police opened the door of the hearse to a “foul odor,” seeing the outline of the human body seemingly strapped to the gurney and covered by blankets, according to the arrest affidavit.

Harford owned Apollo Funeral & Cremation Services in the Denver suburb of Littleton, police said, and the hoarded cremains appear to be those of people who died from 2012 to 2021. The funeral home has been closed since September 2022.

A warrant lists potential charges of abuse of a corpse, forgery of the death certificate, and theft of the money paid for the woman’s cremation, though Denver District Attorney Beth McCann said previously that other charges are possible. Harford was released from custody Friday after briefly appearing in court by video.

Colorado Feb 8

Owners of funeral home found with decaying bodies allegedly spent cremation money on lavish lifestyle

Crimes and Courts Dec 5, 2023

Colorado funeral home owners accused of mishandling 190 bodies appear in court

Available court documents did not yet list a defense attorney who could comment on Harford’s behalf. No voicemail was set up at a telephone listing for Harford, and he has not responded to emails seeking comment.

Police interviewed Harford the day after the Feb. 6 discovery, the arrest affidavit shows. Denver Police Cmdr. Matt Clark previously said that Harford acknowledged to police that he owed money to several crematories in the area and that none would cremate the woman’s body, so he decided to store it in the hearse. The deceased woman’s family told investigators they were given what they believed were the woman’s ashes, which have been turned over to a medical examiner’s office.

When an arrest warrant was issued for Harford on Feb. 12, however, the suspect didn’t turn himself in. By Thursday, police still couldn’t find him and offered a $2,000 award for information leading to his arrest.

Authorities were able to “possibly establish” the identity of 18 individual cremains, according to the arrest affidavit. Police also discovered online reviews of the funeral home with a number of complaints. The families cited poor communication from the company in giving back the remains of their loved ones. One family said they received ashes in an urn labeled with the wrong name, the document shows.

Other Colorado funeral homes have allegedly sent fake ashes to grieving families.

Harford’s arrest follows the discovery of 190 decaying bodies in a building run by the Return to Nature Funeral Home in Penrose, Colorado, about two hours south of Denver.

A married couple who owned Return to Nature are awaiting trial in Colorado Springs following their arrest last year on allegations they abused corpses and gave fake ashes to relatives of the deceased. The operators of another funeral home in the western Colorado city of Montrose received federal prison sentences last year for mail fraud after they were accused of selling body parts and distributing fake ashes.

More than two dozen additional criminal cases and complaints involving Colorado funeral homes since 2007 were detailed in a January report to lawmakers from state regulators. The cases included mishandled bodies, mislabeled remains, ashes never being returned to families and improper embalming of bodies.

During a Colorado House committee hearing Wednesday, the executive director of the state agency that oversees funeral homes, Patty Salazar, said that current laws and regulations have failed people in Colorado, and there is a general understanding that the state needs to do better. Other states run annual inspections of funeral homes and require those who operate them to pass a test or get a degree in mortuary science. No such rules exist in Colorado.

___

Bedayn is a corps member for the Associated Press/Report for America Statehouse News Initiative. Report for America is a nonprofit national service program that places journalists in local newsrooms to report on undercovered issues.

A fighter aircraft was sent to observe the balloon after it was spotted over Utah this morning. The balloon, which is hovering at between 43,000 to 45,000 feet, does not appear to pose a national security threat to the U.S., the officials said.

The U.S. is not saying who owns the balloon, but two U.S. officials said that early indications suggest it is not from a foreign government.

The balloon is not maneuverable and has a small box-like payload, the officials said.

NBC News has reached out to the White House for comment. A National Security Council official referred NBC to the Defense Department for official comment.

“NORAD will continue to track and monitor the balloon,” said a defense official, referring to the North American Aerospace Defense Command. “The FAA also determined the balloon posed no hazard to flight safety. NORAD remains in close coordination with the FAA to ensure flight safety.”

The balloon, which was first reported by CBS News, was spotted roughly a year after the U.S. shot down a Chinese surveillance balloon in February 2023. NBC News previously reported that the spy balloon was able to gather intelligence from multiple sensitive U.S. military sites, and that the balloon used an American internet service provider to communicate, according to multiple sources.

Chinese government representatives had denied that last year’s balloon was used to spy. Instead, they said that the balloon was a civilian airship used for meteorological research that unintentionally drifted into the U.S.

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“Mississippi will always be grateful for their service and we will never forget them,” Reeves said on social media platform X.

The victims have not been publicly identified, but the Mississippi National Guard said one was a member of its A Company 1-149 Aviation Regiment Unit while the other was assigned to its D Company 2-151 Lakota Medical Evacuation Unit.

“Our paramount concern at this time is to ensure proper casualty assistance is conducted to support the surviving family members,” the Mississippi National Guard said.

The two-seat AH-64 Apache was on a routine training flight when it was reported down in a wooded area about 2 p.m., the Mississippi National Guard said in a statement.

The sheriff of Prentiss County, Randy Tolar, told NBC affiliate WLBT of Jackson that the aircraft went down off Highway 30 near Mount Olive Baptist Church.

The church is in the town of Baldwyn, which is in Prentiss and Lee counties in northeast Mississippi. Baldwyn is about 11 miles south of Booneville.

Shortly before the crash, at least two wind gusts measuring 21 mph were registered in Booneville, according to National Weather Service data. The temperature was 64 degrees.

On Feb. 6, a CH-53E Super Stallion helicopter traveling from Creech Air Force Base, Nevada, to Marine Corps Air Station Miramar, California, crashed amid a winter storm, killing all five U.S. Marines on board, officials said.

And in April 2023, two U.S. Army AH-64 Apache helicopters returning to Fort Wainwright in Fairbanks, Alaska, after a training flight collided, killing three soldiers and injuring a fourth, the 11th Airborne Division said

The Mississippi incident is under investigation, the Mississippi National Guard said. 

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Intuitive Machines, the company that built the six-footed lander, initially said the Odysseus lander was upright after touchdown Thursday. But CEO Steve Altemus said Friday the craft “caught a foot in the surface and tipped” and landed on its side, likely leaning on a rock.

“So far, we have quite a bit of operational capability even though we’re tipped over,” he said.

But some antennas were pointed toward the surface, limiting flight controllers ability to communicate and get the right data down, Altemus said.

He said the lander was “near or at its intended landing site.” The Houston company was shooting for the south polar region, near the Malapert A crater, closer to the pole than anyone else so NASA could scout out the area before astronauts show up later this decade.

It was the first U.S. moon landing in more than 50 years since the Apollo era.

With Thursday’s touchdown, Intuitive Machines became the first private business to pull off a moon landing, a feat previously achieved by only five countries. The mission was sponsored in large part by NASA, whose experiments were on board. NASA paid $118 million for the delivery under a program meant to jump-start the lunar economy.

One of the NASA experiments was pressed into service when the lander’s navigation system failed in the final few hours before touchdown. The lander took an extra lap around the moon to allow time for the last-minute switch to NASA’s laser system.

“Odie is a scrapper,” mission director Tim Crain said late Thursday via X, formerly Twitter.

Another experiment, a cube with four cameras, was supposed to pop off 30 seconds before touchdown to capture pictures of Odysseus’ landing. But Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University’s EagleCam was deliberately powered off during the final descent because of the navigation switch and stayed attached to the lander.

Embry-Riddle’s Troy Henderson said his team will try to release EagleCam in the coming days, so it can photograph the lander from roughly 26 feet away.

“Getting that final picture of the lander on the surface is still an incredibly important task for us,” Henderson told The Associated Press.

Intuitive Machines anticipates just a week of operations on the moon for the solar-powered lander, before lunar nightfall hits.

The company was the second business to aim for the moon under NASA’s commercial lunar services program. Last month, Pittsburgh’s Astrobotic Technology gave it a shot, but a fuel leak on the lander cut the mission short and the craft ended up crashing back to Earth.

Until Thursday, the U.S. had not landed on the moon since Apollo 17’s Gene Cernan and Harrison Schmitt closed out NASA’s famed moon-landing program in December 1972. NASA’s new effort to return astronauts to the moon is named Artemis after Apollo’s mythological twin sister. The first Artemis crew landing is planned for 2026 at the earliest.

The jury ordered LaPierre, 74, to repay the group he led for three decades $4,351,231. It also ordered the NRA’s retired finance chief, Wilson Phillips, to pay back the group $2 million. Jurors also found that the NRA omitted or misrepresented information in its tax filings and violated New York law by failing to adopt a whistleblower policy.

LaPierre sat stone-faced in the front row of the courtroom as the verdict was read aloud.

The verdict is a win for New York Attorney General Letitia James, a Democrat who campaigned on investigating the NRA’s not-for-profit status.

“In New York, you cannot get away with corruption and greed, no matter how powerful or influential you think you may be,” James said in a post on X. “Everyone, even the NRA and Wayne LaPierre, must play by the same rules.”

The loss in court is the latest blow to the powerful group, which in recent years has been beset by financial troubles and dwindling membership. LaPierre, its longtime face, announced his resignation on the eve of the trial.

NRA general counsel John Frazer was also a defendant in the case. Although the jury found that he violated his duties, it didn’t order him to repay any money.

The penalties paid by LaPierre — the jury actually found him liable for $5.4 million but determined he’d already paid back a little over a million — and Phillips will go back to the NRA, which was portrayed in the case both as a defendant that lacked internal controls to prevent misspending and as a victim of that same misconduct.

James also wants the three men to be banned from serving in leadership positions at any charitable organizations that conduct business in New York. A judge will decide that question during the next phase of the state Supreme Court trial.

Another former NRA executive turned whistleblower, Joshua Powell, settled with the state last month, agreeing to testify at the trial, pay the NRA $100,000 and forgo further involvement with nonprofits.

James sued the NRA and its executives in 2020 under her authority to investigate not-for-profits registered in the state.

She originally sought to have the entire organization dissolved, but Manhattan Judge Joel M. Cohen ruled in 2022 that the allegations did not warrant a “corporate death penalty.”

The trial, which began last month, cast a spotlight on the leadership, organizational culture and finances of the powerful lobbying group, which was founded more than 150 years ago in New York City to promote rifle skills and grew into a political juggernaut that influenced federal law and presidential elections.

Before he stepped down, LaPierre, had led the NRA’s day-to-day operations since 1991, acting as its face and becoming one of the country’s most influential figures in shaping gun policy.

During the trial, state lawyers argued that he dodged financial disclosure requirements while treating the NRA as his personal piggy bank, liberally dipping into its coffers for African safaris and other questionable expenditures.

His lawyer cast the trial as a political witch hunt by James.

LaPierre billed the NRA more than $11 million for private jet flights and spent more than $500,000 on eight trips to the Bahamas over a three-year span, state lawyers said.

He also authorized $135 million in NRA contracts for a vendor whose owners showered him with free trips to the Bahamas, Greece, Dubai and India, as well as access to a 108-foot (33-meter) yacht.

LaPierre claimed he hadn’t realized the travel tickets, hotel stays, meals, yacht access and other luxury perks counted as gifts, and that the private jet flights were necessary for his safety.

But he conceded that he had wrongly expensed private flights for his family and accepted vacations from vendors doing business with the NRA without disclosing them.

Among those who testified at the trial was Oliver North, a one-time NRA president and former National Security Council military aide best known for his central role in the Iran-Contra scandal of the 1980s. North, who resigned from the NRA in 2019, said he was pushed out after raising allegations of financial irregularities.

After reporting a $36 million deficit in 2018 fueled largely by misspending, the NRA cut back on longstanding programs that had been core to its mission, including training and education, recreational shooting and law enforcement initiatives. In 2021, it filed for bankruptcy and sought to incorporate in Texas instead of New York, but a judge rejected the move, saying it was an attempt to duck James’ lawsuit.

Despite its recent woes, the NRA remains a political force. Republican presidential hopefuls flocked to its annual convention last year and former President Donald Trump spoke at an NRA event earlier this month — his eighth speech to the association, it said.

Associated Press writer Philip Marcelo contributed to this report.

The action starts the clock on the amount of time Trump has to file an appeal and to post a bond for the award. If he does not do so, New York Attorney General Letitia James’ office will be able to begin collection proceedings against Trump and his co-defendants in the civil fraud case.

The vast majority of the $464,576,230.62 judgment — $454,156,783.05 of it, to be exact — is against Trump and his companies. The interest on the judgment against Trump will increase at a daily rate of $111,983.86 until it’s paid off, according to the AG’s office. 

The rest of the judgment is against his sons Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump, who’ve been running the Trump Organization since 2017, and former top executives Allen Weisselberg and Jeff McConney.

The amount includes the prejudgment interest that’s accrued on the more than $350 million award Judge Arthur Engoron handed down last week.

Trump’s lawyers had sought to delay the judgment from being entered, presumably to allow them more time to line up financing for the bond, but Engoron rejected that request Thursday.

“You have failed to explain, much less justify, any basis for a stay,” Engoron told Trump attorney Clifford S. Robert in an email before he signed the judgment. The judgment became official Friday after it was entered in by the clerk.

Trump attorney Alina Habba told Fox News on Monday that “we will be prepared” to post the bond amount.

The bond will likely be very costly. While courts have discretion in setting exactly how much is required for a bond, New York courts typically require up to 120% of the judgment, including all pre-judgment interest. That means he could have to post a bond for well over $500 million.  

If Trump posts the required bond, it is unclear whether the identity of the person or company paying will be public information, a source in the AG’s office told NBC News.

In a ruling last week following a months-long trial, Engoron found Trump and his top executives had intentionally engaged in a massive and long-running scheme to improperly inflate his assets in financial statements so he could take advantage of favorable loan and insurances rates he wasn’t actually entitled to. The judge ordered him to pay what he found were the “ill-gotten gains” from his years-long fraud and also barred Trump “from serving as an officer or director of any New York corporation or other legal entity in New York for a period of three years,” including his namesake company.

Trump maintained he hadn’t done anything wrong and the case was a part of a giant Democratic conspiracy designed to take him down.

Engoron cited the lack of remorse from Trump and his executives in his ruling, saying their “complete lack of contrition and remorse borders on pathological.”

“They are accused only of inflating asset values to make more money. The documents prove this over and over again. This is a venial sin, not a mortal sin,” Engoron wrote. “Defendants did not commit murder or arson. They did not rob a bank at gunpoint. Donald Trump is not Bernard Madoff. Yet, defendants are incapable of admitting the error of their ways.”

He found their “refusal to admit error — indeed, to continue it, according to the Independent Monitor — constrains this Court to conclude that they will engage in it going forward unless judicially restrained.”

Last month, Trump was hit last month with an $83.3 million verdict in writer E. Jean Carroll’s defamation case against him. The judgment in that case was entered on Feb. 8. Trump has said he plans to appeal that verdict as well, which would also require posting a bond in excess of that amount.

In a court filing Friday, Trump’s attorneys asked the judge who presided over that case to extend the time he has to post a bond until 30 days after his post-trial motions seeking to reduce the size of the verdict are decided.

“In the alternative, President Trump requests that this Court grant a partially secured stay of execution until 30 days after the resolution of post-trial motions and authorize President Trump to post a bond in an appropriate fraction of the amount of the judgment,” the filing said.

Trump attorney Alina Habba said in a statement, “The figure awarded to Ms. Carroll is egregiously excessive. The Court must exercise its authority to prevent Ms. Carroll’s from enforcing this absurd judgment, which will not withstand appeal.”

This story first appeared on NBCNews.com. More from NBC News:

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Sunday’s heist at a Jaguar-Land Rover dealership in Waukesha was captured on surveillance camera footage showing nine masked suspects filing into the dealership before each drives off in a car in the city about 19 miles west of Milwaukee.

The video also shows one car being backed up and smashed through an overhead service door.

Waukesha Police Capt. Dan Baumann said the suspects broke into the dealership about 6 a.m. Sunday, found where its car keys were stored and then activated those key fobs to find the cars they stole.

“Nine subjects went out and throughout there looking for keys. One person finds where the keys were hidden and then starts to disseminate those to his friends,” Baumann told WISN-TV.

The nine vehicles are valued at more than $583,000, he said.

One suspect, a 17-year-old Chicago boy, was arrested Sunday in the southern Wisconsin community of Pleasant Prairie after the stolen vehicle he was driving crashed along Interstate 94 during a police pursuit. He was being held at the Waukesha County Jail on a $50,000 bond and faces burglary, theft and criminal damage to property charges, Baumann said.

Police said Sunday that the suspects are believed to be “an organized crime group of teenagers from the Chicago area.”

Baumann said Friday that all or most of the teen suspects are known to members of a police task force in southern Wisconsin and northern Illinois and police in that two-state region were still searching Friday for the eight other suspects.

Six of the nine stolen vehicles have been recovered — four in Chicago, one in the Chicago suburb of Deerfield, and one in Wisconsin after the highway crash that led to the 17-year-old’s arrest, he said.

The two-vehicle crash was reported at about 6 a.m. on a two-lane road northwest of Fresno. A Chevy Silverado pickup and older model GMC Safari van with eight farm workers collided when the pickup driver crossed the centerline, the CHP said.

Both drivers and six other people were killed. One person was hospitalized, but details about that person’s injuries were not immediately available.

Only the driver and front passenger in the Safari were wearing seatbelts, the CHP said.

KSEE News reported that the wife of one of the victims in the van was following the Safari in another van and witnessed the crash. The workers were heading to work in the Firebaugh area, the station reported.

It was not immediately clear why the pickup driver crossed lanes.

“The Republican Party should always be on the side of the Miracle of Life — and the side of Mothers, Fathers, and their Beautiful Babies,” Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social that marked his first comment on a topic that has roiled the GOP this week.

For some in the GOP, the ruling amounted to an unforeseen consequence of the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2022 Dobbs decision, which paved the way for states to restrict abortion. Trump has pointed to his selection of three of the justices who voted in the majority on the Dobbs decision as evidence of his anti-abortion credentials.

But on Friday, he took issue with the Alabama court’s conclusion that embryos are children under state law.

“Like the OVERWHELMING MAJORITY of Americans, including the VAST MAJORITY of Republicans, Conservatives, Christians, and Pro-Life Americans, I strongly support the availability of IVF for couples who are trying to have a precious baby,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “Today, I am calling on the Alabama Legislature to act quickly to find an immediate solution to preserve the availability of IVF in Alabama.”

President Joe Biden’s campaign criticized Trump’s statement as an attempt to “whitewash the reality he created.”

“American women couldn’t care less what Donald Trump posts on Truth Social, they care that they can’t access fertility treatment because of him,” said Biden-Harris campaign manager Julie Chavez Rodriguez. “Let’s be clear: Alabama families losing access to IVF is a direct result of Donald Trump’s Supreme Court justices overturning Roe v. Wade. Trump is responsible for 20-plus abortion bans, restrictions on women’s ability to decide if and when to grow a family, and attacks on contraception. He proudly overturned Roe, and brags about it on the campaign trail — as recently as last night.”

Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey, a Republican, said in a statement earlier in the week that she also wants the legislature to send her a bill protecting IVF treatments.

“Following the ruling from the Alabama Supreme Court, I said that in our state, we work to foster a culture of life,” she said. “This certainly includes some couples hoping and praying to be parents who utilize IVF.”   

Lawmakers in Alabama’s House have already filed legislation that would protect IVF services.

It states: “Any fertilized human egg or human embryo that exists in any form outside of the uterus of a human body shall not, under any circumstances, be considered an unborn child, a minor child, a natural person, or any other term that connotes a human being for any purpose under state law.”

Republican state Sen. Tim Melson told the Alabama Reflector that he planned to introduce similar legislation in the upper chamber.

Before Trump weighed in on the matter for the first time, his lone remaining rival for the Republican presidential nomination, former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley, struggled to define her position. In an interview with NBC News Wednesday, she said, “Embryos, to me, are babies.”

On Thursday, she said in an interview with CNN that she opposes the Alabama court decision.

President Joe Biden, who is seeking re-election, harshly denounced the state court’s IVF ruling Thursday.

“Today, in 2024 in America, women are being turned away from emergency rooms and forced to travel hundreds of miles for health care, while doctors fear prosecution for providing an abortion. And now, a court in Alabama put access to some fertility treatments at risk for families who are desperately trying to get pregnant,” Biden said in a statement. “The disregard for women’s ability to make these decisions for themselves and their families is outrageous and unacceptable.”

Biden also called the court opinion a “direct result” of the Dobbs decision, which overturned the longstanding Roe vs. Wade opinion that had protected abortion rights, and Vice President Kamala Harris directly blamed Trump.

“Ask who’s to blame,” Harris said at a roundtable event in Michigan on Thursday. “And I’ll answer that question: When you look at the fact that the previous president of the United States was clear in his intention to hand-pick three Supreme Court justices who would overturn the protections of Roe v. Wade. And he did it. And that’s what got us to this point today.”

Biden has vowed to fight to restore those rights at the federal level.

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For now, the only U.S. zoo left with any is in Atlanta. But globally, there are many places to check out the cuddly black-and-white bundles of fur as they munch on bamboo, climb trees and lounge on their backs.

The bear is native to China, where it is considered a national treasure.

Here are some of the places where pandas can be seen, including possibly in the wild in China.

Atlanta, Georgia

Zoo Atlanta has four pandas, including the first twins born in the United States in more than a quarter century. Giant pandas typically care for only one cub when twins are born in the wild, which usually leads to just one twin surviving.

Ya Lun and Xi Lun and their parents, Lun Lun and Yang Yang, could be heading back to China in late 2024 unless the loan agreement is extended.

Mexico City, Mexico

The only other place in the Americas where people can see pandas is in Mexico City at the Chapultepec Zoo.

Xin Xin is the last panda in Latin America and is not on loan from China. That's because she's the only remaining bear descended from the giant pandas China gifted to foreign countries during the 1970s and 1980s. The second-generation Mexican-born panda traces her lineage to Pe Pe and Ying Ying, who arrived at the zoo in 1975.

Qatar

One of the last countries that China sent pandas to was Qatar in 2022, ahead of the Middle Eastern country hosting the World Cup.

The pair reside in an indoor enclosure in the desert nation designed to duplicate conditions in the dense forests of China’s mountainous Sichuan province. Eight-hundred kilograms (nearly 1,800 pounds) of fresh bamboo is flown in each week to feed them.

Jing Jing, the male, was given the Arabic name Suhail. Si Hai, the female, was given the Arabic name Thuraya.

Moscow, Russia

In 2019, the Moscow zoo welcomed its first pair of pandas, a male named Ru Yi and a female named Ding Ding. Chinese President Xi Jinping leased the pandas during an official visit that was to show a “sign of respect and trust.”

Berlin, Germany

The Berlin zoo is home to Jiao Qing and Meng Meng, who arrived in Berlin in 2017. They gave birth to twins, the first panda cubs born in Germany. Those cubs have since returned to China.

China

Giant pandas are limited to six mountainous areas of southwestern China in the provinces of Sichuan, Gansu, and Shanxi. A total of 34 pandas were born last year at two bases in Sichuan, including at Chengdu Research Base of Giant Panda Breeding, a popular tourist destination in Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan province.

More than 1,800 are estimated to exist in the wild, where they are threatened chiefly by habitat loss. About 420 others live in captivity in zoos and reserves, the majority within China.

San Diego Feb 21

China plans to send San Diego Zoo more pandas this year, reintroducing panda diplomacy

pandas Aug 30, 2023

Why are the pandas at the National Zoo going to China?

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United Airlines is raising the price to check bags, becoming the latest carrier this year to hike a fee that generated more than $5 billion for airlines in the first nine months of 2023 alone.

United economy passengers who book domestic tickets starting Feb. 24 will pay $40 for a first checked bag, or $35 if they prepay online at least 24 hours before their flight, an increase of $5. A second checked bag will cost $50 at the airport, or $45 in advance, up $5 for both options.

The changes apply to most flights throughout North America, a United spokeswoman said.

In 2020, United raised the price to check a bag at the airport by $5 to $35 but kept it steady at $30 if travelers paid for the service in advance.

Certain credit card holders, frequent flyers with elite status, active military and travelers in top-tier classes can still check a bag for free, United said.

Earlier this week, American Airlines raised its fee to check a first bag on domestic flights to $35 if purchased in advance and $40 at the airport. Both options were previously $30. A second checked bag will go up from $40 to $45.

Airlines and other companies have been grappling with how to grow profits while reining in costs, such as new labor contracts, while pricing power has waned.

JetBlue and Alaska Airlines have also raised bag fees this year.

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The suspects were being held at the South Saint George Police Station in Grenada when they escaped on Sunday and were recaptured on the nearby island nation of Saint Vincent and the Grenadines on Wednesday, according to a statement by the Royal Grenada Police Force.

Saint Vincent and the Grenadines investigators believe the men arrived there on a yacht taken from a dock near Saint George, police in Grenada said.

And the “RGPF is currently working on leads that suggest that the two occupants of the yacht may have been killed in the process,” police said.

The RGPF added: “It is believed that the occupants of the yacht were American citizens.”

“U.S. authorities are coordinating with local law enforcement officials on this incident,” a State Department spokesperson told NBC News on Friday. “We do not comment on ongoing investigations.”

The welfare of U.S. citizens abroad is the State Department’s highest priority, the official said.

“We stand ready to provide appropriate assistance to U.S. citizens in need and to their families,” the spokesperson said.

Ron Mitchell, 30, Trevon Robertson, 19, and Abita Stanislaus, 25, had all been charged with one count of robbery with violence, police said.

Mitchell had been additionally charged with a count of rape, three counts of attempted rape, two counts of indecent assault and causing harm, police said.

This is a developing story. Please check back for updates.

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Satellite images released by NASA shows the lake forming in the Badwater Basin over several months, starting last year when Tropical Storm Hilary dumped a furious 2.2 inches of rain on Aug. 20, roughly the amount of rainfall the park usually receives in a year.

“Two inches of rain does not sound like a lot, but here, it really does stay on the surface,” Matthew Lamar, a park ranger, told The Associated Press at the time.

The lake that began to take shape after Hilary was 7 miles long, 4 miles wide and 2 feet deep, park officials said.

“Most of us thought the lake would be gone by October,” said Death Valley National Park ranger Abby Wines in a news release. “We were shocked to see it still here after almost six months.”

And while some of the water evaporated and absorbed into the ground over the following months — shrinking to about half the size by January — when storms returned in February, the lake continued to expand as the rain runoff drained into the area.

The temporary lake, informally known as Lake Manly, is about 6 miles long, 3 miles wide and 1 foot deep. Now, tourists are flocking to Death Valley National Park for an “extremely rare” opportunity to kayak.

“The lake was deep enough to kayak for a few weeks after Hurricane Hilary, but unfortunately people couldn’t come enjoy it then,” said Wines. “Every road in the park was damaged by flash floods, and it took two months to open the first road into the park. Now most of the main roads are open, so it’s a great time to come visit!”

Park officials say they don’t know for how long the water will stick around, but believe it will create beautiful reflections through April.

Death Valley is a narrow, 282-foot basin that is below sea level but situated among high, steep mountain ranges, according to the park service’s website. The bone-dry air and meager plant coverage allows sunlight to heat up the desert surface. The rocks and the soil emit all that heat in turn, which then becomes trapped in the depths of the valley.

The park, which straddles eastern California and Nevada, holds the record for the hottest temperature recorded on the planet — 134 degrees Fahrenheit, reached in July 1913. During last summer’s heatwave, temperatures climbed past 130 F in July. Hiking trails in summer months advise against venturing out after 10 a.m., though nighttime temperatures still hover over 90 F.

More than 1.1 million people visit the desert park annually. At 5,346 square miles, it’s the largest national park in the Lower 48.

The Associated Press contributed to this story.

Looking at the photo now, Evan’s father, Wayland Strickland, choked up. “You think about it a little bit more in hindsight,” he said.

By 2022, Evan was 19 and a Marine Corps lance corporal stationed in California. He loved to play saxophone, dance for his fellow Marines to make them laugh, and had planned to elope with his girlfriend. On June 8, he headed out for his first flight as a crew chief on an Osprey.

His mother, Michelle Strickland, got a message on Facebook that day from a friend who asked, “Have you heard from Evan?”

“And I’m like, ‘No,’” Michelle recalled. “She tells me, ‘Call him.’”

Evan didn’t answer the phone. Wayland Strickland said he told his wife not to invite trouble by worrying. He was heading to bed when he heard a “blood-curdling scream.” Michelle had opened the front door to see two Marines.

“From that second on, your heart is always broken,” Wayland said.

From March 2022 to November 2023, 20 service members died in four fatal Osprey crashes. The U.S. military grounded the entire fleet of about 400 V-22 Ospreys used by the Navy, Marines and Air Force after the crash of an Air Force Special Operations Command Osprey off Japan last November killed eight airmen. The military says it has identified and believes it has solved a recurrent problem with the clutch in the Osprey’s rotor gearbox that contributed to at least one crash, but it has still not determined root causes for the Osprey’s problems — and is weighing a return to operation for the aircraft.

After her son’s fatal crash, Michelle Strickland was comforted by Evan’s Marine friends, whom she called her “bonus Marines.” One of them, Cpl. Spencer Collart, had served as a pallbearer for Evan.

A little over a year after the funeral, she got a text that another Osprey had gone missing in Australia.

“And, you know, right away I was like, Oh, no. … Your heart just sinks. And I remember shaking, kind of showing [Wayland] the phone, like, ‘No, this can’t be.’”

Collart was one of three service members who died in the Australia crash in August 2023.

Osprey crew members and their families, mechanics, veterans and others form a small but worldwide community. People in the community trade stories and information and share their concerns.

A former Osprey mechanic with years of experience who did not want to speak publicly told NBC News, “It’s hard to find someone in the Osprey community who doesn’t know someone who has died.” He said he promised his child he would not go back up in an Osprey after he lost a friend in a crash.

‘Mishaps’ 

 The V-22 Osprey can take off vertically like a helicopter because of its twin-rotor engines. Once airborne, the rotors can be repositioned so that the Osprey flies like a propeller plane. It is designed to transport combat troops for rapid insertion.

The U.S. military has flown the Osprey since 1989. It was controversial, however, because it was crash-prone. From 1989 to 2017, seven accidents killed 41 service members and other passengers.

From 2018 to 2021, there were no fatal crashes. In 2020 and 2021, there were two “Class A mishaps,” meaning incidents that resulted in a permanent disability to a service member, death or at least $2.5 million in damage to the aircraft, but none of them were fatal. In 2022 and 2023, however, there were 11 Class A mishaps, four of them fatal, according to military data reviewed by NBC News.

In March 2022, a crash in Norway killed four Marines. The accident was later attributed to pilot error.

Less than three months after the Norway crash, the Osprey carrying Evan and four other Marines crashed in the California desert, killing everyone on board including him and Capts. Nicholas P. Losapio and John J. Sax, and Cpls. Nathan E. Carlson and Seth D. Rasmuson.

According to investigators, the June 2022 crash occurred after the aircraft experienced something called a “hard clutch engagement,” which is when the “clutch releases from the rotor system and suddenly reengages,” leading to a loss of lift and the risk of a sudden drop.

The Osprey fell so fast, the experienced pilots did not have time to make any radio communications. The fire from the crash was so hot that it destroyed the aircraft’s black box, investigators said.

The clutch problem was not new. There were 12 hard clutch engagements from 2010 to 2020, according to data from the Pentagon’s V-22 Joint Program Office, but none were fatal. Since the California crash, however, there have been another six. The last one was in January 2023.

In February 2023, the military said it was 99% sure it had solved the “hard clutch engagement” problem. A bulletin mandated the replacement of a part called the input quill assembly after 800 hours of flying. But the military still could not offer an explanation for why the problem kept recurring.

A spokesman for the program office told NBC News that the leading theory among engineers involves a partial engagement of some clutches that “have been installed for a lengthy period of time,” but a “definitive root cause has not yet been determined.”

In August 2023, the accident in Australia killed Evan’s friend Collart and two other service members. The cause remains unknown and the investigation is ongoing.

In November 2023, the crash off the coast of the Japanese island of Yakushima killed eight more service members. NBC News reported earlier this week that the Japan crash investigation is focused on the aircraft’s proprotor gearbox, which connects the engines to the rotors.

“This latest incident has crossed me over into the death trap camp,” one current service member wrote in a private Facebook group for the Osprey community. NBC News is not revealing the member’s name because the comments were shared confidentially.

“Military aviation is an inherently risky endeavor,” Keith Wright, chief of public affairs for the Air Force, said in response to a query about the Osprey incidents. “Our primary purpose is to defend the nation in air, space, and cyberspace, and critical to that is preserving the combat capabilities our personnel and systems provide by mitigating those risks. There are a variety of reasons mishaps occur, which can include human error, mechanical failure, procedural guidance, or training. Every mishap is different, and each is investigated individually and thoroughly to identify causal factors in efforts to prevent similar mishaps.”

Grounded — for now

In December, the military announced it had grounded all its Ospreys as it conducts its investigation. (A few Ospreys have still flown in Djibouti and Okinawa when there were emergencies.)

A spokesperson for Bell-Textron, the Osprey manufacturer, said, “Our thoughts are with those who were lost in these incidents, along with their families, friends and loved ones. We are steadfast in our commitment to safety and are fully supporting the investigation.”

But the Pentagon is now weighing an end to the fleetwide grounding, U.S. officials say.

In a statement, Neil Lobeda, spokesperson for the military’s Joint Program Office, said, “Close coordination among key senior leaders across all three services and the Safety Investigation Board has been paramount in ensuring we are providing our service members with the safest, most reliable aircraft possible. The safety and well-being of our personnel and the reliability of the V-22 continues to be a priority in our discussions as we determine our return to flight plan.”

Some in the Osprey community worry that a return to flight is too soon if the military cannot pinpoint a root cause for the Japan crash or the clutch problem that downed the California flight. Knowing what happened is not the same as knowing why.

Families who lost loved ones still want an answer.

“If they could come forward and say that and be very specific, then I think the families would be put at ease, especially those who are still flying in the aircraft, but that hasn’t happened yet,” said Tim Loranger, a lawyer who is representing the families of service members lost in Osprey crashes.

The Stricklands say they’re relieved the Ospreys have been grounded for now and they want the military contractors to thoroughly investigate why the clutch problem exists. “Understanding the root cause of this event is crucial not only for our family but for the safety and well-being of all those who serve in the military aboard the V-22,” the family said in a statement.

Meanwhile, the last Navy budget included no new Osprey purchases, and some senior military officials anticipate that current Ospreys will only serve as a temporary bridge to a new undetermined option.

There are also concerns that the longer the aircraft stay grounded, and the less pilots can fly, there could be more problems.

A military aviation safety report from 2020 concluded that one of the contributors to fatal accidents was insufficient flight time for pilots.

In 2022, total Osprey flight hours were just over 56,000, according to the Joint Program Office. In 2023, flight hours fell to 47,580.

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