DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. (AP) — Ian Schieffelin had 18 points, 13 rebounds and eight assists in leading Clemson to a 75-67 win over Penn State on Tuesday and the championship of the Sunshine Slam Beach Division. Chase Hunter added 17 points, Chauncey Wiggins 14 and Del Jones 10 for the Tigers (6-1), who shot 44% and made 9 of 19 3-pointers led by Hunter's three. Ace Baldwin Jr. scored 20 points and had 11 assists, Yanic Konan Niederhauser added 14 points and Nick Kern Jr. 11 for the Nittany Lions (6-1), who shot 46% and were just 4 of 18 from the arc. Neither team had a double-digit lead in the game and it was tied with seven minutes to go. But Penn State had a six-minute drought without a field goal while committing three turnovers and the Tigers went up by six. A hook shot from Schieffelin with a minute to go made it a five-point lead and free throws sealed it from there. The eight-point final margin was the largest of the game. Konan Niederhauser's dunk to open the second half tied the game but a Hunter 3-pointer gave the lead back to Clemson. Penn State took its first lead of the second half on a 9-0 run, seven coming from Baldwin, to go up 57-54 with midway through the period. Penn State had its largest lead of seven in the first half but three consecutive 3s put Clemson ahead with three minutes to go and the Tigers led at 38-36 at halftime. Clemson had a 16-9 edge on points off turnovers. ___ Get poll alerts and updates on the AP Top 25 throughout the season. Sign up here . AP college basketball: https://apnews.com/hub/ap-top-25-college-basketball-poll and https://apnews.com/hub/college-basketball
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CYPRESS LAKE, Fla. (AP) — Robert McCray scored 21 points as Jacksonville beat Siena 75-64 on Tuesday. McCray added eight rebounds and five assists for the Dolphins (4-3). Zach Bell scored 11 points, going 3 of 5 and 4 of 4 from the free-throw line. Zimi Nwokeji went 3 of 7 from the field (2 for 4 from 3-point range) to finish with 10 points, while adding six rebounds. Gavin Doty finished with 21 points and nine rebounds for the Saints (3-4). Major Freeman added 12 points and four assists for Siena. Tajae Jones also had 11 points. The Associated Press created this story using technology provided by Data Skrive and data from Sportradar .JERUSALEM (AP) — Israel approved a ceasefire agreement with Lebanon's Hezbollah militants on Tuesday that would end nearly 14 months of fighting linked to the war in the Gaza Strip. The ceasefire, starting at 4 a.m. local time Wednesday, would mark the first major step toward ending the regionwide unrest triggered by Hamas’ attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. But it does not address the devastating war in Gaza , where Hamas is still holding dozens of hostages and the conflict is more intractable. Hours before the ceasefire with Hezbollah was to take effect, Israel carried out the most intense wave of strikes in Beirut and its southern suburbs since the start of the conflict and issued a record number of evacuation warnings. At least 42 people were killed in strikes across the country, according to local authorities. Another huge airstrike shook Beirut shortly after the ceasefire was announced. There appeared to be lingering disagreement over whether Israel would have the right to strike Hezbollah if it believed the militants had violated the agreement, something Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu insisted was part of the deal but which Lebanese and Hezbollah officials have rejected. Israel's security Cabinet approved the U.S.-France-brokered ceasefire agreement after Netanyahu presented it, his office said. U.S. President Joe Biden, speaking in Washington, called the agreement “good news” and said his administration would make a renewed push for a ceasefire in Gaza. The Biden administration spent much of this year trying to broker a ceasefire and hostage release in Gaza but the talks repeatedly sputtered to a halt . President-elect Donald Trump has vowed to bring peace to the Middle East without saying how. Still, any halt to the fighting in Lebanon is expected to reduce the likelihood of war between Israel and Iran, which backs both Hezbollah and Hamas and exchanged direct fire with Israel on two occasions earlier this year. Israel says it will ‘attack with might’ if Hezbollah breaks truce Netanyahu presented the ceasefire proposal to Cabinet ministers after a televised address in which he listed accomplishments against Israel’s enemies across the region. He said a ceasefire with Hezbollah would further isolate Hamas in Gaza and allow Israel to focus on its main enemy, Iran. “If Hezbollah breaks the agreement and tries to rearm, we will attack,” he said. “For every violation, we will attack with might.” The ceasefire deal calls for a two-month initial halt in fighting and would require Hezbollah to end its armed presence in a broad swath of southern Lebanon, while Israeli troops would return to their side of the border. Thousands of additional Lebanese troops and U.N. peacekeepers would deploy in the south, and an international panel headed by the United States would monitor compliance. Biden said Israel reserved the right to quickly resume operations in Lebanon if Hezbollah breaks the terms of the truce, but that the deal "was designed to be a permanent cessation of hostilities.” Netanyahu’s office said Israel appreciated the U.S. efforts in securing the deal but “reserves the right to act against every threat to its security.” Lebanon’s caretaker Prime Minister Najib Mikati welcomed the ceasefire and described it as a crucial step toward stability and the return of displaced people. Hezbollah has said it accepts the proposal, but a senior official with the group said Tuesday it had not seen the agreement in its final form. “After reviewing the agreement signed by the enemy government, we will see if there is a match between what we stated and what was agreed upon by the Lebanese officials,” Mahmoud Qamati, deputy chair of Hezbollah’s political council, told the Al Jazeera news network. “We want an end to the aggression, of course, but not at the expense of the sovereignty of the state," he said, referring to Israel's demand for freedom of action. “Any violation of sovereignty is refused.” Warplanes bombard Beirut and its southern suburbs Even as ceasefire efforts gained momentum in recent days, Israel continued to strike what it called Hezbollah targets across Lebanon while the militants fired rockets, missiles and drones across the border. An Israeli strike on Tuesday leveled a residential building in central Beirut — the second time in recent days warplanes have hit the crowded area near downtown. At least seven people were killed and 37 wounded, according to Lebanon's Health Ministry. Israel also struck a building in Beirut's bustling commercial district of Hamra for the first time, hitting a site around 400 meters (yards) from Lebanon’s Central Bank. There were no reports of casualties. The Israeli military said it struck targets linked to Hezbollah's financial arm. The evacuation warnings covered many areas, including parts of Beirut that previously were not targeted. The warnings sent residents fleeing. Traffic was gridlocked, with mattresses tied to some cars. Dozens of people, some wearing pajamas, gathered in a central square, huddling under blankets or standing around fires as Israeli drones buzzed overhead. Israeli military spokesman Avichay Adraee issued evacuation warnings for 20 buildings in Beirut's southern suburbs, where Hezbollah has a major presence, as well as a warning for the southern town of Naqoura where the U.N. peacekeeping mission, UNIFIL, is headquartered. UNIFIL spokesperson Andrea Tenenti said peacekeepers will not evacuate. Israeli forces reach Litani River in southern Lebanon The Israeli military also said its ground troops clashed with Hezbollah forces and destroyed rocket launchers in the Slouqi area on the eastern end of the Litani River, a few kilometers (miles) from the Israeli border. Under the ceasefire deal, Hezbollah would be required to move its forces north of the Litani, which in some places is about 30 kilometers (20 miles) north of the border. Hezbollah began firing into northern Israel on Oct. 8, 2023, saying it was showing support for the Palestinians, a day after Hamas carried out its attack on southern Israel, triggering the Gaza war. Israel returned fire on Hezbollah, and the two sides have exchanged barrages ever since. Israel escalated its bombardment in mid-September and later sent troops into Lebanon, vowing to put an end to Hezbollah fire so tens of thousands of evacuated Israelis could return to their homes. More than 3,760 people have been killed by Israeli fire in Lebanon the past 13 months, many of them civilians, according to Lebanese health officials. The bombardment has driven 1.2 million people from their homes. Israel says it has killed more than 2,000 Hezbollah members. Hezbollah fire has forced some 50,000 Israelis to evacuate in the country’s north, and its rockets have reached as far south in Israel as Tel Aviv. At least 75 people have been killed, more than half of them civilians. More than 50 Israeli soldiers have died in the ground offensive in Lebanon. ___ Chehayeb and Mroue reported from Beirut and Federman from Jerusalem. Associated Press reporters Lujain Jo and Sally Abou AlJoud in Beirut and Aamer Madhani in Washington contributed. ___ Find more of AP’s war coverage at https://apnews.com/hub/israel-hamas-war Josef Federman, Kareem Chehayeb And Bassem Mroue, The Associated Presshas told her aides to keep her options open in case she decides to run for again in 2028, according to reports. Sources close to the Harris family that the has vowed to "stay in the fight" and may even run to be governor of in 2026. The sources said Harris would be pondering her path forward over the coming holiday season, but has told allies and advisers she doesn't want to rule anything out. In particular, she is said to be planning out how and when she will criticise as she strives to "reassert" her prominence in the Democratic Party. "She doesn’t have to decide if she wants to run for something again in the next six months," one former Harris campaign aide told . "The natural thing to do would be to set up some type of entity that would give her the opportunity to travel and give speeches and preserve her political relationships." Another person close to Harris said: "There will be a desire to hear her voice, and there won’t be a vacuum for long." The report comes as . Despite that loss, found her leading the pack for potential 2028 Democratic nominees, with 41 per cent compared to Gavin Newsom's 8 per cent and Josh Shapiro's 7 per cent. Staying in the running for either the presidency or the California governorship would require maintaining links with other Democratic grandees, rebuilding her online following and potentially setting up a new fundraising organisation. Meanwhile, Harris and her husband Doug Emhoff are preparing to vacate the Naval Observatory in Washington DC – the official residence of the vice president, analogous to the White House – and must choose whether to return to their old home in Los Angeles
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Just like its predecessor, with the entirety of planet Earth available to explore, Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 has a whole lot to do. 2020’s Microsoft Flight Simulator was the first (and, so far, only) 10 I've given in a review, and the enormity of the options available in this year’s follow-up have only been tempered by the lingering problems that accompany them. Because codes weren’t available early and unexpected turbulence at takeoff made it literally impossible to play for the first 24 hours, I’m still working on my up and coming aviation career, as well as this review. For now, Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 has some extraordinary features to set it apart, but its impact is also falling short of how blown away I was by the last edition, and I really wanted to be blown away. Instead, I'm "merely" impressed. Right off the rip, the biggest new addition to Flight Simulator 2024 is its career mode. You pick a starting airport as your home base, get hired by a fictional aviation company, and begin progressing through your career as a pilot. It all plays out like a traditional video game skill tree: after you master the beginner missions, you open up new options, and completing them opens up further opportunities still. So you can get a tail wheel endorsement, for example, after you complete the requirements for a commercial pilots license, which then opens up options for newer planes and jobs like search and rescue, or you can get certified in rotor craft (helicopters) which leads to stuff like operating a sky crane. Which, to me personally, elicits a "hell yeah." Each new certification or endorsement also opens up different jobs you can pick from, ranging from simple stuff like flightseeing, to more complex operations like, well, anything to do with the helicopters, basically. Eventually you earn enough money and reputation to throw off the bonds of your employment and start your own aviation company. I haven't gotten that far yet, but I am moving along with my fixed wing endorsements at a pretty good pace. To what end, I haven't yet decided, but I'm looking forward to opening my own company and taking the lion's share of the profits. Those profits are used to further grow your business, and I can’t wait until I can afford my own fleet of aircraft. The first few missions in career mode are just basic flight training, meant to familiarize you with the ins and outs of flying a plane. What I found disappointing is that the flight training is pretty much identical to the tutorials from 2020. All the training missions take place at the same airfield in Sedona, Arizona as 2020 and the actual tasks are exactly the same. The only real difference is that the AI-generated instruction and on-screen advice is a little more clear about what's expected of you in any given mission. I do appreciate the default tooltips in 2024 because there are about a million different buttons that do a million different things, and I used to have to go to Google whenever I'd forget how to release my parking brake. (I don't even think I'll end up turning them off like I did in 2020, just because I'm a forgetful fellow.) After the initial training missions, you do a few flights to get enough hours in to test for your commercial pilot's license. Taking the tests costs in-game currency, but you only need to pay for it once and you can retake it as many times as you need. You also need to have enough experience and do well enough in the training missions – but if you are already an experienced pilot, you can just jump right into the test and skip the lessons. The further along you get, the more missions and mission types open up. What I thought was a little strange, however, was that they don't all open up near your home airport. I picked a small airfield in the deepest parts of eastern Maine, KMVM Machias Valley Airfield, but after my initial missions, I was being sent to Europe to complete aircraft delivery and skydive missions. It's not something that bothers me too much, but it did come across as odd, which pulled me out of the “career” illusion I had built up for myself. Lousy imagination! Otherwise, I'm actually really loving career mode. In 2020’s iteration, I would make-up little missions for myself, like delivering pizza by air from Knox County Regional Airport in Owl's Head, Maine to the remote Matinicus Island 20 miles off the coast (a real thing that happens, by the way). Having structured reasons to better familiarize myself with the aircraft and patterns in the sky is going to keep me on course, so to speak, and stealthily make me into a better sim-pilot. So far it's my favorite part of Flight Simulator 2024 and I'm looking forward to starting either my own airline or a helicopter sky crane company. Or both! I've got time. Another new addition is the challenge league. This mode is the most game-y of them all, but retains all the simulation flight models and physics I love. There are three challenges each week, as well as leaderboards, which I am a huge fan of because I have a competition in me. I want no one else to succeed. Of the three available in the first round, my favorite is the F/A-18 rally race through the Grand Canyon. You fly Maverick's modern jet of choice through a section of the canyon, slaloming gates in a hunt for pure speed. Since it's still the same flight model under the hood, that’s not as easy as it seems – but holy crap is it fun as hell. It took me a lot of tries to get to my final score of around 1 minute 54 seconds, and that's not even a good score: it only put me in the Bronze league. But the satisfaction of seeing my time raised up above the Xbox Live Gamertag of someone who I don't know at all, but is unknowingly my arch-nemesis, is great. I'm looking forward to revisiting the challenges each week. The previous Flight Simulator had landing challenges with leaderboards, too, but as fun as those were, they didn't quite hit the dynamism of flying a fighter jet through one of the world's seven natural wonders. One of the things I liked the most about the last Flight Simulator was how it let me visit places I'd either never been before or would almost certainly never visit again. In Flight Simulator 2024, sightseeing has been placed front and center in the photo challenges mode. You visit famous landmarks and places around the world and take photos of them. The type and criteria of the photos changes with each landmark. For example, in the first photo challenge, you need to take a picture of the Great Sphinx while the sun is above its right shoulder on the equinox. Oh, and you need to do it on foot. And that's one of the biggest and coolest new features: you can land, get out of your plane, and walk around. However, it's not quite as elegant as I had hoped it would be. First of all, your walking speed is paced realistically, just like the rest of the simulator, (who would have guessed?) so if you've been playing first-person video games all your life, walking at an actual human's pace feels almost painfully slow. Secondly, the level of detail is going to depend on a whole bunch of different factors, like the power of your PC, the strength of your internet connection, and the health of the cloud servers, so your mileage can (and probably will) vary. Still, in spite of some weirdly GoldenEye-esque objects around the Great Pyramid complex, the up-close terrain itself is really detailed. The sand and desert rocks look incredibly realistic, and the ground in general now seems to look more like how ground is actually supposed to look around the world. If you taxi through tall grass at the end of a rural runway, for example, the tracks from your wheels remain even when you return later. Same thing with snow or mud. Mud will even stick to your wheels and supposedly have an effect on your aerodynamics, although I can't speak to how true that is on account of never having flown an actual plane with mud-caked tires. There are also way more animals now. Instead of static points on a map telling you "there is a giraffe here," animals now pop up in the places you'd expect them to be. I very much felt like I was actually at an airfield in Maine when a bull moose plodded its way across the airstrip as I held short of the active runway. I haven't seen any other animals myself, but I know they're there because Flight Simulator 2024 uses an open-source database of animal locations to put them where they're supposed to be – so with some luck, I can go to Africa and see some lions before long. And when you lift your head up from the ground, Flight Simulator 2024 can look much better than its predecessor across the board (with an emphasis on can ). The improvement is especially stark in a place like the Grand Canyon, which I visited many times in 2020’s Flight Simulator. Whereas before it looked very obviously like a smooth, texture-mapped computer model up close, now it looks amazingly like the real thing. I am currently running Flight Simulator 2024 on a pretty beastly PC: it has an i9-13900K processor, a Radeon RX 7900XT GPU, and 64GBs of DDR5 RAM (disclosure, the RAM was provided by Corsair). With that setup, this year’s Flight Simulator looks and runs way better. Mostly. The problem comes from the fact Flight Simulator 2024 is streamed from the cloud, and so far they haven't ironed out all the issues. In career mode, I did a flightseeing mission around Venice, Italy, and St. Mark's Basilica was a purple-checkered polygonal model with no textures whatsoever, while the rest of Venice was rendered in perfect detail. I honestly would rather have something like the world map packs of 2020’s Flight Simulator living on my SSD and only stream the boring parts. Right now, though, there's no way to do that, and the reliance on cloud streaming was something the Flight Simulator team really hammered on the importance of leading up to launch, so I'd be surprised if they switched to some kind of hybrid model at this point. And in spite of everything looking really good on my beastly PC, it's worth noting that my GPU is running at 100% capacity at the recommended settings in order to make that happen. When I turned the graphics down to the next lower preset, it only brought GPU usage down to 98%. That ain't good. In spite of what can reasonably be described as a catastrophic launch, I'm already pretty much in love with Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 – I'm just not blown away like I was five years ago, when I first found myself faced with the opportunity to fly to literally any place on Earth. That option remains, of course, and it's been vastly improved by some smart new features, but it doesn't have that same impact, either. As we move away from the rocky launch, I'm encountering fewer and fewer issues, which gives me the chance to focus on what I love about Flight Simulator. Usually that’s flying around aimlessly, but this time career mode is also giving me real reasons to take off, as well as a better understanding of the world of commercial aviation. I'm going to keep at it before I render my final verdict, but right now, in spite of its initial problems, I think Flight Simulator 2024 is pretty damn great, even if it hasn’t caught the lightning in a bottle that was the last Flight Simulator once again.Schieffelin has 18 points, 13 rebounds and 8 assists as Clemson hands Penn State first loss 75-67