Viking® named its newest ocean ship, the Viking Vela®, with a traditional ceremony in Trieste, Italy. The naming of the Viking Vela also served as a celebration of Viking’s longtime partnership with Fincantieri, which is one of the world’s largest shipbuilding groups and is based in Trieste. With its rich maritime history, Trieste is considered the endpoint to the maritime Silk Road and is now Italy’s most important commercial port. Serving as ceremonial godmother of the Viking Vela was Ivana Elice, Vice President and Project Manager of the Fincantieri Cruise Business Unit, who has overseen the design and engineering of Viking’s ocean ships for 12 years. “We are proud to welcome the Viking Vela to our growing, award-winning fleet. With Fincantieri as our partner, we believe we have built the world’s most elegant fleet of small ocean ships,” said Torstein Hagen, Chairman and CEO of Viking. “We thank Ivana Elice for being godmother of the Viking Vela. In her role at Fincantieri, she has cared for our ocean ships during their construction just as a godmother would, and we are very appreciative of her contributions as a member of the extended Viking family.” In keeping with the naming tradition, during the ceremony, Ivana was presented with a historic Viking broad axe by Ann Ziff, the esteemed philanthropist, Chairman of the Metropolitan Opera and godmother of the Viking Saturn®. The same axe was previously used in the naming of the Viking Saturn in June 2023. After the axe presentation, Ivana pressed a button that allowed a bottle of Norwegian aquavit to break on the ship’s hull. Guests also enjoyed performances by Sissel Kyrkjebø, one of the world’s leading crossover sopranos and godmother of the Viking Jupiter®, and acclaimed Italian singer Alessandro Safina, who paid tribute to the cultures of both Norway and Italy in song. Ivana Elice, Vice President and Project Manager of the Fincantieri Cruise Business Unit, has enjoyed a distinguished career in naval and mechanical engineering, helping support the expansion of the Viking ocean fleet for the past 12 years. In 2012, Ms. Elice was appointed by Fincantieri to oversee the build of Viking’s first ocean ship, the Viking Star®, and she has continued to serve as valuable support for the expansion of Viking’s fleet of sister ships. She joined Fincantieri in 1985 after graduating from the University of Genoa with a master’s degree in naval architecture and mechanical engineering. Her initial role as a noise and vibration specialist within the company’s Naval Vessel Division involved assisting with the design of surface ships and submarines. Since 1993, she has held several positions within Fincantieri’s Merchant Division in the areas of hydrodynamics, ship construction, production engineering and more. The Viking Vela is the newest ship in Viking’s award-winning ocean fleet of sister ships. Classified as a small ship, as are all Viking ocean ships, the Viking Vela has a gross tonnage of 54,300 tons, with 499 staterooms that can host 998 guests; the ships feature all veranda staterooms, elegant Scandinavian design, light-filled public spaces and abundant al fresco dining options. The Viking Vela will spend her inaugural season sailing itineraries during the “quiet season” in the Mediterranean before continuing to Northern Europe. Viking is working on a project for a partial hybrid propulsion system for future ocean ships based on liquid hydrogen and fuel cells, which could allow the company to operate at zero-emission in the Norwegian Fjords and other sensitive environments. The Viking Vela has been designed with the future in mind, ensuring she can be retrofitted to incorporate these new technologies as they become available. The naming of the Viking Vela follows a string of recent accolades for the company. Viking was rated #1 for Oceans, #1 for Rivers and #1 for Expeditions by Condé Nast Traveler in the 2024 Readers’ Choice Awards for the second consecutive year. This achievement marked the first time a travel company won these three categories in back-to-back years. Viking was also named Best Luxury Line, Best Line for Couples and Best Line in the Mediterranean in U.S. News & World Report’s 2025 Best Cruise Lines ranking for the fourth consecutive year. Viking’s ocean ships have been rated and “Recommended” as part of the Forbes Travel Guide 2024 Star Awards, an annual independent evaluation for luxury travel brands. Additionally, Viking received seven awards at the 2023 Cruise Critic Editors’ Picks Awards—more than any other line—across the luxury, river and expedition categories. Source: VikingCompanies having difficulty hiring for Christmas offer incentives
NEW ORLEANS (AP) — Darren Rizzi would be an unconventional choice to take over the New Orleans Saints' head coaching job on a permanent basis. That doesn't mean it can't happen. The Saints (4-7) had been on a seven-game skid when Rizzi, the club's special teams coordinator, was promoted. They've since won two straight, and as the club entered its Week 12 bye, prominent players were already discussing their desire to continue improving Rizzi's resume. “He’s definitely had an impact on our football team,” quarterback Derek Carr said after New Orleans' 35-14 victory over Cleveland last weekend. “We want to keep winning so that maybe he gets a chance to be the coach here for a long time. “That’s what we want as players,” Carr continued. "Hopefully, we can continue to have success, keep winning and give him that opportunity.” Before the Saints' demoralizing defeat at Carolina precipitated the firing of third-year coach Dennis Allen , Rizzi had never been a head coach at the NFL or major college level. The north New Jersey native and former Rhode Island tight end got his first head coaching job at Division II New Haven in 1999. He also coached his alma mater in 2008 before moving to the NFL with Miami in 2009 as a special teams assistant. By 2010, he was the Dolphins' special teams coordinator and added the title of associate head coach in 2017 before ex-Saints coach Sean Payton lured him to New Orleans in 2019. A common thread shared by Payton and Rizzi is that both worked under Bill Parcells. Parcells — known best for winning two Super Bowls as coach of the New York Giants — was coaching the Dallas Cowboys when Payton was his offensive coordinator. Rizzi, who grew up a Giants fan during the Parcells era, got to know his childhood idol during his first couple years in Miami, where Parcells executive vice president of football operations. Since his promotion, Rizzi has spoken to both Payton and Parcells. And he has begun to employ motivational techniques reminiscent of Payton, who left New Orleans in 2022 as the franchise leader in wins (152 in the regular season and nine in the postseason — including New Orleans' lone Super Bowl triumph). Payton as a big believer of symbolic imagery and motivational props, from baseball bats distributed before contests that were expected to be especially physical to gas cans left in the lockers of aging veterans whose performance was key to the club's success. Rizzi, who describes himself as a “blue collar” guy, has his own spin on such things. He began his tenure by asking players to accept individual responsibility for the metaphorical hole the team had dug itself and asked them all to embrace the idea of filling it up — one shovelful at a time. He even has brought a shovel — as well as a hammer, tape measure, level and other construction tools — to team meetings to help make his points. Saints tight end Taysom Hill, who also plays on special teams, has gotten to know Rizzi well during a half-decade of working together. Hill doesn't sound surprised to see Rizzi's combination of work ethic, enthusiasm and personal touch resonating across the entire team now. He also made a lot of changes , from weekly schedule adjustments to reconfiguring players' lockers by position. “He has a really good pulse on what we need collectively as a team to get ready for a football game," said Hill, who scored three touchdowns and accounted for 248 yards as a runner, receiver, passer and returner against Cleveland. “Guys have responded to that.” Because Rizzi's first victory came over the first-place Atlanta Falcons , and because the Falcons lost again last week, the Saints now trail Atlanta by just two games with six to play. Suddenly, the idea of the Saints playing meaningful football down the stretch is not so far-fetched. “We’re starting to get our swag back, and that makes me happy,” Rizzi said. ”We’re going to have some downtime now to kind of press the reset button again and see if we can make a push here." When the Saints return to action at home against the Los Angeles Rams on Dec 1, they'll do so with a level of momentum and positivity that seemed to steadily drain out of the club between their first loss of the season in Week 3 through the six straight setbacks that followed. While Saints players have tended to blame themselves for Allen's demise, they've been quick to credit Rizzi for the turnaround. “He’s pointed us and steered the ship in the right direction,” Carr said. “Hopefully, we can just keep executing at a high level for him, because we love him.” AP NFL: https://apnews.com/hub/nfl
Carter hits 5 3s, scores 23 to help LSU beat Mississippi Valley State 110-45Special teams miscues prove costly for Bears in overtime loss to Vikings
NEW YORK (AP) — Same iconic statue, very different race. With two-way star Travis Hunter of Colorado and Boise State running back Ashton Jeanty leading the field, these certainly aren't your typical Heisman Trophy contenders. Sure, veteran quarterbacks Dillon Gabriel from top-ranked Oregon and Cam Ward of No. 15 Miami are finalists for college football's most prestigious award as well, but the 90th annual ceremony coming up Saturday night at Lincoln Center in New York City offers a fresh flavor this year. To start with, none of the four are from the powerhouse Southeastern Conference, which has produced four of the past five Heisman winners — two each from Alabama and LSU. Jeanty, who played his home games for a Group of Five team on that peculiar blue turf in Idaho more than 2,100 miles from Manhattan, is the first running back even invited to the Heisman party since 2017. After leading the country with 2,497 yards rushing and 29 touchdowns, he joined quarterback Kellen Moore (2010) as the only Boise State players to be named a finalist. “The running back position has been overlooked for a while now," said Jeanty, who plans to enter the 2025 NFL draft. "There's been a lot of great running backs before me that should have been here in New York, so to kind of carry on the legacy of the running back position I think is great. ... I feel as if I'm representing the whole position.” With the votes already in, all four finalists spent Friday conducting interviews and sightseeing in the Big Apple. They were given custom, commemorative watches to mark their achievement. “I'm not a watch guy, but I like it,” said Hunter, flashing a smile. The players also took photos beneath the massive billboards in Times Square and later posed with the famous Heisman Trophy, handed out since 1935 to the nation's most outstanding performer. Hunter, the heavy favorite, made sure not to touch it yet. A dominant player on both offense and defense who rarely comes off the field, the wide receiver/cornerback is a throwback to generations gone by and the first full-time, true two-way star in decades. On offense, he had 92 catches for 1,152 yards and 14 touchdowns this season to help the 20th-ranked Buffaloes (9-3) earn their first bowl bid in four years. On defense, he made four interceptions, broke up 11 passes and forced a critical fumble that secured an overtime victory against Baylor. Hunter played 688 defensive snaps and 672 more on offense — the only Power Four conference player with 30-plus snaps on both sides of the ball, according to Colorado research. Call him college football’s answer to baseball unicorn Shohei Ohtani. “I think I laid the ground for more people to come in and go two ways,” Hunter said. “It starts with your mindset. If you believe you can do it, then you'll be able to do it. And also, I do a lot of treatment. I keep up with my body. I get a lot of recovery.” Hunter is Colorado's first Heisman finalist in 30 years. The junior from Suwanee, Georgia, followed flashy coach Deion Sanders from Jackson State, an HBCU that plays in the lower level FCS, to the Rocky Mountains and has already racked up a staggering combination of accolades this week, including The Associated Press player of the year. Hunter also won the Walter Camp Award as national player of the year, along with the Chuck Bednarik Award as the top defensive player and the Biletnikoff Award for best wide receiver. “It just goes to show that I did what I had to do,” Hunter said. Next, he'd like to polish off his impressive hardware collection by becoming the second Heisman Trophy recipient in Buffaloes history, after late running back Rashaan Salaam in 1994. “I worked so hard for this moment, so securing the Heisman definitely would set my legacy in college football,” Hunter said. “Being here now is like a dream come true.” Jeanty carried No. 8 Boise State (12-1) to a Mountain West Conference championship that landed the Broncos the third seed in this year's College Football Playoff. They have a first-round bye before facing the SMU-Penn State winner in the Fiesta Bowl quarterfinal on New Year’s Eve. The 5-foot-9, 215-pound junior from Jacksonville, Florida, won the Maxwell Award as college football’s top player and the Doak Walker Award for best running back. Jeanty has five touchdown runs of at least 70 yards and has rushed for the fourth-most yards in a season in FBS history — topping the total of 115 teams this year. He needs 132 yards to break the FBS record set by Heisman Trophy winner Barry Sanders at Oklahoma State in 1988. In a pass-happy era, however, Jeanty is trying to become the first running back to win the Heisman Trophy since Derrick Henry for Alabama nine years ago. In fact, quarterbacks have snagged the prize all but four times this century. Gabriel, an Oklahoma transfer, led Oregon (13-0) to a Big Ten title in its first season in the league and the No. 1 seed in the College Football Playoff. The steady senior from Hawaii passed for 3,558 yards and 28 touchdowns with six interceptions. His 73.2% completion rate ranks second in the nation, and he's attempting to join quarterback Marcus Mariota (2014) as Ducks players to win the Heisman Trophy. “I think all the memories start to roll back in your mind,” Gabriel said. Ward threw for 4,123 yards and led the nation with a school-record 36 touchdown passes for the high-scoring Hurricanes (10-2) after transferring from Washington State. The senior from West Columbia, Texas, won the Davey O’Brien National Quarterback of the Year award and is looking to join QBs Vinny Testaverde (1986) and Gino Torretta (1992) as Miami players to go home with the Heisman. “I just think there's a recklessness that you have to play with at the quarterback position,” Ward said. Get poll alerts and updates on the AP Top 25 throughout the season. Sign up here . AP college football: https://apnews.com/hub/ap-top-25-college-football-poll and https://apnews.com/hub/college-footballUpdated December 29, 2024 at 17:44 PM ET Few presidents have come as far as fast in national politics as Jimmy Carter . In 1974, he was nearing the end of his single term as governor of Georgia when he told the world he wanted to be president. Two years later, he was the president-elect. Although his name recognition nationally was only 2% at the time of his announcement, Carter believed he could meet enough people personally to make a strong showing in the early presidential caucuses and primaries. He embarked on a 37-state tour, making more than 200 speeches before any of the other major candidates had announced. When voting began in Iowa and New Hampshire in the winter of 1976, Carter emerged the winner in both states. He rode that momentum all the way to the presidential nomination and held on to win a close contest in the general election. His career as a highly active former president lasted four full decades and ended only with his death Sunday in his hometown of Plains, Ga. He was 100 and had lived longer than any other U.S. president, battling cancer in both his brain and liver in his 90s. A life that bridged political eras James Earl Carter Jr. was the 39th U.S. president, elected as a Democrat displacing the incumbent Republican, Gerald Ford, in 1976. Carter would serve a single tumultuous term in the White House, beset by inflation, energy shortages, intraparty challenges and foreign crises. But he managed to win the nomination for a second term. He lost his bid for reelection to Republican Ronald Reagan in a landslide in 1980. Thereafter, he worked with Habitat for Humanity and traveled the globe as an indefatigable advocate for peace and human rights. He was given the U.N. Prize in the Field of Human Rights in 1998 and awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002. Carter was the first president from the Deep South elected since the Civil War. He entered politics at a time when Democrats still dominated in his home state and region. He had begun his career as a naval officer in the submarine corps, but in 1953 he left the service to take over the family peanut business when his father died. He later served four years in Georgia's state legislature before making his first bid for governor in 1966. In that contest, he finished behind another Democrat, Lester Maddox, a populist figure known for brandishing a pickax handle to confront civil rights protesters outside his Atlanta restaurant. Carter shared much of the traditional white Southern cultural identity. But he was also noted for his support for integration and the Civil Rights Movement led by fellow Georgian Martin Luther King Jr. Four years after losing to Maddox, Carter was elected his successor and declared in his inaugural speech that "the time for racial discrimination is over." Time magazine would feature him on its cover four months later, making him a symbol of the "New South." And as his term as governor ended, he was all in on a presidential bid. But he did not burst onto the national stage so much as he crept up onto it, appearing before small groups in farming communities and elsewhere far from the big media centers. A meteoric rise to the White House Beyond his earnest image and rhetoric, Carter also had a savvy game plan based on the new presidential nominating rules that the Democratic Party had adopted in the early 1970s. Carter's team, led by campaign manager Hamilton Jordan, mastered this new road map, with Carter climbing from a strong showing in the still-new Iowa caucuses to a clean win in New Hampshire's primary. So though in January 1976 he was the first choice of only 4% of Democrats nationally, he won the first two events and leveraged that attention to capture the imagination of voters in other regions. Carter shut out segregationist champion George Wallace in the Southern primaries and also dominated in the industrial states of the North and Midwest. Democrats held 48 primaries or caucuses around the United States that year, and Carter won 30, with no other candidate winning more than five. Wherever he went, he was able to connect with rural voters and evangelicals wherever they were to be found — doing well in big cities but also in the sparsely populated parts of Ohio and Pennsylvania. While Carter's juggernaut lost momentum in the summer and fall, with Republican President Gerald Ford nearly closing the polling gap by Election Day, the Georgian held on to win 50% of the popular vote in November. By winning in his home state and everywhere else in the South (save only Virginia) while holding on to enough of the key population centers in the Northeast and Great Lakes regions, Carter was able to cobble together nearly 300 Electoral College votes without winning California, Illinois or Michigan. Troubles in office The surprisingly modest margin of Carter's victory over Ford augured more difficulties ahead. And as well as the Carter persona may have suited the national mood in 1976, it did not fit well in the Washington he found in 1977. All presidential candidates who "run against Washington" find it necessary to adjust their tactics if and when they are elected. But the former peanut farmer and his campaign staff known as the "Georgia mafia" never seemed to lose faith in the leverage they thought they had as outsiders. Almost immediately upon taking office, Carter encountered difficulties with various power centers in Congress. He and his tight circle of aides brought along from Georgia and the campaign were not attuned to congressional customs or prerogatives, and a variety of their agenda priorities ran afoul of their own party's preferences. A case in point was a "hit list" of Western water projects that the Carterites regarded as needless pork barrel spending. For a raft of Democratic senators and representatives facing reelection in thirsty states and districts, the list came as a declaration of war. Although Congress fought Carter to a draw on the projects, many of these Western seats would be lost to Republican challengers in 1978 and 1980. Carter did have signal successes in brokering a historic peace deal between Israel and Egypt and in securing Senate ratification of his treaties ceding the Panama Canal to Panama. He also managed to achieve significant reforms in regulations — especially those affecting energy production and transportation — that would eventually lower consumer prices. Carter had taken office amid historically high inflation and energy prices that had persisted since the Arab oil embargo of 1973. Carter appointed a new chair of the Federal Reserve, Paul Volcker, whose tight money policies eventually tamed inflation but also triggered a recession and the highest unemployment rates since the Great Depression. Along the way, there was more grief on the oil front as Iran's Islamic Revolution in 1979 caused not only a price spike but long lines at the pump — worse than in 1973. Carter and the Democrats paid a price, suffering more than the usual losses for the president's party in the 1978 midterm elections, which greatly reduced Democratic margins in both the House and the Senate. Yet the Iranian crisis had even worse consequences. The revolution saw the overthrow of the Shah, a longtime ally of the U.S., and the installation of a stern theocratic regime led by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, a fierce critic of the United States. When Carter agreed to grant the Shah a visa to receive cancer treatments in the U.S., young followers of the ayatollah overran the U.S. Embassy in Tehran . Fifty-two Americans were taken hostage for 444 days. Carter's efforts to free them were unavailing. An airborne raid intended to free them ended in catastrophe in the Iranian desert, leaving eight U.S. service members dead after a collision of aircraft on the ground. Afghanistan becomes an issue Yet another blow was dealt to Carter's standing when the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan to prop up its client regime there. Opposing that aggression was popular, but Carter's decision to retaliate by having the U.S. boycott the 1980 Olympics in Moscow was less so. Carter was able to use the hostage crisis to his advantage in suppressing the challenge to his nomination mounted by Sen. Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts. Carter refused to debate Kennedy and made the primaries a kind of referendum on the Iranian situation. Enough Democrats rallied to his side that Kennedy's bid, a favorite cause of liberal activists and organized labor, fell far short. Still, it contributed to the weakness of Carter's standing in the general election. And what had worked against a challenger from the Democratic left did not work when Carter faced one from the Republican right. Ronald Reagan was a former two-term governor of California who had sought the nomination twice before, and he did not begin 1980 as the consensus choice of his party. But he wove a complex set of issues into a fabric with broad appeal. He proposed sweeping tax cuts as a tonic for the economy, more spending on defense, a more aggressive foreign policy and, just as important, a return to the traditional values of "faith, freedom, family, work and neighborhood." He also opposed abortion and busing for racial integration and favored school prayer — the three hottest buttons in social policy at the time. After a come-from-behind win in New Hampshire and a sweep of the Southern primaries, Reagan never looked back. His triumph at the Republican National Convention in Detroit set the tone for his campaign. The election looked close at Labor Day and even into October. But the single debate the two camps agreed to , held on Oct. 28, 1980, the week before the election, was a clear win for the challenger. Carter failed in his attempts to paint Reagan as an extremist. The Republican managed to be reassuring and upbeat even as he kept up his attacks on Carter's handling of the economy and on the rest of Carter's record. The polls broke sharply in the final days, and in November, Reagan captured nearly all the Southern states that Carter had carried four years earlier and won the 1980 presidential election with 489 Electoral College votes. Carter conceded before the polls had even closed on the West Coast. Reassessment in retrospect Historians have generally not rated Carter's presidency highly, and he left office with his Gallup poll approval rating in the low 30s. But there has been a steady upward trajectory in assessments of his presidency in recent years, and his Gallup approval rating has climbed back above 50% and has remained there among the public at large. This reflects the work of several Carter biographers and former aides and the natural comparison with the presidents who have followed him. In 2018, Stuart E. Eizenstat, Carter's chief domestic policy adviser, published President Carter: The White House Years , which historians have praised both as a primary source and as an assessment of Carter's term. In it, Eizenstat wrote that Carter "was not a great president, but he was a good and productive one. He delivered results, many of which were realized only after he left office. He was a man of almost unyielding principle. Yet his greatest virtue was at once his most serious fault for a president in an American democracy of divided powers." As far back as 2000, historian Douglas Brinkley wrote that in the first 20 years after Carter lost the presidency, he had become "renowned the world over as the epitome of the caring, compassionate, best sort of American statesman ... an exemplar of behavior for all national leaders in retirement." A new life out of office But the greatest factor in Carter's rising reputation was his own performance in his post-presidential career. He worked with Habitat for Humanity to rehabilitate homes for low-income families. He taught at Emory University and established his own nonprofit, the Carter Center . And over the ensuing decades, he published more than two dozen books and became an international advocate for peace, democratic reforms and humanitarian causes. As former president, Carter did not shy from controversy, particularly when it came to the Middle East, the region that gave him his greatest foreign policy achievement and also his most damaging setback as president. Copyright 2024 NPRTRAVIS Kelce has splurged about $175,000 in gifts for his girlfriend Taylor Swift's birthday, spoiling the pop megastar with luxury, designer gold jewelry and bouquets, a source revealed to The U.S. Sun. Swift , who concluded her nearly two-year Eras Tour in Vancouver, Canada , on Sunday, celebrated her 35th birthday on Friday. As the Cruel Summer singer glams up for the evening festivities, The U.S. Sun can exclusively detail the array of gifts her NFL tight-end boyfriend gifted her for her 35th. Kelce sent his girlfriend 35 bouquets, one for each year, from the luxury floral brand The Million Roses. The bouquets included 15 black heart boxes of red roses, valued at $315 each; 10 orders of deluxe white boxes filled with black and red roses, which retail at $880 a box; and 10 boxes of neon rose gold roses adorned in a dark pink suede heart box dome, valued at $580 each. In total, the Kansas City Chiefs tight end splashed a whopping $19,325 on flowers. Most read in The US Sun But to accompany the sea of lush flowers, Kelce splashed $155,200 on jewelry from Tiffany & Co., Rolex, and Van Cleef & Arpels for his Grammy Award-winning girlfriend. Swift can now add a rose gold Day-Date 36 Rolex, valued at $60,350, to her collection of watches. From Tiffany & Co. , the three-time Super Bowl champ, 35, purchased a customized gold split cuff with a heart engraved on the inside for $22,000, as well as a $25,000 Elsa Peretti open-heart bracelet. To complete the look, Kelce spent $35,500 on a sweet long Alhambra necklace, $8,200 on a vintage Alhambra pendant, and $4,150 on a pair of Alhambra earrings. Most read in American Football "Thirty-five years old is a very important birthday, and he wanted to make things really special for this special occasion," a source close to Kelce and Swift's entourage told The U.S. Sun. "Many luxury items, and the bouquets, one for each year. "He has been working on this for a bit now, and he knows that the occasion was super important as now they are able to spend way more time together as the tour is over. "The last few months have been very intense for the both of them, and now they just want to enjoy each other, and Taylor's birthday is the first day of many more days and times for celebrations in the next couple of weeks." HOLIDAY SPECIAL The source disclosed to The U.S. Sun that despite the luxurious gifts for Swift's special day, Kelce has something more extravagant for Christmas . "Travis and Taylor love birthdays. They also love Christmas, and they are so looking forward to that," the source added. "Travis kept some more unique presents in his sleeve for Christmas time, he loves to surprise Taylor and get her some very nice gifts." Kelce's grant total for Swift's birthday came out to $174,525. But as Swift looks to ease back into the stateside after concluding her tour, Kelce and the Chiefs are looking to finish the season strong with four games remaining this year. The two-time defending Super Bowl champion Chiefs are set to face off against the Cleveland Browns on Sunday. Kansas City, who are first in the American Football Conference with a stellar 12-1 record, will take on the Houston Texans on December 21, Pittsburgh Steelers in a Christmas Day showdown and cap off the season against the Denver Broncos on January 5. Read More on The US Sun The Chiefs are striving to be the first team in NFL history to win three consecutive Lombardi Trophies. However, teams like the Philadelphia Eagles , Detroit Lions , and Buffalo Bills , who handed the Chiefs their only loss of the season in a Sunday Night Football clash on November 18, aim to crush the defending champ's goal. Kansas City Chiefs tightend Travis Kelce splashed an eye-popping $174,525 in gifts for his girlfriend Taylor Swift's birthday. The list of gifts Kelce gave Swift: $60,350 : Rolex Day-Date 36. $25,000 : Tiffany & Co. open heart bracelet. $22,000 : Tiffany & Co. customer split cuff. $35,500 : Van Cleef & Arpels Alhambra long necklace. $8,200 : Van Cleef & Arpels vintage Alhambra pendant. $4,150 : Van Cleef & Arpels vintage Alhambra earrings. $5,800 : The Million Roses: 10 boxes of neon rose gold roses. $8,800 : The Million Roses: 10 boxes of black and red roses. $4,725 : The Million Roses: 15 boxes of red roses.