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Former NBA Star Says Caitlin Clark is Not the Face of the League
No. 9 SMU aims to improve playoff odds vs. CalMany consumers stay with their banks for years unless persuaded by other bank incentivesLOS ANGELES (AP) — Receiver Demarcus Robinson will not be suspended by the Los Angeles Rams this week after his arrest on suspicion of driving under the influence. Robinson will be available to play when the Rams (5-6) visit the New Orleans Saints on Sunday, Rams coach said Wednesday. “I think he does understand the severity of this, and how lucky we were that nobody was injured,” McVay said. “I do believe that he’s remorseful. We are going to let the legal process take place. The league has a process as well.” Robinson was arrested early Monday morning after California Highway Patrol officers observed a white Dodge sedan driving over 100 mph on the 101 freeway in the western San Fernando Valley, a few miles from the Rams’ training complex in Woodland Hills. The driver, who identified himself as Robinson, had “objective signs and symptoms of alcohol impairment,” the CHP said in a statement released to The Associated Press. Robinson spoke to the team and expressed remorse about his arrest, McVay and quarterback Matthew Stafford said. “I think it was a bad decision he made,” McVay said. “I don’t think that makes him a bad person, and I do believe this is something that, with the words that he said, our guys will learn from it, and hopefully nobody is ever going to repeat something like this. Let it be a learning opportunity, and a fortunate outcome that nobody was injured.” Robinson has 26 receptions for 384 yards and a team-leading six touchdown catches while starting all 11 games in his second season with . He caught a TD pass in several hours before his arrest. The nine-year NFL veteran has served as a capable No. 3 option for Stafford behind star receivers Cooper Kupp and Puka Nacua. Robinson spent his first six NFL seasons with the Kansas City Chiefs, winning a Super Bowl ring in February 2020, and spent one year with Baltimore before joining the Rams last year. “Let this be a lesson to all of us,” Stafford said. “We’re lucky with the result that came of it, to be honest with you, that nobody was hurt or injured. I know that D-Rob is a great person. I love being around him. Love him as a teammate. ... I’m just trying to support him, help him out any way I can.” ___ AP NFL:
Jannik Sinner leads Italy back to the Davis Cup semifinals and a rematch against AustraliaSCMB: Schwab Offers Low Cost Municipal Bond ETF But Not Great ResultsBad Axe: Wisconsin wary of rival Minnesota with bowl bid in peril
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Authored by James Fanell and Bradley Thayer via American Greatness, Whether American presidents are successes or failures is measured by their major foreign and domestic actions. That has been the historical standard by which they are weighed and which defines their legacy. Some presidents are outstanding in every respect. Washington defined the American presidency. Lincoln saved the Union and kept foreign powers, most importantly Great Britain, from intervening to aid the South. Most presidents are heavily mixed; Buchanan employed the Army to suppress the Mormon Rebellion, but his monumental failure was that he did not act to stop the Civil War. Lyndon Johnson’s failure in Vietnam defined his presidency. Richard Nixon had many successes in foreign policy, but Watergate was his demise. Jimmy Carter failed abroad and at home. With just over 40 days left, Americans are nearing the end of the Biden administration, and so it is fitting to provide an assessment of it and to place it in historical context. By any metric from American history and by any objective standard used to measure his predecessors in the White House, the Biden administration has been a catastrophic failure for the American people. Were that it was otherwise. An old man suffering from the horrors of dementia is a tragedy. Biden is not only a dementia patient but also President of the United States. It is clear that now he is more dementia victim than he is president. He cannot stay awake at international meetings and other fora, and he seems to willingly accept the deliberate snubs. Accordingly, as hard as it is to acknowledge, given that he is the President of the United States, world leaders, and Americans know that he has no business being in the nation’s highest office. This impacts all Americans and U.S. national security, and it is important to recognize facts that impact national security as they are, rather than as we would desire them to be. In the years to come, the fiasco of the Biden administration will be explained by multiple factors. We may certainly anticipate that presidential historians will argue that his dementia was debilitating and precluded him from effective leadership, or that his presidency was just a Potemkin Village. Others may assess that Barack Hussein Obama was actually in control through his direct intervention and via surrogates like Susan Rice—who overreached in pushing a radical Marxist agenda. At this point, no matter the causes, it is essential to document the Biden administration’s failures and to learn from them as a cautionary tale about the disastrous impacts of the worst president in American history. Of course, we note that his greatest catastrophes may be yet to come. In domestic policy, Biden destroyed the economy, inflation returned with a vengeance, and America’s borders were opened intentionally. This caused a flood of illegal immigration. Immigration took an unprecedented turn, even an unimaginable one; the U.S. government entered the business of importing people, some 12 to 15 million, and thereby funded the cartels and other criminals and criminal organizations. The true numbers will not be known until Trump comes into office and reveals how this happened and the true impact and parameters of the problem. Another domestic failure has been the massive increase in the federal deficit—one that impacts every American, as well as our national security posture. Likewise, energy security was compromised, and America’s energy independence was lost. These domestic disasters reveal the spirit of the American people was targeted deliberately—in order to usher in a new world order based on the tenets of collectivism and top-down control rather than the principles of individualism, freedom, and liberty. In the realm of foreign policy, the Biden Administration will be remembered for their disastrous and deadly retreat from Afghanistan to the benign neglect of checking the People’s Republic of China (PRC) across the Indo-Pacific. By failing to deter the Russian invasion of Ukraine and by laboring to simultaneously sustain and escalate the war, rather than pressuring both sides to end the conflict, Biden will be held responsible for the deaths and displacement of many millions. Even the recent collapse of governments in Germany and France can be laid at Biden’s doorstep due to his waffling approach to great power politics and NATO’s ineptitude. The Middle East went from stability to war as Israel fights against multiple threats in the wake of the horrific terror attacks on October 7, 2023. In the Indo-Pacific, Xi Jinping, the General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), treated Biden as a supplicant. In no small part because Xi knew that Joe Biden’s administration was compromised via millions from the PRC that flowed in and enriched the Biden family’s coffers. Xi instructed Biden on how to behave, and the Biden administration went along with it when it mattered, such as not laboring to overthrow the CCP at a time of great peril for it. The opportunity cost of the Biden administration was massive. Their actions precluded other strategic choices, priorities, and paths that the U.S. might have taken. For example, the strategic airfield in Bagram, Afghanistan would not have been lost to Chinese influence and occupation. The war in Ukraine might have been deterred, and millions alive and billions of dollars saved for American citizens being hit by deadly hurricanes in North Carolina or fires in Maui. Moreover, America’s arsenal of stockpiled weapons would not have been depleted. Likewise, the CCP would be on the run through a concerted and consistent whole-of-government agenda to roll back the PRC’s advances in their declared “People’s War” against the U.S. Fundamentally, Biden was the return to and the last of the post-Cold War presidents—Clinton, George W. Bush, and Obama—those who could do anything they wanted in the domestic and international realms because they were living off the capital their predecessors had accumulated—a strong and prosperous America. In his first term, Trump was different and labored mightily to change course. Now America faces genuine peril at home and abroad. The warnings from the Biden administration are myriad. However, at root, the lesson is how could it have been otherwise when a vile and loathsome individual intent on enriching himself be permitted to be used as a puppet by Obama and the CCP? Biden neither has the merit nor the mettle to be president. He is a vessel filled with personal ambition but does not possess the acumen or virtue to realize his ambition. It had to be given to him by Obama. His legacy is a grotesque one: he proved the “Peter Principle” wrong—that you actually can rise far beyond your level of incompetence. He did his best to destroy the country. He leaves for his successor a dangerous world and an economy in an equally precarious position. Thankfully, Trump and his administration will be up for such a massive task.
A California Walmart employee's decision to work on a holiday led to her winning $1 million. On Labor Day Rebecca Gonzalez had the federal holiday off and was excited to grill with her loved ones. “I wanted to obviously be home with my family because we planned to barbecue,” Gonzalez told the California Lottery. But her life would change forever when she did a solid for her employer, even though she did not really want to. Her short shift was busy so it slipped her mind to purchase a lottery ticket on her break, but when she clocked out she remembered after she passed by a row of California Lottery vending machines. California man claims he hasn't been paid $44 MILLION lottery prize months after winning Illinois Lottery player snags $10M jackpot prize on $50 scratch-off ticket “I didn’t remember I was going to buy a Scratchers [ticket] until I left for the night and passed by the machines,” she said. She stopped, put in $10, and received a Single Double Triple Scratchers game. The odds— 2,057,388 to 1 to be exact — that her $10 investment would win her the game’s $1 million grand prize were low, but she defied them. “I couldn’t believe it,” Gonzalez said. Gonzalez has used her winnings to pay off all of her debt, and she told the California Lottery that she and her husband are in the process of closing on a new home. But the money has not changed Gonzalez, she still clocks in at the Walmart in the City of Industry. In fact she hasn't even told her coworkers about her new fortune, except the one partially responsible for her win. “I’ve only told one person at work,” Gonzalez said. “It was the manager who wanted me to stay late on a holiday.” The Walmart where Gonzalez works received a $5,000 payout from the state lottery for selling the winning ticket, officials said. Gonzalez wasn’t the only recent big winner in the California Lottery. Three players also won jackpots playing the $1 Million Ultimate Cash Scratchers game. Wayne Sims purchased his ticket in San Francisco; Alex Vela bought one at Circus Liquors in North Hollywood and Robert Befriends purchased his winning ticket from Palma Liquor in La Palma, KTLA.com reported. A 7-Eleven in Burbank also sold a $1 million-winning Multiplier Craze Scratchers ticket to R. Abrahamian. DAILY NEWSLETTER: Sign up here to get the latest news and updates from the Mirror US straight to your inbox with our FREE newsletter.
The countdown to launch has begun for a small Washington state company developing something long dreamed of in the space industry. Andy Lapsa, co-founder and CEO of Stoke Space, a standout in the state’s burgeoning space technology industry, calls it “this Holy Grail of rocketry, which is fully, rapidly reusable rockets.” At Stoke’s newly built headquarters in Kent, engineers and technicians are assembling the giant barrel-shaped sections of a rocket and two very different engines designed to make not just the booster but the upper stage of the spacecraft reusable. The goal is a rocket capable of launching into orbit, returning to Earth and then lifting off again almost daily. The plan, said Tom Feldman, Stoke co-founder, is spaceflight on “an aircraftlike schedule.” This would provide transformative cost savings and access that could open up space for commercial expansion and accelerate further innovation. Kelly Hennig, Stoke’s chief operating officer, said the initial rocket launch from Florida’s Cape Canaveral is planned toward the end of next year, though that one will be expendable, not reused. Reaching the Holy Grail, she said, will take about another year beyond that. Stoke is designing and building its rocket in Kent and test firing engine prototypes at Moses Lake in Central Washington. There, on 75 sprawling acres of sagebrush desert, tall white fuel tanks containing liquid hydrogen, oxygen or liquid natural gas rise like pillars around a set of intricately designed test facilities. Those include a test stand for the booster-stage engine, rising above a 60-foot-deep flame trench where the first hotfire engine test is scheduled for later this month. Nearby is a smaller engine stand, where Stoke has already been testing what engineer Sophia Yu calls an “insane engine” with a unique ring-of-fire design that will power the second stage of the rocket. “It’s one of the coolest things I’ve ever seen,” said Yu, 27, who joined Stoke in March after 3 1⁄2 years at Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin rocket company, also headquartered in Kent. At Moses Lake last year, Stoke conducted a short hop-and-hover test of a second-stage prototype, successfully demonstrating that engine. Lapsa said leading his just over 160 employees to develop his rocket has been “an unbelievable experience.” Stoke is hiring and expects to double in size next year. Butch and Sundance Lapsa and Feldman met as rocket propulsion engineers at Blue Origin and left to found Stoke in fall 2019. On a tour of the new headquarters, the two were an odd-couple team. Lapsa, 42, trim with silvering hair and a boyish face, wore a neat black T-shirt and jeans in tech startup fashion, the image of someone who has so far raised more than $185 million from venture capitalists. Endearingly, fashion seems of zero concern to his buddy Feldman, 36, who wore his standard work uniform: faded blue denim cutoff shorts with a puffy black vest, his hair sticking out every which way from under a baseball cap. Lapsa, who’d worked at Blue for more than a decade, said leaving to start a company on their own was “easily the hardest decision that I’ve made.” Feldman had been at Blue just over six years. Shaping Stoke’s engineering concept, he said, “We spent the first six months working out of my basement, heads down, doing the math on, like, ‘Is this a good idea?’ Combined with, like, ‘How do you start a company and raise money?'” At the time, he had a 3-month-old baby at home, and the two engineers had no Rolodex of financiers to call. “We really just jumped off the cliff together,” Feldman said. A “ring-of-fire” engine Together, they’ve created something new. Feldman, who says he chose to study rocket propulsion in college because it seemed “the most badass engineering thing to do,” notes that space rockets are basically giant cylindrical fuel tanks with fiery engines at their base. Typically a large, powerful engine lifts the payload from the bounds of Earth’s gravity. Then that stage separates and a smaller second stage pushes it the rest of the way into orbit or further in space. While early NASA space programs developed expendable rockets that were used once then fell away into the ocean, Elon Musk’s Texas-based SpaceX and Bezos’ Kent-based Blue Origin succeeded in designing first-stage rockets that could land and be reused. More than half a century after the Apollo moon landings, the engineering ingenuity has fired up the public imagination and a new generation’s enthusiasm for space technology. SpaceX last month achieved a startling feat: “catching” its giant new Starship’s first stage between the waiting arms of the launch tower. Musk’s not-yet-achieved goal is also to land and make reusable the Starship’s second stage. Stoke too aims to have a reusable second stage. That’s a difficult design problem because the second stage will burn like a meteor when it reenters the atmosphere and requires a heat shield to survive. SpaceX plans for the second stage of Starship to “belly flop” through the atmosphere with about 18,000 tiles protecting the belly, then flip to a vertical position when near the ground. Stoke has devised a very different, more elegant solution. Its second-stage rocket will come down vertically. The design problem was how to fire an engine that would slow the rocket’s descent when there’s a domed heat shield in the way to protect the circular base. The result is that Stoke’s novel design looks nothing like a standard rocket engine, which typically has a large, bell-shaped exhaust nozzle. Instead, around the heat shield’s circular perimeter, 24 small thrusters will fire to slow the rocket’s descent in a “ring of fire.” The heat shield is deeply integrated with the thrusters so that it’s part of the engine. The second-stage rocket’s fuel — cryogenic hydrogen — is also used as coolant fed through intricate internal channels in the heat shield. When the shield gets hotter, it heats the fuel in these channels, which then drives the pumps faster and automatically increases the cold fuel flow through the heat shield. On NASA’s now-retired space shuttle and on Starship’s second stage, each of the thousands of heat shield tiles must be inspected closely for damage before reuse. But Lapsa said Stoke’s heat shield is designed to be “just as indestructible as possible.” Its design is so robust that “even if it was shot with a 9-mm pistol” and suffered a fuel leak, “it would still work,” said Feldman. Building the pieces of this rocket In January last year, Stoke moved into a new 168,000-square-foot Kent headquarters, where the workforce is young and diverse. Manufacturing engineer McKenzie Kinzbach, 28, who previously worked at SpaceX and Universal Hydrogen, said that in a field still dominated by men, she found Stoke’s culture welcoming for women. A tour of the facility this month started at a control room that allows remote viewing and monitoring of tests at Moses Lake and future launches at Cape Canaveral. Beyond that, in a high-ceilinged, clean factory space, engineers and technicians worked to complete rocket engines, heat shields shaped like giant satellite TV dishes 14 feet in diameter, and immense stainless steel barrel sections that will make up the body of the rocket. The body of Stoke’s 123-foot-tall rocket has remarkably thin walls, less than a tenth of an inch thick. The steel arrives here as flat sheet metal, which is cut with lasers and formed in-house. Some small spherical internal fuel tanks made of steel are blown up like balloons. Stoke’s rocket will have seven large engines on the first stage, burning oxygen and liquid natural gas and each developing 100,000 pounds of thrust. Inside the chambers where the fuel combusts, the temperature rises to about 6,000 degrees Fahrenheit. Engine parts engineered with cooling features to withstand that temperature are made from copper, inconel — a nickel-chromium alloy resistant to extreme heat — and a proprietary material Stoke has developed for components that interface with hot oxygen. The thrust chambers, turbine housings, fuel injectors and nozzles are all manufactured using 3D printers large enough to make metal components up to 2 feet tall. The parabolic heat shield is fabricated by welding together 198 rectangular panels, each one 3D printed with those intricate coolant channels embedded. A test site carved out of the desert When Katherine Cruz, Stoke’s vice president of test operations and another Blue Origin alumnus, arrived in the spring of 2021 to set up Stoke’s Moses Lake site, it was an expanse of empty desert and they had no power, internet or piped water. She said it took “grit and a lot of passion” to build the impressive test facility. At the entrance of the site, a “light tree” with green, amber and red lights indicates access restrictions to each test area. When a hotfire test is imminent, a red light means no one can go in. “We’re intentionally playing with fire,” said Cruz, 33. In June, impatient to test-fire its first-stage engine, Stoke mounted it on a stand and shot its fiery exhaust out horizontally into empty desert. With a massive new test stand now complete, that engine can now be tested in its proper vertical orientation. This month, engineers will hang the engine from heavy metal rings built into the top of the reinforced concrete structure and let that exhaust flow downward into a “flame diverter” stretching 60 feet below. Stoke broke ground on this newest structure just a year ago, digging out a deep, wide trench below and at its lowest point installing the flame diverter — a tall, curving waterfall of pipes underneath where the engine will hang. In a hotfire test, water will be pumped through those pipes and gush from holes directly under the rocket engine’s fiery plume to absorb the energy. The steam produced will rush along the 165-foot-wide, 262-foot-long gash in the desert floor. To find out if the novel ring-of-fire concept was feasible, Stoke built a smaller stand for testing that engine first and has fired it hundreds of times since 2022. An updated version of that engine is now being assembled in Kent and will begin testing early next year. “The intention of this next iteration engine is to get very, very close to what we are hoping to fly,” said Cruz. The mission and the vision The space industry in the Pacific Northwest has swelled in recent years and spawned a host of startup companies. The sector is anchored by Blue Origin in Kent and two major satellite projects: Amazon’s Project Kuiper in Kirkland and SpaceX’s Starlink in Redmond. Other notable companies include Aerojet Rocketdyne, now part of L3Harris, in Redmond, and BlackSky in Seattle. Kelly Maloney, co-founder of the trade group Space Northwest, said the industry now supports 13,000 direct employees with currently about 1,500 open positions. Stoke’s avionics manufacturing manager James Miller, 32, who worked at Blue Origin for six years and then on Project Kuiper at Amazon, said he took a cut in salary to move to Stoke 2 1⁄2 years ago. When he interviewed and heard the details of Stoke’s technology plan, “I said, ‘Man, I really can’t say no to this. This is too cool.’ " Technician manager David Hilts-Hoskins, 31, grew up in Puyallup and learned his mechanical skills mostly working on boats before he joined Blue Origin. After eight years there, he joined Stoke in January. “I love all the novelty of everything,” he said. “It’s been amazing.” Stoke assembly manager Tyler Crews, 37, likewise learned his skills practically, not in college, “hands-on and really being curious.” He was raised in Lynnwood, his dad worked for Boeing and his whole family is excited to see what he’s working on. CEO Lapsa said Stoke’s rockets are designed to be reused 100 times with quick turnarounds, vastly reducing the cost of access to space. “You wouldn’t throw a 737 away at the end of every flight,” he said. “It’s silly to do the same for a rocket.” COO Hennig said the ability of Stoke’s rocket to bring things down from orbit as well as bring things up adds more commercial possibilities. That could facilitate asteroid mining, space junk cleanup and orbital manufacturing — where microgravity has been touted as an advantage for making some protein-based drugs, optical fibers and even artificial eye retinas. Hennig said Stoke has also talked to the government about potentially using the rocket to deliver military cargo at high speed across the globe, though that would presumably strand the second stage far away and make it not reusable. Beyond these far-out concepts, everyone in this new space industry seems to share a wilder vision, one straight from the rhetoric of Musk and Bezos: humans populating space and other planets in our solar system. For outsiders, that’s just science fiction. While envisioning scientific bases on Mars makes sense — like the bases established in Antarctica — surely no one would want to live there full time, even if it were possible. Yet Musk, with more sway than ever after aggressively backing Donald Trump in the presidential election, has successfully sold a vision of “cities on Mars.” And people in the space industry want to believe. “I absolutely think we will have colonies and cities on Mars or the moon,” says Lapsa, politely disagreeing with a skeptical journalist. “Whether that’s in 15 years or 150 years, I don’t know, but I think we will have them.” The first small step for man, among the many steps to that far-off future, he sees as Stoke’s idea of making access to space routine. “I’m very excited about all of those visions,” Lapsa said. “But I think that if any of them are going to come true, you really need a healthy, vibrant, competitive economy in space.” While Stoke still has many technical challenges ahead to reach even its initial launch, he believes rapid reusability is within grasp. Standing on the shoulders of the Apollo generation and using advances in computing and materials, Lapsa said, “We can do things with a cost structure and a timeline that was never possible before.” ©2024 The Seattle Times. Visit seattletimes.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.Tottenham Hotspur return to action for the first time since their 4-0 demolition of Manchester City when they welcome Roma to North London on Thursday night in the Europa League . Ange Postecoglou 's side will look to recover from dropping their first points in the league phase away to Galatasaray last time out, while this will be Claudio Ranieri 's first European game in charge since rejoining the club as manager for the third time earlier this month. © Imago Out: Guglielmo Vicario (ankle), Micky van de Ven (hamstring), Mikey Moore (illness), Will Lankshear (suspended), Richarlison (hamstring), Wilson Odobert (hamstring) Doubtful: Cristian Romero (foot) Sports Mole's predicted XI: Forster; Spence, Dragusin, Davies, Gray; Sarr, Bentancur, Bergvall; Johnson, Solanke, Werner Out: Eldor Shomurodov (muscle) Doubtful: Mario Hermoso (muscle), Alexis Saelemaekers (ankle) Sports Mole's predicted XI: Svilar; Celik, Mancini, Hummels, Angelino; Soule, Baldanzi, Cristante, Zalewski; Dybala, Dovbyk
The Big Central Conference coaches have made their picks for the 2024 all-star teams in all 12 divisions. Congratulations to all those players selected to either first or second team in their respective divisions. You all contributed greatly to another exciting season in New Jersey’s newest super conference. NOTE : The selections were made by coaches from the conference and not reporters from NJ.com . If an athlete’s name is misspelled, please let us know and we will make the correction. BCC ALL-DIVISION TEAMS American Gold Division American Silver Division Freedom Gold Division Freedom Silver Division Liberty Gold Division Liberty Silver Division National Gold Division National Silver Division Patriot Gold Division Patriot Silver Division United Gold Division United Silver Division RECOMMENDED • nj .com Super Football Conference All-Division teams, 2024 Nov. 22, 2024, 2:00 p.m. Super Football Conference: Freedom Red All-Division teams, 2024 Nov. 22, 2024, 1:23 p.m. Mike Kinney can be reached at mkinney@njadvancemedia.com The N.J. High School Sports newsletter is now appearing in mailboxes 5 days a week. Sign up now! Follow us on social: Facebook | Instagram | X (formerly TwitteCYPRESS LAKE, Fla. (AP) — Kam Craft and Peter Suder both had 18 points in Miami (OH)'s 70-58 victory against Siena on Monday. Craft added five rebounds for the RedHawks (3-2). Suder shot 7 of 9 from the floor, including 1 for 3 from 3-point range, and 3 for 3 from the line. Eian Elmer shot 4 for 8 (2 for 4 from 3-point range) and 5 of 5 from the free-throw line to finish with 15 points. The Saints (3-3) were led by Major Freeman, who recorded 15 points. Brendan Coyle added 12 points for Siena. Justice Shoats had 12 points. The Associated Press created this story using technology provided by Data Skrive and data from Sportradar .