Weekend Edition April 6-7, 2024

(This weeks Top Things you should know)

1. If it gets dark outside on Monday afternoon don’t panic, the solar eclipse will be seen across the continental US, though the percent of coverage is less impressive the closer you live to the Pacific or Atlantic coastline.

2. A poultry facility in Michigan and egg producer in Texas both reported outbreaks of avian flu this week. The latest developments on the virus also include infected dairy cows and the first known instance of a human catching bird flu from a mammal. Although health officials say the risk to the public remains low, there is rising concern, emerging in part from news that the largest producer of fresh eggs in the U.S. reported an outbreak.

3. After initial assessments said the port could be blocked for months, a small amount of shipping traffic is passing out of Baltimore through a channel that has been cleared. It is primarily for vessels involved in the cleanup, but some barges and tugs are moving through the cleared area when it is available.

4. In California, highway 1 has been closed again as rains are expected towards the weekend. As the cliffside highway has washed partially away it has been determined unsafe for use until further notice.

5. The cicadas are coming. This spring, an unusual cicada double emergence is about to invade the southern and central parts of the United States in what University of Connecticut cicada expert John Cooley called “cicada-geddon.” The last time these two broods came out together was in 1803, and Thomas Jefferson was president. Both 17 and 13 years cicadas are synched up for a maximum cicada outing when the ground reaches 64° Fahrenheit.

6. This weekend is college basketball nirvana, with the women’s final four games on Friday, and the Mens on Saturday. The women’s final will be on Sunday the 7th, and the Men crown a champion on Monday the 8th.

7. Haiti appears to have no government what so ever, and roaming gangs are ransacking the capital. More than 53,000 people fled Haiti's capital, Port-au-Prince in the last three weeks of March as conflict between powerful armed gangs wreaked havoc for civilians, with the government largely absent and a path out of the chaos yet to be established by politicians.

It’s April 5, 2024

President Joe Biden threatened on Thursday to condition support for Israel's offensive in Gaza on it taking concrete steps to protect aid workers and civilians, seeking for the first time to leverage U.S. aid to influence Israeli military behavior. It was later reported that Israel will open more aid routes to Gaza and increase deliveries.

1. No Labels, the centrist group which has sought to field a third-party presidential bid, is abandoning efforts to create a “unity ticket” aiming to win the White House, the organization announced Thursday.

2. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization or Nato has marked its 75th anniversary with a meeting of the alliance’s foreign ministers in Brussels, as celebrations are being overshadowed by the war in Ukraine and a blockade of aid to Kyiv by Republicans. (An interesting point of trivia, one US state is not included in the nato agreement, Hawaii has no Atlantic coastline, and is not part of a land mass that does.)

3. Caitlin Clark is capping her illustrious college career with another record-breaking season and another set of prestigious awards. The star guard from Iowa was honored Thursday as The Associated Press Player of the Year in women’s basketball for the second consecutive year. Clark received 35 votes from the 36-member national media panel that votes on the AP Top 25 each week. Cameron Brink of Stanford received the other vote. Voting was done before March Madness began

4. U.S. stocks tumbled Yesterday after a Federal Reserve official raised the possibility of delivering none of the cuts to interest rates this year that Wall Street has been banking on, if inflation worsens.

5. IF YOU STILL think that Google Chrome’s “Incognito mode” is a way to protect your privacy online, stop now. Google has agreed to delete “billions of data records” the company collected while users browsed the web using Incognito mode, according to documents filed in federal court in San Francisco on Monday. The agreement, is part of a settlement in a class action lawsuit filed in 2020, it caps off years of disclosures about Google’s practices that shed light on how much data the tech giant siphons from its users—even when they’re in private-browsing mode.

6. Is your flight on time? Performance results for North American airlines released by aviation analytics experts at Cirium show that Delta Air Lines  (DAL)  was first in 2023 with an on-time percentage of 84.72%. Alaska Airlines  (ALK)  came in second at 82.25% and American Airlines  (AAL)  was third with an on-time percentage of 80.61%. Rounding out the top five were United Airlines  (UAL)  and Southwest Airlines  (LUV) . Frontier Airlines  (ULCC) , however, came in eighth on the list — with an on-time rate of 68.68% — and that was apparently enough to trigger some major scheduling changes.

It’s April 4, 2024

1. Florida will ban abortion past six weeks of pregnancy starting next month matching Georgia as the most permissive abortion laws in the south eastern United States. The Florida state supreme court upheld a 15-week abortion ban, a move that removed the barriers for a separate, six-week ban that takes effect on 1 May. In a separate ruling, the court also agreed to let Florida residents settle the issue through a November ballot measure.

2. More than 53,000 people fled Haiti's capital, Port-au-Prince in just three weeks of March as conflict between powerful armed gangs wreaked havoc for civilians, with the state largely absent and a path out of the chaos yet to be established by politicians.

3. More than a dozen homes were damaged in one West Virginia community and more than 100,000 customers in the state were without power this week as a powerful system of thunderstorms with damaging winds, dangerous hail and the potential for destructive tornadoes swept through parts of the Ohio Valley.

4. LSU star Angel Reese, who is known for her eyelash extensions, painted fingernails and ferocious play in the paint, formally declared for the WNBA draft on Wednesday. Her announcement comes two days after the Tigers’ season ended with a loss to Caitlin Clark and Iowa in the Elite Eight round of the women’s NCAA Tournament.

5. Monday’s total solar eclipse will make landfall along Mexico’s Pacific coast and cross into Texas and 14 other U.S. states, before exiting over Canada. It will last almost twice as long, with an even wider audience, than the total solar eclipse that stretched coast-to-coast in the U.S. in 2017. The moon will shroud the sun for up to 4 minutes, 28 seconds, a spectacle normally unfolding in remote corners of the globe but this time passing over major cities like Dallas, Indianapolis and Cleveland. An estimated 44 million people live within the path of totality, with another couple hundred million within 200 miles (320 kilometers), guaranteeing the continent’s biggest eclipse crowd ever.

6. Ukraine lowered its draft-eligible age for men from 27 to 25 on Wednesday, reflecting the strain that more than two years of war with Russia has put on its military and the need to infuse its depleted ranks with new conscripts. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy signed three bills into law aimed at strengthening the country’s beleaguered forces, which are trying to hold the front lines in fighting that has sapped Ukraine’s ranks and stores of weapons and ammunition. The new laws, which will also do away with some draft exemptions and create an online registry for recruits, might add around 50,000 troops to the military, said Oksana Zabolotna, an analyst with the Center for United Actions, a government watchdog in Kyiv.

7. A poultry facility in Michigan and egg producer in Texas both reported outbreaks of avian flu this week. The latest developments on the virus also include infected dairy cows and the first known instance of a human catching bird flu from a mammal. Although health officials say the risk to the public remains low, there is rising concern, emerging in part from news that the largest producer of fresh eggs in the U.S. reported an outbreak.

It’s April 3, 2024

1. A tugboat pushing a fuel barge was the first vessel to use an alternate channel to bypass the wreckage of Baltimore’s collapsed Francis Scott Key Bridge, which had blocked traffic along the vital port’s, main shipping channel. The barge supplying jet fuel to the Department of Defense left late Monday and was destined for Delaware’s Dover Air Force Base, though officials have said the temporary channel is open primarily to vessels that are helping with the cleanup effort. Some barges and tugs that have been stuck in the Port of Baltimore since the collapse are also scheduled to pass through the channel.

2. An international charity suspended delivery of food to starving Palestinians on Tuesday, a day after an Israeli airstrike killed seven aid workers from World Central Kitchen who were trying to ease the humanitarian crisis in Gaza. Ships still laden with some 240 tons of aid from the charity that arrived Monday turned back from Gaza, according to Cyprus, which has played a key role in trying to establish a sea route to bring food to the territory.

3. The Tropicana Las Vegas the Strip’s third-oldest casino, shut its doors for good at noon Tuesday, with demolition slated for October to make room for a $1.5 billion Major League Baseball stadium for the relocating Oakland Athletics — part of Las Vegas’ latest rebrand as a hub for sports entertainment.

4. Motorists moved slowly along one lane of a scenic stretch of California’s iconic Highway 1 on Monday after a giant chunk of it collapsed into the ocean following heavy weekend rains, stranding as many as 1,600 people in the coastal community of Big Sur. Since then Cal Trans has allowed alternating one way traffic to pass as engineers try to determine a fix.

5. The women’s final four NCAA Basketball teams are set, South Carolina will play NC State and Iowa will play UConn on Friday.

6. A 7.2 magnitude earthquake rocked Taiwan on Wednesday, the strongest tremor to hit the island in at least 25 years, killing four people, injuring dozens and sparking a tsunami warning for southern Japan and the Philippines that was later lifted.

7. The White House on Tuesday directed NASA to establish a unified standard of time for the moon and other celestial bodies, as the United States aims to set international norms in space amid a growing lunar race among nations and private companies.

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   On a follow up to yesterday’s bonus news. There was no winner for the billion dollar powerball lottery, the next drawing is Wednesday.

It’s April 2, 2024

A biased test has kept thousands of black kidney patients off of transplant lists. More than 14,000 Black kidney transplant candidates so far, have been given credit for lost waiting time, moving them up the priority list for their transplant.

At issue is a once widely used test that overestimated how well Black people’s kidneys were functioning, making them look healthier than they really were — all because of an automated formula that calculated results for Black and non-Black patients differently.

Caitlin Clark scored 41 points to lift the top-seeded Iowa Hawkeyes past defending champion LSU 94-87 in a rematch of the 2023 NCAA Tournament championship game. Iowa (33-4) advances to the Final Four for the second straight year and gains a measure of revenge against the team that knocked out the Hawkeyes in last year’s title matchup.

The NCAA said Monday one of the 3-point lines on the court used for the women’s basketball regionals at Moda Center in Portland, Oregon, was 9 inches short of regulation, a mistake made by the contractor that makes the courts used throughout March Madness. 3 games had already splayed on that court.

The teams’ coaches agreed to play Sunday’s game as scheduled with one line shorter than the other rather than delay it. Reasoning that each team would have the advantage for one half. N.C. State beat Texas 76-66 to advance to the Final Four.

The NCAA 3-point line is at 22 feet, 1 3/4 inches for both women and men.

Donald Trump posted a $175 million bond in his New York civil fraud case on Monday, averting asset seizures by state authorities that could have hobbled the former U.S. president’s business empire

Germany has legalized possession of small amounts of cannabis for recreational use over objections from doctors and police.

UPS will become the primary air cargo provider for the United States Postal Service.

The contract from the U.S. Postal Service significantly expands an existing partnership between the two.

UPS will move the majority of air cargo in the U.S. for the postal service following a transition period, according to UPS. USPS’s current air cargo contract with FedEx Corp. is set to expire in late September

This spring, an unusual cicada double dose is about to invade the southern and central parts of the United States in what University of Connecticut cicada expert John Cooley called “cicada-geddon.” The last time these two broods came out together was in 1803. Both 17 and 13 years cicadas are synched up for a maximum cicada outing when the ground reaches 64° Fahrenheit.

The Syrian and Iranian governments accused Israel of a missile attack on an Iranian diplomatic building in Damascus that killed a senior Iranian general, in a possible escalation of a shadow war between Israel and Iran that has intensified during the war in Gaza.

Lou Conter, the last living survivor on board the USS Arizona during the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, has died. He was 102.

Conter died Monday morning while surrounded by family in Grass Valley, California, according to his daughter.

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The power ball multi-state lottery prize has reached $1b the Monday night drawing numbers were…19, 24, 40, 42, 56 power ball 23

It is April 1, 2024

Baltimore bridge collapse may have port closed for months. Many in Baltimore are concerned about the economic impact.

King Charles attended Easter services as his first public event after announcing his cancer diagnosis.

Pressure mounts on Benjamin Netanyahu to resign. Families of Israeli hostages join protests calling for Netanyahu to go

The NCAA men’s basketball tournament is filled with yet more upsets as final four are set. Alabama will Play UConn, and Purdue will play NC State. On Saturday April 6th

AT&T says a data breach leaked millions of customers data.

“Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire,” opens to $80 million the second largest opening so far this year behind the Dune sequel.

Gmail is 20 years old today. Introduced on April 1st 2004, Gmail was, a free service boasting 1 gigabyte of storage per account, an amount that sounds today, but it sounded like a preposterous amount of email capacity back then, enough to store about 13,500 emails before running out of space compared to just 30 to 60 emails in the then-leading webmail services run by Yahoo and Microsoft.