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How does St. Charles North sophomore Bronwyn How, who has a Division I offer, handle pressure? ‘With such grace.’
The New York Knicks are no strangers to playing on Christmas Day. But few of their holiday games have come with the anticipation that accompanies Wednesday's clash against the San Antonio Spurs. The Knicks will look to remain hot, while second-year Spurs superstar Victor Wembanyama will play at Madison Square Garden for the second time in his career Wednesday afternoon. Both teams were off Tuesday after playing on Monday night. The Knicks beat the visiting Toronto Raptors 139-125 and the Spurs' late comeback fell short in a 111-106 loss to the host Philadelphia 76ers. The lopsided victory was the latest evidence a new mix is starting to gel for the Knicks, who have won four straight and have gone 9-2 since Nov. 29 to move into third place in the Eastern Conference. Karl-Anthony Towns, who was acquired from the Minnesota Timberwolves on Oct. 2, and OG Anunoby shared the team lead with 31 points each on Monday night. "It's great vibes right now," the Knicks' Josh Hart said. "So we've just got to make sure we continue to bring that to the game." Anunoby became the fifth different player in the last 11 games to at least share the team lead in scoring. The only player to pace the Knicks in scoring in consecutive games over that span is Towns, who scored 23 points in a 121-106 win over the Orlando Magic on Dec. 3 and 27 points two nights later in a 125-101 victory over the Charlotte Hornets. "We're a very talented team, so it could be anyone's night, for sure," Anunoby said. Few players in the NBA are as talented as Wembanyama, the versatile 7-foot-3 star who already has collected three triple-doubles in 95 NBA games. Wembanyama earned Western Conference Player of the Week honors last week after collecting 72 points, 14 blocks, 13 rebounds and eight assists in a pair of wins. "He has helped put us in a lot of cool positions, especially this year," Spurs point guard Tre Jones told the San Antonio Express-News. Wembanyama finished with 26 points, nine rebounds and eight blocks Monday, when the Spurs overcame a nine-point fourth-quarter deficit to take a pair of late leads. Wembanyama missed a potential go-ahead 3-pointer with 2:08 left for San Antonio, which went ahead once more at 103-102 before the 76ers ended the game on a 9-3 run. The loss was just the second in the last six games for the Spurs, who are in ninth place in the Western Conference but just 1 1/2 games behind the sixth-place Los Angeles Clippers in the race for the final guaranteed playoff spot. San Antonio has missed the playoffs in each of the last five seasons. While Wembanyama struggled in his first game in New York on Nov. 8, 2023 (14 points on 4-of-14 shooting), his breakout game against the Knicks in San Antonio on March 29 -- when he had 40 points and 20 rebounds in a 130-126 overtime victory -- has increased the intrigue surrounding the Christmas meeting. "The first time I'm going to play on Christmas," Wembanyama told the Express-News. "I'm super excited." The Knicks will be playing on Christmas Day for the fourth straight season and an NBA-high 57th time overall. They improved to 24-32 on the holiday last Dec. 25 with a 129-122 win over the Milwaukee Bucks. The Spurs are playing on Christmas Day for the first time since 2016, when they beat the Chicago Bulls 119-100 to improve to 6-5 all-time on the holiday. This article first appeared on Field Level Media and was syndicated with permission.Deaths from starvation will likely pass famine levels in northern Gaza as soon as next month owing to Israel 's “near-total blockade” of food and other aid, the U.S.-created global food-crisis monitor said on Tuesday. The finding by the Famine Early Warning System Network appeared to expose a rift within the Biden administration over the extent of starvation in northern Gaza, with the U.S. ambassador to Israel, Jacob Lew , disputing part of the data used in reaching the conclusion and calling the stepped-up famine warning “irresponsible." Northern Gaza has been one of the areas hardest-hit by fighting and Israel's restrictions on aid throughout its 14-month war with Hamas militants. Israel at one point increased the number of aid deliveries it permitted into northern Gaza under pressure from President Joe Biden . But the U.N. and aid groups say Israel recently has blocked almost all aid again. Only nine U.N. trucks have been able to bring in food and water over the past 2 1/2 months, Oxfam says. Israel says it has been operating in recent months against Hamas militants still active in northern Gaza. It says the vast majority of the area’s residents have fled and relocated to Gaza City, where most aid destined for the north is delivered. But some critics, including a former defense minister, have accused Israel of carrying out ethnic cleansing in Gaza’s far north, near the Israeli border. FEWS Net said unless Israel changes its policy, it expects the number of people dying of starvation and related ailments in northern Gaza to reach between two and 15 per day sometime between next month and March. The internationally recognized mortality threshold for famine is two or more deaths a day per 10,000 people. Cindy McCain, the American head of the U.N. World Food Program, in a Dec. 15 appearance on CBS' “Face the Nation” called for political pressure to get food flowing to Palestinians trapped in north Gaza. “We need unfettered access. We need a ceasefire and we need it now,” she said. “We can't ... sit by and just allow these people to starve to death.” FEWS Net was created by the U.S. Agency for International Development in the mid-1980s to warn of global food crises. The United States, Israel's main backer, provided a record amount of military support in the first year of the war. At the same time, the Biden administration repeatedly urged Israel to allow more access to aid deliveries in Gaza overall, and warned that failing to do so could trigger U.S. restrictions on military support. The administration recently said Israel was making improvements and declined to carry out its threat of restrictions. Military support for Israel's war in Gaza is politically charged in the United States. Republicans and some Democrats have staunchly opposed any effort to limit U.S. support over the suffering of Palestinian civilians trapped in the conflict. The Biden administration's reluctance to do more to press Israel for improved treatment of civilians undercut support for Democrats in last month's elections. Lew, the U.S. ambassador, challenged the famine warning in a posting on social media, saying it was based on “outdated and inaccurate” data. He pointed to uncertainty over how many of the 65,000 people remaining in northern Gaza had fled in recent weeks, saying that skewed the findings. FEWS said its famine assessment holds even if as few as 10,000 remain there. “We work day and night with the U.N. and our Israeli partners to meet humanitarian needs — which are great — and relying on inaccurate data is irresponsible.,” Lew wrote. ___ AP writers Matthew Lee in Washington and Josef Federman in Jerusalem contributed to this report.By Joy Reid This is an adapted excerpt from the Dec. 11 episode of "The ReidOut." The United States Constitution enumerates three separate and co-equal branches of government: The legislative, the executive and the judicial. The idea was to prevent any one branch from becoming too powerful since people inside each would fight to defend their own power. But now, those basic checks and balances enumerated in the Constitution are collapsing. Under Republicans, all three branches of our government are bowing down to the incoming president, Donald Trump. Case in point: FBI Director Christopher Wray has announced he will resign at the end of President Joe Biden’s term. Tuberville and his fellow congressional supplicants are looking to blow up the Constitution because it restrains Trump’s powers too much. “My goal is to keep the focus on our mission — the indispensable work you’re doing on behalf of the American people every day,” Wray told the FBI’s workforce Wednesday. “And in my view, this is the best way to avoid dragging the bureau deeper into the fray.” In normal times, Wray, who was appointed by Trump during his first administration, would have served out his full term, through 2027. However, Wray, a Republican and a contributor to the conservative Federalist Society, was deemed insufficiently obsequious for Trump. Instead, Trump announced last month that he wants MAGA loyalist Kash Patel to take over Wray's job. Republican senators were more than willing to play the role of the president-elect’s marionettes. Take 91-year-old Iowa Sen. Chuck Grassley, who on Monday issued a letter criticizing Wray for executing a search warrant at Trump's Mar-a-Lago residence to recover classified documents and for his handling of the investigation into Russia’s interference in the 2016 election. Grassley suggested Wray and his deputy “move on.” The same day, he shared a photo on X of him shaking hands with Patel. An even more obvious Trump appendage is Sen. Tommy Tuberville of Alabama. “You’ve got several of these senators up here trying to be relevant and [I] want to do ‘my due diligence,’” Tuberville said Wednesday on the right-wing podcast “The Benny Show.” “Wait a minute, the people of Alabama gave a referendum to me. They said, ‘You vote for whatever Donald Trump wants.’ And that’s exactly what I’m doing. These people from the Senate, the senator from Alaska — Donald Trump wins Alaska — she’s gonna be judge and jury over Donald Trump’s picks? I don’t understand this." It’s no surprise that Tuberville doesn’t understand his explicit Article II, clause 2 constitutional duty to advise the president on and consent or refuse the appointment of judges, secretaries and ambassadors since this is the same guy who thinks the branches of government are “the House, the Senate and the executive.” Tuberville is proudly displaying the corrosive effects of Trump’s grip on America, where he and his fellow congressional supplicants are looking to blow up the Constitution because it restrains Trump’s powers too much. What they want for America is a model based on Russia and Hungary where their leaders — Vladimir Putin and Viktor Orbán, respectively — have demolished the system of checks and balances and installed loyalists. The ruling parties control the media, their parliaments and pretty much everything else. Independence is reviled and rejected. Here in the U.S., it’s called the “unitary executive theory," a popular conservative concept that says a president has sole authority over the executive branch. Trump, Elon Musk, Vivek Ramaswamy, the conservative-majority Supreme Court , and the president-elect’s Project 2025 friends like Russell Vought all believe that the president deserves total power, despite this country’s founders having fought a literal war to withdraw from a monarchy. In Trump’s America, the president should be immune from prosecution for allegedly mishandling classified documents or their efforts to overthrow an election or maybe even directing SEAL Team Six to assassinate a political rival (as Justice Sonia Sotomayor warned could be deemed constitutional under the Supreme Court's July 1 immunity ruling). But it doesn't stop there; Republicans also want to expand the president’s powers to include something called impoundment. Impoundment is the idea that the president has the constitutional authority to withhold, or “impound,” money from projects approved by Congress. Trump has already surrounded himself with players who want to get him that historic expansion of power, including Mark Paoletta, who will return as general counsel of the Office of Management and Budget, working closely with Vought. Paoletta, who happens to be close buddies with Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and his wife, Ginni Thomas, has argued repeatedly for broad impoundment power. His singular goal at OMB seems to be giving Trump, not Congress, the power of the purse. Musk and Ramaswamy, Trump’s picks to run the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, hold similar views. In their November op-ed for The Wall Street Journal, the pair wrote: Skeptics question how much federal spending DOGE can tame through executive action alone. They point to the 1974 Impoundment Control Act, which stops the president from ceasing expenditures authorized by Congress. Mr. Trump has previously suggested this statute is unconstitutional, and we believe the current Supreme Court would likely side with him on this question. What they are referring to is a law signed by Congress after President Richard Nixon tried what Trump is likely going to attempt. Nixon refused to spend money that Congress had appropriated for several programs. The move was so brazen that William Rehnquist, the head of the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel who would later serve on the Supreme Court, wrote a memo stating that there is no constitutional right for the president to do that. The courts agreed and so lawmakers went ahead and passed a law reasserting Congress’ power of the purse. However, they did set up a process through which presidents could impound funds but only with Congress’ participation. This brings us back to today, with a Congress willing to do whatever Trump wants, and a Supreme Court that likely agrees the president-elect should have the freedom to do whatever he wants with his so-called unitary executive power. Allison Detzel contributed. Joy-Ann Reid is host of “The ReidOut” at 7 p.m. ET on MSNBC. “The ReidOut” features one-on-one conversations with politicians and newsmakers while addressing provocative political issues both inside and outside of the beltway.US added a strong 227,000 jobs in November in bounce-back from October slowdown WASHINGTON (AP) — America’s job market rebounded in November, adding 227,000 workers in a solid recovery from the previous month, when the effects of strikes and hurricanes had sharply diminished employers’ payrolls. Last month’s hiring growth was up considerably from a meager gain of 36,000 jobs in October. The government also revised up its estimate of job growth in September and October by a combined 56,000. Friday’s report also showed that the unemployment rate ticked up from 4.1% in October to a still-low 4.2%. The November data provided the latest evidence that the U.S. job market remains durable even though it has lost significant momentum from the 2021-2023 hiring boom, when the economy was rebounding from the pandemic recession. Federal appeals court upholds law requiring sale or ban of TikTok in the US A federal appeals court panel on Friday unanimously upheld a law that could lead to a ban on TikTok in a few short months, handing a resounding defeat to the popular social media platform as it fights for its survival in the U.S. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit ruled that the law - which requires TikTok to break ties with its China-based parent company ByteDance or be banned by mid-January — is constitutional, rebuffing TikTok’s challenge that the statute ran afoul of the First Amendment and unfairly targeted the platform. TikTok and ByteDance — another plaintiff in the lawsuit — are expected to appeal to the Supreme Court. Stock market today: Wall Street hits more records following a just-right jobs report NEW YORK (AP) — U.S. stocks rose to records after data suggested the job market remains solid enough to keep the economy going, but not so strong that it raises immediate worries about inflation. The S&P 500 climbed 0.2%, just enough top the all-time high set on Wednesday, as it closed a third straight winning week in what looks to be one of its best years since the 2000 dot-com bust. The Dow Jones Industrial Average dipped 0.3%, while the Nasdaq composite climbed 0.8% to set its own record. Treasury yields eased after the jobs report showed stronger hiring than expected but also an uptick in the unemployment rate. Killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO spotlights complex challenge companies face in protecting top brass NEW YORK (AP) — In an era when online anger and social tensions are increasingly directed at the businesses consumers count on, Meta last year spent $24.4 million to surround CEO Mark Zuckerberg with security. But the fatal shooting this week of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson while walking alone on a New York City sidewalk has put a spotlight on the widely varied approaches companies take to protect their leaders against threats. And experts say the task of evaluating threats against executives and taking action to protect them is getting more difficult. One of the primary worries are loners whose rantings online are fed by others who are like-minded. It’s up to corporate security analysts to decide what represents a real threat. Police believe the gunman who killed UnitedHealthcare's CEO quickly left NYC on a bus after shooting NEW YORK (AP) — Police officials say the gunman who killed the CEO of the largest U.S. health insurer likely left New York City on a bus soon after fleeing the scene on a bicycle and hopping in a cab. Chief of Detectives Joseph Kenny says video of the gunman fleeing Wednesday’s shooting of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson showed him riding through Central Park and later taking a taxi to a bus terminal, directly across from New Jersey. Police have video of the man entering the bus station but no video of him exiting. Investigators on Friday found a backpack in Central Park that was carried by the shooter, police said. USDA orders nationwide testing of milk for bird flu to halt the virus The U.S. government has ordered testing of the nation’s milk supply for bird flu to better monitor the spread of the virus in dairy cows. The Agriculture Department on Friday said raw or unpasteurized milk from dairy farms and processors nationwide must be tested on request starting Dec. 16. Testing will begin in six states — California, Colorado, Michigan, Mississippi, Oregon and Pennsylvania. The move is aimed at eliminating the virus, which has infected more than 700 dairy herds in 15 states. Words on ammo in CEO shooting echo common phrase on insurer tactics: Delay, deny, defend A message left at the scene of an insurance executive’s fatal shooting echoes a phrase commonly used to describe insurer tactics to avoid paying claims. The words “deny,” “defend” and “depose” were written on the ammunition used to kill UnitedHealthcare's CEO. That's according to two officials who spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity Thursday. The words are similar to the phrase “delay, deny, defend.” That's how attorneys describe insurers denying services and payment, and the title of a 2010 book critical of the industry. Police haven’t officially commented on the words. But Thompson’s shooting and the messages on the ammunition have sparked outrage on social media and elsewhere, reflecting frustration Americans have over the cost and complexity of getting care. Michigan Democrats move to protect reproductive health data before GOP takes control of House LANSING, Mich. (AP) — Democrats in Michigan are pressing to pass reproductive health care legislation before the party loses its majority with the new legislative session next year. A bill to protect digital reproductive health data including data logged on menstrual cycle tracking apps is a Democratic priority as lawmakers meet this month. Democratic women and supporters of the legislation say they are acting with new urgency before President-elect Donald Trump takes office because they don't believe his campaign promise to leave abortion to the states. The rush is also a reaction to Republicans taking control of the state House in January. Democrats kept control of the state Senate in the November election. Japan's Nippon Steel sets sights on a growing overseas market in its bid to acquire US Steel KASHIMA, Japan (AP) — The signs at Nippon Steel read: “The world through steel,” underlining why Japan’s top steelmaker is pursuing its $15 billion bid to acquire U.S. Steel. Japan's domestic market isn't growing, so Nippon Steel has its eyes on India, Southeast Asia and the United States, where populations are still growing. Nippon Steel gave reporters a tour of one of its plants in Japan on Friday. The bid for U.S. Steet is opposed by President-elect Donald Trump, President Joe Biden and American steelworkers. If the deal goes through, U.S. Steel will keep its name and its headquarters in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, but become subsidiary of Nippon Steel. China's ban on key high-tech materials could have broad impact on industries, economy BANGKOK (AP) — China has banned exports of key materials used for a wide range of products, including smartphones, electric vehicles, radar systems and CT scanners, swiping back at Washington after it expanded export controls to include dozens of Chinese companies that make equipment used to produce computer chips. Both sides say the controls are justified by national security concerns. Analysts say they could have a much wider impact on manufacturing in many industries and supply chains, depending on the ability of each side to compensate for loss of access to strategically important materials, equipment and components. Here's why this could be a tipping point in trade conflict between the two biggest economies.
Trump is named Time's Person of the Year and rings the New York Stock Exchange's opening bell NEW YORK (AP) — President-elect Donald Trump rang the opening bell at the New York Stock Exchange after being recognized by Time magazine as its person of the year. The honors Thursday for the businessman-turned-politician are a measure of Trump’s remarkable comeback from an ostracized former president who refused to accept his election loss four years ago to a president-elect who won the White House decisively in November. At the stock exchange, Trump was accompanied by his wife, Melania Trump, daughters Ivanka and Tiffany and Vice President-elect JD Vance. Trump grinned as people chanted “USA” before he opened the trading day and raised his fist. Javascript is required for you to be able to read premium content. Please enable it in your browser settings.
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