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The incident allegedly happened at the Starbucks Convenience Center at 199 Lincoln Road West in Vallejo, just off Highway 80 about 45 miles north of the San Francisco International Airport, according to Vallejo Police Department Sgt. Rashad Hollis. The suspects took personal belongings but left the band’s instruments, according to the group called Sports Team. “They can take our Nintendo Switches, but they can never take our ability to play rock songs about motorways,” the band wrote. According to the band’s posting, the group stopped for coffee about 10 minutes after arriving in the area. While they were ordering coffee at Starbucks, they said a man ran inside to tell them some guys were breaking into the van. “Ran out to try to stop and find masked guys ransacking the van,” the band reported. When they shouted at them to stop, the suspects pulled out a gun, according to the band. In a video posted on social media Tuesday morning, one of the members can be heard yelling “Get down!” to his bandmates and then pleading for someone inside the convenience store to “ring the police!” The band members can also be heard talking about the robbers taking a “bag” and a laptop. The group have a concert date Tuesday in Sacramento, which they said they plan to keep. Locals at the scene were apparently not surprised, according to the group. “In all seriousness pretty shocking how resigned everyone seemed to be to it,” the band wrote. “It happens 9 a.m. at some petrol station Starbucks. Wild.” Police were called but allegedly told the band to “submit an online report,” though that might have been the result of a miscommunication between the 911 caller and band members who posted on social media. The Vallejo Police Department explained that the person who called 911 was asked multiple times by the dispatcher if the suspects were armed and if a gun was pointed at anyone, and the caller said they were not sure. “No one was able to confirm there was a firearm,” Hollis told The Epoch Times. “So, based off of what was reported as a smash-and-dash—that’s a vehicle burglary. No life was in imminent danger.” Vehicle burglaries usually require victims to file an online report, according to Hollis. To complicate matters, the Vallejo police department responded to another call right after the alleged vehicle break-in. The second call involved a barricaded suspect wanted for assault with a deadly weapon that required a SWAT response, which drained the department’s resources. That call didn’t end until 3 a.m. Wednesday, Hollis said. Sports Team’s next show is set for Dec. 7 in San Francisco, followed by two others.Boris Johnson has blamed the Church of England for Britain’s obesity crisis, saying that its failure to provide people with the “spiritual sustenance” they need is leading people to “gorge themselves”. The former prime minister said that when he was younger it was “very rare for there to be a fatso in the class. Now they’re all fatsos, and I’d be shot for saying they’re fatsos, but it’s the truth.” He criticised the Most Rev Justin Welby and other religious leaders for going on about slavery reparations”rather than addressing “people’s spiritual needs”. Johnson said it is leading to a decline in church attendance. “The living bread is being provided by Tesco,” he said. “And they’re gorging themselves on the real living bread.” Johnson was oneNone
Watch as orphaned bears are released back into the wild after being rehabbed in Colorado
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Menendez brothers' bid for freedom delayed until January
Menendez brothers' bid for freedom delayed until JanuaryVikings escape with 30-27 win over Bears in overtime thriller
The nation’s Medicare system is breaking – and our senior citizens are paying the price. Last month, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services slashed government reimbursements to physicians for the fifth year in a row, placing a severe financial burden on seniors and their doctors that will take effect in January – unless Congress intervenes first. The U.S. population aged 65 and over has grown nearly five times faster than the total population, according to 2020 census data , boosting the demand for doctors who treat seniors and accept Medicare insurance. At the same time, government payments to physicians who accept Medicare have been cut year after year. What’s more, Medicare has made no adjustments for inflation to physician payments in more than two decades, even in periods of record inflation. In fact, physicians today are paid nearly 30% less by Medicare than they were in 2001 when accounting for inflation, according to the American Medical Association. Over the same period, between 2001 to 2023, the cost of operating a medical practice increased 47%. The math is simple: When payments to physicians fall below the cost of delivering care, the system destabilizes. It becomes economically unsustainable for doctors to see Medicare patients, entire clinics are forced to close and seniors must seek care in places intended for other things, like emergency rooms. Unfortunately, without an urgent fix to our nation’s outdated Medicare reimbursement system, millions of American seniors are suffering the consequences. What does this look like in practice? Let’s take a composite case of real patient scenarios we have seen and heard as doctors and as members of Congress who hear regularly from constituents. A patient we will call Jean one day noticed a mole on her skin that was growing, darkening in color and starting to itch. Jean tried to make an appointment with her doctor, but her clinic had to close due to inadequate Medicare reimbursements. The earliest appointment she could find with a new doctor was at least three to four months away. That kind of wait time is typical of many metro areas across the country , especially as more doctors shut their doors and are unable to see Medicare patients at all. Unfortunately for Jean, in the months that followed, the mole grew even larger, and it began to hurt and bleed – so much so that she went to the emergency room at her nearest hospital. After waiting 10 hours to be seen, she was told she would need a biopsy of the mole. The biopsy showed that she had melanoma skin cancer that would require surgery and perhaps chemotherapy. Since Jean’s cancer was detected at a later stage, her health care costs included thousands of dollars of scans, procedures and drugs – instead of hundreds of dollars to remove the mole had it been caught early. Hospitals cannot be expected to compensate for shortages and long wait times in outpatient care caused by the underfunding of Medicare. Hospital emergency department overcrowding was already a problem before the COVID-19 pandemic, and the situation has only worsened. With an ever-expanding population of seniors, sending them to emergency rooms instead of doctor’s offices is not sustainable. ER overcrowding carries risks for safety, worse health outcomes for patients and financial damage for patients and the health care system. The average cost of treating a common medical problem at an ER is approximately $2,032, more than 12 times higher than treating the same issue in a physician’s office ($167). Insurance data shows that 18 million of the 27 million annual visits to U.S. emergency rooms are for “non-emergency” problems. That adds $32 billion in additional costs to our health system, much of which could be saved if the government were to adequately reimburse doctors for the costs of caring for Medicare patients in the first place. One solution is to ensure that Medicare payments grow with the Medicare Economic Index , which measures health care operating costs adjusting for inflation. The Medicare Payment Advisory Commission, the independent government agency that advises Congress on the Social Security program, has recommended that lawmakers tie Medicare payments to doctors to the index. Congress must act now and adjust the formula to stabilize the Medicare payment system permanently. That’s why two of us who are members of Congress – Reps. Bera and Bucshon – are co-sponsoring the Strengthening Medicare for Patients and Providers Act , which would adjust the Medicare system to account for inflation. Medicare is a promise that the federal government made to American seniors – who have already paid their share in taxes into the system. We urge our fellow members of Congress and supporters of better, more cost-efficient health care for seniors to work together to pass this vital reform before the end of the year. Shadi Kourosh , M.D., M.PH, is an associate professor of dermatology at Harvard Medical School and associate professor of public health at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Ami Bera , M.D., is a Democratic U.S. congressman from California. Larry Bucshon , M.D., is a Republican U.S. congressman from Indiana.
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“Gladiator II” asks the question: Are you not moderately entertained for roughly 60% of this sequel? Truly, this is a movie dependent on managed expectations and a forgiving attitude toward its tendency to overserve. More of a thrash-and-burn schlock epic than the comparatively restrained 2000 “Gladiator,” also directed by Ridley Scott, the new one recycles a fair bit of the old one’s narrative cries for freedom while tossing in some digital sharks for the flooded Colosseum and a bout of deadly sea-battle theatrics. They really did flood the Colosseum in those days, though no historical evidence suggests shark deployment, real or digital. On the other hand (checks notes), “Gladiator II” is fiction. Screenwriter David Scarpa picks things up 16 years after “Gladiator,” which gave us the noble death of the noble warrior Maximus, shortly after slaying the ignoble emperor and returning Rome to the control of the Senate. Our new hero, Lucius (Paul Mescal), has fled Rome for Numidia, on the North African coast. The time is 200 A.D., and for the corrupt, party-time twins running the empire (Joseph Quinn and Fred Hechinger), that means invasion time. Pedro Pascal takes the role of Acacius, the deeply conflicted general, sick of war and tired of taking orders from a pair of depraved ferrets. The new film winds around the old one this way: Acacius is married to Lucilla (Connie Nielsen, in a welcome return), daughter of the now-deceased emperor Aurelius and the love of the late Maximus’s life. Enslaved and dragged to Rome to gladiate, the widower Lucius vows revenge on the general whose armies killed his wife. But there are things this angry young phenom must learn, about his ancestry and his destiny. It’s the movie’s worst-kept secret, but there’s a reason he keeps seeing footage of Russell Crowe from the first movie in his fever dreams. Battle follows battle, on the field, in the arena, in the nearest river, wherever, and usually with endless splurches of computer-generated blood. “Gladiator II” essentially bumper-cars its way through the mayhem, pausing for long periods of expository scheming about overthrowing the current regime. The prince of all fixers, a wily operative with interests in both managing gladiators and stocking munitions, goes by the name Macrinus. He’s played by Denzel Washington, who at one point makes a full meal out of pronouncing the word “politics” like it’s a poisoned fig. Also, if you want a masterclass in letting your robes do a lot of your acting for you, watch what Washington does here. He’s more fun than the movie but you can’t have everything. The movie tries everything, all right, and twice. Ridley Scott marshals the chaotic action sequences well enough, though he’s undercut by frenetic cutting rhythms, with that now-familiar, slightly sped-up visual acceleration in frequent use. (Claire Simpson and Sam Restivo are the editors.) Mescal acquits himself well in his first big-budget commercial walloper of an assignment, confined though he is to a narrower range of seething resentments than Crowe’s in the first film. I left thinking about two things: the word “politics” as savored/spit out by Washington, and the innate paradox of how Scott, whose best work over the decades has been wonderful, delivers spectacle. The director and his lavishly talented design team built all the rough-hewn sets with actual tangible materials the massive budget allowed. They took care to find the right locations in Morocco and Malta. Yet when combined in post-production with scads of medium-grade digital effects work in crowd scenes and the like, never mind the sharks, the movie’s a somewhat frustrating amalgam. With an uneven script on top of it, the visual texture of “Gladiator II” grows increasingly less enveloping and atmospherically persuasive, not more. But I hung there, for some of the acting, for some of the callbacks, and for the many individual moments, or single shots, that could only have come from Ridley Scott. And in the end, yes, you too may be moderately entertained. “Gladiator II” — 2.5 stars (out of 4) MPA rating: R (for strong bloody violence) Running time: 2:28 How to watch: Premieres in theaters Nov. 21. Michael Phillips is a Tribune critic.Saquon Barkley on Giants' releasing Daniel Jones: 'It sucks to see how everything went down'
So, what’s so funny about peace, love and understanding?