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DMK alliance is strong, says Law MinisterFLORENCE, S.C. -- A night filled with Christmas cheer turned into a nightmare for some residents of Coventry Lane Apartments when a fire broke out late Monday evening, displacing multiple families just days before the holiday. Roshanna Clayton, a single mother of two, recalls the terrifying events that unfolded. “It was around 10:30 last night,” We had just finished playing one of the Christmas games we found online. I was a little out of breath and went to lay across my bed,” Clayton said. Her daughter had gone to her room, her son was in the living room with Clayton’s mother, who was recovering from knee surgery, when he saw the flames outside. “He came running to me, shouting, Mommy, there’s a fire outside!” By the time Clayton reached the front door, her upstairs neighbor, Miss Lynn, was banging on it to warn the family. The fire had engulfed a second-floor unit across the way, and the heat was becoming intense. “I told my mom we had to get out, but she was struggling to move because of her knee surgery and hip pain,” Clayton said. As smoke began to fill the apartment, Clayton grabbed her phone and car keys, but when she returned to help her mother, she found her on the floor, unable to stand. “I saw plastic dripping from above and felt the heat. I was terrified.” Clayton helped her mother crawl to safety through their back sliding door while her children had already made it outside. She also woke her uncle, who had recently suffered a stroke, and guided him out as smoke thickened around them. “My son was standing outside in just his boxers, my daughter in shorts, and my mom in her nightgown,” she recounted. “It was freezing, and everything was happening so fast.” The family watched in fear as firefighters battled the flames, which reignited multiple times before finally being extinguished. Fortunately, their apartment sustained only smoke damage, sparing them from the flames, but it was enough to render their home uninhabitable. Neighbors showed remarkable kindness amidst the chaos, offering blankets and clothing to those who fled with nothing. “One of the women across from me ran out with just her underclothes on,” Clayton said. “When I was able to get back into my unit briefly, I grabbed some clothes for her. Everyone came together last night, and we truly supported one another.” Clayton and her children are currently staying at her sister-in-law’s house, but the uncertainty of finding a permanent place to live weighs heavily on her. Her landlord has no vacant units, and while another landlord nearby offered an apartment, the upfront costs of first and last month’s rent plus a security deposit are a financial hurdle. “The Red Cross gave us a card to help temporarily, but I’m still waiting to hear back from them for more assistance,” she said. “As a single mom, it’s hard, especially so close to Christmas.” Despite losing much of what they had, Clayton is grateful her family is safe. “We didn’t have much for Christmas as it is, but my kids are just happy to be alive,” she said. “That’s the greatest gift.” To support families affected by the fire, the Palmetto Street Church of God is accepting donations of new and unwrapped clothing and toys at their gym from 2 p.m. to 4 p.m. Tuesday The West Florence Fire Department has expressed gratitude for the community’s generosity and reminded everyone to prioritize fire safety during the holidays. For Clayton and others, this Christmas will look different, but the outpouring of compassion from neighbors and strangers alike has provided a glimmer of hope. “We wave to each other in passing, but last night, we truly came together. That’s something I’ll never forget.” Get local news delivered to your inbox!
Willy Adames was a central component of a 2024 Milwaukee Brewers team that overcame significant personnel losses to win the NL Central. Now he, too, is leaving. The former Brewers' shortstop agreed to a seven-year, $182 million contract with the San Francisco Giants on Saturday, according to . The deal, which is pending a physical, includes a $22 million signing bonus. The deal is the largest in franchise history by total value, surpassing Buster Posey's eight-year, $167 million contract signed in 2013. Posey , putting him in a key position with this deal. Because Adames turned down a qualifying offer, the Brewers will receive draft pick compensation from San Francisco. In joining the Giants, Adames finds a team that will use him as a true shortstop. There was some speculation that he could move to third base with certain suitors, but in San Francisco he'll slot in nicely alongside All-Star third baseman Matt Chapman. With Chapman , San Francisco now has the left side of its infield locked down for more than half a decade. Adames is under contract through 2031, which will be his age-35 season. San Francisco is also bringing in a star shortstop two years after the infamous Carlos Correa miss, in which the Minnesota Twins shortstop agreed to a 12-year, $350 million contract that was later spiked due to injury concerns about his right ankle. Correa later landed with the New York Mets, then the Twins again after the Mets deal similarly fell through. Adames' exit comes a year after the Brewers saw the departures of ace Corbin Burnes, manager Craig Counsell and president of baseball operations David Stearns last winter. They regrouped admirably, winning 93 games in 2024, but now must find another way to continue their stretch of NL Central excellence. The deal rewards Adames for a career season in 2024 in which he hit .251/.331/.462 while holding down shortstop for an MLB-best 161 games. He didn't enter free agency with the juice of, say, a Trea Turner or Xander Bogaerts (both of whom got at least $280 million), but he this winter and . Adames has been one of the most underrated players for years, as evidenced by the fact that he has never made an All-Star Game, despite being a shortstop with a career 109 OPS+. He is an above-average hitter capable of playing the game's most important position outside of the battery, and those players get paid. It feels so long ago, but Adames' run as an underrated player began when he was the shortstop not named Wander Franco on the Tampa Bay Rays. During his fourth season in Tampa, Adames was traded to Milwaukee to make room for Franco, a can't-miss prospect whose career ended in a Dominican courtroom over . The Brewers enjoyed the fruits of the deal immediately and received 14.0 WAR from Adames over the course of three-and-a-half seasons. He was a defensive keystone, a middle-of-the-order bat and a clubhouse leader. Milwaukee built its recent teams on quiet moves turning into big wins, and Adames was one of the biggest examples of that.
The Boston Red Sox continued to rebuild their pitching staff, acquiring left-hander Jovani Morán on Tuesday from the Minnesota Twins in exchange for catcher and infielder Mickey Gasper. The 27-year-old Morán appeared in 79 games as a reliever for the Twins from 2021 to 2023, posting a 4.15 ERA, striking out 112 with 52 walks and holding opponents to a .208 batting average. He missed all of last season recovering from Tommy John surgery. He originally was chosen in the seventh round of the 2015 draft. In Gasper, the Twins are getting a 29-year-old who made his major league debut last season and appeared in 13 games with Boston. The switch-hitter was selected by the New York Yankees in the 27th round of the 2018 draft. He was picked by Boston in the minor league portion of the 2023 Rule 5 Draft. The Red Sox and Twins both currently have 39 players on their 40-man rosters. ___ AP MLB: https://apnews.com/hub/mlb
NEW YORK — The man accused of burning a woman to death inside a New York City subway train used a shirt to fan the flames, a prosecutor said Tuesday at his arraignment on murder charges. Sebastian Zapeta, 33, who federal immigration officials said is a Guatemalan citizen who entered the U.S. illegally, was not required to enter a plea and did not speak at the hearing in Brooklyn criminal court. Zapeta, wearing a white jumpsuit over a weathered black hooded sweatshirt, will remain jailed at the city's Rikers Island complex and is due back in court on Friday. His lawyer did not ask for bail. Zapeta is charged with two counts of murder, accusing him of intentionally killing the woman and killing her while committing arson. He is also charged with one count of arson. The top charge carries a maximum sentence of life in prison without parole. Brooklyn District Attorney Eric Gonzalez called the attack a “gruesome and senseless act of violence” and said it would be “met with the most serious consequences.” The apparently random attack occurred Sunday morning on an F train that was stopped at the Coney Island station. The victim's identification is still pending. Authorities say Zapeta approached the woman, who may have been sleeping in the train, and set her clothing on fire with a lighter. Zapeta then fanned the flames with a shirt, engulfing her in fire, Assistant District Attorney Ari Rottenberg said in court Tuesday. Zapeta then sat on a bench on the subway platform and watched, Rottenberg said. According to Rottenberg, Zapeta told detectives that he didn’t know what happened but identified himself in images of the attack. Zapeta's lawyer, public defender Andrew Friedman, did not speak to reporters after the arraignment. A message seeking comment was left for him. Video on social media appears to show some people looking on from the platform and at least one police officer walking by while the woman is on fire inside the train. NYPD Transit Chief Joseph Gulotta said Sunday that several officers responded to the fire and one stayed to keep the crime scene “the way it’s supposed to be" while the others went to get fire extinguishers and transit workers. “Officers who were on patrol on an upper level of that station smelled and saw smoke and went to investigate. What they saw was a person standing inside the train car fully engulfed in flames,” Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch said. They eventually put the fire out, but “unfortunately, it was too late,” Tisch said, and the woman was pronounced dead at the scene. Zapeta was taken into custody Sunday afternoon while riding a train on the same subway line after teenagers recognized him from images circulated by the police. A Brooklyn address for Zapeta released by police matches a shelter that provides housing and substance abuse support. The shelter did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Federal immigration officials said Zapeta was deported in 2018 but later reentered the U.S. illegally. The crime deepened a growing sense of unease among some New Yorkers about the safety of the subway system, amplified by graphic video of the attack that ricocheted across social media. Overall, crime is down in the transit system compared to last year. Major felonies declined 6% between January and November compared to the same time period last year, according to data from the Metropolitan Transportation Authority. But murders are up, with nine killings this year through November compared to five during the same period last year. There have also been several high-profile incidents, including one in September where police inadvertently shot two bystanders and a fellow officer when they opened fire on a man holding a knife in front of a train. Earlier this month, a Manhattan jury acquitted former Marine Daniel Penny in the chokehold death last year of an agitated subway rider. The case became a flashpoint in debates over safety, homelessness and mental illness on the system. Policing the subway is difficult, given the vast network of trains moving between 472 stations. Each stop contains multiple entry points and, in many stations, multiple floors and platforms.Heavy travel day starts with brief grounding of all American Airlines flights
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NEW YORK (AP) — Walmart's sweeping rollback of its diversity policies is the strongest indication yet of a profound shift taking hold at U.S. companies that are revaluating the legal and political risks associated with bold programs to bolster historically underrepresented groups in business. The changes announced by the world's biggest retailer followed a string of legal victories by conservative groups that have filed an onslaught of lawsuits challenging corporate and federal programs aimed at elevating minority and women-owned businesses and employees. The risk associated with some of programs crystalized with the election of former President Donald Trump, whose administration is certain to make dismantling diversity, equity and inclusion programs a priority. Trump's incoming deputy chief of policy will be his former adviser Stephen Miller , who leads a group called America First Legal that has aggressively challenged corporate DEI policies. “There has been a lot of reassessment of risk looking at programs that could be deemed to constitute reverse discrimination,” said Allan Schweyer, principal researcher the Human Capital Center at the Conference Board. “This is another domino to fall and it is a rather large domino,” he added. Among other changes, Walmart said it will no longer give priority treatment to suppliers owned by women or minorities. The company also will not renew a five-year commitment for a racial equity center set up in 2020 after the police killing of George Floyd. And it pulled out of a prominent gay rights index . Schweyer said the biggest trigger for companies making such changes is simply a reassessment of their legal risk exposure, which began after U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in June 2023 that ended affirmative action in college admissions. Since then, conservative groups using similar arguments have secured court victories against various diversity programs, especially those that steer contracts to minority or women-owned businesses. Most recently, the conservative Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty won a victory in a case against the U.S. Department of Transportation over its use of a program that gives priority to minority-owned businesses when it awards contracts. Companies are seeing a big legal risk in continuing with DEI efforts, said Dan Lennington, a deputy counsel at the institute. His organization says it has identified more than 60 programs in the federal government that it considers discriminatory, he said. “We have a legal landscape within the entire federal government, all three branches -- the U.S. Supreme Court, the Congress and the President -- are all now firmly pointed in the direction towards equality of individuals and individualized treatment of all Americans, instead of diversity, equity and inclusion treating people as members of racial groups,” Lennington said. The Trump administration is also likely to take direct aim at DEI initiatives through executive orders and other policies that affect private companies, especially federal contractors. “The impact of the election on DEI policies is huge. It can’t be overstated,” said Jason Schwartz, co-chair of the Labor & Employment Practice Group at law firm Gibson Dunn. With Miller returning to the White House, rolling back DEI initiatives is likely to be a priority, Schwartz said. “Companies are trying to strike the right balance to make clear they’ve got an inclusive workplace where everyone is welcome, and they want to get the best talent, while at the same time trying not to alienate various parts of their employees and customer base who might feel one way or the other. It’s a virtually impossible dilemma,” Schwartz said. A recent survey by Pew Research Center showed that workers are divided on the merits of DEI policies. While still broadly popular, the share of workers who said focusing on workplace diversity was mostly a good thing fell to 52% in the November survey, compared to 56% in a similar survey in February 2023. Rachel Minkin, a research associated at Pew called it a small but significant shift in short amount of time. There will be more companies pulling back from their DEI policies, but it likely won’t be a retreat across the board, said David Glasgow, executive director of the Meltzer Center for Diversity, Inclusion and Belonging at New York University. “There are vastly more companies that are sticking with DEI," Glasgow said. "The only reason you don’t hear about it is most of them are doing it by stealth. They’re putting their heads down and doing DEI work and hoping not to attract attention.” Glasgow advises organizations to stick to their own core values, because attitudes toward the topic can change quickly in the span of four years. “It’s going to leave them looking a little bit weak if there’s a kind of flip-flopping, depending on whichever direction the political winds are blowing,” he said. One reason DEI programs exist is because without those programs, companies may be vulnerable to lawsuits for traditional discrimination. “Really think carefully about the risks in all directions on this topic,” Glasgow said. Walmart confirmed will no longer consider race and gender as a litmus test to improve diversity when it offers supplier contracts. Last fiscal year, Walmart said it spent more than $13 billion on minority, women or veteran-owned good and service suppliers. It was unclear how its relationships with such business would change going forward. Organizations that that have partnered with Walmart on its diversity initiatives offered a cautious response. The Women’s Business Enterprise National Council, a non-profit that last year named Walmart one of America's top corporation for women-owned enterprises, said it was still evaluating the impact of Walmart's announcement. Pamela Prince-Eason, the president and CEO of the organization, said she hoped Walmart's need to cater to its diverse customer base will continue to drive contracts to women-owned suppliers even if the company no longer has explicit dollar goals. “I suspect Walmart will continue to have one of the most inclusive supply chains in the World,” Prince-Eason wrote. “Any retailer's ability to serve the communities they operate in will continue to value understanding their customers, (many of which are women), in order to better provide products and services desired and no one understands customers better than Walmart." Walmart's announcement came after the company spoke directly with conservative political commentator and activist Robby Starbuck, who has been going after corporate DEI policies, calling out individual companies on the social media platform X. Several of those companies have subsequently announced that they are pulling back their initiatives, including Ford , Harley-Davidson, Lowe’s and Tractor Supply . Walmart confirmed to The Associated Press that it will better monitor its third-party marketplace items to make sure they don’t feature sexual and transgender products aimed at minors. The company also will stop participating in the Human Rights Campaign’s annual benchmark index that measures workplace inclusion for LGBTQ+ employees. A Walmart spokesperson added that some of the changes were already in progress and not as a result of conversations that it had with Starbuck. RaShawn “Shawnie” Hawkins, senior director of the HRC Foundation’s Workplace Equality Program, said companies that “abandon” their commitments workplace inclusion policies “are shirking their responsibility to their employees, consumers, and shareholders.” She said the buying power of LGBTQ customers is powerful and noted that the index will have record participation of more than 1,400 companies in 2025.(Image: Private Media/Zennie) It is bad enough that 2024 was a record high for global greenhouse gas emissions. It is extra bad because the number we’ve ended up at is higher than all of the old projections of what this year would end up at. That is to say: we are underestimating our ability to stop using fossil fuels. There have been incredible advances in renewables and climate policies, but also, “fossil fuel subsidies remain at an all-time high and funding for fossil fuel-prolonging projects quadrupled between 2021 and 2022”. Why? What is justifying this weird refusal to back away from the fossil fuel economy? It’s many things, but a big one is the false promise of a machine that cleans up fossil fuels, rather than us needing to find a replacement for them. Is Labor’s carbon capture fantasy even dumber than Dutton’s nuclear dream? Read More Back in 2022, I contributed an essay to Greta Thunberg’s Climate Book . It was about the weaponised false promise of carbon capture and storage (CCS). I wanted to talk about it not as a technological phenomenon but a rhetorical one. A tactically deployed promise that is never meant to come true . Failure as a feature, not a bug. The second coming hasn’t come yet After a surge of planned projects in the late 2000s and early 2010s failed to turn into operational carbon capture sites, there was a lull. But since 2020, the volume of planned CCS has increased very significantly, as we can see from the latest update from the Global CCS Institute (GCCSi), a CCS reporting and advocacy group that publishes annual data: As with so many previous years, the change in “operational” CCS is small. The pipeline for CCS has been surging for a half-decade now, and the amount of operational CCS has only grown by a few megatonnes of capacity. We were promised a CCS revolution, and we aren’t getting one. Each year’s database puts an estimated “start date” on these CCS projects, so if we compile every report from each year, we can get an idea of what should be operational, and compare it to what is : In 2024, the amount of operational CCS should be several times higher than it actually is, based on the promised start dates of projects in older reports. Some projects are being cancelled, others are pushing out those dates further into the future due to frequent delays . Carbon capture isn’t a technology that likes to be built. It’s almost a cruel chart to make, but compare the percentage growth in operational CCS to the growth in wind and solar over the same time, and you get an idea of the different dynamics we’re dealing with here: Why do we keep believing the promise when it keeps failing to materialise? There are many reasons, but I want to dive into a specific one in this post: a range of different future scenarios, from a range of different sources, has leant hard on CCS as a way to minimise projected reductions in fossil fuel use, and therefore politically soften any potentially scary visions of the “disruptive” elimination of fossil fuels. What the future looks like Media has gone missing in action on Labor’s carbon capture fraud Read More Fossil fuel companies (both power generation and extractive) love using the false promise of CCS to justify massive, high-emitting projects. It’s worth diving into this incredible July 2024 investigation by Drilled’s Amy Westervelt, specifically on how fossil fuel companies were actively aware that their promises on CCS were hollow. Fossil fuel companies have, for a long time, performed a sort of strategic science fiction exercise, where they publish fossil-heavy and CCS-reliant scenarios to try and own the space of what the future looks like. Using the data made available in the latest Global Energy Outlook , I’ve made a little illustration of how fossil fuel companies use assumptions about CCS in their scenarios that are weirdly disconnected from the material realities of ultra-slow deployment: Equinor, my friendly local state-owned fossil fuel company, are comfortably the worst offender here. From 2018 to 2021, their CCS projections were verging on possible. In 2022, 2023 and 2024 , the 2030 assumptions for CCS are deeply bonkers and far exceed Shell and British Petroleum’s assumptions. This is despite Equinor being notably off track even for their own company CCS targets. Consider the International Energy Agency’s (IEA) “World Energy Outlook” , a major annual global energy system model, whose future scenarios drive investment decisions and government policies. I’ve created a compilation of each year’s recent CCS assumptions in their most-ambitious “net-zero” scenario, and you can immediately see that as far as CCS is from even realising its own pipeline of planned projects, the gap between the assumptions in the IEA’s net-zero scenario is significantly worse: If CCS development were truly following the IEA’s 2022 net-zero scenario, operational capacity today would be about 12 times what it ended up being this year. The IEA’s 2024 scenario, released a few weeks ago, assumes that CCS capacity will be around 25 times greater in 2030 than it is today. It’s worth acknowledging the IEA can be circumspect about this. Its 2020 “CCUS” report looked back on an old ambitious scenario : CCUS deployment tripled over the last decade, albeit from a low base — but it has fallen well short of expectations. In 2009, the IEA roadmap for CCUS set a target of developing 100 large-scale CCUS projects between 2010 and 2020 to meet global climate goals, storing around 300 MtCO2 per year. Actual capacity is only around 40 Mt — just 13% of the target. Can you put a number on how badly Trump will screw the climate? Yes, many. Read More The IEA’s net-zero scenario was a big deal, when they first gave it a go in 2021 after pressure from climate groups. It was the first scenario the group published that started with a temperature goal, and then solved backwards. But to solve that equation, it has consistently relied on a volume of CCS deployment that doesn’t seem to be matched by real-world manifestation — and models need to change to reflect the persistent reality. To continue the comparison with wind and solar, these two technologies exhibit the exact opposite effect: the IEA’s scenarios have historically underestimated the deployment of the technologies (across all their scenarios). The two graphics below compare the 2014 “World Energy Outlook” scenarios, and their assumptions on wind and solar power generation, to the 2024 edition’s projections, overlaid with what both actually generated each year: Again, it’s worth defending the IEA here. It is keenly aware of how the technology is being proffered particularly by the fossil fuel industry in an absurd, over-stated context. It said as much in its 2023 “oil and gas transitions” report , where it pointed out CCS in a scenario with no change to the oil and gas produced would require “26,000 terawatt hours of electricity generation to operate in 2050, which is more than global electricity demand in 2022”, and would also require “over US$3.5 trillion in annual investments all the way from today through to mid-century, which is an amount equal to the entire industry’s annual average revenue in recent years”. The IEA has also been at pains to point out it is not the worst offender when it comes to leaning on CCS to model climate ambition, showing that its reliance on CCS in net-zero models is a lot lower than the IPCC’s reliance on CCS. It’s not wrong. To give you an idea — here are 146 1.5c-aligned IPCC scenario assumptions showing the total amount captured by CCS each year, compared to the actual installed capacity from the GCCSi database: Who’s paying for our trillion-dollar climate transition, and why are there so many oil lobbyists at COP29? Read More A recent study by Tsimafei Kazlou, Aleh Cherp and Jessica Jewell published in Nature showed that if you consider a reasonable but optimistic feasibility of CCS growth, that is still significantly slower than what 90% of IPCC 1.5c mitigation pathways assume (noting that the recent AR6 report does go to some lengths to include some CCS-free scenarios). “We show how realistic assumptions about failure rates, based on the history of CCS and other historical benchmarks, can identify a feasible upper bound of CCS capacity in 2030 (0.37 Gt yr)”. That is, to give you an idea, about 10 times smaller than the amount of CCS Equinor assumes in its “ambitious” climate scenario. The net result of a heavy dose of CCS assumptions in authoritative scenarios, projections and models — one that doesn’t reflect the real-world dynamics — is a significantly increased risk of missed targets, and a false impression of ambition. I have truly lost count of the number of times a fossil fuel company references either the IPCC, or the IEA, when justifying heavy, load-bearing promises on CCS. Here’s one nice, recent example. This is from ExxonMobil’s latest “Global Energy Outlook” , showing carbon capture growing at three times the rate of wind and solar, from 2022 to 2050. This isn’t Exxon’s own scenario assumption — this is ExxonMobil referencing the IPCC’s “below two degrees” scenarios: “See?? Even the climate scientists that you love and trust agree with us that leaning heavily on carbon capture is a totally fine thing to do”. I don’t know if it’s well recognised in the climate modelling community just how widespread stuff like this is, within fossil fuel company climate and sustainability claims. This is a truncated extract of a recent blog post by Ketan Joshi. Read the full version here . Have something to say about this article? Write to us at letters@crikey.com.au . Please include your full name to be considered for publication in Crikey’s Your Say . We reserve the right to edit for length and clarity.
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No. 16 Iowa State falls short in Big 12 title game again, this time with CFP at stakeSutton added eight rebounds for the Mavericks (4-7). Tony Osburn scored 15 points and added five rebounds and three steals. JJ White had nine points and went 4 of 5 from the field. Jacob Holt led the way for the Hornets (2-7) with 15 points, six rebounds and two blocks. Mike Wilson added nine points and six rebounds for Sacramento State. Chudi Dioramma had seven points, 10 rebounds and two blocks. Omaha's next game is Friday against Northern Iowa on the road, and Sacramento State hosts UC Davis on Saturday. The Associated Press created this story using technology provided by Data Skrive and data from Sportradar .