Democrats plan to elect new party leader just days after Trump's inaugurationThe live broadcast of "Altamont: This Is Our Story" will be on air and online on Wednesday, Dec. 11, at 7 p.m. WEIU TV is presenting "Altamont: This Is Our Story," which features the town’s community members as they share stories important to Altamont and its history. The program features 18 storytellers, all with unique tales of local businesses, events and people that helped form Altamont as it is today. WEIU interviewed Altamont residents about topics closely related to them. Featured in the program are Kurt Becker - Origin of Altamont, Karan Greuel - Ballard Nature Center, Kenny Schumacher - Social Organizations, Jason Williams - Parks & Veterans Memorial, Dale Wolff - Faith-Based Community, Randy Milleville - Mill Road Threshermans Association, Larry Taylor - City Government/Electrical System, Roger Beccue - Local Businesses, Jon Becker - Altamont Fire Protection District, Kathy Corder - Frog Pond Nursery School, Robi Flach - Altamont Lutheran Interparish School, Eric Heiden - Altamont Grade School - Altamont Community High School, Emily Miller - Lutheran Care Center, Val Behl - Schuetzenfest, Dale Laue - Effingham County Fair, Scott Beal - Dr. Charles M. Wright House, Matt Robinson - Altamont Sports, and Nik Alwerdt - Alwerdt Gardens/Sculpture Park/Beautification of Altamont. The program will be shown live on WEIU TV on Wednesday, Dec. 11, at 7 p.m. Throughout the program, there will be three 10-minute pledge breaks, during which viewers are invited to call and speak with one of the storyteller phone operators to order their own copy of the program on DVD, Blu-ray or flash drive; they will also be tallying up orders to announce callers’ names during the event as an added sentiment of appreciation. This locally produced program featured during the Live broadcast is also a means to raise funds to help WEIU, which serves the community with a focus on producing local programs. Viewers can donate during the live show by calling the phone number at the bottom of the screen (1-877-PBS-WEIU) or through the website, weiu.net . For those who live within the WEIU viewing area, the program will stream on the WEIU-TV Public Broadcasting Station Facebook and YouTube pages, as well as on the PBS App, Local Now, Hulu+ and YouTube TV.
NEW YORK (AP) — U.S. donors gave $3.6 billion on Tuesday, an increase from the past two years, according to estimates from the nonprofit GivingTuesday . The Tuesday after Thanksgiving, now known as GivingTuesday, has become a major day for nonprofits to fundraise and otherwise engage their supporters each year, since the 92nd St Y in New York started it as a hashtag in 2012. GivingTuesday has since become an independent nonprofit that connects a worldwide network of leaders and organizations who promote giving in their communities. “This just really shows the generosity, the willingness of American citizens to show up, particularly collectively,” said Asha Curran, CEO of the nonprofit GivingTuesday. “We are just seeing the power of collective action and particularly collective giving over and over and over again.” This year, about 18.5 million people donated to nonprofits and another 9.2 million people volunteered, according to GivingTuesday's estimates. Both the number of donors and the number of volunteers increased by 4% from the group's 2023 estimates. “For us, it’s not just about the number of dollars," Curran said. "It’s about the number of people who feel like they have agency over the way their communities progress forward into the future.” The nonprofit GivingTuesday estimates the amount of money and goods donated and the number of participants using data from donor management software companies, donation platforms, payment processors and donor-advised funds. Curran said they are purposely conservative in their calculations. Nonprofits in the U.S. raised $3.1 billion in both 2022 and 2023 on GivingTuesday. That mirrored larger giving trends where the overall amount of donations dropped in 2022 and mostly held steady in 2023 after accounting for inflation. It’s never easy to predict current giving trends, but Una Osili, associate dean at the Indiana University Lilly Family School of Philanthropy, said there were economic forces pushing in both directions. “At the very same time, there’s a lot of uncertainty, especially around prices, the cost of living, the supermarket toll that people are expecting to continue even though inflation has moderated,” she said. Donating or volunteering with nonprofits aren't the only ways people participate in their communities. Many give to crowdfunding campaigns , political causes or support people directly in their networks. But tracking charitable donations is one way that researchers use to understand people's civic engagement. “This country is undeniably in a lot of pain and very divided right now,” Curran said. “And so to have a day that felt as hopeful and as optimistic as yesterday did, I’m sure was not only comforting to me, but to many, many millions of people.” Associated Press coverage of philanthropy and nonprofits receives support through the AP’s collaboration with The Conversation US, with funding from Lilly Endowment Inc. The AP is solely responsible for this content. For all of AP’s philanthropy coverage, visit https://apnews.com/hub/philanthropy .NEW YORK (AP) — Aaron Judge won't be bothered if free agent Juan Soto gets a bigger deal from the New York Yankees than the captain's $360 million , nine-year contract. “It ain’t my money. I really don’t care as long as we get the best players, we get the most that we can, I’m happy with whatever,” Judge said Friday, a day after he was a unanimous winner of his second AL MVP award. “That's never been something on my mind about who gets paid the most.” Judge led the major leagues with 58 homers, 144 RBIs and 133 walks while hitting .322 as New York reached the World Series for the first time since 2009, only to lose to the Los Angeles Dodgers . People are also reading... Soto batted .288 with 41 homers, 109 RBIs and 129 walks in his first season with the Yankees and finished third in MVP voting, also trailing Kansas City shortstop Bobby Witt. Jr. A free agent at 26, Soto has met with the Yankees, Mets, Los Angeles Dodgers and Boston Red Sox, and he plans to meet with the Philadelphia Phillies, a person familiar with the negotiations told The Associated Press. The person spoke on condition of anonymity because the meetings have not been publicly announced. Negotiations are not likely to intensify until after Thanksgiving. Judge hasn’t spoken with Soto since the World Series. Judge went through the free-agent experience after hitting an AL record 62 homers in 2022. “The best thing is to really give those guys space," Judge said. "I talked to him all season and he knows how we feel about him and I think the most important thing is now let him do his thing with his family, pray about it, talk with people and come to the right decision for him and his family.” Soto met with Yankees officials on Monday at a hotel in southern California, a group that included owner Hal Steinbrenner, team president Randy Levine, general manager Brian Cashman, manager Aaron Boone and senior adviser for baseball operations Omar Minaya. “We had a good meeting. It was a very honest back-and-forth dialogue, a couple hours long,” Steinbrenner said Wednesday. Asked how confident he was about keeping Soto, Steinbrenner said: “No idea. We’ll be in the mix. I’ll leave it at that.” Soto and Judge filled the Nos. 2 and 3 slots in the Yankees batting order in a franchise-record 153 games, topping the 145 of Joe Dugan and Babe Ruth in 1923, according to the Elias Sports Bureau. “I get to see a lot of pitches," Judge said. "He's going to be a tough at-bat in front of me. He’s going to wear down the pitcher right there in the first inning, within the first 15 pitches or so. Yeah, I think that was a big impact just having having a guy like that in front of you. "If I could have eight Juan Sotos in the lineup with me, I would love that.” After the World Series, Judge spent about a week in Tampa, Florida, where the Yankees hold spring training, and met with Steinbrenner. “We kind of just discussed a lot of things from Juan to other guys that are kind of out there that I think could definitely help this team,:" Judge said. "So I kind of just gave my input on a couple things.” Judge said when he agreed to his big deal in late 2022, Steinbrenner wanted to have a deeper relationship. They've been meeting every week or two, and pitcher Gerrit Cole has developed a similar exchange with the owner. “I think just having that relationship to where I can kind of communicate with him about what I’m seeing, what I’m feeling, what I see with the guys, what I see against other guys that we play against,” Judge said. “I think it’s a cool part to where I think just the more communication you have from top to bottom, it just — it makes everybody better.” Judge's contract is baseball's fourth largest behind the deals of the Dodgers' Shohei Ohtani ($700 million), the Los Angeles Angels' Mike Trout ($426.5 million) and the Dodgers' Mookie Betts ($365 million). Judge cited the example of teammate Giancarlo Stanton, whose $325 million deal was the highest when he joined the Yankees ahead of the 2018 season but now ranks tied for ninth. “Even though he signed one of those — the first big mega-contracts back in Miami, once he came here he didn’t care about the highest-paid guy. He just wanted good players around him,” Judge said. In joining Mickey Mantle in 1956 as the Yankees' only unanimous MVPs, Judge credited his teammates. “You look at every single one of my teammates in that room and know that each and every single one of them impacted me in a way that put me in that position,” Judge said. “So it’s always going to be a team award in my book.” AP MLB: https://apnews.com/hub/MLB Copyright 2024 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission. Be the first to know Get local news delivered to your inbox!
An online spat between factions of Donald Trump's supporters over immigration and the tech industry has thrown internal divisions in his political movement into public display, previewing the fissures and contradictory views his coalition could bring to the White House. The rift laid bare the tensions between the newest flank of Trump's movement — wealthy members of the tech world including billionaire Elon Musk and fellow entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy and their call for more highly skilled workers in their industry — and people in Trump's Make America Great Again base who championed his hardline immigration policies. The debate touched off this week when Laura Loomer, a right-wing provocateur with a history of racist and conspiratorial comments, criticized Trump’s selection of Sriram Krishnan as an adviser on artificial intelligence policy in his coming administration. Krishnan favors the ability to bring more skilled immigrants into the U.S. Loomer declared the stance to be “not America First policy” and said the tech executives who have aligned themselves with Trump were doing so to enrich themselves. Much of the debate played out on the social media network X, which Musk owns. Loomer's comments sparked a back-and-forth with venture capitalist and former PayPal executive David Sacks, whom Trump has tapped to be the “White House A.I. & Crypto Czar." Musk and Ramaswamy, whom Trump has tasked with finding ways to cut the federal government, weighed in, defending the tech industry's need to bring in foreign workers. It bloomed into a larger debate with more figures from the hard-right weighing in about the need to hire U.S. workers, whether values in American culture can produce the best engineers, free speech on the internet, the newfound influence tech figures have in Trump's world and what his political movement stands for. Trump has not yet weighed in on the rift. His presidential transition team did not respond to questions about positions on visas for highly skilled workers or the debate between his supporters online. Instead, his team instead sent a link to a post on X by longtime adviser and immigration hard-liner Stephen Miller that was a transcript of a speech Trump gave in 2020 at Mount Rushmore in which he praised figures and moments from American history. Musk, the world's richest man who has grown remarkably close to the president-elect, was a central figure in the debate, not only for his stature in Trump's movement but his stance on the tech industry's hiring of foreign workers. Technology companies say H-1B visas for skilled workers, used by software engineers and others in the tech industry, are critical for hard-to-fill positions. But critics have said they undercut U.S. citizens who could take those jobs. Some on the right have called for the program to be eliminated, not expanded. Born in South Africa, Musk was once on an a H-1B visa himself and defended the industry's need to bring in foreign workers. “There is a permanent shortage of excellent engineering talent," he said in a post. “It is the fundamental limiting factor in Silicon Valley.” Trump's own positions over the years have reflected the divide in his movement. His tough immigration policies, including his pledge for a mass deportation, were central to his winning presidential campaign. He has focused on immigrants who come into the U.S. illegally but he has also sought curbs on legal immigration, including family-based visas. As a presidential candidate in 2016, Trump called the H-1B visa program “very bad” and “unfair” for U.S. workers. After he became president, Trump in 2017 issued a “Buy American and Hire American” executive order, which directed Cabinet members to suggest changes to ensure H-1B visas were awarded to the highest-paid or most-skilled applicants to protect American workers. Trump's businesses, however, have hired foreign workers, including waiters and cooks at his Mar-a-Lago club, and his social media company behind his Truth Social app has used the the H-1B program for highly skilled workers. During his 2024 campaign for president, as he made immigration his signature issue, Trump said immigrants in the country illegally are “poisoning the blood of our country" and promised to carry out the largest deportation operation in U.S. history. But in a sharp departure from his usual alarmist message around immigration generally, Trump told a podcast this year that he wants to give automatic green cards to foreign students who graduate from U.S. colleges. “I think you should get automatically, as part of your diploma, a green card to be able to stay in this country," he told the “All-In" podcast with people from the venture capital and technology world. Those comments came on the cusp of Trump's budding alliance with tech industry figures, but he did not make the idea a regular part of his campaign message or detail any plans to pursue such changes.
10 NYC Art Shows to See in December
NoneUnlikely battleground California plays key role -- again -- in setting US House's political balanceFSK Completes Public Offering of $100 million 6.125% Unsecured Notes Due 2030
A new report from state officials paints the clearest picture yet of the scale of Colorado’s outdoor recreation economy. Earlier this month, Colorado Parks and Wildlife unveiled the latest iteration of its Statewide Comprehensive Outdoor Recreation Plan, a guiding document for public land management that is updated on a five-year cycle. The sprawling document, which identifies challenges, strategies and priorities for the state’s recreation sector, also contains a wide breadth of data on how Coloradans use outdoor spaces. “As the 2025 (plan) confirms, outdoor recreation is essential to Colorado’s economy and quality of life,” said Colorado Parks and Wildlife Director Jeff Davis, in a statement. Here are four takeaways from the 242-page report : Last year, outdoor recreation generated $65.8 billion in economic output for the state economy, and recreationists in Colorado spent over $52.1 billion on trips and equipment, according to the report. “However, the economic impacts do not stop there — outdoor recreation spending has positive ripple effects across other sectors through supply purchases, wages and other factors,” the report states. “People and businesses are drawn to Colorado by its outdoor recreation opportunities, further driving the state’s economic engine.” The industry created $36.5 billion in the state’s gross domestic product, which is 8.5% of the state’s entire GDP, and generated $11.2 billion in local, state and federal tax revenue. Over 400,000 jobs — 12.5% of the state’s labor force — were supported by outdoor recreation in 2023. Another report released last month by the Bureau of Economic Analysis shows Colorado ranks in the top 10 for states with the largest outdoor recreation economies. Outdoor recreation use remains historically high, though the report suggests a slowdown in some areas. A survey of 479 public land managers in Colorado indicates that outdoor recreation surged during the first years of the COVID-19 pandemic . Most respondents represented local agencies, such as county, city and town governments. Over half — 62% — indicated visitation had increased during the height of the pandemic from approximately March 2020 through December 2021. During the fiscal years of 2020 and 2021, the number of sales of hunting and fishing licenses reached above 1.1 million but dipped below 1 million in 2022, 2023 and 2024. “There was an increase in fishing license sales during the COVID-19 pandemic, but the sales volumes appear to have returned to pre-pandemic levels,” the report states. Between fiscal years 2019 and 2024, boat registration sales decreased by around 3% while hunting license sales increased by around 1%. Sales of big game hunting licenses decreased by about 10% while the sales of other hunting licenses increased by 11%. In a survey of 765 Colorado residents, 72% said they recreate outdoors at least once per week but less than half — 42% — said they participated more frequently in outdoor recreation following the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. Most respondents — 69% — expected their participation in the next year to remain about the same compared to the previous year. Nationally, the number of Americans who recreate outdoors continues to increase, with 55% of the U.S. population above the age of 6 engaging in outdoor recreation in 2022. “However, for the first time since the 2020 pandemic, the number of outings per participant decreased, indicating that new participants are continuing to recreate outdoors post-pandemic, but they tend to do so less frequently,” the report reads. Other state agencies like the Colorado Tourism Office are also working to help manage the influx of recreationists in recent years. Earlier this year, the office released its 158-page Destination Stewardship Strategic Plan , a 10-year framework for state, regional and local officials — as well as community groups, tribes and landowners — to partner on tourism management and recreation sustainability initiatives. According to the Colorado Parks and Wildlife report, 1.2 million Coloradans — 20% of the state’s population — lack access to open space, parks, trails and water within a 10-minute walk from home. At the same time, just 1% of the population lives outside a 10-mile drive to any recreation opportunity. The largest gaps in recreation access are concentrated along the Eastern Plains. In surveys of state residents and public land managers, both groups said protecting existing infrastructure at recreation sites was a top priority. Sixty percent of respondents who were Colorado residents said they want land managers to prioritize the operation of current outdoor areas and facilities. The top three amenities that users want prioritized and maintained were wildlife viewing areas, dirt or soft surface trails and paths and picnic areas for small and large groups. For land managers, the vast majority — 87% — identified maintaining existing recreation infrastructure or resources as the highest priority for current management needs. Eighty-three percent identified maintaining existing trails as the highest trail-related priority. The top three priorities regarding new outdoor recreation included developing new trails or expanding existing trails, connecting to adjacent or regional trail systems and developing neighborhood, community or special-use parks or facilities, such as playgrounds. Most respondents — 79% — identified maintaining visitor safety and protection as the highest priority for visitor service. The issue ranked third in priorities in the previous two reports. The 242-page report dedicates one page to the impact of climate change on the state’s outdoor recreation economy. The section warns of threats to the ski industry, fishing and wildlife-related activities. “Colorado is warming, and our warming climate is already impacting recreation in our state,” the report reads. Over the last 130 years, Colorado warmed 2.9 degrees Fahrenheit and is expected to warm an additional 1-4 degrees by 2050, under a medium-low greenhouse gas emissions scenario. By 2050, an average year is likely to be as warm as the very warmest years on record through 2022, and by 2070, an average year is likely to be warmer than the warmest years through 2022, according to the report. The report states Colorado’s declining snowpack, particularly at lower elevations, will lead to a shortened winter recreation period while expanding shoulder season recreation opportunities. “Lower streamflows and warmer waters will force rafting outfitters in some areas to shift operations earlier in the year, and are leading to more voluntary or mandatory fishing closures to protect heat-stressed fish,” the report states. “Some areas in Colorado are already shifting to stocking more heat-tolerant fish, such as brown trout.” The report adds that more frequent heat waves, particularly in the Front Range and Grand Junction areas, will likely increase pressure on mountain communities and parks with water resources and may drive greater recreation activity in the early morning and evening. “Wildfires can also cause area closures, smoke and resulting health impacts on the public, and post-fire flooding and landslides that disrupt transportation routes and aquatic ecosystems,” the report states. “Outdoor industries are already adapting to changing conditions and may increasingly need to modify operations and infrastructure as warming continues.” The full Statewide Comprehensive Outdoor Recreation Plan can be viewed at CPW.State.co.us/plans-and-reports .