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Bill Madden: Oakland A’s continue to be an embarrassment to MLB, but so do a half-dozen other teams

Published Fri, 27 Dec 2024 09:10:03 GMT

The sorry plight of the Oakland Athletics, which came to a head this week with the announcement the team will be pulling up stakes and heading to a new ballpark in Las Vegas, is the most glaring example of the bigger problem vexing baseball — the lack of competitiveness on and off the field — that was clearly not sufficiently addressed in the most recent collective bargaining agreement.In at least a half-dozen cities, they are charging major league prices to see what are essentially minor league baseball teams.Going into the weekend, the hapless A’s along with the Royals, Rockies, Reds, Nationals and Tigers had a combined run differential of minus-261. At the same time, the A’s, Marlins, Royals, Reds and Pirates were all averaging under 17,000 fans per game. Any way you look at it, this is not a good look for baseball.But nothing has been more of a black eye for baseball this year than the A’s with their dilapidated stadium and disaster of an owner in J...

3 San Diego craft breweries are among the most popular in the US: data

Published Fri, 27 Dec 2024 09:10:03 GMT

SAN DIEGO -- San Diego's craft beer culture has been buzzing through Southern California, but new data shows "The Capital of Craft" has an influence throughout the entire country.With more than 150 brewery locations throughout the county, according to the San Diego Brewers Guild, it's no surprise that some of best local brews have taken the nation by storm one pint at a time. These San Diego breweries won medals at the 2023 Brewers Cup of California In fact, there are three particular San Diego craft breweries that are considered to be among the most popular in the U.S., according to new data from the American Brewers Association.The group released its 2022 list of the top 50 producing craft brewing companies on Tuesday, which is based on national beer sales volume.The Brewers Association says the number of operating craft breweries climbed last year, reaching an all-time high of 9,552. This included 2,035 microbreweries, 3,418 brewpubs, 3,838 taproom breweries and 261 regional cr...

After Russia bombs own city, explosive found at same site

Published Fri, 27 Dec 2024 09:10:03 GMT

Seventeen apartment buildings were evacuated Saturday in a Russian city near the Ukrainian border after an explosive device was found at the site where a bomb accidentally dropped by a Russian warplane caused a powerful blast this week, authorities said.The bomb blast late Thursday rocked part of Belgorod, leaving a large crater and three people injured. The Russian Defense Ministry quickly acknowledged that a weapon accidentally released by one of its own Su-34 bombers caused the explosion. The ministry said an investigation was underway but did not elaborate on the details of the weapon, which military experts said likely was a powerful 500-kilogram (1,100-pound) bomb.The governor of Belgorod province, Vyacheslav Gladkov, reported Saturday that sappers examining the site of Thursday’s blast found and decided to detonate what he called an “explosive object” that was “in the immediate vicinity of residential buildings.” The precautionary evacuations ended later in the day, acc...

Heat wave in Thailand prompts warning to stay indoors

Published Fri, 27 Dec 2024 09:10:03 GMT

BANGKOK (AP) — Extreme heat that has sent temperatures soaring in Thailand as authorities warned people to stay indoors. The Meteorological Department’s forecast on Saturday said the highest temperature in the next 24 hours could reach 43 degrees Celsius (107 degrees Fahrenheit) in country’s north and could hit 40 C (104 F) in the capital, Bangkok. The highest temperature on Saturday was in the northern province of Phetchabun at 42.5 C (109 F).“Even if I turn the air conditioning to 20 degrees, I still sweat,” said 37-year-old Supichaya Jittaleela, who attended an outdoor political rally despite the heat. People should be wary of extremely high temperatures as well as sudden summer storms until at least next week, the weather department said. A police officer directing traffic in Samut Prakarn, a province just south of Bangkok, collapsed and died of heart stroke, media reported this week.Saturday’s highest heat index — which measures what the temperature feels like due t...

Oklahoma county worried about fallout from racist recording

Published Fri, 27 Dec 2024 09:10:03 GMT

IDABEL, Okla. (AP) — So many residents of northern Texas cross the border into McCurtain County in far southeast Oklahoma each week that the area has earned the nickname of the “Dallas-Fort Worth Hamptons.”With its clean rivers and lakes, these forested foothills of the Ouchita Mountains have become dotted with luxury cabins, and a tourism boom over the last two decades has fueled a renaissance in the region. Jobs are no longer limited to the timber industry or the chicken processing plant, and parents are more optimistic that their children won’t have to leave the community to find work.But the growing optimism about the county’s future took a gut punch last week when the local newspaper identified several county officials, including Sheriff Kevin Clardy and a county commissioner, who were caught on tape discussing killing journalists and lynching Black people. One commissioner has already resigned, and elected officials, including the mayor of Idabel and Republican Gov...

Rape lawsuit trial puts spotlight back on Trump and women

Published Fri, 27 Dec 2024 09:10:03 GMT

NEW YORK (AP) — Former President Donald Trump’s behavior toward women, long a source of flashpoints in his political career, now faces a new level of scrutiny: a trial in a lawsuit accusing him of rape.Jury selection is set to start Tuesday in the case filed by former advice columnist E. Jean Carroll, who says Trump raped her in a luxury New York department store dressing room in the 1990s.Trump, who is unlikely to attend the trial, has called the accusations “a complete con job.” Carroll, who is seeking unspecified damages, casts the case as a #MeToo-inspired quest for accountability from the epitome of prominent men.“I’m filing this lawsuit not just for myself but for every woman in America who has been grabbed, groped, harassed, sexually assaulted and has spoken up and still has been disgraced, shamed or fired,” Carroll said early on.The lawsuit is putting Trump’s history with women under a microscope as he runs to return to the White House. But if a trial over a rape accus...

Campaign for Greek election begins with dissolved parliament

Published Fri, 27 Dec 2024 09:10:03 GMT

ATHENS, Greece (AP) — The campaign for Greece’s May 21 national election officially opened Saturday with the dissolution of the parliament that was elected in July 2019.Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis met with President Katerina Sakellaropoulou to propose the dissolution and she accepted it, as obliged by the Constitution of Greece. Mitsotakis said that with less than three months before lawmakers’ four-year terms were due to end, next month’s voting does not count as an early election.Shortly after his meeting with the president, Mitsotakis gave a televised address in which he defended his government’s record. He listed its achievements as well as the challenges ahead, and sought to make the case for a stable government going forward.However, the prime minister’s center-right New Democracy will be hard-pressed to continue leading Greece in another single-party government. Next month’s legislative election will be the country’s first under a pr...

School violence in Brazil mirrors US. Its reaction doesn’t

Published Fri, 27 Dec 2024 09:10:03 GMT

About two weeks after a man killed four children in a Brazilian daycare center, authorities already have rounded up some 300 adults and minors nationwide accused of spreading hate speech or stoking school violence.Little has been revealed about the unprecedented crackdown, which risks judicial overreach, but it underlines the determination of the country’s response across federal, state and municipal levels. Brazil’s all-hands effort to stamp out its emerging trend of school attacks stands in contrast to the U.S., where such attacks have been more frequent and more deadly for a longer period, yet where measures nowadays are incremental.Actions adopted in the U.S. – and some of its perceived shortcomings – are informing the Brazilian response, said Renan Theodoro, a researcher with Center for the Study of Violence at the University of Sao Paulo.“We have learned from the successes and the mistakes of other countries, especially the United States,” Theodoro told The Associa...

What’s next for abortion pill after Supreme Court’s action

Published Fri, 27 Dec 2024 09:10:03 GMT

WASHINGTON (AP) — Nothing will change for now. That’s what the Supreme Court said Friday evening about access to a widely used abortion pill.A court case that began in Texas has sought to roll back Food and Drug Administration approval of the drug, mifepristone. Lower courts had said that women seeking the drug should face more restrictions on getting it while the case continues, but the Supreme Court disagreed.The court’s action almost certainly will leave access to mifepristone unchanged at least into next year, as appeals play out, including a potential appeal to the high court.The new abortion controversy comes less than a year after the Supreme Court’s conservative majority overturned Roe v. Wade and allowed more than a dozen states to effectively ban abortion outright.The following is a look at the drug at issue in the new case, how the case got to the nation’s highest court and what’s next in the legal case.___WHAT IS MIFEPRISTONE?Mifepristone was appr...

5 charged in youth game brawl; man later died of heart event

Published Fri, 27 Dec 2024 09:10:03 GMT

ALBURGH, Vt. (AP) — Five adults have been charged with misdemeanor assault for a brawl that erupted at a middle school basketball game earlier this year, Vermont State Police said, but they won’t face any charges related to the death of one person involved in the fight who later had an acute cardiac event.Police watched multiple videos of the Jan. 31 boys basketball game. They determined that a verbal dispute between groups of fans for the Alburgh and Albans City School escalated into a fight on the court.Police said Friday they found “no evidence to support criminal charges related to the death” of 60-year-old Russell Giroux, who died more than two hours after the altercation at the Alburgh Community Education Center. The medical examiner determined last month that Giroux’s cause of death was an “acute cardiac event following altercation in an individual with coronary artery atherosclerosis.” The manner of death will be listed as “undetermined.”The five, who range in age from...