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Come for the birding, stay for the brunch — Prince George’s Co. wraps up Black Birder’s Week

Published Thu, 20 Feb 2025 16:04:55 GMT

Maria Elena Montero wants everyone to find the same joy she feels when she goes bird watching.Montero, who works at the tourism agency Experience Prince George’s, will be leading a birding and brunch event Saturday, the final event of Black Birder’s Week.She said that, as a person of color, “I’m definitely a rare bird out there, right? I’m the only one who looks like me.”That’s why Black Birder’s Week was founded three years ago.Black bird watchers, ecologists and scientists compared notes on how they were challenged in the field after an incident in New York City in which a white woman called police after a Black birder in Central Park asked her to leash her dog.Since then, Black Birder’s Week has turned into a celebration of the increased interest in getting outdoors and the message that, as Montero said, “nature belongs to everyone.”As a longtime birder, Montero said the “healing power of nature” can be restorative. Just being outside, observing birds, listening to th...

China’s Ukraine envoy calls for governments to ‘stop sending weapons to the battlefield’ and negotiate peace

Published Thu, 20 Feb 2025 16:04:55 GMT

BEIJING (AP) — China’s Ukraine envoy calls for governments to ‘stop sending weapons to the battlefield’ and negotiate peace.Source

City: Opa-Locka Police Chief and former BSO Sheriff Scott Israel to announce resignation

Published Thu, 20 Feb 2025 16:04:55 GMT

Opa-Locka Police Chief and former Broward County Sheriff Scott Israel will announce his resignation from the law enforcement agency, city officials said.According to a release from the city, Israel will confirm he is resigning at a news conference scheduled for Friday morning at the city’s municipal complex.Israel’s resignation comes just over a year after he was named Opa-Locka’s chief of police.Israel was removed from leading the Broward Sheriff’s Office following the response to the mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in 2018. He was widely criticized at the time for his handling of the massacre.Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis removed Israel from his post after being a BSO sheriff for six years.

For the first time, you can see Mars as it is right now

Published Thu, 20 Feb 2025 16:04:55 GMT

(CNN) — Mars is making its live streaming debut, and the show will reveal the red planet in a whole new light.On Friday, the European Space Agency is set to stream on YouTube an hour of the first live images directly from Mars, according to a statement from the agency.The event is celebrating the 20th anniversary of the launch of the agency’s Mars Express — a mission to take three-dimensional images of the planet’s surface to see it in more complete detail.You can watch the stream on ESA’s YouTube channel for an hour starting at 6 p.m. Central European Time, or noon ET Friday. While it won’t be truly live, there will be a new image about every 50 seconds of that hour, the agency said.Updates will also be available on ESA’s Twitter account and the hashtag #MarsLIVE, the agency said.“Normally, we see images from Mars and know that they were taken days before,” said James Godfrey, spacecraft operations manager at ESA’s mission control center in Darmstadt, Germany, in a statem...

Message for the stars: NASA’s Europa Clipper mission to carry poem and names into space

Published Thu, 20 Feb 2025 16:04:55 GMT

(CNN) – You’ve heard about a ‘message in a bottle,’ but what about a message in a bottle that will end up… in space?!NASA is offering an extraordinary opportunity for space enthusiasts and poetry lovers alike to become part of its upcoming Europa Clipper mission. In a unique initiative, the space agency is inviting the public to contribute their names to an original poem penned by acclaimed U.S. poet Ada Limón titled “In Praise of Mystery: A Poem for Europa.”Come October 2024, when the spacecraft embarks on its momentous journey, the poem adorned with the names of participants will be on board. This poetic masterpiece will traverse billions of miles to reach its ultimate destination, Jupiter’s intriguing moon, Europa. The primary objective of the mission is to explore the potential of the vast ocean thought to exist beneath Europa’s icy crust and investigate its ability to support life.If you wish to be part of this cosmic endeavor, ma...

Friday is National Donut Day

Published Thu, 20 Feb 2025 16:04:55 GMT

(CNN) — The first Friday in June — June 2 this year — is National Donut Day.Started by the Salvation Army in Chicago in 1938, the day honors the group’s “donut lassies,” who served treats and provided assistance to soldiers on the front lines during World War I. (And this isn’t to be confused with National Doughnut Day, which is in November and honors the actual food; though both days are celebrated by eating doughnuts.)Doughnuts have been around since long before the First World War, and we have the Dutch to thank for them. The Dutch would make “olykoek,” which translates to oily cake. The first Dutch doughnuts didn’t have a hole, but they were fried in hot oil and the dough was sweet.It wasn’t until 1847 that the holed-out doughnut we know and love today appeared. Hanson Gregory, 16 at the time, claimed credit. Sick of doughnuts with a raw center, he used a pepper pot to punch out holes to help his doughnuts cook more evenly.By 1920, Adolph Levitt, a Russian living in New York, ha...

Police investigating fiery fatal crash in Lynn

Published Thu, 20 Feb 2025 16:04:55 GMT

Police are investigating a fiery crash in Lynn on Thursday night that left a person dead and a building damaged.Officers responding to a report of a car into a building on Boston Street around 11 p.m. found a pickup truck that appeared to have hit a building that housed a paint store and a dry cleaning business.Witness video showed the pickup fully engulfed in flames.Police later confirmed the driver died in the crash. Their name has not been released.No additional information was immediately available.The crash remains under investigation.This is a developing news story; stay with 7NEWS on-air and online for the latest details.

No school Friday at Winter Hill Community School in Somerville after concrete falls from ceiling

Published Thu, 20 Feb 2025 16:04:55 GMT

The Winter Hill Community Innovation School in Somerville will be closed Friday after a small section of concrete fell into a stairwell inside the building, school and city officials said. Officials said the concrete fell outside school operating hours, while the school was unoccupied. The stairwell was later closed to students and staff while a structural engineer was brought in and while city Department of Public Works staff responded, according to officials. Officials said DPW crews had “conducted minor repairs” and had been monitoring the building’s interior as of Thursday night. The planned closure on Friday now comes “out of an abundance of caution,” according to officials, to let engineers “conduct a more thorough review of the building.”In a message signed by Somerville’s Interim Superintendent of Schools Jeff Curley, Mayor Katjana Ballantyne and school principal Courtney Gosselin, officials said they are working on a plan to temporarily relocate classroo...

Summer Heat & Storms To Chilly Air

Published Thu, 20 Feb 2025 16:04:55 GMT

High heat made it in for many locations away from the coastline yesterday as inland temps soared into the lower 90s. While it was cooler at the coast, temps were still well into the 70s and 80s,allowing for a great beach day overall. Today, temps will be similar, 80s near the coast, low 90s inland. The difference today, more clouds build and scattered showers and storms break out this afternoon. After noon, scattered storms start to break out across the interior. Those storms will be most numerous inland early to mid afternoon. The risk for a shower or thunderstorm east of I-95 is highest late afternoon/early this evening. Widespread severe weather is not expected, although one or two storms could produce strong wind gusts and small hail. Localized downpours and lightning will generally be the main risks with storms. The steering winds that guide these storms are light, so slow moving downpours could produce localized street flooding. As a cold front swings through this evening, sca...

US jobs report for May could point to slower hiring as Fed rate hikes cool demand for workers

Published Thu, 20 Feb 2025 16:04:55 GMT

WASHINGTON (AP) — America’s surprisingly resilient job market may have delivered yet another month of solid hiring and pay gains in May, if economists’ forecasts prove to be correct. Still, some signs of cooling could emerge in the government report being released Friday.Analysts have estimated that hiring slowed to a still-healthy pace of 190,000 added jobs last month, according to a survey by the data provider FactSet. That would mark a decline from the robust 253,000 jobs that were gained in April and would fall below the average for the previous three months of about 220,000. The unemployment rate is projected to rise slightly to 3.5% from a five-decade low of 3.4%.Companies have steadily slowed hiring since January, when the three-month average pace of gains was an unusually strong 330,000.Federal Reserve officials would welcome a more modest rate of job growth. The central bank has raised its benchmark interest rate 10 times in 14 months in an a...