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Pac-12 recruiting: The top offensive prospects in the West in the class of 2024 (and the favorites to land them)

Published Sun, 16 Feb 2025 16:05:00 GMT

The Hotline is delighted to provide Pac-12 fans with a weekly dive into the recruiting process through the eyes and ears of Brandon Huffman, the Seattle-based national recruiting editor for 247Sports.The following report was provided to the Hotline on May 11 …It has long been stated that the Pac-12 must retain the best high school players in its footprint. That necessity has never been more glaring than after the 2023 NFL Draft, when the top two picks were from Southern California but played for Alabama (Bryce Young) and Ohio State (CJ Stroud) instead of a Pac-12 school.With the conference in transition — USC and UCLA are joining the Big Ten next summer — the following five offensive prospects in the high school class of 2024 are critically important to the Pac-12’s recruiting fortunes.1. OT Brandon Baker (Santa Ana, Calif.)High school: Mater Dei247 Sports national rating: Five stars; No. 1 offensive tackleComment: Baker went on record last summer questioning USC a...

How does the NBA lottery work, and who has the best chance to draft Wembanyama?

Published Sun, 16 Feb 2025 16:05:00 GMT

The NBA draft lottery has offered teams a quick path from bad to good for nearly four decades. The stakes this year are unusually high with French phenom Victor Wembanyama the top prospect.The lottery format has undergone a few changes since the New York Knicks won the first one in 1985, when there were seven teams. There are twice as many lottery teams now, all hoping, like the Knicks did when they drafted Patrick Ewing, to have luck strike at the right time and land the player who can turn around a franchise.The Detroit Pistons, Houston Rockets and Spurs all have a 14% chance of getting him, but there will be 14 teams at the McCormick Place Convention Center that have hopes.WHEN IS THE NBA DRAFT LOTTERY?The league will hold this year’s lottery Tuesday night in Chicago, with the winner getting the No. 1 pick and the chance to draft Victor Wembanyama. He is considered the best prospect in years — perhaps since LeBron James went No. 1 20 years ago. The lottery telecast begins at 8 p....

Officials say suspect appears to have planned ‘fireball’ attack that severely injured German police

Published Sun, 16 Feb 2025 16:05:00 GMT

BERLIN (AP) — An explosion at a residential building in Germany that left nine first responders seriously injured appears to have been a planned attack carried out by a man wanted in connection with an unpaid fine, officials said Friday.Police and firefighters had gone to the building in the western town of Ratingen on Thursday after receiving a call about a helpless person inside a top-floor apartment.What started out as a routine operation turned into an inferno when a man opened the apartment door and threw out a burning object that exploded into a fireball, severely injuring the first responders.“We are deeply shocked,” said Thomas Hendele, who heads the administration in Mettmann county, of which Ratingen is a part. “We are angry. Angry at this act, for which there is no justification.”A special operations unit detained a 57-year-old German man as a suspect hours later. Investigations showed the man had stockpiled flammable liquids in the building, indicating he had...

More red ink: Congressional budget agency projects bigger deficits as debt talks continue

Published Sun, 16 Feb 2025 16:05:00 GMT

WASHINGTON (AP) — This year’s projected government budget deficit has jumped by $130 billion, due in part to a proposed change to student loan repayment plans and a series of bank rescues organized by federal regulators, the Congressional Budget Office said Friday .Revenue collections through April were lower than the agency expected, resulting in a projected budget deficit of $1.5 trillion for 2023, the office’s update to the nation’s 10-year budget outlook says.Overall, the nonpartisan office expects deficits to increase by $20 trillion during the 2024 to 2033 period, with a caution that the projections are “subject to a great deal of uncertainty.” That’s about the same as the originally projected shortfall. The updated 10-year projection comes as President Joe Biden and congressional leaders try to break an impasse on raising the legal limit on federal borrowing to support the government’s debts. Democrats and Republicans have disagreed on whether and how ...

Ex-correctional officer charged with sexually abusing 3 inmates in California federal prison cells

Published Sun, 16 Feb 2025 16:05:00 GMT

WASHINGTON (AP) — A former correctional officer at a federal women’s prison in California where inmates say they were subjected to rampant sexual abuse has been arrested and accused of abusing three inmates in his care, the Justice Department said Friday.Darrell Wayne Smith, who worked at the Federal Correctional Institution in Dublin, was arrested on Thursday in Florida on a 12-count indictment. He is accused of sexually abusing the three women in their prison cells and in the prison’s laundry room between 2019 and 2021, prosecutors said.Smith is at least the sixth employee at the Dublin prison charged with abusing inmates. An Associated Press investigation last year revealed a culture of abuse and cover-up that had persisted for years at the prison, about 20 miles (30 kilometers) east of Oakland. That reporting led to increased scrutiny from Congress and pledges from the federal Bureau of Prisons that it would fix problems and change the culture at the prison.The prison’s former w...

Army seeks to ID unknown liquid in WWI munition, similar to chemical weapon in Spring Valley cleanup

Published Sun, 16 Feb 2025 16:05:00 GMT

The U.S. Army is still trying to identify an unknown liquid found inside one of two World War I-era weapons that were discovered three weeks ago, in Fort Totten Park, in Northeast D.C., and whether there’s a connection to the chemical weapons found during the decadeslong cleanup of a former chemical weapons site near the American University campus.U.S. Army Corps of Engineers spokeswoman Cynthia Mitchell told WTOP a 75 mm shell discovered in mound of soil by a National Park Service employee was empty, after analysis at Marine Corps Base Quantico.However, “the 6-inch Livens projectile has a liquid fill that will require further analysis,” Mitchell said.A Livens Projector was a simple mortar-like weapon that could throw large drums filled with toxic or flammable chemicals. The weapons were used during World War I, specifically between 1916 through 1918.Livens projectors were encountered often during the Ward 3 Spring Valley cleanup, at the former American University ...

USAID chief optimistic on Serbia-Kosovo talks, pledges support

Published Sun, 16 Feb 2025 16:05:00 GMT

PRISTINA, Kosovo (AP) — The United States’ top international development official on Friday said Washington is focusing on the urgency of normalizing relations between Kosovo and Serbia in EU-brokered talks between the two former war foes. USAID Administrator Samantha Power has been in Kosovo for the past two days, following a three-day visit to Serbia. As the most senior representative of U.S. President Joe Biden to visit Kosovo recently, she said her country’s focus now was on “the importance of implementation of the agreements that will produce a normalization that will be incredibly important for Kosovo and for Serbia.”Over the two days of her trip, Power visited a local farm and food processing facility. She met with young entrepreneurs at a hub for innovation and also spoke to young peacemakers bridging divides between Kosovo and Serbia.“Normalization is going to be really, really good for business,” she said at a news conference. “The good that normalization will do for...

GOP lawmaker: Former Trump prosecutor declined to provide details on hush-money investigation

Published Sun, 16 Feb 2025 16:05:00 GMT

WASHINGTON (AP) — An ex-prosecutor who once oversaw Manhattan’s yearslong investigation of former President Donald Trump repeatedly declined to substantively answer questions at a closed-door meeting Friday of the House Judiciary Committee, according to a Republican lawmaker in the meeting.Rep. Darrell Issa, a California Republican, exited the meeting and said Mark Pomerantz, the former prosecutor, repeatedly invoked the Fifth Amendment that protects people from providing self-incriminating testimony.Pomerantz, who left Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s office after disagreements over the direction of the case, was subpoenaed by the Republican-controlled House committee. The panel, chaired by GOP Rep. Jim Jordan, is probing how Bragg handled Trump’s historic indictment.Bragg had sued to halt Jordan’s subpoena of Pomerantz, but last month agreed to Pomerantz’s testify after a delay and a condition that lawyers from the prosecutor’s office b...

China orders recall of 1.1M Teslas to fix accelerator pedal problem that raises crash risk

Published Sun, 16 Feb 2025 16:05:00 GMT

DETROIT (AP) — Chinese safety regulators have ordered Tesla to recall 1.1 million vehicles because drivers might step on the accelerator for too long, increasing the risk of a crash.The State Administration for Market Regulation said in a notice Friday that the recall involves imported Model S, X and 3 models as well as the Chinese-made Models Y and 3. The models were produced between January 12, 2019 and April 24, 2023, but it wasn’t clear from the notice whether those dates applied only to the Chinese-made vehicles.The recall, which starts May 29, was triggered because drivers aren’t able to select the regenerative braking system and because of the lack of a warning when they press hard on the accelerator pedal, the watchdog said on its website.The combination of these issues “may increase the probability of mistakenly stepping on the accelerator pedal for a long time, which may increase the risk of collision and pose a safety hazard,” it said.Regenerative braking takes ener...

Carolina Hurricanes ride collective scoring into the East final of the NHL playoffs

Published Sun, 16 Feb 2025 16:05:00 GMT

RALEIGH, N.C. (AP) — It wasn’t long after the Carolina Hurricanes had closed out a second playoff opponent when defenseman Brent Burns began heaping praise on the team’s forwards for making it easy for the defensemen to jump into the offense.One of those forwards, Jesper Fast, sat to his right and couldn’t hold back. “Well,” Fast said, “you make it pretty easy for us as well.”The Hurricanes weren’t supposed to be able to do this: advancing in the playoffs after a series of injuries hit their forward group to sideline some of their most naturally talented goal-scorers. Yet the collective approach has worked so well that the Hurricanes are finding the net more frequently than they did in the regular season despite being down in bodies — and now has them in the Eastern Conference Final.“It’s really a five-man group,” Burns said after Thursday’s 3-2 overtime win in Game 5 to eliminate the New Jersey Devils. “We talk about that. On the nights things ar...