Author: CNN

CNN
 — 

The nascent 2024 presidential campaign seemed to hit a different gear this week with Nikki Haley entering the Republican primary. The former South Carolina governor and onetime United Nations ambassador joins former President Donald Trump as the only major competitors to declare bids for the presidency.

Haley’s announcement, and the lack of one so far from President Joe Biden and a slew of Republicans, including Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, got me thinking: Do primary winners tend to be early or late entrants to the presidential race?

The answer depends on who else is running. If you’re in a primary without an incumbent, then it’s better to be early, while it matters far less with an incumbent running.

The modern primary era began in 1972 on the Democratic side and in 1976 on the Republican side. Since then, hundreds of major candidates have decided to run for president or at least formed exploratory committees with the Federal Election Commission. For each of them, I jotted down whichever date was first, to see if there was a pattern.

It turns out that the median date for candidates to enter a presidential primary without an incumbent has been March 16 the year before the general election. There has been a wide variation on that from year to year. Some years, the median candidate gets in really early (January 2007 for the 2008 cycle on both the Democratic and Republican side), while other years it’s much later (August 1991 for the 1992 cycle on the Democratic side).

There is no real correlation between how late or how early a field forms and the eventual nominee’s success in the general election. Democrats, for example, won the presidency in both 1992 and 2008, even with a much later start in 1992.

What does seem to matter for winning a primary is when candidates get into the race compared with their competitors. In the 17 primaries since 1972 that did not feature an incumbent, 10 of the winning candidates entered earlier than that year’s median candidate. Two of the winners were the median candidates. Five got into the race later than the median candidate.

There were six who started running about one and a half months or more before that cycle’s median candidate. Democrat George McGovern, in the 1972 cycle, started nearly a full year before the median hopeful that cycle.

McGovern remains the only major-party nominee who had less than 5% of the vote in early national surveys while the polling leader had more than 20% support. McGovern’s success is part of the reason why primary campaigns seem to start so early compared with when the actual voting takes place.

Getting in the public eye early, raising money and building an organization are key to winning a presidential campaign. If you fall too far behind, it can be a disaster.

Even candidates you might “think” entered the race late, often got in far earlier. Trump’s June 2015 official announcement became well known for his ride down the escalator. Less remembered was the fact that he started an exploratory committee in March 2015, and he was already campaigning at the time.

Of course, joining a presidential race early is no guarantee of success. Former Florida Gov. Reubin Askew in the 1984 cycle and ex-Maryland Rep. John Delaney in the 2020 cycle filed with the FEC for the Democratic primary less than a year after the previous presidential election. Neither got very far.

Still, on the whole, joining early is better than getting in late. After all, the winners who have gotten in late didn’t get that late. The latest, for example, was Republican Ronald Reagan in the 1980 campaign. He entered less than three months after the median candidate.

Biden, in the 2020 cycle, was the other winning candidate to enter more than 15 days after the median candidate.

Both Biden and Reagan shared some qualities that few others had. They had previously run for president and were well known nationally, so they didn’t need time to build name recognition or a campaign and fundraising apparatus.

What we’ve seen more often is the late-entering “savior” candidate who enters on a white horse – and fails. Think about former Tennessee Sen. Fred Thompson in the 2008 cycle and then-Texas Gov. Rick Perry in the 2012 cycle. Both Republicans entered with a splash and proceeded to win zero primaries combined. The same was true for Democrat Mike Bloomberg in the 2020 cycle, though he won American Samoa.

For incumbents, meanwhile, there’s a much greater ability to wait before indicating publicly that they’re going for another term.

The median date, since 1976, for presidents to either form an exploratory committee or announce their campaign is April 30 of the year before the general election. That’s about a month and a half later than when the median nonincumbent’s campaign gets started.

Some presidents do go early. Trump’s failed 2020 reelection campaign started the moment he entered the White House. (He formed an exploratory committee on Inauguration Day.)

Later is the general rule, however, for incumbents. Reagan’s highly successful 1984 reelection campaign, for instance, didn’t get underway until October 1983. George H.W. Bush, likewise, got going on his 1992 reelection bid in October 1991.

It shouldn’t be too surprising that incumbents can afford to go later. They rarely have any major competitors for their party nomination. They have universal name recognition, and incumbents don’t need the same amount of time to ramp up their campaign infrastructure to raise money.

All of that seems to match up with what Biden is going through at this point. In fact, some reports suggest he’ll likely announce a reelection bid in April.

But for Republicans wondering whether it’s too soon to start campaigning, history is pretty clear. It’s better to start sooner or you might fall too far behind to recover.

Seoul, South Korea
CNN
 — 

North Korea said Sunday it conducted a test of an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) a day earlier, its third known test of the long-range weapon in less than a year.

The state-run Korean Central News Agency said a Hwasong-15 ICBM was fired in a “surprise ICBM launching drill” under the written orders of leader Kim Jong Un.

The missile flew 989 kilometers (614 miles) for almost 67 minutes to an altitude of 5,768.5 kilometers (3,584 miles), according to the KCNA report.

It said the test was proof of Pyongyang’s ability to launch a “fatal nuclear counterattack on the hostile forces” and “clear proof of the sure reliability of our powerful physical nuclear deterrent.”

Saturday’s test came after North Korea warned Friday of “unprecedented strong responses” if the United States and South Korea go ahead with planned military exercises.

And on Sunday, Kim Yo Jong, the sister of leader Kim Jong Un and the top official in her brother’s regime, issued another warning.

“We will watch every movement of the enemy and take corresponding and very powerful and overwhelming counteraction against its every move hostile to us,” she said in a statement released by KCNA.

Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida said the missile fired Saturday landed inside Japan’s exclusive economic zone west of the northern main island of Hokkaido, sparking condemnation from the US.

The ICBM test was North Korea’s third in a year.

North Korea launched a missile last March with a slightly longer flight distance and time. That was its first test of such a missile since 2017.

In November, after another similar launch, Pyongyang announced the “test firing of a new kind” ICBM, which it called the Hwasong-17.

Japanese Defense Minister Yasukazu Hamada said at the time it had the potential to reach the US mainland. “The ICBM-class ballistic missile launched this time could have a range of over 15,000 km when calculated based on the flight distance of this ICBM,” Hamada said in a statement. “It depends on the weight of the warhead, but in that case, the US mainland would be included in the range.”

North Korea tests its missiles at a highly lofted trajectory. If they were fired at a flatter trajectory, they would in theory have the ability to reach the US mainland.

The US government described Saturday’s missile launch as “a flagrant violation of multiple UN Security Council resolutions,” according to a statement from White House National Security Council spokesperson Adrienne Watson.

“While [the US Indo-Pacific Command] has assessed it did not pose an immediate threat to U.S. personnel, or territory, or to our allies, this launch needlessly raises tensions and risks destabilizing the security situation in the region,” Watson said. “It only demonstrates that the DPRK continues to prioritize its unlawful weapons of mass destruction and ballistic missile programs over the well-being of its people.”

Watson said the US is urging other countries “to condemn these violations and call on the DPRK to cease its destabilizing actions and engage in serious dialogue.”

Earlier this month, the Kim Jong Un regime showcased almost at least 11 advanced ICBMs at a nighttime military parade in Pyongyang in the biggest display yet of what its state-run media described as North Korea’s “nuclear attack capability.”

Analysts said those missiles appeared to be Hwasong-17s.

Ankit Panda, a nuclear policy expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said on social media that if each missile in the parade were equipped with multiple nuclear warheads, they could represent enough volume to overwhelm US ballistic missile defenses.

Saturday’s test came after the North Korean Foreign Ministry lashed out at the United States and South Korea on Friday over their plans for upcoming military exercises.

Washington and Seoul are expected to hold nuclear tabletop drills next week at the Pentagon, the South Korean Defense Ministry said Friday. The allies are also expected to hold military drills next month in the Korean Peninsula.

North Korea, in the same statement, also said it would consider additional military action if the UN Security Council continues to pressure Pyongyang “as the United States wants.”

In January, Kim Jong Un called for “an exponential increase of the country’s nuclear arsenal” and highlighted the “necessity of mass-producing tactical nuclear weapons,” according to the country’s state media KCNA.

Kim had called for the development of a new “Intercontinental Ballistic Missile system,” capable of a rapid nuclear counterstrike, according to the KCNA report.

New York
CNN Business
 — 

For decades, bright, playful and oddly-shaped fast-food restaurants dotted the roadside along America’s highways.

You’d drive by Howard Johnson’s with its orange roofs and then pass Pizza Hut’s red-topped huts. A few more miles and there was the roadside White Castle with its turrets. Arby’s roof was shaped like a wagon and Denny’s resembled a boomerang. And then McDonald’s, with its neon golden arches towering above its restaurants.

These quirky designs were an early form of brand advertising, gimmicks meant to grab drivers’ attention and get them to stop in.

As fast-food chains spread across the US after World War II, new roadside restaurant brands needed to stand out. Television was new media not yet beamed into every single home, newspapers were still ascendant and social media unimaginable.

So restaurant chains turned to architecture as a key tool to promote their brand and help create their corporate identity.

But the fast-food architecture of today has lost its quirky charm and distinctive features. Shifts in the restaurant industry, advertising and technology have made fast-food exteriors bland and spiritless, critics say.

Goodbye bright colors and unusual shapes. Today, the design is minimal and sleek. Most fast-food restaurants are built to maximize efficiency, not catch motorists’ attention. Many are shaped like boxes, decorated with fake wooden paneling, imitation stone or brick exteriors, and flat roofs. One critic has called this trend “faux five-star restaurants” intended to make customers forget they are eating greasy fries and burgers.

The chains now sport nearly identical looks. Call it the gentrification of fast-food design.

“They’re soulless little boxes,” said Glen Coben, an architect who has designed boutique hotels, restaurants and stores. “They’re like Monopoly homes.”

Fast-food restaurants developed and expanded in the mid-twentieth century with the explosion of car culture and the development of interstate highways.

Large companies came to dominate highway restaurants through a strategy known as “place-product-packaging” – the coordination of building design, decor, menu, service and pricing, according to John Jakle, the author of “Fast Food: Roadside Restaurants in the Automobile Age.”

Fast-food chains’ buildings were designed to catch the eye of potential customers driving by at high speeds and get them to slow down.

“The buildings had to be visually strong and bold,” said Alan Hess, an architecture critic and historian. “That included neon signs and the shape of the building.”

A leading example: McDonald’s design, with its two golden arches sloping over the roof of its restaurant, a style known as Googie.

Introduced in California in 1953, McDonald’s design was influenced by ultra-modern coffee shops and roadside stands of Southern California, then the heart of budding fast-food chains.

The two 25-foot bright yellow sheet-metal arches that rose through the McDonald’s buildings were tall enough to attract drivers amid the clutter of other roadside buildings, their neon trim gleaming day and night. McDonald’s design set off a wave of similar Googie-style architecture at fast-food chains nationwide.

Well into the 1970s, the designs were a prominent fixture of the American roadside, “imprinting the image of fast-food drive-in architecture in the popular consciousness,” Hess wrote in a journal article.

But there was a backlash to this aesthetic. As the environmental movement developed in the 1960s, opposition to the conspicuous Googie style grew. Critics called it “visual pollution.”

“Critics hated this populist, roadside commercial California architecture,” Hess said. Googie style fell out of fashion in the 1970s as fast-food style favored dark colors, brick and mansard roofs.

McDonald’s new prototype became a low-profile mansard roof and brick design with shingle texture. Its arches moved from atop the building to signposts and became McDonald’s corporate logo.

“McDonald’s and Jack in the Box unfurled their neon and Day Glo banners and architectural containers against the endless sky,” the New York Times said in 1978. They have been “toned down with the changing taste of the 60’s and 70’s.” And with the growth of mass communications advertising campaigns, brands no longer relied on architectural features to stand out –they could simply flood the television airwaves.

In the 1980s and 1990s, companies began introducing children’s play areas and party rooms to draw families – additions to existing “brown” structures, Hess said.

The rise of mobile ordering and cost concerns since then altered modern fast-food design.

With fewer people sitting down for full meals at fast-food restaurants, companies didn’t need elaborate dining areas. So today they’re expanding drive-thru lanes, increasing the number of pickup windows and adding digital kiosks in stores.

“We have a lot of red-roof restaurants” that “clearly need to go away,” a Pizza Hut executive said in 2018 of its classic design. The company’s new prototype, “Hut Lanes,” helps to speed up wait times at drive-thru locations.

The new fast-food box designs with their flat roofs are more efficient to heat and cool than older structures, said John Gordon, a restaurant consultant. Kitchens have been reconfigured to speed up food preparation. They’re also cheaper to build, maintain and staff a smaller store.

But in the effort to modernize, some say fast-food design has became homogenized and lost its creative purpose.

“I don’t know if you’d be able to identify what they were if they had a different name on the front,” said Addison Del Mastro, an urbanist writer who documents the history of commercial landscapes. “There’s nothing to engage the wandering imagination.”

CNN
 — 

Hall of Fame horse trainer Bob Baffert will miss the Kentucky Derby for a second straight year after a federal judge denied his request to have a two-year ban by Churchill Downs Inc. (CDI) overturned.

US District Court Judge Rebecca Grady Jennings ruled Friday that Baffert and his attorneys “failed to carry their burden to demonstrate that the Court should impose a preliminary injunction against CDI’s suspension.”

Baffert, 70, argued, among other things, that his suspension had a negative effect on his business and reputation. Baffert also argued that Churchill Downs would not be affected if he were allowed to compete at the Kentucky Derby in May.

Jennings noted his participation could impact the integrity of the race as he is the only trainer who has had horses test positive in consecutive marquee races on Churchill Downs Inc. tracks.

“Failing to punish trainers whose horses test positive in marquee races could harm CDI’s reputation and the integrity of their races,” Jennings wrote.

CNN has reached out to Baffert’s representation for comment. It is unclear if Baffert’s attorneys intend to appeal the federal judge’s decision.

“Churchill Downs is pleased that the Court denied Mr. Baffert’s demand for a preliminary injunction and granted our motion to dismiss on all but one claim, and on that claim, the Court held that Mr. Baffert did not establish a likelihood of success on the merits,” the company that runs the Louisville racetrack said Friday.

“Today’s opinion is a victory for the integrity of horseracing and we will continue to take action to protect the safety of our human and equine athletes.”

Baffert was banned from all three Triple Crown races last year after Medina Spirit’s victory at the 2021 Kentucky Derby was disqualified.

The Kentucky Derby winner, who died in December 2021, tested positive for betamethasone – an anti-inflammatory corticosteroid sometimes used to relieve joint pain – in a blood sample taken after crossing the finish line first. Kentucky horse racing rules don’t allow that and tell trainers to stop using the therapeutic 14 days before an event.

In February 2022, the Kentucky Horse Racing Commission announced its decision to disqualify Medina Spirit and suspended Baffert for 90 days.

In total, Baffert received a two-year suspension from Churchill Downs, a one-year suspension from the New York Racing Association, and was suspended from the 147th running of the Preakness Stakes in Maryland.

A two-time winner of horse racing’s Triple Crown, Baffert is eligible to enter horses this year at the Preakness Stakes in May and at the Belmont Stakes in June. Baffert’s suspension from the Kentucky Derby expires after the 2023 race.

CNN
 — 

Qatari Shiekh Jassim Bin Hamad Al Thani has officially made a bid for English Premier League club Manchester United, Al Thani confirmed in a statement Friday.

“Sheikh Jassim Bin Hamad Al Thani today confirmed his submission of a bid for 100% of Manchester United Football Club,” Al Thani’s statement read.

“The bid plans to return the club to its former glories both on and off the pitch, and – above all – will seek to place the fans at the heart of Manchester United Football club once more.

“The bid will be completely debt free via Sheikh Jassim’s Nine Two Foundation, which will look to invest in the football teams, the training centre, the stadium and wider infrastructure, the fan experience and the communities the club supports.

“The vision of the bid is for Manchester United Football Club to be renowned for footballing excellence, and regarded as the greatest football club in the world.

“More details of the bid will be released, when appropriate, if and when the bid process develops.”

Al Thani is the chairman of one of Qatar’s banks QIB.

CNN has reached out the club and Raine Group – the investment banking firm handling the sale – for comment but did not immediately hear back.

In November, club owners the Glazer family announced their intention to explore the sale of the club.

Al Thani is the second known bidder for the club. British billionaire Jim Ratcliffe’s company INEOS had formally entered the bidding process to buy the club, according to The Times last month.

Raine Group had set a Friday 10 p.m. UK (5 p.m. ET) soft deadline for offers, according to multiple reports.

CNN
 — 

Six people are dead and another was wounded Friday in a series of shootings in Tate County, Mississippi after a man opened fire on his ex-wife and potentially other family members, Tate County Sheriff Brad Lance told CNN.

The suspect, Richard Dale Crum, 52, was arrested after the alleged rampage and is facing charges of first-degree murder in connection with the case, the sheriff’s office said. Additional charges are expected to be filed, the department said.

Authorities got the first 911 call around 11 a.m. ET after the suspect pulled into the parking lot of a store in Arkabutla, a small rural town in northern Mississippi, and fired into the car next to him where he fatally shot the driver, Lance said. Another person in the vehicle was not injured.

Lance said the suspected gunman went into the store then took off, driving to his ex-wife’s home. Lance said the suspect shot and killed his ex-wife before striking her fiancé, who was also in the residence.

Deputies caught up to the suspect after finding a vehicle matching its description in front of a residence that authorities determined belonged to him, Lance said.

On a small road behind the suspect’s home, authorities found two men who had been shot and killed. One was found on the road and the other was in a vehicle, Lance said.

Another two victims were found shot and killed in a house neighboring the suspect’s home, Lance said. According to Lance, deputies believe the suspect might be related to the victims, a man and woman.

Lance said another person was injured in the shootings. That person was treated by emergency crews and not taken to a hospital for additional treatment, Lance said.

Deputies took the suspect into custody as he was trying to leave the scene near his house, Lance said.

Lance said deputies found several handguns and a shotgun in the suspect’s car. The suspect is being held at the Tate County jail, according to Lance.

The victims have not been identified. Lance said a motive is unclear at this time.

CNN has not been able to determine if Crum has obtained an attorney.

The Mississippi Bureau of Investigation is working with local law enforcement in the investigation, Bailey Martin, a spokesperson for the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation told CNN.

Gov. Tate Reeves said he’d been briefed on the shootings, explaining in a tweet that the suspect is believed to have acted alone.

“I will ensure that the full resources of the state are available to law enforcement as we continue to investigate the situation,” Reeves said.

Tate County is in northwest Mississippi, about 30 minutes south of Memphis, Tennessee. 

Correction: A previous version of this story mistakenly transposed a spokesperson’s name for the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation. The person’s name is Bailey Martin.

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CNN
 — 

When you don’t get enough good sleep, the short-term consequences are noticeable — maybe you’re distracted at work or snappy with loved ones. But in the background, irregular and poor-quality sleeping patterns could increase your risk for developing cardiovascular disease, according to a study published this week in the Journal of the American Heart Association.

“This study is one of the first investigations to provide evidence of a connection between irregular sleep duration and irregular sleep timing and atherosclerosis,” said lead study author Kelsie Full, an assistant professor of medicine in the epidemiology division at Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville.

Atherosclerosis is the buildup of plaque in arteries, according to the American Heart Association. This plaque is made up of cholesterol, fatty substances, cellular waste products, calcium and fibrin, a clotting agent in the blood. As plaque accumulates, blood vessel walls thicken, which reduces blood flow and therefore diminishes the amount of oxygen and other nutrients reaching the rest of the body. Atherosclerosis can lead to cardiovascular health conditions, including coronary heart disease, angina, heart attacks, strokes and carotid or peripheral artery disease.

Poor sleep — including poor quality, abnormal quantity and fragmented sleep — has been linked with cardiovascular disease and cardiovascular disease-related deaths before, but less had been known about the specific associations between sleep regularity and atherosclerosis.

Sleep regularity, the new study’s authors defined, is estimated by variations in sleep duration (how long someone sleeps each night) and sleep timing (the time when someone falls asleep nightly) — the fewer variations the better.

The authors set out to learn more about this relationship by analyzing the sleep of older adults — age 69 on average — who participated in the Multi-Ethnic Study of Atherosclerosis, a longitudinal cohort study designed to investigate the prevalence and progression of, and risk factors for, cardiovascular disease. More than 2,000 participants were recruited between 2000 and 2002 from Minnesota, Maryland, Illinois, North Carolina, California and New York state.

During sleep assessments conducted between 2010 and 2013, participants kept a sleep diary over seven consecutive days and wore a wristwatch that tracked their sleep and wake history. Participants also underwent an at-home sleep study to measure breathing, sleep stages, waking during the night and heart rate.

After participants’ cardiovascular health was assessed during the same time frame, the researchers found those with irregular sleep durations — those that varied by 90 minutes to more than two hours within a week — were about 1.4 times more likely to have high coronary artery calcium scores compared with those with more consistent sleep durations. (This calcium score measures the amount of calcified plaque in arteries; a higher number increases the risk of some cardiovascular conditions.) The former group was also more likely to have carotid plaque and abnormal results from a test assessing blood vessel stiffness.

“These results suggest that maintaining regular or habitual sleep durations, or sleeping close to the same total amount of time each night,” Full said, “may play an important role in preventing cardiovascular disease.”

Since sleep quality and atherosclerosis were measured at the same time, researchers weren’t able to assess or prove whether irregular sleep caused the condition — they found only an association between the two.

The findings of the study published Wednesday could be due to both a direct link between sleep and the heart, and/or other lifestyle factors.

“People with less sleep or irregular patterns do tend to have less healthy patterns in other lifestyles (like diet and physical activity),” Dr. Donald Lloyd-Jones, chair of the department of preventive medicine at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago, said via email. Lloyd-Jones wasn’t involved in the study.

“Sleep is critical for the heart to be able to rest, as that is when heart rate slows and blood pressure normally dips,” he added. “Without that regular rest, the heart and vascular system are stressed over time.”

Whatever interrupts a person’s sleep could result in changes that affect the heart, said Dr. Andrew Freeman, director of cardiovascular prevention and wellness at National Jewish Health in Denver. Freeman wasn’t involved in the research.

“Interrupted sleep — especially (in) those with sleep apnea — usually releases catecholamines like adrenaline, which can do all sorts of things if it’s a chronic problem,” Freeman said. Sleep interruptions can also be a sign of increased stress or anxiety, he added.

Still, the study’s findings were in participants with no history of cardiovascular disease, so everyone should take heed, Lloyd-Jones said.

“Sleep matters to all of us,” he added. “It is an important part of the Life’s Essential 8 approach to optimizing your cardiovascular health — which can also help prevent cancers, dementia and many other chronic diseases of aging.”

Life’s Essential 8 is the American Heart Association’s checklist for lifelong good health, which also includes eating healthy, being physically active, quitting tobacco, managing weight, controlling cholesterol and managing blood sugar and blood pressure.

The association recommends adults get seven to nine hours of sleep each night, which is more likely if you have sound sleep hygiene. That involves going to bed at the same time each night, waking at the same time daily, avoiding caffeine after late morning, using your bedroom for sleep and intimacy only, avoiding screen usage before bed and sleeping in a dark, quiet and cool room.

“I also recommend keeping a notebook next to the bed,” Freeman said. “Then when people wake up in the middle of the night, (they should) write down what comes to mind first. It could be they heard a bird or they had to pee or they had some stressor on their mind. And that may be a focus for when they meditate or do something mindful.”

If you have sleep apnea or persistent sleep issues, seek treatment from a sleep specialist or other clinician.

CNN
 — 

Rep. Angie Craig’s office released audio Friday of threatening, vulgar phone calls it said it received after the Minnesota Democrat was physically assaulted in her apartment building in Washington, DC, earlier this month.

One of the callers said, “Finally this piece of sh*t gets accosted. … You deserved it.”

Another caller said, “I hope it happens to you again, because you deserve it. And don’t call the police for help.”

Craig’s office said the disturbing calls and threats came after a segment on Fox News’ “The Five” addressed her attack by a man in her apartment building’s elevator six days earlier. In the segment, the hosts bashed previous efforts by some Democrats to “defund the police”.

“Fox News’ ‘The Five’ launched a new round of false attacks on Rep. Craig’s record during their Wednesday afternoon show, working from opposition research released earlier in the day by the NRCC (National Republican Congressional Committee),” her office said in a news release.

CNN has reached out to Fox News and the NRCC for comment.

“Now that the congresswoman has been victimized, now she feels your pain? Nonsense,” Fox News host Jeanine Pirro said on the segment. “And for those who say ‘at least now she’s on our side.’ Baloney.”

“You’ve done your damage, stick with it,” Pirro added. “Defund the police as it relates to you.”

Craig’s office said she has always been an opponent of defunding police and has worked to support law enforcement.

The threatening phone calls are being reported to US Capitol Police, Craig’s office said.

The man who allegedly attacked Craig made his initial appearance in federal court Monday, where he did not enter a plea.

According to court documents, Kendrid Hamlin followed Craig into her apartment building’s elevator and blocked her from exiting the elevator after she refused to let him use her restroom. When she tried to move past him, he allegedly punched the congresswoman in her face and held her from reaching the elevator keypad.

Craig then threw a hot coffee she was carrying at Hamlin, who then let go of her, the documents said. She was able to leave the elevator when the doors opened and yell for help.

House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries has condemned the attack and said he asked the House sergeant at arms and the US Capitol Police to assure her safety in Washington, DC, and in Minnesota.

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CNN
 — 

With the thick vegetation of the northern Guatemala rainforests hiding its 2,000-year-old remnants, the full extent of the early Mayan way of life was once impossible to see. But laser technology has helped researchers discover a previously unknown 650-square-mile (1,683-square-kilometer) Maya site that offers startling new insights about ancient Mesoamericans and their civilization.

The researchers detected the vast site within the Mirador-Calakmul Karst Basin of northern Guatemala by using LiDAR (light detection and ranging) technology, a laser mapping system that allows for structures to be detected below the thick tree canopies. The resulting map showed an area composed of 964 settlements broken down into 417 interconnected Mayan cities, towns and villages.

A 110-mile (177-kilometer) network of raised stone trails, or causeways, that linked the communities reveals that the early civilization was home to an even more complex society than previously thought, according to a recent analysis on the architecture groupings, published in the journal Ancient Mesoamerica.

“They’re the world’s first superhighway system that we have,” said lead study author Richard Hansen, a professor of anthropology at Idaho State University. “What’s amazing about (the causeways) is that they unite all these cities together like a spiderweb … which forms one of the earliest and first state societies in the Western Hemisphere.”

The causeways, which rise above the seasonal swamps and dense forest flora of the Maya Lowlands, formed “a web of implied social, political, and economic interactions” with further implications regarding “strategies of governance” due to how difficult they would have been to build, according to the study.

The causeways were composed of a mixture of mud and quarry stone among several layers of limestone cement. Mayans likely made the elevated pathways with a process similar to the one they used to build their pyramids — by creating 10- to 15-foot (3- to 4.5-meter) stone boxes, then filling, stacking and leveling them off, according to Hansen. Several of these causeways were as wide as 131 feet (40 meters), nearly half the length of an American football field.

In Maya language, the word for causeway is “Sacebe” which translates to “white road.” On top of the raised roads was a thick layer of white plaster, which would have helped to increase visibility in the night as the plaster reflected moonlight, Hansen said.

“They didn’t have any pack animals in the Maya region … and we’re not thinking that they had wheeled vehicles on these causeways like Roman roads, like chariots or whatnot, but they were definitely built for people to interact, communicate and probably travel between sites,” said Marcello Canuto, anthropology professor and director of the Middle American Research Institute at Tulane University.

Canuto, who was not involved in this study, was co-director on research that used the same LiDAR technology to reveal over 60,000 ancient Mayan structures in 2018.

The causeways “were efforts that involve a lot of people, a lot of labor and coordination,” Canuto said. “They are complex work projects that would have required coordination and some form of hierarchy.”

LiDAR has been used to detect the remains of early Mayan civilizations since 2015, when two large-scale surveys were taken of the southern half of the Mirador-Calakmul Karst Basin. The technology allows for these discoveries to be made without harming the rainforests.

From an airplane flying overhead, light waves are pulsed down, and they bounce off objects below before returning to the sensor. Similar to sonar, which uses sound to locate structures, the LiDAR sensor tracks the amount of time each pulse takes to return and creates a three-dimensional map of the environment below.

“Imagine you’re in Poughkeepsie, (New York), and that’s all you can see, but you might catch this thing that we call the turnpike, right, but everything else is covered in jungle … you’ll have no idea that this turnpike might connect New York with Philadelphia,” Canuto said. “LiDAR is telling us everything that we found archaeologically over the last 100 years, here and there, is found everywhere … LiDAR lets us connect all the dots.”

Researchers are looking to gather more sampling and possibly locate more settlements through LiDAR technology this month to continue their research into the early Mayan civilization, according to Hansen.

CNN
 — 

It’s the stuff of nightmares. You’re trying to get somewhere, you’ve prepped and planned and you’re doing your best and yet you end up right back where you started.

That’s about what happened to frequent flyer Bryan Gottlieb and his fellow Air New Zealand passengers on Thursday when their planned journey from Auckland to New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport was disrupted by an electrical outage at the airport.

JFK’s Terminal 1 was closed and some of the flights scheduled to land there had to be diverted. Some international flights landed at other airports: Newark, Washington Dulles, Boston Logan.

Gottlieb’s flight, ANZ2, turned around mid-flight and landed back in Auckland, more than 16 hours after departing the same airport. Flight tracking site FlightAware logs a total flying time of 16 hours and 25 minutes, with the plane turning back roughly halfway through its scheduled journey.

“I was sleeping pretty soundly, and I woke up with the feeling that I would surely be landing in JFK soon,” Gottlieb said in a message to CNN Travel. Then “the passenger next to me tapped me on the shoulder and said ‘did you know we’re almost back in Auckland?’”

Gottlieb said his fellow passenger gave him the news two or three hours before the plane was set to land. An announcement about the diversion didn’t come until the flight was almost back in New Zealand, he said, although “you could see our route on the tracker, and word had spread around.”

He said when the pilot made the announcement, “he acknowledged that part of the decision was based on schedule efficiency for the airline, and that the lack of crew at an airport near JFK would have caused the airline further delays.”

The passengers were not happy.

“Everyone on that plane would have much preferred to be in any airport in the US, to say nothing of Newark or LaGuardia right in the same general area,” said Gottlieb, a game designer who was headed home from a five-week work trip to join the tail end of his brother’s bachelor party trip.

Air New Zealand said Thursday in a statement to CNN Travel that “diverting to another US port would have meant the aircraft would remain on the ground for several days, impacting a number of other scheduled services and customers.”

At the time, the flight was still en route back to Auckland, and the airline said its team was ready to assist its customers with rebooking on the next available service.

“We apologise for the inconvenience and thank our customers for their patience and understanding,” the statement said. CNN reached out to the airline for more details on Friday but did not immediately hear back.

Gottlieb, who lives in New York, spent eight hours at the airport in Auckland waiting for his next flight out to Los Angeles, where he was set to connect to JFK. Air New Zealand provided him with $100 worth of meal vouchers, but he didn’t have any luck buying his way into a loyalty club lounge to freshen up in Auckland. He hadn’t heard about other compensation at the time he communicated with CNN.

The diverted flight was Gottlieb’s second attempt at getting home. His original flight back to the States on Monday was canceled due to the devastating cyclone that struck New Zealand this week. His wife’s plans to join him for the last two weeks of his stay were foiled when her flight was canceled due to airport flooding in Auckland at the end of January.

With the 16-hour Auckland to Auckland delay, he missed the bachelor party altogether. As far as trips go, “it was a wild one for sure!”

Gottlieb said he is disappointed with the airline’s response “at a corporate level,” but encountered very helpful airline staff.

“This is certainly the worst travel experience I’ve ever had, but ultimately, these things do happen, and I always try to keep in mind that none of the people I’m interacting with had anything to do with the decisions that delayed me — they’re all just doing their best and they were legitimately kind.”

And New Zealand is one of Gottlieb’s favorite places.

“The people and region are both lovely. I sure do wish it was a little closer though.”