Author: CNN

Six journalists in South Sudan have been detained over the circulation of footage showing President Salva Kiir appearing to wet himself at an official event, the national journalists union said on Saturday.

The footage from December showed a dark stain spread down the 71-year-old president’s gray trousers as he stood for the national anthem at a road commissioning event. The video never aired on television but subsequently circulated on social media.

The journalists, who work with the state-run South Sudan Broadcasting Corporation, were detained on Tuesday and Wednesday, said Patrick Oyet, president of the South Sudan Union of Journalists.

They “are suspected of having knowledge on how the video of the president urinating himself came out,” he told Reuters.

South Sudan Information Minister Michael Makuei and National Security Service spokesperson David Kumuri did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Kiir has been president since South Sudan gained independence in 2011. Government officials have repeatedly denied rumors circulating on social media that he is unwell. The country has been embroiled in conflict for much of the past decade.

The detained journalists are camera operators Joseph Oliver and Mustafa Osman; video editor Victor Lado; contributor Jacob Benjamin; and Cherbek Ruben and Joval Toombe from the control room, Oyet said.

“We are concerned because those who are detained now have stayed longer than what the law says,” he added.

By law, South Sudanese authorities are allowed to detain suspects for only 24 hours before bringing them before a judge.

The incident “matches a pattern of security personnel resorting to arbitrary detention whenever officials deem coverage unfavorable,” said the sub-Saharan Africa representative for the Committee to Protect Journalists, Muthoki Mumo.

CNN
 — 

When the Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai volcano erupted in January 2022, it sent shockwaves around the world. Not only did it trigger widespread tsunami waves, but it also belched an enormous amount of climate-warming water vapor into the Earth’s stratosphere.

Now researchers in a new report have unveiled something else: the eruption set off more than 25,500 lightning events in just five minutes. Over the course of just six hours, the volcano triggered nearly 400,000 lightning events. Half of all the lightning in the world was concentrated around this volcano at the eruption’s peak.

The “cataclysmic eruption” shattered “all records,” according to the report from Vaisala, an environmental monitoring company that tracks lightning around the world.

“It’s the most extreme concentration of lightning that we’ve ever detected,” Chris Vagasky, meteorologist and lightning expert at Vaisala, told CNN. “We’ve been detecting lightning for 40 years now, and this is really an extreme event.”

The annual report by Vaisala found that 2022 was a year of extremes for lightning. Lightning increased in the US in 2022, with more than 198 million lightning strokes — 4 million more than what was observed in 2021, and 28 million more than 2020.

“We are continuing an upward trend in lightning,” Vagasky said.

The World-Wide Lightning Location Network, another lightning monitoring network led by the University of Washington, which is not involved with the report, said Vaisala’s findings about global lightning as well as the Hunga volcano are consistent with their own observations.

“We can do this because the stronger eruptions generate lightning, and lightning sends detectable radio signals around the world,” Robert Holzworth, the director of the network, told CNN. “The Hunga eruption was absolutely impressive in its lightning activity.”

Researchers have used lightning as a key indicator of the climate crisis, since the phenomenon typically signals warming temperatures. Lightning occurs in energetic storms associated with an unstable atmosphere, requiring relatively warm and moist air, which is why they primarily occur in tropical latitudes and elsewhere during the summer months.

But in 2022, Vaisala’s National Lightning Detection Network found more than 1,100 lightning strokes in Buffalo, New York, during a devastating lake-effect snowstorm that dumped more than 30 inches of snow in the city, but piled historic totals in excess of 6 feet in the surrounding suburbs along Lake Erie. Lake-effect snow occurs when cold air blows over warm lake water, in this case from the Great Lakes. The large difference in temperature can cause extreme instability in the atmosphere and lead to thunderstorm-like lightning even in a snow storm.

The report noted that many of these lightning events happened near wind turbines south of Buffalo, which Vagasky said was significant. He explained that the ice crystal-filled clouds were lower to the ground than usual, scraping just above the blades of the turbines.

“That can cause what is known as self-initiated upward lightning,” Vagasky said. “So the lightning occurs because you have charged at the tip of this wind turbine blade that is really close to the base of the cloud, and it’s really easy to get a connection of the electric charge.”

This is an area of ongoing research, he said, as the country turns to more clean energy alternatives.

“We’re seeing bigger and bigger wind turbines, and certainly as we’re putting in more and more wind energy and renewable energy, lightning is going to play a role in that,” he said.

The report comes after an unusual year in 2021, when they found lightning strokes increased significantly in the typically frozen Arctic region, which scientists say is a clear sign of how the climate crisis is altering global weather.

“Lightning in polar regions wasn’t mentioned [in this year’s Vaisala report], but our global lightning network shows a trend for much more lightning in the northern polar regions,” Michael McCarthy, research associate professor and associate director of the World Wide Lightning Location Network, told CNN. “That trend closely tracks the observed average temperature changes over the northern hemisphere.

“This close tracking suggests, but does not prove, a climate change effect,” McCarthy added.

Vagasky said lightning in colder areas will only amplify as the planet warms, noting that meteorologists and climatologists have been collecting more data to not only make the climate connections clear but also keep people safe.

“That’s why they’ve named lightning as an essential climate variable,” he said, “because it’s important to know where it’s occurring, how much is occurring, and so you can see how thunderstorms are trending as a result of changing climates.”

Editor’s Note: John Marks is the showrunner of “Giuliani: What Happened To America’s Mayor?” A former 60 Minutes producer and US News & World Report correspondent, Marks has worked most recently as a staff showrunner and director at Left/Right, a New York based production house, for a variety of cable and streaming networks. The views expressed in this commentary are his. Read more opinion on CNN. Watch “Giuliani: What Happened to America’s Mayor?” on CNN Sunday at 9 and 10 PM ET/PT.

CNN
 — 

My father, a lawyer, once told me he hated movies about the law. With one exception, they were always false in one way or another. Yet the exception spoke to him profoundly, to his years as a defense attorney in the civil courts of Texas. That was 1982’s “The Verdict,” starring Paul Newman, directed by Sidney Lumet with a screenplay by the playwright David Mamet. Newman plays an alcoholic ambulance chaser named Frank Galvin, who finds himself suddenly giving a damn about justice in the midst of a case that should have been open and shut.

“The Verdict” is a movie about redemption. Newman’s closing argument is a confession about his own loss of faith in the law. Framed in a wide shot that shows the lawyer, the jury, the judge, the grain of the wood of the court itself, the symbolism of American justice becomes visible.

That image came back to me so many times over the last year and a half as I worked on a CNN documentary series about another lawyer – former US Attorney, former New York Mayor and former counsel to President Donald Trump, Rudolph Giuliani. I thought about Giuliani, and then I thought of this scene and what it meant to my father.

We tend to think of Giuliani in his capacity as mayor, as indicated in the subtitle of the series, “What Happened To America’s Mayor?” – but for most of his life in government and in private practice, the mayor was a lawyer, at one time, by all accounts, a great one. He started there, and it seems likely he will end there. At this time, his law license has been suspended in New York and Washington DC.

Read through this lens, can the story of Giuliani be seen as the tale of a lawyer who lost faith with the law, like the character in “The Verdict,” but without the Hollywood ending? When we ask what happened to him, how one of the most admired (and among some, feared) leaders in modern American history became a target of federal, state and professional investigations, is that the answer?

In the last few weeks of 2022 alone, Giuliani generated one more tumbling wave of negative publicity. He was up before the DC Bar and under investigation by a grand jury in Georgia for trying to overturn an election. When the House January 6 committee referred Trump to the Justice Department for potential prosecution, Giuliani and five other Trump allies were named as potential co-conspirators. After the release of the executive summary of the committee’s final report, a spokesman for Giuliani denied in a statement to CNN aspects of how the report depicted Giuliani, describing him as “an honest, good American who has dedicated his life to serving others and doing the right thing.”

These post-January 6 headlines don’t tell a story of redemption, far from it, but they do punctuate a very different set of headlines far back in Giuliani’s past – reminders of that moment, 20 years ago, when in the face of unprecedented tragedy, he revealed an astounding capacity for leadership that surprised even his harshest critics.

On September 11, 2001, after two terms as a wildly successful, divisive and often self-destructive mayor, Giuliani was recast in a single day as a hero and emerged for a single moment as the most compelling leader in the United States. If that’s not a Hollywood ending, I don’t know what is. Had the story ended there, as political strategist Rick Wilson says in the documentary, schools would have been named after Giuliani.

In the moral economy of public life, does the earlier moment redeem or somehow balance the latter? Certainly, as we found in interviews for the documentary, there are old friends and allies who remain in awe of Giuliani’s behavior in those weeks, loyal to that man and his memory. Others always considered 9/11 the aberration and see 1/6 as a reversion to form.

Early on, Giuliani had a sense of civic duty. His Catholic upbringing in Brooklyn gave him a moral compass, and his Jesuit education gave him a sense of intellectual engagement and responsibility. He had a certain native ferocity that struck a familiar chord in a lot of New Yorkers.

As a young prosecutor, rooting out police corruption, as US Attorney for the Southern District, busting the mob and perp-walking white collar criminals, and as the law-and-order mayor, Giuliani displayed a fearless and often abrasive sense of moral rectitude. If he believed a thing, he implied at his press conferences, it must be right.

At his thorniest, in the New York era, especially in the wake of the police killings of Amadou Diallo and Patrick Dorismond, that sense of narcissistic rectitude could make Giuliani sound like a heartless bully with a racist bent or at the very least a political opportunist who would dog-whistle at racism as soon as the political moment required it. Certainly, many Black New Yorkers saw him that way.

In his finest hour, on the other hand, in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, Giuliani’s rectitude was softened by a sense of overwhelming tragedy. More than his actions, his demeanor seemed to reinvent him as a rare thing on the American stage, a wholly noble figure above and beyond politics.

Yet the dark side of power, so evident in Giuliani’s post-Trump behavior, always gripped the former mayor’s imagination – as another, very different movie about law and order suggests. Giuliani’s favorite film for years was Francis Ford Coppola’s mafia epic “The Godfather.” In the documentary, GOP pollster and political consultant Frank Luntz talks about watching it with Giuliani in a basement room of City Hall known as “The Lair.”

“He sits behind me,” Luntz recalled, “and during the entire movie he explains why the life of politics is the life of the Godfather. And, of course, in the one story where Sonny explains to the Godfather that they should be selling drugs, and you see this battle within the family, Rudy starts tapping me on the shoulder, saying, ‘Do you see, do you see? When you have a disagreement, you keep it in the family.’”

A lot of people love that movie, but few end up looking like a key architect of the most serious sedition case in modern American history. Connecting the dots between these educational screenings of “The Godfather” and January 6, one could imagine a vision of the law that makes it solely the tool of whoever wields power, sort of the opposite of the vision in “The Verdict.”

When Newman’s character makes his closing argument before the court, speaking the lines written by David Mamet, he speaks as someone who has rediscovered the law as salvation, and diagnoses the failure that has brought him to this point. “We think of ourselves as victims, and we become victims. We become…we become weak. We doubt ourselves, we doubt our beliefs. We doubt our institutions. And we doubt the law.” And then he proposes the solution: “In my religion, they say, “Act as if ye had faith, and faith will be given to you.” If…if we are to have faith in justice, we need only to believe in ourselves. And act with justice. See, I believe there is justice in our hearts.”

That scene is the law, my father said, explaining his regard for the movie. The essence of it: the advocate, the people, the process by which the rule of law unfolds.

Giuliani’s story is not a movie, of course. It’s real life, and no life, extraordinary or otherwise, is easy to measure from the outside. We cannot know what lies in his heart. Yet there is a clear chasm between the Giuliani of September 11, 2001, and the man of January 6, 2021. In the winter of 2023, it is hard to see anything like a Hollywood ending, public or private, on the horizon. It is hard to detect in the latest headlines about this lawyer an opening of redemptive light that might pave the way.

CNN
 — 

“Avatar: The Way of Water” is setting box office records and generating Oscar buzz, which recently got director James Cameron reflecting on a moment he had celebrating one of his other big films.

Cameron revealed in a conversation with CNN’s Chris Wallace for a new episode of “Who’s Talking to Chris Wallace?” that he regrets quoting a line from “Titanic” during his acceptance speech for best director at the 1998 Academy Awards.

“Mom, dad, there is no way that I can express to you what I’m feeling right now,” Cameron said during the ceremony. “My heart is full to bursting, except to say, ‘I’m the king of the world!’”

Of the moment, Wallace asked Cameron: “How bad was the backlash in Hollywood? The feeling that Jim Cameron was riding a little too high at that point?”

Cameron clarified that what was perceived by some to be “arrogance” was not how he was feeling on stage.

“I was trying to express the joy and excitement that I was feeling in terms of that movie – and the most joyful moment for Leonardo DiCaprio’s ‘Titanic’ character was when he was free and at the bow of the ship,” Cameron recalled.

“Titanic” won 11 Oscars that night, including best picture, but Cameron said he also took home a valuable lesson.

“What I learned is you don’t quote your own movie to the Academy if you win, because it’s cringeworthy,” he told Wallace. “It makes the assumption that you didn’t win by a narrow margin, but that every single person sitting in the audience on that night at the Kodak Theatre saw and loved ‘Titanic.’ And we’ll never know how much we won by, but it might not have been a landslide at all.”

“I took flack for all 25 years after that,” Cameron continued. “You do have to be careful what you say in your acceptance speech, me and Sally Field, we have a little self-help group together on this.”

In 1985, Field won her second Academy Award for her performance in “Places in the Heart.” She later became a punchline for saying, “I can’t deny the fact that you like me. Right now, you like me!”

New episodes of “Who’s Talking to Chris Wallace?” premiere Friday on HBO Max and Sunday at 7 p.m. ET on CNN.

CNN
 — 

A 6-year-old boy is in police custody after he shot a teacher at Richneck Elementary School in Newport News, Virginia, Friday afternoon, Police Chief Steve Drew said in a news conference.

“The individual is a 6-year-old student. He is right now in police custody,” Drew said. “We have been in contact with our commonwealth attorney and some other entities to help us best get services to this young man.”

Drew said the female teacher – who is in her 30s – was shot inside a classroom and added that “this was not an accidental shooting.”

The police chief said there was an altercation between the teacher and the student, who had the firearm, and that a single round was fired.

Drew, who had earlier said the teacher was in critical condition, said Friday evening her injuries were considered life-threatening but that there was “some improvement in the last update that we got.”

There were no other students involved, the chief said.

The investigation is ongoing, he added.

“We’ll get the investigation done, there’s questions we’ll want to ask and find out about. I want to know where that firearm came from, what was the situation,” Drew added.

Richneck Elementary School will be closed Monday, according to Newport News Public Schools Superintendent, Dr. George Parker.

“I’m in shock, and I’m disheartened,” Parker said in Friday’s news conference. “We need to educate our children and we need to keep them safe.”

“We need the community’s support, continued support, to make sure that guns are not available to youth and I’m sounding like a broken record today, because I continue to reiterate that: that we need to keep the guns out of the hands of our young people,” the superintendent said.

Officials are also looking into any past instances that may have transpired before the shooting, Parker added.

CNN
 — 

The NFL has experienced nothing quite like the last few days.

After Damar Hamlin suffered a cardiac arrest and was rushed to the hospital, Cincinnati Bengals fans embraced their Buffalo Bills counterparts in the Paycor Stadium, men and women broke into tears, while others prayed.

Hour-by-hour, day-by-day, the emotion and concern for Hamlin’s health swelled like an ocean – the players and coaches of 32 teams, as well as NFL fans, anxiously waiting for any updates on the Bills safety’s wellbeing.

After watching the frightening event unfold, Colts rookie safety Rodney Thomas II drove from Indianapolis to Cincinnati to see his friend Hamlin. Meanwhile, NFL fans held vigils outside the University of Cincinnati Medical Center where Hamlin was sedated and intubated in the ICU.

After arriving, Thomas held his friend’s hand and talked to him.

“I know he could hear me,” said Thomas of Hamlin, whom he had met at Central Catholic High School in Pittsburgh, where the two were teammates and became close friends.

“Even if he couldn’t hear me, it didn’t matter. I said what I had to say.”

Michael Addis, professor in the department of psychology at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts, told CNN Sports that what we’ve witnessed over the last few days shows the sport’s evolution, a development he attributes to changing views of masculinity where men are allowed to “experience emotional vulnerability.”

“I think it’s a sign that we’re better prepared than we were a quarter of a century ago to acknowledge emotional and physical health problems in men because, of course, all that sort of traditional laws of masculinity teach us to hide that,” said Addis, who is an expert in men’s depression.

Bills quarterback Josh Allen told reporters on Thursday that the Buffalo players had been providing plenty of emotional support to each other.

“We’ve had some very open and honest and deep talks,” said Allen. “Some unbelievable, this sounds weird, but some embraces as men, just hugging somebody and actually just leaning into them. There’s been a lot of that going around and you need every bit of it, you really do.

“I think the fact that we just keep hearing good news about Damar, it just keeps pushing us forward.” added Allen, referring to Hamlin’s “substantial improvement” in the hospital.

Hamlin is able to communicate by shaking his head, nodding or writing brief notes, said University of Cincinnati Health Dr. Timothy Pritts, part of the player’s medical team.

On Friday, the Bills announced Hamlin’s breathing tube had been removed overnight and that he FaceTimed into their team meeting to talk to players and coaches. He had a simple message: “Love you boys.”

The NFL announced on Thursday that the game between the Bills and the Bengals has been canceled, though the final week of regular season action begins on Saturday, with the playoff landscape to then become clearer.

However, returning to action so quickly will be a big ask for players after such a “traumatic event,” according to Addis.

“For some people, getting back to business is what it’s all about. And it’s a healthy distraction from what they’re experiencing,” said Addis. “For other people, there’s no way that they’re going to get back to business so early.”

Cincinnati quarterback Joe Burrow said during the week that a return to action on Sunday will most likely be felt differently by his teammates.

“I’m sure if you polled the locker room there’d be mixed votes on that,” Burrow told reporters on Wednesday.

“Personally, I think playing is going to be tough, but there’s people that want to play, too, and there’s people that don’t. Personally, I probably want to play,” added Burrow.

“I think getting back to as normal as you can as fast as you can is personally how I kind of deal with these kinds of things. But like I said, everyone has a different way of dealing with it.”

Bills quarterback Allen said that while “people are going to be changed forever” from what took place on Monday, he thinks “putting that helmet back on was a really good thing for our team and just to go through that process.”

However, returning to action may be tougher for some players following Hamlin’s mid-game cardiac arrest, according to Addis, not least that they might have experienced their first “existential awakening to their own mortality.”

“These players are used to seeing broken bone. They’re used to concussion protocols,” Addis said. “This was an ordinary, run-of-the-mill play that came close to resulting in a player’s death.

“So I think for all of the players involved, as well as potentially for fans, this is a time where the risk of trigger of trauma responses is very real.

“For some of these players, depending upon experiences in their own lives, this will bring back some of those feelings.”

Over the last few years, the sporting world has become more conscious about athletes’ mental health, but as the NFL season nears its conclusion, Addis questions if players will have the time and the space to process their emotions.

“Whether that fits with the economic demands of the NFL and the fan demands, it just remains to be seen,” said Addis.

“I’m really curious to see how this all plays out, because I don’t think the institution of the sport is ready to be as flexible about this as the players might need.”

NFL commissioner Roger Goodell said in a memo to teams Tuesday that the heads of player engagement and team clinicians for all clubs have received information about mental health and support resources for players and staff.

Within 10 seconds of collapsing, Hamlin was receiving life-saving medical attention.

Bills head coach Sean McDermott said on Thursday that assistant athletic trainer Denny Kellington was the person who performed on-field CPR and saved Hamlin’s life.

This season the NFL has been widely criticized for the way it has handled player concussions, but the immediate response of medical personnel to Hamlin’s collapse has been widely praised.

That readiness to act quickly in the face of an emergency is the result of long hours of planning and preparation, according to Dr. Jonathan A. Drezner, who is director of the University of Washington’s medicine center for sports cardiology and team physician for the Seattle Seahawks.

The medical staff of NFL teams have a “a written emergency action plan,” including sudden cardiac arrest, head and neck trauma and abdominal or chest trauma, according to Drezner, who explained those plans are practised twice before the season begins – once at their practice facility and once at the stadium which hosts games.

Then in a “pre-game medical timeout,” both sets of medical staff, including additional physicians, airway management physicians and neurotrauma consultants meet with the officials an hour before kickoff of NFL matches “to make sure everyone’s on the same page to do what needs to happen in case there is emergency,” said Drezner.

“So it’s sort of planning for the ‘what ifs.’ And so I think within the NFL, we actually have quite a robust emphasis on being prepared,” added the Seahawks team physician.

“I think that was evidenced in the response that Damar Hamlin received from the medical team, both of the Buffalo Bills and the ancillary help that was available in Cincinnati. And hopefully if there is a medical emergency at any NFL game that a response like that can be replicated,” said Drezner.

Before the NFL season starts, players are subjected to annual electrocardiograms in an attempt to identify preexisting heart conditions, according to Drezner.

Teams also research players’ family history of heart disease or sudden cardiac arrest and if picked up, will then investigate further.

Drezner says he doesn’t think that the “risk factors for cardiac arrest in the NFL are different than any other sport.”

“Most sudden cardiac arrest in young competitive athletes is from a preexisting heart condition. And again, these are the types of heart condition that you look for through screening, but no screening is perfect.”

In the aftermath of Hamlin’s collapse, the whole league showed its support for the safety and the Bills, changing their social media profile pictures to say “Pray for Damar” and skylines across the country turned blue for Hamlin.

Bills general manager Brandon Beane voiced his appreciation for the support from across the NFL community over the past week, calling it a “family.”

“This week every team changed their logo on their social media page to pray for Damar, I don’t think I’ve ever seen that,” Beane told reporters.

“And, yeah we go to battle, but in the end life is the number one battle, and to see that unity from players, coaches, GMs, owners, fans is unheard of. But I think it’s a good light, it sheds a great light on the NFL. The NFL is truly a family.”

CNN
 — 

The NFL family has waited on tenterhooks this past week on the health of Damar Hamlin as he continues to recover in hospital, but this weekend the show goes on and the final game week of the regular season still holds plenty of thrilling football.

Hamlin collapsed during the first quarter of the Bills game at Cincinnati on Monday, a contest that was postponed, then canceled by the NFL on Thursday night.

The canceled game leaves the Bills (12-3) – a win behind the Chiefs (13-3) in the hunt for the No. 1 seed and a bye in the next round.

The Bills will have to play their game against the Patriots (8-8) Sunday knowing that with a win and a Chiefs loss they could still clinch that top spot in the AFC thanks to a higher win percentage.

Cincinnati Bengals quarterback Joe Burrow says he “probably wants to play” his team’s next game but also understands that others don’t in the aftermath of Hamlin’s collapse on Monday.

“I’m sure if you polled the locker room there would be mixed votes on that,” he told reporters. “Personally, I think playing is going to be tough, but there’s people that want to play, too, and there’s people that don’t.

“Personally, I probably want to play. I think getting back to as normal as you can as fast as you can is personally how I kind of deal with these kinds of things. But like I said, everyone has a different way of dealing with it.”

The Bengals have no chance of topping the AFC. At best, they could steal the Bills’ second spot if they beat the Ravens and the Bills lost.

The flip side is that even if the Ravens beat the Bengals, thanks to a higher win percentage the Bengals will remain top of the AFC North.

The Ravens have looked toothless these last few weeks in the absence of quarterback Lamar Jackson, but with an imperious defense and the Bengals potentially struggling to overcome the shock of Monday, there is an opportunity for the Ravens to move into the playoffs with some momentum

The game gets underway at 6:00 p.m. ET on Sunday.

For Tennessee and Jacksonville, the playoffs have come early.

The winner takes a playoff spot and top spot in the AFC South, meanwhile the loser comes away with absolutely nothing.

And it’s not looking great for the Titans, who lost a sixth game on the go when they were beaten 27-13 at home by the Cowboys.

Things have been made worse by their situation at quarterback. Starter Ryan Tannehill is out injured. His replacement Malick Willis threw only 99 yards and was turned over twice against Houston, before he was replaced in their last game by Josh Dobbs.

The 2017 draft pick has only played seven career NFL games and started a game for the first time against the Cowboys.

The teams played against each other just four weeks ago, with the Jaguars coming out 36-22 on top on Tennessee soil. Quarterback Trevor Lawrence was on fire, throwing 368 yards and three touchdowns.

Tune in at 8:15 p.m. ET on Saturday.

Another game with everything to play for as the Packers, Lions and Seahawks all have an identical 8-8 record going into the final game.

Because of previous results against each other, if the Packers win, they are through to the playoffs; if the Lions win, they will need a down-and-out Rams team to do them a favor and stop the Seahawks winning on home soil.

This is also a game of two teams that have recovered from terrible starts (Packers were 3-6 and the Lions were 1-6) to finish the regular season in top form.

The Packers have built their success on one of the meanest defenses in the NFL. They have won their last four games on the spin without conceding more than 20 points in any of them.

Against the Packers is a Lions team scoring for fun. Detroit put 41 past Chicago last week with Jared Goff hitting top form, throwing 255 yards, three touchdowns and zero interceptions.

The Packers will be praying for a Seahawks win as this is the final game on Sunday, meaning that the Lions could already be knocked out when they kick off in Wisconsin.

But if the Rams pull off an upset, this game could have everything riding on it for both teams.

Tune in at 8:20 p.m. ET on Sunday.

A few weeks ago the Philadelphia Eagles looked unstoppable. They had only lost one game, had the best record in the NFL and practically sown up top spot in the NFC.

Fast forward to this weekend and the Eagles could potentially end the weekend in the five-seed after losing their last two games.

The Cowboys are only one game behind the Eagles in the NFC East after beating them two weeks ago and could leapfrog them in the playoff table.

Their fate is still in their hands however, but Philadelphia will be hoping that the Giants do them a favor by resting their starters.

The Giants clinched an improbable playoff spot last week when they beat the Colts but, regardless of results, will come in six-seed and so face the age old question of whether to play or rest their best players.

That bye is particularly important to an Eagles team who are desperate to give a full rest to star quarterback Jalen Hurts, who has been sensational for the Eagles but missed the two recent losses because of a shoulder injury.

With the Cowboys facing relatively easy game against the Commanders, all eyes will be on the Eagles to see if they can turn around their mini-slump to end the season on a high, or lose all the momentum they have built up this season.

The game gets underway at 6:00 p.m. ET on Sunday.

Here’s how to catch these teams and others across the league in action, from wherever you are.

Australia: NFL Game Pass, ESPN, 7Plus

Brazil: NFL Game Pass, ESPN

Canada: CTV, TSN, RDS, NFL Game Pass on DAZN

Germany: NFL Game Pass, ProSieben MAXX, DAZN

Mexico: NFL Game Pass, TUDN, ESPN, Fox Sports, Sky Sports

UK: NFL Game Pass, Sky Sports, ITV, Channel 5

US: NFL Game Pass, CBS Sports, Fox Sports, ESPN, Amazon Prime

Reuters
 — 

Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said on Saturday his government was ready to provide whatever support was needed to residents of Western Australia state as record-breaking floods isolated far-flung communities there.

The crisis in the Kimberley – an area almost three times the size of the United Kingdom – was sparked this week by severe weather system Ellie, a former tropical cyclone that brought heavy rain to the vast region.

Among the worst-hit locations was Fitzroy Crossing, a town of around 1,300 people where supplies were being airlifted in due to the flooding, which authorities have said is the state’s worst on record.

Albanese said his Labor government was “working constructively” with the Western Australia government on the crisis in the sparsely populated region that also includes the resort town of Broome.

“These floods are having a devastating impact, many of these communities … are communities that do it tough, and the resources simply aren’t there on the ground,” Albanese told reporters in the city of Geelong, in Victoria state. “My government stands ready to provide whatever support is requested.”

Western Australia emergency authorities said Australian Defence Force aircraft were being used to assist flood-hit communities, and Chinook helicopters were en-route to help relocated impacted residents.

The nation’s weather forecaster said severe weather was no longer occurring in the state but that “the situation will continue to be monitored and further warnings will be issued if necessary.”

The emergency in the country’s far northwest comes after frequent flooding in Australia’s east over the last two years due to a multi-year La Nina weather event, typically associated with increased rainfall. Some regions have endured four major flood crises since last year.

CNN
 — 

Weeks after Hawaii’s Mauna Loa erupted for the first time in decades, neighboring volcano Kilauea is showing activity again after a brief pause, according to officials.

Kilauea – which had stopped erupting last month for the first time since September 2021 amid Mauna Loa’s own lava eruption and subsequent slowdown – had increased earthquake activity beneath its summit and recorded ground deformation on Thursday morning, officials said.

“Kilauea volcano is erupting,” the Hawaiian Volcano Observatory and the US Geological Survey said on Thursday. A glow was detected in nearby webcam images, “indicating that the eruption has resumed within Halemaʻumaʻu crater in Kilauea’s summit caldera” at Hawaii Volcanoes National Park, the agencies said.

Officials elevated Kilauea’s volcano alert level to “warning” status as well as updated its aviation color code from orange to red on Thursday before dropping the levels down again on Friday.

Hawaiian Volcano Observatory “is  lowering  Kīlauea’s  volcano alert level from WARNING to WATCH because the initial high effusion rates are declining, and no infrastructure is threatened,” the Friday update says.

The color code was changed back to orange for aviation on Friday “because there is currently no threat of significant volcanic ash emission into the atmosphere outside of the hazardous closed area within Hawai’i Volcanoes National Park,” according to the update.

Because the eruptions is occurring within a closed portion of the national park, “high levels of volcanic gas are the primary hazard of concern, as this hazard can have far-reaching effects down-wind,” according to a status report from the Hawaiian Volcano Observatory.

It also warns residents to avoid exposure to volcanic particles that could waft some distance from the eruption.

The National Park Service has posted an air quality alert on its website, warning that unhealthy levels of volcanic pollutants can occur. It includes charts with regular air quality readings, particularly relevant for those with pre-existing respiratory conditions. Mostly “good” air quality readings had been recorded through Friday morning.

Visitors to the national park may encounter a “minor hazard,” the status report says.

“Visitors to Hawaiʻi Volcanoes National Park should note that under southerly (non-trade) wind conditions, there is potential for a dusting of powdery to gritty ash composed of volcanic glass and rock fragments.”

The eruption is currently confined to the crater and poses “no threat to communities,” the Hawaii Emergency Management Agency said on social media.

Kilauea’s eruption in 2018 was one of the most destructive in recent Hawaii history, forcing evacuations of surrounding neighborhoods and destroying hundreds of homes.

CNN
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More storms are set to slam Northern California and other parts of the West Coast this weekend, threatening heavy rain late Friday to places already struggling with flooding from a separate system that killed at least two people.

After much of California was lashed with heavy rain and damaging winds Wednesday and Thursday that flooded roads, toppled trees and knocked out power to most across the state, daytime Friday will bring some relief before another storm moves in at night.

TRACK THE STORMS HERE

“California continues to take the brunt of the heavy precipitation and strong winds associated with these systems as we head into the first full weekend of 2023,” the National Weather Service said early Friday morning.

Torrential rain is expected Friday night in Northern California and southwest Oregon, with the heaviest rain falling along the coastal ranges where flash flooding also is expected, according to the weather service.

By Saturday night into early Sunday, heavy rain is expected shift toward central California, the forecasters said.

This weekend’s forecast comes as about 60,000 homes and businesses in California are still in the dark from a deadly storm system that over the past two days whipped up damaging winds, dangerously heavy rainfall and heavy snow in much of the state as well as southern Oregon. Before that, a New Year’s weekend storm system also had produced flooding.

The deluges have occurred as California has been enveloped by drought and faced fierce wildfires that have scarred the landscape. Now, much of the state cannot bare to absorb more moisture without the possibility of even more flooding.

Over the coming weekend, “additional rainfall amounts of 3 to 6 inches, with locally higher totals forecast for northern California will likely exacerbate flooding concerns over already saturated soil,” the weather service warned.

Excessive rain proved deadly Wednesday when a 19-year-old woman died after crashing her car into a utility pole on a partially flooded road in Northern California, the Fairfield Police Department said. The driver hit “a patch of standing water and hydroplaned, losing control of the vehicle, before colliding into a utility pole,” police explained.

A young child – about age 1 or 2 – was killed Wednesday after a redwood tree fell on a home in Sonoma County in Northern California, Occidental Volunteer Fire Department Chief Ron Lunardi said.

In nearby San Francisco, some saw localized flooding, mudslides and sinkholes as of Wednesday evening, said Mary Ellen Carol, executive director of the city’s emergency management department.

Indeed, San Francisco experienced its wettest 10-day period on record for downtown since 1871, according to a Thursday tweet from the local weather service. The area soaked up more than 10 inches of rain between December 26 and Wednesday, the agency said.

Strong waves along the shores of Capitola in Santa Cruz County damaged piers as flooding inundated local businesses.

Weather alerts beyond some that expired Friday are expected to be issued this weekend for places due for a mix of rain and snow. Here’s what’s forecast for millions:

• Friday night: Heavy rain arrives in Northern California.

• Saturday: The accrual of back-to-back heavy rainfall events could lead to even more significant flood impacts possibly including rising waters and mudslides in Northern and central California. Flash flooding and debris flows are also possible.

“By Saturday night into early Sunday, the next moisture-laden Pacific cyclone is forecast to approach California with the next onslaught of heavy rain once again aiming for northern California,” the weather service said.

• Also Saturday: An additional 1 to 2 feet of snow threaten to make travel dangerous in areas above 5,000 feet in mountains of Northern and central California, the Weather Prediction Center said.