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The math problem: Kids are still behind. How can schools catch them up?

Published Fri, 21 Feb 2025 10:58:02 GMT

On a breezy July morning in South Seattle, a dozen elementary-aged students ran math relays behind an elementary school.One by one, they raced to a table, where they scribbled answers to multiplication questions before sprinting back to high-five their teammate. These students are part of a summer program run by the nonprofit School Connect WA, designed to help them catch up on math and literacy skills lost during the pandemic. There are 25 students in the program, and all of them are one to three grades behind.One 11-year-old boy couldn’t do two-digit subtraction. Thanks to the program and his mother, who has helped him each night, he’s caught up. Now, he says math is challenging, but he likes it.Other kids haven’t fared so well.Across the country, schools are scrambling to catch up students in math as post-pandemic test scores reveal the depth of missing skills. On average, students’ math knowledge is about half a school year behind where it should be, according to education...

Suspect barricaded in Encanto house by San Diego police

Published Fri, 21 Feb 2025 10:58:02 GMT

SAN DIEGO -- The suspect in a shooting that exchanged gunfire with San Diego police Monday night has been barricaded in an Encanto home.Officers responded to reports for a shooting on the 500 block of Iona Drive near the intersection of Market Street and Akins Avenue around 8:45 p.m. As of 10 p.m., a heavy police presence remains in the area surrounding the house, including SWAT officers.SDPD says the suspect could be in possession a long gun. Just before 10:10 p.m., the suspect also appeared to set a fire in the home. FOX 5 crews reported hearing gunshots erupt right before the flames became visible.San Diego Fire-Rescue was dispatched to the scene. Injuries in the shooting and fire have not been disclosed at this time.Authorities are asking the public to avoid the area around the scene. The perimeter is shown below in a map posted by SDPD to X, formerly known as Twitter.Photo of impacted area surrounding the Encanto shooting.For those that live around the scene, SDPD is asking peo...

Tropical Storm Idalia is nearing Florida. Residents are being urged to wrap up their preparations

Published Fri, 21 Feb 2025 10:58:02 GMT

TAMPA, Fla. (AP) — Florida residents loaded up on sandbags and evacuated from homes in low-lying areas along the Gulf Coast as Tropical Storm Idalia intensified Monday and forecasters predicted it would hit in days as a major hurricane with potentially life-threatening storm surges.“You should be wrapping up your preparation for #TropicalStormIdalia tonight and Tues morning at the latest,” the National Weather Service in Tampa Bay said Monday on X, formerly known as Twitter. As the state prepared, Idalia thrashed Cuba with heavy rain, especially in the westernmost part of the island, where the tobacco-producing province of Pinar del Rio is still recovering from the devastation caused by Hurricane Ian almost a year ago. Authorities in the province issued a state of alert, and residents were evacuated to friends’ and relatives’ homes as authorities monitored the Cuyaguateje river for possible flooding. As much as 10 centimeters (4 inches) of rain fell in Cuba on Sunday, meteorological...

Neurosurgeon investigating patient’s mystery symptoms plucks a worm from woman’s brain in Australia

Published Fri, 21 Feb 2025 10:58:02 GMT

CANBERRA, Australia (AP) — A neurosurgeon investigating a woman’s mystery symptoms in an Australian hospital says she plucked a wriggling worm from the patient’s brain.Surgeon Hari Priya Bandi was performing a biopsy through a hole in the 64-year-old patient’s skull at Canberra Hospital last year when she used forceps to pull out the parasite, which measured 8 centimeters, or 3 inches.“I just thought: ‘What is that? It doesn’t make any sense. But it’s alive and moving,’” Bandi was quoted Tuesday in The Canberra Times newspaper.“It continued to move with vigor. We all felt a bit sick,” Bandi added of her operating team.The creature was the larva of an Australian native roundworm not previously known to be a human parasite, named Ophidascaris robertsi. The worms are commonly found in carpet pythons.Bandi and Canberra infectious diseases physician Sanjaya Senanayake are authors of an article about the extraordinary medical case published in the latest edition of the journal Emerg...

Syria protests spurred by economic misery stir memories of the 2011 anti-government uprising

Published Fri, 21 Feb 2025 10:58:02 GMT

BEIRUT (AP) — Anti-government protests in southern Syria have entered their second week, with demonstrators waving the colorful flag of the minority Druze community, burning banners of President Bashar Assad and at one point raiding several offices of his ruling party. The protests were initially driven by surging inflation and the war-torn country’s spiraling economy, but quickly shifted focus, with marchers calling for the fall of the Assad government.The protests have been centered in the government-controlled province of Sweida, the heartland of Syria’s Druze, who had largely stayed on the sidelines during the long-running conflict between Assad and those trying to topple him.In a scene that once would have been unthinkable in the Druze stronghold, protesters kicked members of Assad’s Baath party out of some of their offices, welded the doors shut and spray-painted anti-government slogans on the walls. The protests have rattled the Assad government, but don’t seem to...

Native nations on front lines of climate change share knowledge and find support at intensive camps

Published Fri, 21 Feb 2025 10:58:02 GMT

PORT ANGELES, Wash. (AP) — Jeanette Kiokun, the tribal clerk for the Qutekcak Native Tribe in Alaska, doesn’t immediately recognize the shriveled, brown plant she finds on the shore of the Salish Sea or others that were sunburned during the long, hot summer. But a fellow student at a weeklong tribal climate camp does.They are rosehips, traditionally used in teas and baths by the Skokomish Indian Tribe in Washington state and other tribes.“It’s getting too hot, too quick,” Alisa Smith Woodruff, a member of the Skokomish tribe, said of the sun-damaged plant.Tribes suffer some of the most severe impacts of climate change in the U.S. but often have the fewest resources to respond, which makes the intensive camps on combatting the impact of climate change a vital training ground and community-building space.People from at least 28 tribes and intertribal organizations attended this year’s camp in Port Angeles, Washington, and more than 70 tribes have taken part in similar camps orga...

Suspect’s motive unclear in campus shooting that killed 1 at UNC Chapel Hill, police say

Published Fri, 21 Feb 2025 10:58:02 GMT

CHAPEL HILL, N.C. (AP) — Police were searching for both the weapon and the motive in a shooting at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill that left one faculty member dead and prompted an hours-long lockdown amid a search for the suspect. The assailant in Monday afternoon’s shooting at a science building in the heart of the flagship university’s campus was taken into custody about an hour and a half after the gunfire was first reported, officials said at a news conference. Neither the suspect nor the victim were immediately identified and it wasn’t clear whether they knew each other. Formal charges were pending. “To actually have the suspect in custody gives us an opportunity to figure out the why and even the how, and also helps us to uncover a motive and really just why this happened today. Why today, why at all?” UNC Police Chief Brian James said. “And we want to learn from this incident and we will certainly work to do our best to ensure that this neve...

Dentist accused of killing wife by poisoning her protein shakes set to enter a plea to charges

Published Fri, 21 Feb 2025 10:58:02 GMT

DENVER (AP) — A Colorado dentist accused of killing his wife by lacing her protein shakes with poison is set to enter a plea in court to a first-degree murder charge on Tuesday. Police said James Craig, who began an affair before his wife’s March 18 death, had searched online for answers to questions such as “is arsenic detectable in an autopsy?” and “how to make murder look like a heart attack.” In the following days, Craig’s wife, Angela Craig, then Googled symptoms she was having including vertigo, shaking and cold lips, said District Attorney John Kellner at a July preliminary hearing. Angela Craig, a mother of six who was married to her husband for 23 years, died of poisoning from cyanide and tetrahydrozoline, the latter a substance found in over-the-counter eye drops, according to the Arapahoe County coroner Kelly Lear. .At the preliminary hearing, James Craig’s attorneys argued there was no direct evidence that Craig had slipped poison into his wife...

The EU ‘appalled’ by the latest two terror attacks against Israelis in the West Bank

Published Fri, 21 Feb 2025 10:58:02 GMT

Palestinian terrorists on Monday gunned down Batsheva Nigri, a 42-year-old mother of three, in a drive-by shooting near Hebron. Her 12-year-old daughter, who was sitting beside her, was unhurt, writes Yossi Lempkowicz."The EU has repeatedly expressed its concerns about the increasingly high number of casualties of the violence this year. We call on all parties to de-escalate the situation and refrain from actions that could increase the cycle of violence,” it said in a statement."The European Union is appalled by the two terror attacks last Saturday (19 August) and Monday (21 August) in the occupied West Bank that claimed the lives of three Israeli civilians and left another person injured,’’ an EU spokesperson said this week in a statement."We express our condolences to the families of the victims. The EU strongly condemns terrorism in all its forms," the statement added.The European Union said it is "gravely concerned by the continuing wave of violence in Israel and in the occupie...

'The world has gone dark': Family mourns sisters killed in Uber collision

Published Fri, 21 Feb 2025 10:58:02 GMT

A family is heartbroken after two sisters were killed in a crash while riding in an Uber in the Westmont area of Los Angeles County over the weekend.The crash occurred around 5:30 a.m. Saturday morning at the intersection of Vermont Avenue and Century Boulevard. Kimberly Izquierdo, 27, Veronica Amezola, 23, and their childhood friend Juvelyn Arroyo, 23, were leaving a concert in South Los Angeles when another driver ran a red light and collided with their rideshare driver.Jose Izquierdo, Kimberly and Amezola’s brother, says his family is broken and life is bleak without his two sisters. Kimberly Izquierdo, 27, Veronica Amezola, 23, Juvelyn Arroyo, 23. Aug. 28, 2023. (Izquierdo Family)“For our family, the world has gone dark,” Jose said. “They had such an impact on this world in such a little time that they had to. They did everything out of the kindness of their heart and their compassion and their intelligence.”Kimberly just graduated from nursing school and was beginning her caree...