online casino plus NoneWest Virginia knocks off No. 3 Gonzaga in overtimeWest Virginia knocks off No. 3 Gonzaga in overtime

Kelly Clarkson has always been a Swiftie, and she paid tribute to Taylor Swift on her daytime talk show Tuesday afternoon (Nov. 26) by performing a cover of “Lavender Haze” during her popular Kellyoke segment. See latest videos, charts and news See latest videos, charts and news Dressed in a yellow top and patterned skirt, the star effortlessly hit Swift’s high notes in the chorus, singing, “I feel the lavender haze creepin’ up on me/ Surreal, I’m damned if I do give a damn what people say/ No deal, the 1950s s— they want from me/ I just wanna stay in that lavender haze.” “Lavender Haze” appeared on Swift’s Billboard 200 chart-topping 2022 album, Midnights , and the song peaked at No. 2 on the Hot 100 songs chart. “I happened upon the phrase ‘lavender haze’ when I was watching Mad Men ,” she previously explained of the track in her now-deleted “Midnights Mayhem With Me” video posted to Instagram. “I looked it up because I thought it sounded cool, and it turns out that it’s a common phrase used in the ’50s where they would describe being in love.” She continued, “I guess theoretically, when you’re in the lavender haze, you’ll do anything to stay there and not let people bring you down off of that cloud. I think a lot of people have to deal with this now, not just ‘public figures,’ because we live in the era of social media. If the world finds out that you’re in love with somebody, they’re going to weigh in on it.” Watch Kelly Clarkson cover Taylor Swift’s “Lavender Haze” below.

Gonzaga lands Virginia transfer G Jalen Warley

LONDON, Ont. — Lawyers in the sexual assault case of five members of Canada's 2018 world junior hockey team began what are expected to be several weeks of legal arguments on Monday, ahead of next year's trial. Dillon Dube, Carter Hart, Michael McLeod, Cal Foote and Alex Formenton were charged with sexual assault earlier this year in an incident that allegedly took place in London, Ont., in June 2018. McLeod also faces an additional charge of sexual assault for "being a party to the offence." Dube, McLeod and Formenton attended court in person for the first time in London on Monday, all three dressed in dark suits. Lawyers for the players have said their clients plan to defend themselves against the allegations, and all five are expected to plead not guilty. A jury trial is scheduled to begin on April 22 of next year. Court heard Monday the trial will be heard by Justice Maria Carroccia. Several weeks have been set aside for legal arguments before then, but the issues discussed in those hearings cannot be reported at this time due to a publication ban meant to protect the accused's right to a fair trial. This report by The Canadian Press was first published Nov. 25, 2024. The Canadian PressOMAHA, Neb. (AP) — Creighton point guard Steven Ashworth likely won't play Tuesday in the No. 21 Bluejays' game against San Diego State in the Players Era Festival in Las Vegas. Ashworth sprained his right ankle late in a loss to Nebraska on Friday, and coach Greg McDermott said he didn't know how long he would be out. “He stepped on a guy's foot on a 3-point shot and you're defenseless in that situation," McDermott said after the game. "He torqued it pretty good.” An athletic department spokesman said Monday that Ashworth's status was doubtful for the game against the Aztecs. Ashworth is Creighton's second-leading scorer with 16 points per game and leads the team with 6.4 assists per game. He also is 23 of 23 on free throws. Get poll alerts and updates on the AP Top 25 throughout the season. Sign up here . AP collegebasketball: https://apnews.com/hub/ap-top-25-college-basketball-poll and https://apnews.com/hub/college-basketball

The Saskatchewan Roughriders will soon make decisions on how the team will look in 2025. That also includes what the CFL club will do at the quarterback position and current starter Trevor Harris. Harris will be 39 next May and has had back-to-back seasons with a knee injury that has kept him out for multiple games. “It’s early so we have just started the evaluation process,”said Riders general manager Jeremy O’Day. “We haven’t made a decision on any of the players yet as far as who is coming back and who we want back. “I will say that Trevor is everything you see on a regular basis – when he speaks, when he is in the huddle, when he is in the locker room, when he is home with his family he is a true leader. There’s not enough weight we could put on what he does for the organization.” Harris had 3,264 yards, 20 touchdowns and just nine interceptions in 12 games played. He was named a West Division All-CFL player for his year. “Coming back and playing at that level after coming back from an injury is very impressive,” O’Day said. “We love Trevor and those are discussions we will have moving forward but nothing to report right now.” One of the biggest names available for the quarterback spot is B.C. Lions pivot Vernon Adams Jr., who’s team is actively trying to trade away. “We’re not going to talk about players who are on other teams under contract. If you want to know if I have talked to B.C., I have not,” O’Day said. “We will wait and see what happens there if they will reach out or not.” O’Day also admitted they will, “be close” when it comes to if they were under the CFL salary cap or not after this season. O’Day and the organization believe that positive steps were taken in 2024 for the club. After missing the playoff for two seasons, the Riders finished 9-8-1 and hosted the West Semifinal. The team’s season came to an end in the West Final in Winnipeg against the Blue Bombers. “There’s one goal when you go into every season and that’s to win a championship and when you don’t reach that goal, it’s disappointing,” O’Day said. “I thought we took a lot of positive steps as a football team for sure. Some of the plans that we had going into (the season) and some of the things that we wanted to accomplish and improve on going into the season, I thought we were successful in doing that.” The team came into a season with a first-time head coach in Corey Mace and a whole new staff. “I was surprised that we started so fast. When you have a new staff, new schemes and new coaches, it’s hard in a short training camp to get to a point where you’re going to go out and win football games early. That was a pleasant surprise,” O’Day said. “It’s a credit to the coaches and the work they put into the offseason and training camp and the players for their buy-in.” And O’Day believes 2025 could have even more success. “We’re going to use (2024) as a building block. I truly feel like this is an ascending team. We have young players that are becoming really good players and I feel like we have done a decent job with putting ourselves in position going into the offseason. I feel like there is some momentum there and our players are excited about 2025.”(The Center Square) – Legislators in Washington, D.C., have taken a number of steps over the past few days to push for insurance and pharmaceutical reforms to be passed before the end of the year. On Wednesday, a bicameral group of Republican and Democrat lawmakers held a press conference discussing the need for pharmacy benefit manager reform to protect small pharmacies across the country and “save lives.” “Whether you are a Republican, Democrat, or an independent, we all want the same thing. We want accessible, affordable, quality health care,” said Rep. Buddy Carter, R-Ga. “We’re not here today to just discuss one bill or to discuss just one patient’s story. We're here because there's broad, bipartisan pharmacy benefit manager, or PBM, reform that is needed to save lives.” Pharmacy benefit managers are the middlemen responsible for managing the drug prices covered by health insurance plans. According to the Harvard Political Review , the problem with pharmacy benefit managers is that they “have vertically integrated with pharmacy chains and health insurers through massive conglomerates.” That then allows them to abuse their power to cut out small pharmacies and increase prices. Carter also signed a letter that was released last week calling on the Department of Justice to dig into the role pharmacy benefit managers played in the opioid epidemic. Reps. Raja Krishnamoorthi, D-Ill., Deborah Ross, D-N.C., and Cliff Benz, R-Ore., all joined him in signing that letter. “The opioid crisis has devastated communities in North Carolina and across the country, and PBMs may have fueled it by prioritizing profits over people,” Ross said on social media . “That’s why I joined a letter calling on the DOJ to investigate their role and hold these bad actors accountable.” The letter looked at recent reports on the largest pharmacy benefit managers, CVS Caremark, Express Scripts, and OptumRx which state that they “colluded and conspired to steer patients towards OxyContin in exchange for $400 million.” OxyContin is a trade name for the narcotic oxycodone hydrochloride, a painkiller available by prescription only. This and the general “lack of transparency” is just one of the many complaints that legislators aired on Wednesday. “My colleagues who are joining me today, Democrats and Republicans ... all recognize that PBMs are decreasing the accessibility, the affordability, and therefore the quality of health care in America,” Carter said. “We have an opportunity, right now, to advance bipartisan legislation that increases reporting requirements, which would heighten transparency and shine a light on the opaque practices of these PBMs.” Carter was also joined by Sen. James Lankford, R-Okla., who is leading the effort to get legislation passed in the U.S. Senate. “This year, we're losing about one pharmacy a day in America,” Lankford said. “We want leadership to be able to take this up and to bring it up in the end-of-year package ... Stop holding up legislation that is bipartisan, bicameral, and solving a problem that Americans need solved.”West Virginia knocks off No. 3 Gonzaga in overtime

TSS Inc.'s CEO Darryll Dewan sells $1.51 million in stockTrump's tariff policy could depreciate CNY by 10% -15%ORCHARD PARK, N.Y. — The Buffalo Bills have announced their uniform combination for their Sunday Night Football game. The Bills on social media on Wednesday said they will don their traditional white helmets, blue jerseys, and white pants when they host the San Francisco 49ers. Kickoff is scheduled for 8:20 p.m. Sunday at Highmark Stadium. The game will be aired on NBC and Channel 2. The Bills are 5-0 when wearing that uniform combination this season, most recently beating the Kansas City Chiefs two weeks ago. While many NFL teams reveal classic or alternate uniform combinations for a game or two well before the season begins, the Bills usually announce what they will wear days ahead of each game. If you're superstitious in any way, we are keeping track of the Bills record in various jersey combinations this season. Here's the standings after 11 games: See you on Sunday night. 💯 @DeltaSonicWash | #SFvsBUF pic.twitter.com/kk22t4svxC

Losses for big technology stocks pulled major indexes lower on Wall Street. The S&P 500 fell 0.4% Wednesday. The Dow Jones Industrial Average slipped 0.3% from its record high a day earlier, and the Nasdaq composite lost 0.6%. Losses for Nvidia, Microsoft and Broadcom were the biggest weights on the market. Dell sank 12.2% after reporting revenue that fell shy of forecasts, and HP dropped 11.4% after giving a weaker-than-expected outlook. Treasury yields fell in the bond market. U.S. financial markets will be closed Thursday for Thanksgiving, and will reopen for a half day on Friday. THIS IS A BREAKING NEWS UPDATE. AP’s earlier story follows below. Stocks wavered in afternoon trading on Wednesday, as losses for several Big Tech companies offset gains elsewhere in the market. The S&P 500 fell 0.4% in afternoon trading, even though more stocks were rising than falling in the index. The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 135 points, or 0.3%, as of 3:05 p.m. Eastern time. Both indexes set records on Tuesday. The Nasdaq composite fell 0.5%. Losses for tech heavyweights helped pull the broader market lower. Semiconductor giant Nvidia slipped 1.6%. Its huge value gives it outsized influence on market indexes. Microsoft fell 0.9% Several personal computer makers added to Big Tech's heavy weight on the market following their latest earnings reports. HP sank 11.8% after giving investors a weaker-than-expected earnings forecast for its current quarter. Dell slumped 11.9% after its latest quarterly revenue fell short of Wall Street forecasts. Gains for financial and health care companies helped counter Big Tech's downward pull. Visa rose 0.9% and Thermo Fisher Scientific added 2.3%. The U.S. economy expanded at a healthy 2.8% annual pace from July through September, according to the Commerce Department, leaving its original estimate of third-quarter growth unchanged. The growth was driven by strong consumer spending and a surge in exports. The update follows a report on Tuesday from the Conference Board that said confidence among U.S. consumers improved in November, but not by as much as economists expected. Consumers have been driving economic growth, but the latest round of earnings reports from retailers shows a mixed and more cautious picture. Department store operator Nordstrom fell 8.5% after warning investors about a trend toward weakening sales that started in late October. Clothing retailer Urban Outfitters jumped 19.1% after beating analysts’ third-quarter financial forecasts. Weeks earlier, retail giant Target gave investors a discouraging forecast for the holiday season, while Walmart provided a more encouraging forecast. Consumers, though resilient, are still facing pressure from inflation. The latest update from the U.S. government shows that inflation accelerated last month. The personal consumption expenditures index, or PCE, rose to 2.3% in October from 2.1% in September. Overall, the rate of inflation has been falling broadly since it peaked more than two years ago. The PCE, which is the Federal Reserve's preferred measure of inflation, was just below 7.3% in June of 2022. Another measure of inflation, the consumer price index, peaked at 9.1% at the same time. The latest inflation data, though, is a sign that the rate of inflation seems to be stalling as it falls to within range of the Fed's target of 2%. The central bank started raising its benchmark interest rate from near-zero in early 2022 to a two-decade high by the middle of 2023 and held it there in order to tame inflation. The Fed started cutting its benchmark interest rate in September, followed by a second cut in November. Wall Street expects a similar quarter-point cut at the central bank's upcoming meeting in December. “Today’s data shouldn’t change views of the likely path for disinflation, however bumpy," said David Alcaly, lead macroeconomic strategist at Lazard Asset Management. "But a lot of observers, probably including some at the Fed, are looking for reasons to get more hawkish on the outlook given the potential for inflationary policy change like new tariffs.” President-elect Donald Trump has said he plans to impose sweeping new tariffs on Mexico, Canada and China when he takes office in January. That could shock the economy by raising prices on a wide range of goods and accelerating the rate of inflation. Such a shift could prompt the Fed to rethink future cuts to interest rates. Treasury yields slipped in the bond market. The yield on the 10-year Treasury fell to 4.25% from 4.30% late Tuesday. The yield on the two-year Treasury, which more closely follows expected actions by the Fed, fell to 4.22% from 4.25% late Tuesday. U.S. markets will be closed Thursday for Thanksgiving, and will reopen for a half day on Friday. Damian J. Troise And Alex Veiga, The Associated PressJustin Baldoni Reveals He Had a ‘Near Breakdown’ During 'It Ends With Us'

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Linda McMahon, former administrator of the U.S. Small Business Administration. Tom Williams/Congressional Quarterly/ZUMA Educators are flipping out over Donald Trump’s choice of pro wrestling exec and longtime donor Linda McMahon for Secretary of Education. Predictably so, since experts in just about every field are flipping out when Trump chooses some poorly qualified (yet very loyal) hack to oversee their specialty—or selects another fox to guard the henhouse. America’s biggest union, the National Education Association, for instance, slammed McMahon as unqualified and bent on a privatization agenda: Her chief goal for education is to promote vouchers, which drain resources from public schools and send taxpayer money to unaccountable private schools that are permitted to discriminate against students and educators. The policies she promotes are aligned with Trump’s Project 2025 plan . McMahon, who served as head of the Small Business Administration during Trump’s initial term, has scant education experience. She earned a teaching certificate in college and was a student teacher for a semester, but resigned from the Connecticut Board of Education in 2010, according to the Washington Post , after the Hartford Courant found that she’d claimed an education degree she never obtained. More recently, a lawsuit accused McMahon and her estranged husband, Vince, of tolerating the sexual abuse of children by an employee of their company, World Wrestling Entertainment. (A lawyer for McMahon told CNN the allegations are “baseless.”) But hey, she likes vouchers. Voucher-esque programs, speaking of discrimination, were first deployed across the South during desegregation so authorities could shutter public schools—the white parents didn’t want their kids mixing with Black kids—and instead provide grants to fund the private education of exclusively white children at hundreds of new private schools that popped up to serve them. This was a sordid and horribly racist enterprise, as you will glean from this history compiled by the Center for American Progress. When states expand voucher programs, shoddy and established school operators both cash in, and public schools and their students are the losers. And it’s still happening, de facto. ProPublica reported the other day that tens of millions of dollars in public funds are still flowing to these “segregation academies”—of the 39 schools the reporters found in North Carolina alone, more than half had reported to the federal government that their student bodies were at least 85 percent white. Republicans have been drooling over vouchers for as long as I can remember. They were talking about them when I was in grade school, and I’m a geezer. But now the messaging revolves around school “choice,” with proponents claiming that vouchers, which a number of states have revived in the form of education savings accounts (ESAs), allow low-income parents to escape failing public schools. And this is certainly true to some extent. But the voucher/ESA cheerleaders neglect to mention that those public schools are failing in significant part because affluent families have fled en masse, and that their budgets have been gutted by, well, the same voucher-loving politicians and/or charter school systems championed by billionaire philanthropists like Bill Gates and the Waltons, and affluent members of both parties. All this drainage leaves many public schools underfunded to the point that teachers literally have to beg for basic classroom supplies—as some did during parents’ night at the public high school my kids attended in Oakland, California. McMahon or no McMahon, vouchers have come back into vogue recently, likely in reaction to the educational upheaval of the Covid pandemic. “In 2023 alone, seven states passed new school voucher programs and nine expanded existing plans—highlighting a push that is largely coming from red states,” notes a Brookings Institution report published last year. And sure, some low-income families will benefit from the programs, which channel money that would have gone to the local public school into private accounts (the ESAs) that can be used for private K-12 tuition and related expenses. But there can be a lot of collateral damage, notes the Brookings report. First, whenever you expand government payouts—and this is something the Republicans complain about in other contexts—fraudsters and opportunists will come out of the woodwork. The report cites research showing that when traditional voucher programs were enacted, a host of “pop-up” private schools would follow, of which many fail quickly . “That’s exactly what is happening with the ESA-style expansions in Arizona now,” the report notes. (Arizona, which in 2011 became the first state to offer ESAs for selected students, expanded its program in 2022 to all students—including those already enrolled in private schools—according to a subsequent Brookings paper that deems the program “a handout to the wealthy.”) Voucher programs also lead to tuition hikes by existing private schools, according to the Brookings report, “and that is exactly what recent reports are showing with ESA passage.” So, basically, shoddy and established operators alike cash in, and public schools and their students are the big losers. There are other consequences, too. From the report: The last decade of research on traditional vouchers strongly suggests they actually lower academic achievement. In Louisiana, for example, two separate research teams found negative academic impacts as high as -0.4 standard deviations—extremely large by education policy standards—with declines that persisted for years. Those results were published across top journals for empirical public and education policy . Similar results in Indiana found impacts closer to -0.15 standard deviations. To put these negative impacts in perspective: Current estimates of COVID-19’s impact on academic trajectories hover around -0.25 standard deviations. Vouchers, more broadly, are of a piece with what I’ve been calling the Plunder —the steady rigging of our economic system over the past four and a half decades to benefit people who need no government support at the expense of those who really do. This, as I argued in a recent piece , was a primary reason why Trump won a second term, as ironic as that may sound. I wrote about the rigging of our educational system in my 2021 book about excessive wealth in America. (Chapter title: “Getting In.”) Take the tax-advantaged 529 college savings plans our government offers. Like private retirement plans—401(k)s, IRAs, etc—these plans provide far more help to rich families than to poor ones. The example I used in my book involved two (fictitious) students living in Ohio, one rich, the other middle-class. The middle-class family could only afford to put $6,000 a year into their daughter’s 529—an investment fund that grows tax-free over the years and can be used to pay college tuition and qualified expenses when the child comes of age. And that’s good. They needed that assistance. But for some reason the rules also allow the rich couple in my example to frontload their son’s 529 with up to five years worth of the maximum contribution all at once. So, they put $150,000 into a 529 that they set up for him as a newborn, do this again during his fifth year, and then, when he’s 10, bring the balance up to maximum the state allows, beyond which they can contribute no more. With so much cash in their fund from the start, you can imagine how quickly the interest accumulates. Rich families gained yet another lucrative perk in late 2017, when Donald Trump signed his most notable first-term achievement , the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. Beyond cutting taxes for wealthy folks and corporations, the TCJA stipulated that parents could now take up to $10,000 a year from their child’s 529 fund for private K-12 tuition. It’s worth noting that elite private high schools—where tuition typically runs between $40,000 to $60,000 a year—offer extensive college admissions mentoring, whereas a middle-class kid at an underfunded public school cannot use their 529 fund to cover expenses like SAT prep, college advising, or essay coaching that their school doesn’t offer in any meaningful way. When I crunched the numbers, here’s what I found: Even assuming a conservative annual investment return of 5 percent for the students’ 529 funds, the rich family got some $117,000 in tax breaks, nearly seven times what the middle-class family received, not to mention that young Nigel (XTC fans will get the reference) had two and a half years of his private high school tuition covered by the taxpayers. He also ended up with a staggering $688,660 in his fund—likely enough to also cover the cost of law school or med school or business school should he choose any of those paths. Small wonder that, at the time I reported these numbers, the “ Ivy Plus ” colleges were enrolling more students from the top-earning 1 percent families than from the bottom 50 percent. And that, compared with kids with families in the bottom 20 percent of the wealth spectrum, the children of 1 percenters were 77 times more likely to attend an Ivy Plus college. Vouchers only add insult to this injury. They can be marketed to sound like a good and equitable thing—a perk for all Americans—when in reality, without serious means-testing, they end up delivering the most benefit to families who need it the least. They are but one of the levers (here’s another ) the Project 2025 people and Trump’s new administration may use to accelerate a plunder that has been in progress for decades, under the watch of both major parties. One can almost hear it now: the “giant sucking sound” that the late Ross Perot used to talk about, except in this case it won’t be the sounds of US jobs going to Mexico. It will be the sound of the remaining wealth of the middle-class getting sucked ever upward and into the coffers of our most privileged.