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Orioles roundtable: Four questions heading into MLB winter meetings

Published Sun, 16 Feb 2025 16:30:11 GMT

Next week, the movers and shakers of MLB will convene in Nashville, Tennessee, for the apex of the offseason.Whether the Orioles are among the teams that make a splash remains to be seen, but this year’s meetings will see Baltimore in a vastly different spot than in previous years of executive vice president and general manager Mike Elias’ tenure. His first few offseasons were spent as the leader of one of baseball’s worst teams, and while the Orioles were buyers this time last year, the upcoming meetings will bring more pressure for the club to upgrade its roster after a 101-win season that ended with a thud in the playoffs.Ahead of the winter meetings, Baltimore Sun beat reporters Nathan Ruiz and Jacob Calvin Meyer and editor Tim Schwartz give their thoughts about how the next week might progress.What is the Orioles’ top winter meetings priority?Ruiz: Making headway on a significant starting pitching acquisition, whether it be through free agency or trades....

Sanders wins Sportsperson of Year award from Sports Illustrated for starting turnaround at Colorado

Published Sun, 16 Feb 2025 16:30:11 GMT

DENVER (AP) — Deion Sanders reinvigorated a fanbase and put a downtrodden football program back on the map in his first season at Colorado.For that, the Buffaloes coach was named Sportsperson of the Year by Sports Illustrated.It was a roller-coaster inaugural season as Sanders took over a 1-11 Colorado team. But it was an entertaining ride, complete with sellouts, celebrities showing up on the Folsom Field sideline, media visits from major networks and of course progress on the field.The Buffaloes sprinted out of the gate, going 3-0 and becoming the the talk of college football. They finished by losing eight of their last nine to wind up 4-8.Sanders did things his way, too. He overhauled his roster after his arrival from Jackson State and turned to the transfer portal in order to quickly rebuild. That rubbed some the wrong way.Not that Sanders cared. He once quipped, “Your opinion of me is not the opinion that I have for myself.” Sanders frequently wears a Colorado sweatshirt that r...

Human rights of Danish sub killer were not violated when prison banned letters, visits, court says

Published Sun, 16 Feb 2025 16:30:11 GMT

COPENHAGEN, Denmark (AP) — The human rights of a self-taught Danish engineer who was convicted five years ago of murdering a Swedish journalist on his homemade submarine, were not violated as he had claimed, a Danish court ruled Thursday.Peter Madsen was sentenced to life in prison in 2018 for killing Kim Wall, a 30-year-old freelance reporter, after bringing her aboard his self-built submarine with the promise of an interview. There he tortured and killed her before dismembering her body and dumped it at sea in a case that gripped Scandinavia.Madsen had sued the southern Denmark prison where he is incarcerated over a ban on getting visits, exchanging letters and making telephone calls without permission. In its ruling, the district court in Nykoebing Falster said that the ban was not a breach of the European Convention on Human Rights. However, the court said that Madsen may receive visits, phone calls and write letters with a vetted person but needs permission each time. On Aug. 1...

GOP Rep. George Santos warns his expulsion from Congress before conviction would set a precedent

Published Sun, 16 Feb 2025 16:30:11 GMT

WASHINGTON (AP) — A defiant Rep. George Santos warned on Thursday that his expulsion from Congress before being convicted in a court of law would establish a new precedent that “is going to be the undoing of a lot of members of this body.”The first-term Republican congressman from New York could well become just the sixth member of Congress to have been expelled by colleagues. Republicans and Democrats have offered resolutions to remove him, and the House is expected to vote on one of them Friday.While Santos survived two earlier expulsion efforts, a critical House Ethics Committee report released on Nov. 16 has convinced more members that his actions merit the House’s most severe punishment.Santos preempted the vote with a press conference just outside the Capitol early Thursday. He noted that, of the previous expulsions, three were for disloyalty to the Union during the Civil War and two were for lawmakers who had been convicted in federal court. In short, he presented himse...

Scotland bids farewell to its giant pandas that are returning to China after 12-year stay

Published Sun, 16 Feb 2025 16:30:11 GMT

EDINBURGH, Scotland (AP) — Visitors to the Edinburgh Zoo had their final chance to see and bid farewell Thursday to a pair of popular giant pandas who are returning home to China after more than a decade in Scotland. Yang Guang and Tian Tian are leaving in early December after a 12-year stay. They have been a popular attraction since people lined the road outside the zoo to greet them when they arrived in 2011.They are the latest pandas to leave the West after exchange agreements have expired and not been renewed by China.The only U.S. zoo with pandas is in Atlanta and its agreement expires next year. Washington’s National Zoo sent its three pandas — Mei Xiang, Tian Tian and their cub, Xiao Qi Ji — to China earlier in November. The black and white bears at the San Diego Zoo were sent home in 2019 and the remaining panda at the Memphis, Tennessee, zoo returned earlier this year. Veteran China-watchers have speculated that the People’s Republic is gradually pulling its bears from Amer...

Former UK Treasury chief Alistair Darling, who steered nation through a credit crunch, has died

Published Sun, 16 Feb 2025 16:30:11 GMT

LONDON (AP) — Alistair Darling, a central figure in the U.K.’s response to the 2008 financial crisis who later helped organize the campaign against Scottish independence, has died. He was 70.Darling had been treated for cancer, his family said in statement on Thursday. He served as Britain’s treasury chief under then Prime Minister Gordon Brown, who praised him as a “popular and effective’’ government minister.Though Darling held a variety of posts during his 28 years in the House of Commons, he is likely to be remembered most for his work in steering the nation’s finances during the global credit crunch. The package of measures he implemented were credited with preventing an even more dramatic slide after the crisis threatened the nation’s banking system.“Alistair will be remembered as a statesman of unimpeachable integrity whose life was defined by a strong sense of social justice and who gained a global reputation for the assured competence and the exercise of considered judgment...

UN atomic chief backs nuclear power at COP28 as world reckons with proliferation

Published Sun, 16 Feb 2025 16:30:11 GMT

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates (AP) — The world wants more nuclear energy as a means to fight climate change and supply an ever-growing demand for electricity, part of a generational shift in thinking on atomic power, the head of the United Nations nuclear watchdog said Thursday. Rafael Mariano Grossi, the director-general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, made the comments in an interview with The Associated Press at the COP28 climate talks. He called the inclusion of nuclear power at the summit, where he said a major nuclear agreement was likely, showed just how far the formerly “taboo” subject had come decades after the disasters at Three Mile Island and Chernobyl. However, he acknowledged the challenge still posed for his agency in monitoring nuclear programs in countries, particularly in Iran after the collapse of its 2015 nuclear deal with world powers. “This used to be easier when this international consensus was there and so Iran could see that this was not about polit...

Infrequent grand juries can mean long pretrial waits in jail in Mississippi, survey shows

Published Sun, 16 Feb 2025 16:30:11 GMT

JACKSON, Miss. (AP) — Most people in Mississippi’s county jails have been locked up at least three months while waiting to go on trial. Some have longer wait times because two-thirds of the counties only convene grand juries two or three times a year, according to a survey released Thursday by a group that tracks justice issues.Mississippi does not require consistency among the 82 counties about how often grand juries meet to consider indictments — the formal charging documents to send a case to trial.“If you get arrested in one of these counties where grand juries seldom meet, you can wind up in jail for months or even years just waiting to be indicted, and you will spend more time behind bars simply because of geographic misfortune,” said Cliff Johnson, an attorney who is director of the Roderick and Solange MacArthur Justice Center at the University of Mississippi School of Law.Starting during the summer, law students and staff at the center spent several weeks issuing more...

CSIS whistleblowers faced hurdles seeking justice and telling their stories

Published Sun, 16 Feb 2025 16:30:11 GMT

VANCOUVER — Canadian Security Intelligence Service employees who say the agency’s British Columbia office is a toxic workplace have faced a series of hurdles in speaking out — including a law against identifying themselves or colleagues.The Canadian Press has published an investigation into claims by the covert officers, including two who say they were sexually assaulted by the same senior colleague while on duty.The officers say they went public after being hindered from seeking justice by institutional secrecy and a prohibition under the CSIS Act against identifying themselves or others as covert officers, which is punishable by up to five years in prison. But the same hurdles also represented a challenge to telling their story.The officers who say they were assaulted filed lawsuits against the federal government, using the assumed names Jane Doe and A.B.Jane Doe, whose lawsuit was dismissed on jurisdictional grounds, says she knows the service may fire her for going public. “I...

A ‘predator’ at CSIS: Officers allege rape, harassment and a toxic workplace culture

Published Sun, 16 Feb 2025 16:30:11 GMT

VANCOUVER — A rookie surveillance officer with Canada’s spy agency and another officer decades her senior were tracking a person in British Columbia in the summer of 2019 when they lost sight of their target.She said the senior officer later blamed a communications failure due to a radio dead zone.But the woman said the real reason was her colleague was raping her, having broken off surveillance to drive to a parkade where the alleged attack took place in their Canadian Security Intelligence Service vehicle.The man, who was supposed to be her mentor and coach, treated his “own needs as more important than doing the job,” she said in an interview.She said she was raped by her colleague nine times while at work in CSIS surveillance vehicles between July 2019 and February 2020. A second officer said she too was sexually assaulted as a rookie by the same officer in surveillance vehicles during covert missions, despite warnings from the first to their bosses that he sho...