Tired of looking at the same décor and design day after day? Renovating your home is an exciting project that will make your space look new again. However, it can easily become overwhelming if you don’t know where to start. Are you wondering how to keep organized and manage your finances during a renovation? Have…
Early in the 2022–’23 college basketball season, the University of Connecticut Huskies men’s team emerged with the discernible appearance of a potential national champion.
On Monday night, their potential manifested into the program’s fifth title and the justifiable designation as one of the sports elite that now stands side-by-side with collegiate royalty. Only UCLA (11), Kentucky (8), and North Carolina (6) have more and UConn’s 76–59 victory over San Diego State ties them with Duke and Indiana. Kansas, which is a college basketball standard bearer, started in 1898; was coached by the founder of the game Dr. James Naismith; and has four. The Jayhawks immediately preceded UConn as NCAA champion, defeating North Carolina in last year’s finale.
Coming out of the Big East, UConn steamrolled through their six games in the NCAA tournament, picking off opponents by an average of 20 points per game, including a 28-point (82–54) dismantling of perennial power Gonzaga in their Elite Eight matchup. UConn went 31–8 this season and opened their schedule 14–0. Their first loss came on Christmas Eve against Big East competitor Xavier and started a challenging stretch of five losses in six games between December 31 and January 18.
All of UConn’s defeats this season were to conference foes. From February 18 until their crowning achievement on Monday, UConn was 12–1. Their lone setback was to regular season and conference tournament champion Marquette in the Big East Tournament at Madison Square Garden on March 10. The game foreshadowed the dominant performance that UConn’s 6′-9″ power forward/center Adama Sanogo would produce during his team’s decisive advance to the title.
The 21-year-old from the Republic of Mali in West Africa, who played in high school for Our Savior New American on Long Island and then the Patrick School in New Jersey, was virtually unstoppable. The First-Team Big East selection began the NCAA tournament by posting 28 points and 13 rebounds in UConn’s 87–63 opening round win against Iona and capped off his season by scoring 17 points and grabbing 10 rebounds versus San Diego State and being named the Final Four’s Most Outstanding Player.
“He’s obviously cemented himself into the pantheon of the greatest big guys, with all the production and back-to-back first team all-league, and now this—to have the national championship—just puts him in a position in one of the most storied programs in college basketball,” said UConn head coach Dan Hurley.
Hurley added that Sanogo is among college’s historic big men. “He’s an all-time great.”
The 50-year-old Hurley has continued the legacy of a legendary basketball family from Jersey City, New Jersey. Patriarch Bob Hurley is a member of the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame for his 39 years of heading St. Anthony’s High School, where he won 26 state and four national titles.
Dan Hurley’s older brother Bobby was a two-time NCAA champion (1991, 1992) as the starting point guard for Duke and the seventh overall pick of the Sacramento Kings in the 1993 NBA Draft. He is currently the head coach at Arizona State.
Now the younger Hurley, who had stops as the head coach at Wagner (2010–’12) and Rhode Island (2012–’18), before taking the UConn job in 2018 after the controversial departure of Kevin Ollie, who guided the Huskies to the 2014 championship, has crafted his own distinctive identity.
Notable performances by established stars and aspiring All-Stars highlighted the start of the 2023 Major League Baseball season for the Mets and Yankees.
The Mets began in Miami last Thursday with a 5-3 win versus the Marlins, improving their franchise opening day record to 41-13. Ace Max Scherzer delivered a solid performance, going six innings and allowing three runs on four hits. However, opening day also arrived with bad news for the Mets. General Manager Billy Eppler announced that No. 2 starter Justin Verlander, last season’s American League Cy Young Award winner with the World Series champion Houston Astros, will start the season on the injured list with a low grain teres major (thick muscle of the shoulder joint) strain. There is no timetable for his return, but the Mets hope he will not miss more than three starts. They signed Verlander to a two-year, $86.7 million deal in December.
In Games 2 and 3 of the series against the Marlins, starters David Peterson and Tylor Megill respectively had strong outings in allowing just three runs in total but the Mets settled for a split, losing Game 2, 2-1 and taking Game 3, 6-2. In the finale of the four-game set, Kodai Senga, another Mets off-season signing, dazzled in his MLB debut, striking out eight batters and allowing one run in five 1/3 innings in a 5-1 victory. The 30-year-old Senga was a two-time Pacific League (Japan) strikeout leader and five-time Japan League champion.
The Mets opened this week getting bombed by a combined 19-0 facing the Milwaukee Brewers on the road, falling 10-0 on Monday and 9-0 on Tuesday. Starter Carlos Carasco was the losing pitcher on Monday while Scherzer gave up five runs in his second start on Tuesday. The Mets ended the three-game series at Milwaukee yesterday afternoon and will now host the Marlins for three-games at Citi Field in their home opening series with Game 1 today (1:10 p.m.). Afterwards, they will travel to San Diego to take on the Padres for three games next Monday through Wednesday.
The Yankees’ season began last Thursday with a three-game series against the San Francisco Giants in the Bronx and featured Gerrit Cole breaking a franchise Opening Day record with 10 strikeouts in a 5-0 win. Last season’s American League MVP Aaron Judge, who broke the AL home run record with 62, picked up where left off with his first of this season. Heralded rookie Anthony Volpe made his MLB debut and showed the versatility that has the organization and fans excited about what he can become by stealing a base every game against the Giants as the Yankees captured two out of three. “It’s been a whirlwind, but the best type of whirlwind there can be,” said the 21-year-old shortstop. On Monday, the Yankees defeated the Philadelphia Phillies in the Bronx 8-1 but were on the losing end Tuesday 4-1. They closed out the series yesterday and are in Baltimore to play the Orioles today, Saturday, and Sunday before meeting the Cleveland Indians on the road for three games next Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday.
Since the beginning of the pandemic three years ago, more than 1.12 million Americans have died of COVID-19 infection, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). New York was one of the hardest hit cities, with the number of total and probable deaths more than 45,000. But how do we know that those were deaths from COVID and not deaths with COVID?
As of March 31, 2023, 38,764 of the 45,156 deaths in NYC were confirmed with a positive molecular test, which detects genetic material of the virus, while the remaining deaths —classified as “probable” — had “COVID-19 or similar” listed as cause of death without confirmation. This type of death reporting has led to some confusion about whether people are actually dying from COVID, or if COVID is listed on death certificates even if it was not the infection that resulted in death.
There are good reasons for this confusion. For example, how can we be sure hospitals are reporting accurately? And what about people who die at home without taking a COVID test — how are they accounted for?
One way of understanding the death toll is looking at how many extra deaths have happened during the pandemic, using a measure called excess mortality, or excess deaths. In an interview with the AMNews, Dr. Yea-Hung Chen, an epidemiologist at the University of California, San Francisco, described one way of thinking of excess mortality: “It’s this thought exercise of imagining this magical world where the pandemic never happened…..It asks the question of ‘Had the pandemic not occurred, how many deaths would we have expected to see?’”
Dr. Jonathan Wakefield, a biostatistician at University of Washington and member of the Technical Advisory Group of the World Health Organization (WHO) COVID-19 Mortality Assessment Group, explained in an interview with the AmNews why excess mortality is a more “robust measure” for assessing pandemic deaths.
“In general, it is not straightforward to unambiguously define a COVID death. Not only do COVID COVID death assignment procedures vary from country to country, they also vary in time within countries as, for example, testing capabilities change, so to establish a COVID death is not always straightforward… Scientifically, excess mortality is more justifiable because it’s a much easier quantity to estimate: it’s more clear-cut, instead of ambiguous, and also can’t be politicized so easily.”
The data do show that COVID is causing excess deaths on the population level. Wakefield emphasized that “there is no question that there were a huge number of excess deaths in the United States.” The WHO estimates he worked on indicated that in 2020 and 2021, there were 932,458 excess deaths in the United States.As of this writing, the CDC places the total number of excess deaths in the pandemic period in the U.S. at 1.31 million: 215,527 more than the official death count from COVID.
One counter argument suggests that some of these deaths may result from other COVID-related events, such as restrictions put in place at accessing hospitals as a result of lockdown measures. Even if some excess deaths may have resulted from other pandemic-related issues, both researchers emphasize that COVID is the main culprit. Chen explained that the timing of excess deaths matters: According to the CDC, excess deaths that are not classified as COVID deaths “peak at around the same time as excess deaths,” a pattern that would be expected only if COVID is driving these deaths.
Another argument claims that hospitals are misreporting COVID deaths. The argument suggests that people are dying with COVID, rather than from COVID. Dr. Chen responded to this theory by saying: “If you look at out of hospital settings, you see this massive, massive difference between COVID deaths and excess deaths, and we think that is very indicative of underreporting of COVID, to the extent that even if there are isolated cases of this with COVID or from COVID being an issue in hospitals, it is far outweighed by the home deaths’ underreporting and also the likelihood that in-hospital reporting probably, in general, follows the CDC guidelines.”
Wakefield allowed for the potential of discrepancies in reporting, noting that across states and countries it is difficult to accurately count COVID deaths. He emphasized that this is why excess mortality is a valuable measure, particularly in a country with death records as relatively robust as the United States: “It’s impossible that this excess mortality doesn’t exist… The science is quite clear here. There was a huge excess.” For additional resources about COVID-19, visit www1.nyc.gov/site/coronavirus/index.page or call 311. COVID-19 testing, masks, and vaccination resources can also be accessed on the AmNews COVID-19 page: www.amsterdamnews.com/covid/.
Trump was barely sequestered in his haven in Palm Beach when he unleashed a barrage of reactions to his indictment and arraignment. According to one account, he was practically inaudible when he said “Not guilty” to the 34 felony counts against him. But he was loud and vociferous back in Mar-a-Lago, defining the court appearance and the charges “an insult to our country.” Aha, those are just the words we can slap on him, like the ones seen repeatedly at Tuesday’s counter demonstration outside the Manhattan courthouse.
Trump, your behavior epitomizes that statement because you are “an insult to our country.” Not to gloat, but we were hoping to see you fingerprinted and shackled with an accompanying mugshot. Alas, it’s embarrassing enough, perhaps, to have you mocked on social media, a sad clown resorting to no end in your quest for power and prestige. The signs outside the Manhattan Criminal Courts said it all for us: “Trump the thug,” “Not above the law,” and “Lock him up!” The largest one outlined on the ground at the park across the street from the courthouse repeated the large banner emblazoned with the words “Don’t Buy Trump’s Lies.”
Unfortunately, we know that far too many Americans still embrace his lies, and a host of them are poised to carry out his provocations. That’s a sad commentary on the espoused American creed, and we have to chuckle at Trump’s recent Tweet that he can’t believe his arrest is happening in America. Well, arraigned one, you better believe and get ready for more rounds of “insult” as you call the drumbeat of justice.
Over the next several months we are sure to witness more charges against him and more inane responses as we move toward the trial date. And, to be sure, he’s going to use all the media attention to his advantage, so don’t go for the dope’s hooey. Don’t buy the lies.
