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Five Questions1 Which actress, an award-winner for her role in the crime drama film Monster, was born in South Africa?2 Who travels around in a British police box that’s larger on the inside than it is on the outside?3 How many eyes are there on a U.S. one dollar bill?4 What tell-all chef cautions diners not to eat fish on Mondays (usually old) or order meat well-done (masks a poor cut)?5 What item was purchased for $168 million on eBay by a fabulously wealthy Russian businessman in 2006 — a plane, a yacht or a tricked-out railcar?

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Tonya Bankhead is a pharmacy tech at Walgreens. She enjoys taking care of her customers.

caLendar

Thursday■ “Invisible Vegan”: Healing Springs Farmacy Mississippi pres-ents the film “Invisible Vegan” at 4:30 p.m. at the Columbus-Lown-des Public Library, 314 Seventh St. N., followed by a plant-based dinner at 5:30 p.m. RSVP by email to [email protected].■ Gordy Forum: The spring Gordy Honors College Forum series at Mississippi University for Women opens with Shennette Garrett-Scott of the University of Mississippi speaking on the strug-gle of black women in the state to participate in the suffrage move-ment and exercise their right to vote. The free program is 6 p.m. in Nissan Auditorium on campus.

PubLic meetingsJan. 31: Starkville Board of Aldermen work session, 11 a.m., City HallFeb. 3: Oktibbeha County Board of Supervisors meeting, 9 a.m., Chancery CourthouseFeb. 4: Starkville Board of Aldermen meeting, 5:30 p.m., City Hall

By yue Stella [email protected]

Five road projects across the Golden Triangle area could help keep current companies and attract more potential businesses, Golden Triangle Develop-ment LINK CEO Joe Max Higgins said at a breakfast event with local lawmakers Monday morning.

The projects are estimated to cost a total of $12.3 million, with the two most expensive projects — accounting for $8.4 million — located in Lowndes County. The LINK hosted state legislators repre-senting Golden Triangle districts at East

Mississippi Community College’s Com-muniversity to present infrastructure needs for industrial development and publicly lobby for any state funds that might be available to help get them done.

Having the breakfast early in this year’s legislative session was critical, Higgins said.

“This year, we decided to be proac-tive,” he said. “Let’s go ahead and arm our legislators with it so when they go down there (to Jackson) they got it in their back pocket.”

An estimated $5.3 million is needed to provide a second access road to In-ternational Paper’s plant in Columbus, Higgins said. The company borders the railway on the north, and the plant’s only entrance and exit would be blocked when a train derails or simply parks on the tracks for hours, said Kellum Kim, com-

LINK pitches road projects to legislative delegation$12.3 million needed for roads to support area industrial development

Tess Vrbin/Dispatch Staff Kate Dickerson, left, a junior at Starkville High School, receives a sign from Starkville-Oktibbeha Consolidated School District Superintendent Eddie Peasant on Friday at SHS. Peasant told Dickerson to put the sign in her fam-ily’s yard in recognition of her being chosen from a pool of 129 student applicants for the Sacrifice for Freedom: World War II in the Pacific program, a competitive National History Day research institute in Hawaii every year.

Columbus Social Security office reopens after flooding shuts it down for 8 daysservices diverted to other offices during closureBy Slim [email protected].

COLUMBUS — By mid-morning Monday, it was business as usual at the Columbus Social Security office on Bluecutt Road.

About a dozen people waited their turn to see a Social Security repre-sentative in the reception area that showed no signs of the flooding that closed the offices for eight days earli-er this month .

“Yes, we were closed for a week,” said manager Karen Denton, who referred all other questions to the re-gional communications office in At-lanta.

Patti Patterson, the regional com-munications director, said the Colum-bus office was closed from Jan. 13-21 as a result of flooding on the property, located at 3577 Bluecutt Road near the intersection of Highway 45 North. The office is normally open 9 a.m.-4 p.m. Monday through Friday.

“Appointments and telephone calls were handled by other offices,” Pat-terson said. “Signage on the office doors provided information on how to receive services as well as the ad-dresses for the closest Social Security Offices, in Starkville, Tupelo and Tus-caloosa.”

Patterson said most Social Secu-rity services are available online or via phone appointments. Applications for retirement, disability or Medicare benefits can be made online as well as appealing a ruling or decision.

Patterson said there are only a few services that cannot be accessed on-line.

“Applying for an original or new So-cial Security card is one of the things that requires an office visit,” she said.

Yue Stella Yu/Dispatch Staff

Golden Trian-gle Develop-

ment LINK CEO Joe Max Hig-

gins presents at a legislative

breakfast event Monday

morning five proposed

projects in Clay, Lowndes

and Oktibbe-ha counties

that could potentially help

invite more businesses in.

The projects would combine to cost an es-

timated $12.3 million.

By teSS [email protected]

Kate Dickerson is “not a big heights person,” but her first time on a plane this summer

“will definitely be worth it,” she said.

The Starkville High School junior and her history teacher, Craig Wood, will be one of 16 student-teacher teams nationwide

traveling to Hawaii to study World War II in June, as part of the Sacrifice for Freedom: World War II in the Pacific program.

The program is run by the nonprofit National History Day, in which middle and high school students create projects displaying their historical research, interpreta-tion and critical thinking skills. Students from SHS and Armstrong Middle School participate every year in NHD’s state competition and regularly advance to the na-

tional competition held every June in Washington, D.C.

Dickerson was first exposed to the program when her older brother, Tyler, participated in it, but she herself became interested in history last year when she took Advanced Placement European History, she said.

“It opened my eyes a little bit more to history,” she said. “(At first,) it was just another class I had to take, but now it’s something I’m actually interested in.”

She applied for the Sacrifice for Freedom program — which is separate from NHD’s regular com-

SHS student-teacher team to travel to Hawaii, research WWII

student one of 16 in country chosen to participate in research

Wood

See projects, 6A

See sHs, 3A

The DispaTch • www.cdispatch.com2A Tuesday, January 28, 2020

By ERIC TUCKER, ZEKE MILLER and LISa MaSCaRO The Associated Press

WA S H I N G T O N — President Donald Trump’s legal team is raising a broad-based attack on the impeachment case against him even as it mostly brushes past allegations in a new book that could undercut a key de-fense argument at his Senate trial.

Former national security adviser John Bolton writes in a manuscript that Trump wanted to withhold mil-itary aid from Ukraine until it com-mitted to helping with investigations into Democratic rival Joe Biden. That assertion matters because Trump and his lawyers have repeat-edly insisted that he never tied the suspension of security aid to politi-cal investigations.

The revelation clouded White House hopes for a swift end to the impeachment trial, as Democrats demanded witnesses and some Republicans expressed openness to the idea. It also distracted from hours of arguments Monday from Trump’s lawyers, who declared anew that no witness has testified to direct knowledge that Trump’s delivery of aid was contingent on in-

vestigations into Democrats. Bolton appeared poised to say exactly that if summoned by the Senate.

“We deal with transcript evidence, we deal with publicly available infor-mation,” attorney Jay Sekulow said. “We do not deal with speculation.”

Trump is charged with abusing his presidential power by asking Ukraine’s leader to help investigate Biden at the same time his admin-istration was withholding hundreds of millions of dollars in security aid. A second charge accuses Trump of obstructing Congress in its probe.

Republicans are to conclude their arguments Tuesday.

On Monday, Trump’s attorneys, including high-profile lawyers Ken Starr and Alan Dershowitz, launched a historical, legal and political attack on the entire impeachment process. They said there was no basis to re-move Trump from office, defended his actions as appropriate and as-sailed Biden, who is campaigning for the Democratic nomination to oppose Trump in November.

Former Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi devoted her presentation to Biden and his son Hunter, who served on the board of a Ukraine gas company when his father was leading the Obama administration’s diplomatic dealings with Kyiv. The legal team argued that Trump had legitimate reasons to be suspicious

of the younger Biden’s business dealings and concerned about cor-ruption in Ukraine and that, in any event, he ultimately released the aid without Ukraine committing to investigations the Republican pres-ident wanted.

Trump has sought, without pro-viding evidence, to implicate the Bidens in the kind of corruption that has long plagued Ukraine. Though anti-corruption advocates have raised concerns, there has been no evidence of wrongdoing by either the former vice president or his son.

Democrats say Trump released the money only after a whistleblow-er submitted a complaint about the situation.

Starr, whose independent coun-sel investigation into President Bill Clinton resulted in his impeachment — he was acquitted by the Senate — bemoaned what he said was an “age of impeachment.” Impeachment, he said, requires an actual crime and a “genuine national consensus” that the president must go. Neither ex-ists here, Starr said.

“It’s filled with acrimony and it di-vides the country like nothing else,” Starr said of impeachment. “Those of us who lived through the Clinton impeachment understand that in a deep and personal way.”

Dershowitz, the final speaker of the evening, argued that impeach-able offenses require criminal-like conduct — a view largely rejected by legal scholars. He said “nothing in the Bolton revelations, even if true, would rise to the level of an abuse of power or an impeachable offense.”

Trump lawyers raise defenses as pressure grows for witnesses‘Nothing in the Bolton revelations, even if true, would rise to the level of an abuse of power or an impeachable offense’

Alan Dershowitz, a lawyer for President Trump

Trump to unveil his Middle East peace plan amid skepticismBy aROn HELLER The Associated Press

WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump is set to unveil his administration’s much-anticipated Middle East peace plan in the latest American ven-ture to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Odds of it taking shape, though, appear long, giv-en the Palestinians’ preemptive rejection of the plan and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s shaky political standing.

For both men, the White House summit looks to be a welcome diversion.

Trump is expected to present the proposal along-side Netanyahu at noon Tuesday. The event comes the day Trump’s impeachment trial continues in the Senate and the Israeli parliament had planned a hearing to discuss Netanyahu’s request for immunity from criminal corruption charges.

Netanyahu withdrew that request hours before the parliamentary proceedings were set to begin, say-ing in a statement he had “decided not to let this dirty game continue.” But Israel’s parliament, the Knesset, is still expected to meet even after the withdrawal.

Trump

By KaTHLEEn ROnaynE and andREW dEMILLO The Associated Press

L I T T L E ROCK, Ark. — When the leading Democratic presidential candidates m a r k e d M a r t i n Luther King Jr. Day by linking arms and march-ing through South Car-olina’s capital, Michael Bloomberg was nowhere near the early primary state.

The former New York mayor was instead in Ar-kansas, tossing out candy at a King Day parade and enjoying his status as the only presidential hopeful in town.

“Mike Boomerang?” a woman asked, as the billionaire businessman walked by.

“Mike Bloomberg,” a supporter clarified. “He’s running for president.”

Bloomberg is running, but he’s on his own track, essentially creating a par-allel race to the nomina-tion with no precedent. While his competitors are hunkered down in the four states with the earliest primaries, Bloomberg is almost everywhere else — a Minnesota farm, a Utah co-working space, an office opening in Maine. He’s staked his hopes on states like Texas, Cali-fornia and Arkansas that vote on March 3, aiming to disrupt the Democrat-ic primary right around the time it’s typically set-tling on a front-runner. Or, should Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, a self-de-scribed democratic social-ist, be that front-runner, Bloomberg could be a backstop to Democrats still looking for a moder-ate choice.

Skipping the early vot-ing states and banking on success in later del-egate-rich contests has

never been done success-fully. But no candidate has ever brought the financial firepower that Bloomberg can — he is worth an es-timated $60 billion and has already spent more than $200 million building a campaign in more than two dozen states, taking him well past Super Tues-day.

“Every other campaign thinks about this as a se-quential set of contests. They spend time in Iowa and New Hampshire ... hoping that they’ll (get a) momentum bounce from one to the next,” said Dan Kanninen, Bloomberg’s states director. “We’re thinking about this as a na-tional conversation.”

There’s little public polling available to mea-sure Bloomberg’s prog-ress. National polls show his support in the mid to high single digits, similar to that of former South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg.

But interviews with voters and party officials across the Super Tuesday states show Bloomberg is still just starting to make an impression. While of-ficials marveled at the inescapable ambition of

Bloomberg’s advertising, many voters still do not know who he is, or know only what they’ve seen on television. Others noted they were interested but were still waiting to see who emerged as a clear leader in earlier contests.

Bloomberg creates a parallel presidential race. Can he win?

By dEEPTI HaJELa The Associated Press

NEW YORK — Brit-ain’s Prince Andrew has provided “zero coopera-tion” to the American in-vestigators who want to interview him as part of their sex trafficking probe into Jeffrey Epstein, a U.S. prosecutor said Monday.

Speaking at a news con-ference outside Epstein’s New York mansion, U.S. Attorney Geoffrey Ber-man said prosecutors and the FBI had contacted An-drew’s lawyers and asked to interview him.

“To date, Prince An-drew has provided zero cooperation,” said Ber-man, the top federal pros-ecutor in Manhattan.

Buckingham Palace de-

clined to comment.Andrew announced

last year that he was with-drawing from his royal duties amid renewed pub-lic attention on a woman’s claim that she had several sexual encounters with the prince at Epstein’s behest, starting when she was 17.

Virginia Roberts Giuf-fre says that after meet-ing Epstein in Florida in 2000, the millionaire flew her around the world and pressured her into having sex with numerous older men, including Andrew, two senior U.S. politicians, a noted academic, wealthy financiers and the attor-ney Alan Dershowitz, who is now part of President Donald Trump’s impeach-ment defense team.

All of those men have

denied the allegations. Ep-stein killed himself in his jail cell last summer while he was awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges.

Giuffre has said she had sex with Andrew three times, including once in London in 2001 at the home of Epstein’s girl-friend, Ghislaine Maxwell.

It isn’t clear what legal exposure Andrew might have in the case, if any. The age of consent for sex is 16 in England and 17 in New York. However, Giuffre claims that she was paid by Epstein for her sexual encounters with Andrew. That could constitute a vi-olation of U.S. sex traffick-ing laws if she was under age 18 or was coerced into unwanted sex acts.

Prince Andrew called uncooperative in Epstein probe

Polls show Bloomberg’s support in the mid to high single digits, similar to that of former South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg

Bloomberg

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The DispaTch • www.cdispatch.com TUESDAy, JAnUARy 28, 2020 3A

By emily WaGSteR PettuS The Associated Press

J A C K S O N — Mississippi will take steps to close part of a state prison that has been rocked by deadly vio-lence and beset by longstanding problems such as broken toilets and moldy showers, Gov. Tate Reeves said Monday in his first State of the State address.

At least 12 inmates have died in Mississippi prisons since late December — most of them at the Mississippi State Peniten-tiary at Parchman, and many of them in outbursts of violence. Prison problems have dominat-ed much of Republican Reeves’ time since he was inaugurated as governor Jan. 14.

In his speech at the state Capitol, Reeves said he has told the Mississippi Department of Corrections “to begin the nec-essary work to start closing Parchman’s most notorious unit — Unit 29.”

He said logistical questions about the closing must be an-swered.

“But I have seen enough,”

Reeves said. “We have to turn the page. This is the first step, and I have asked the depart-ment to begin the preparations to make it happen safely, justly and quickly.”

Governors generally use the State of the State to discuss the economy and to outline goals for the legislative session.

Reeves said in his speech that he wants to improve the foster care system, increase pay for teachers and enhance train-ing for workers. Reeves said the “big lie” is that all Americans must embark on the same path that includes at least a four-year university degree.

“In Mississippi, we know there is pride in a trade. We know that there is money to be made,” Reeves said. “We can let the East Coast have their ivo-ry towers. We can let the West Coast have a generation of gen-der studies majors. We will take more jobs and higher pay.”

He also said he wants to re-duce state regulations.

“That means eliminating those unfair regulations that keep people from earning li-censes to work,” Reeves said.

Reeves and other officials toured part of Parchman last

week, and he said Thursday that the state is taking imme-diate steps to try to improve living conditions that he de-scribed as “terrible.” Multiple health department inspections have shown problems at Parch-man, such as broken sinks and toilets, holes in cell walls and widespread mold and mildew in showers.

The interim commissioner of the Department of Correc-tions, Tommy Taylor, said after Reeves’ speech Monday that in-mates in Unit 29 now have clean water to drink and warm water for showers. He said some in-mates had not been allowed to

shower for several days while prisons were on lockdown be-cause of the violence. He said those no longer on lockdown have had a chance to show-er and have been given new clothes.

Taylor also said toilets have been repaired, and crews are patching holes that allow rain into buildings. He said work-ers are also repairing problems with electrical systems and heating.

“We’re preparing to make it more livable as long as they’ve got to stay there while we’re making this transition,” Taylor said.

Reeves said last week that the state might reopen a closed prison in another part of the state to house some inmates currently at Parchman.

Unit 29 has about a dozen buildings, and three of them are already closed, Taylor said.

Death row inmates are housed at Unit 29, and Taylor said the condition of their build-ing is “OK.” State law requires death row to be at Parchman, and Taylor said those inmates will remain where they are un-less legislators change the law and direct the Department of Corrections to put death row somewhere else.

Mississippi governor: Close part of notorious state prison‘this is the first step, and i have asked the department to begin the preparations to make it happen safely, justly and quickly’

Gov. Tate Reeves in Monday’s State of the State address

Inmate found dead in privately run prison in Mississippithe aSSociated PReSS

JACKSON — An inmate was found dead in his cell at a privately run prison in Mississip-pi over the weekend, among the latest inmate deaths in a state that’s seen at least a dozen in the past month.

Jermaine Tyler, 38, was found unresponsive Saturday in Marshall County Correctional Fa-cility, said Issa Arnita, spokesman for Manage-ment & Training Corporation, the company that runs the prison.

“There were no initial signs of foul play,” Ar-nita said in a statement.

Tyler was serving a life sentence on a capital murder conviction from Rankin County.

At least a dozen inmates have died in Mis-sissippi prisons during the past month. Many of the deaths happened during outbreaks of vio-lence, and prison officials have attributed some

of the violence to clashes between gangs.More than two dozen inmates sued the

state Jan. 14, saying understaffed prisons are “plagued by violence” and inmates are forced to live in decrepit and dangerous conditions. En-tertainers Jay-Z and Yo Gotti are paying for the attorneys in the case, a spokesperson for the two confirmed. All of the plaintiffs have been inmates at the Mississippi State Penitentiary at Parchman.

Tyler was one of two inmates who died during the weekend in Mississippi.

Joshua Norman, 26, was found hanging in his cell Sunday morning at Parchman, accord-ing to a news release from the Mississippi De-partment of Corrections. Sunflower County Coroner Heather Burton said foul play is not suspected in the death. Norman was serving a five-year sentence on an armed robbery convic-tion from Oktibbeha County.

Reeves

Tell your child a bedtime story.

the aSSociated PReSS

SCOTTSBORO, Ala. — A massive fire that killed at least eight people and destroyed dozens of boats in an Alabama marina ear-ly Monday was spread so rapidly by the wind that “we didn’t have time to do nothing,” said one resident who survived but lost his brother in the cold water.

Tommy Jones, a Jackson County Park Marina resi-dent, said he also watched helplessly as a small boat containing a woman and her children was engulfed in flames.

“There was nothing we could do,” he said.

Scottsboro Fire Chief Gene Necklaus said all

eight people who were known to be missing have been confirmed dead, and “that number could go up, because we don’t know how many were on boats” that sank.

The fire began just after midnight and quickly con-sumed the dock as people slept. The wooden dock and at least 35 vessels went up in flames and an alu-minum roof that covered many of the boats melted and collapsed, cutting off escape routes and raining debris over the area as boat-ers leaped into the river.

Jones said he was aboard his 35-foot cabin cruiser when someone came banging on the boat

after midnight saying, “Man, the marina is on fire.” The flames were rac-ing out to the far end of the dock where Jones’ boat was tied.

Jones said he and sev-eral other men cut some boats free and sent them drifting out into the water. When a man placed his wife and children into a small boat, they cut that boat free too. Finally, Jones said, he jumped into the water and swam for shore, 200 yards away. He believes his broth-er Yancey Roper, who lived aboard another boat, swam in a different direction. Of-ficials later told him that his brother had drowned.

As Jones was swim-

ming for shore in water with a temperature in the mid-50s, he said, “I looked back and that other boat with the wife and the chil-dren on it was all engulfed in flames.”

At least seven people were sent to hospitals suf-fering from exposure to the flames or the frigid water.

“It was scary. The worst thing for me is you could hear people screaming for help, and there was noth-ing we could do. Nobody could do anything to get to them,” said Julie Jackson, who lives with her hus-band and son in a house-boat on another dock that did not burn.

Alabama fire chief: At least 8 died in marina boat dock fire

SHScontinued from Page 1a

petition — by writing a paper about what WWII means to her and her family’s connection to it. Her great-grandfather, Air Force Sgt. James Donovan Gautier Jr. of Moss Point, was a prison-er of war for three and a half years and survived the Bataan Death March, the forced movement of thousands of American and Filipino POWs by the Japanese army across roughly 60 miles of the Philippines.

Dickerson and Wood learned in December they were one of 16 teams chosen from a pool of 129 applicants, though the information was not publicly released until earlier this month, something Wood said was “a really hard secret to keep” due to their excitement.

They were one of only two teams from the South, the other being from Georgia, and Dick-erson said this was part of why it was a surprise to be chosen.

“(Being) from Mis-sissippi, you don’t really think you would stand out, but I’m excited that I did,” she said.

Wood wrote his own application letter de-tailing how he teaches WWII history and ex-plaining his own family’s connection to the war. His great-uncle served

in the Pacific Ocean on a patrol torpedo boat, he said.

“He never talked about it, except for one random Christmas when he brought it up and then never spoke about it again,” Wood said.

Local participation in NHD grows every year, with 15 students from Starkville-Oktibbeha Consolidated School District qualifying for the national competition in D.C. last year. Wood said the success comes from the district expecting its NHD participants to cre-ate college-level projects using skills they will need in higher education, such as finding both primary and secondary sources, working with a word limit and developing public speaking skills. He and other history teachers are there to guide students through their projects but let them take initiative, he said.

“These kids are learning the topics that they want to learn about,” Wood said. “We don’t tell them to pick one specific topic, because if we did that, we wouldn’t have as many people do it.”

Dickerson and Wood’s Hawaii trip will include a visit to the airfield that was attacked in Pearl Har-bor on Dec. 7, 1941, and they will spend a night on the U.S.S. Missouri, the

site of the Japanese sur-render that ended WWII.

All 16 teams are assigned a list of books to read about WWII and Hawaii history, and each student will research a fallen soldier from their home state who is buried at the national cemetery in Hawaii in order to write and deliver a eulogy for that person during the trip. Dickerson said she is considering researching a soldier from the Copiah area whose remains and family were identified only recently thanks to advancements in forensic science.

Part of the program’s goal is to understand the sacrifices that soldiers and their families made, Dickerson said.

“It’s almost a way of saying thank you to his family as well, because (the soldier) made a sacrifice, but so did the family,” she said.

Her grandmother, Gautier’s daughter, grew up moving regularly because of her father’s service, Dickerson said, and she was “ecstatic” to learn that her grand-daughter had been chosen to honor WWII veterans in this way.

“A big part of my great-grandfather’s story was to never forget, to remember your history because it can repeat itself, and she just loved

that me doing this is a way to live that out for him,” Dickerson said.

4A Tuesday, January 28, 2020

OpinionPETER BIRNEY IMES Editor/PublisherBIRNEY IMES III Editor/Publisher 1998-2018BIRNEY IMES JR. Editor/Publisher 1947-2003BIRNEY IMES SR. Editor/Publisher 1922-1947

ZACK PLAIR, Managing EditorBETH PROFFITT Advertising DirectorMICHAEL FLOYD Circulation/Production ManagerMARY ANN HARDY ControllerDispatch

the

Letters to the editor

the iMPeAChMeNt triAL

Impeachment: The left’s ultimate weaponIn 1868, President

Andrew Johnson was impeached

for violating the Tenure of Office Act that had been enacted by Con-gress over his veto in 1867. Defying the law, Johnson fired Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, with-out getting Senate approval, as the act required him to do.

In his 1956 Pulitzer Prize-winning book, John F. Kennedy made Edmund Ross one of the Senate’s “Profiles in Courage” for his decisive and heroic vote not to convict and remove Johnson.

Repealed in 1887, the Tenure of Office Act was later declared unconstitutional by the Su-preme Court.

But while the act was the lethal instrument to be used in the political assassination of a president whom the Radical Re-publicans meant to terminate, Stanton’s ouster was not the primary cause of their fury.

What truly enraged the Rad-ical Republicans was Johnson’s resolve to be more magnan-imous toward the defeated South than they meant to be. Johnson had in mind an earlier end to the military occupation

of the South and a more rapid return of the seceded states to the Union.

The story is told in the 1942 Hollywood film “Tennessee John-son,” starring Van Heflin, which has since gone down the memory hole along with Woodrow Wil-son’s White House favorite, “Birth of a

Nation.”As historians concede, the

impeachment of Johnson was about Reconstruction and who would remake the South. Would it be the Southern majority that fought and lost the war, or the victorious Yankees and the “scalawags” and “carpetbag-gers” laboring alongside them?

The triumphant Radical Republicans were not about conciliation. So severe were aspects of the occupation that Gen. Robert E. Lee reportedly said if he had known what was coming, he might not have quit fighting.

So, too, the impeachment of Donald Trump is not really about his 10-week delay in shipping arms to Ukraine or his postponing of a visit by Ukraine’s president until he announced an investigation of

Burisma Holdings and Joe and Hunter Biden.

Even before the 2016 elec-tion, Democrats, collaborating with a like-minded media, were using the instruments of power they possess, to first prevent and then to overturn the elec-tion results of 2016.

Russiagate, the James Comey FBI investigation, the Mueller probe — aborting a Trump presidency has always been the goal.

Saturday, White House counsel Pat Cipollone succinct-ly described to the Senate the bottom line:

“They’re asking you to remove President Trump from the ballot in an election that’s occurring in approximately nine months. ... They’re asking you to tear up all of the ballots across this country on your own initiative, take that deci-sion away from the American people.”

To save “our democracy,” to which they pay tireless tribute, the impeachers want to ensure that the people, in a supposedly free election in 2020, are not allowed to make the same mis-take they made in 2016.

To save our democracy, the House and half the Senate want to deny the America electorate one of the most important roles the people play in this republic

— the exercise of their right to choose the head of state and commander in chief of the United States.

Disqualifying presidential candidates whom populists favor but elites abhor is a quite common practice — in Third World countries.

Over the weekend, we learned that John Bolton, who has offered to testify in the Sen-ate trial, claims in his coming book that Trump made a direct link between sending military aid to Ukraine and Ukraine’s opening an investigation of the Bidens.

This has caused some Re-publican senators to reconsider calling witnesses, particularly Bolton, in the impeachment trial.

If four Republicans vote for witnesses, they will be doing the work Adam Schiff, Jerry Na-dler and Nancy Pelosi’s House failed to do in their haste to get Trump impeached by Christ-mas. They will be prolonging a trial set up to burn and bury their president.

The Senate should let Trump’s defenders complete their case, as the House man-agers and impeachers have already done. Then allow 16 hours of questioning. Then call for the verdict.

There is no treason, no brib-

ery and no high crime in what the House managers allege. There is nothing in the articles of impeachment voted that rises to a level to justify removing a president.

Harry Truman dropped atomic bombs on defenseless cities and sent 2 million POWs back to the tender mercies of Stalin in Operation Keelhaul after World War II.

JFK greenlighted the over-throw of an ally, President Ngo Dinh Diem in South Vietnam, in a coup that ended in the murder of Diem.

LBJ ordered the wiretapping of Martin Luther King, and his White House shared the fruits of that FBI surveillance with a friendly press.

No one was impeached.Why? Because Truman, JFK

and LBJ were establishment favorites.

For Trump, a phone call with a Ukrainian president saying, “Send us your Biden file and we will have a meeting,” is a political capital crime justifying democracy’s version of a death penalty.

Patrick J. Buchanan, a nationally syndicated columnist, was a senior advisor to presi-dents Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford and Ronald Reagan. His website is http://buchanan.org/blog.

Voice of the peopleCommuter appalled at condition of city, county roads

Since retiring I have been keeping my first grandbaby and having several medical appointments in Columbus. I commute to and from Vernon, Alabama to the Columbus/New Hope area three-to-four times per week. I also now do a lot of my shopping and fill up my car with gas in Columbus.

I am appalled at the condition of many of the roads that I travel. I do not under-stand why these roads are not kept in better condition for commuters. I do not know where the funding comes from for this; however, it seems to me that road-ways would be a greater priory to the city council than say an amphitheater. I do not understand why Columbus cannot repave needed roads! I would suggest the city council and county commissioners get out and ride on the roadways listed below and discuss at their next meetings.

The following are those I was on today and noted to be in pitiful condition:

Gunshoot, Lemberg, Dutch Lane, Leigh Drive, Baptist Blvd., and Fifth Street North. Several of these are roads around Baptist Hospital, and I feel sorry for those patients who are sick and in pain riding in an ambulance or personal car ei-ther dodging the potholes or hitting them.

Someone and their department/ city planning/ city council should want to work on improving these roads for not only the people that live in Columbus but also for those of us that travel from Alabama to spend our money in your city. I would like to send the cost of a front end alignment to the supervisors after travel-ing up and down Gunshoot Road multiple times per week. I was hopeful that would be next after the Highway 50 paving.

Katrina RhudyVernon, Alabama

Sharing Adrian Rogers quoteThis 1931 quote from former Southern

Baptist Convention president Dr. Adrian Rogers is very relevant for today. Every eligible voter needs to understand this and realize that if they vote for those who are advocating these policies, it will be the end of Democracy in America.

“You cannot legislate the poor into freedom by legislating the wealthy out of freedom. What one person receives without working for, another person must work for without receiving. The govern-ment cannot give to anybody anything that the government does not first take from somebody else. When half of the people get the idea that they do not have to work because the other half is going to take care of them, and when the other half gets the idea that it does no good to work because somebody else is going to get what they work for. That my dear friend is about the end of any nation. You cannot multiply wealth by dividing it.”

Patsy RobertsonColumbus

CAMPAiGN 2020

Bloomberg is showing Democrats a good timeDemocrats could use

some cheering up now that their con-

ventional politicians are locked in fierce ideologi-cal battle. The moderate Democratic majority fears that an aggressive left could saddle them with a zombie candidate sure to lose to President Donald Trump. That person could also cost them control of the House by hurting down-ballot Democrats in hard-won swing districts.

Oh, happy day, then, that former New York Mayor Mike Bloomberg is tapping his vast fortune to make de-feating Trump central to his mission. Bloomberg is vying for the Demo-cratic nomination, and his candidacy is gaining strength. But he’s now focused on getting under Trump’s skin.

Watching Bloomberg troll Trump should be a mood lifter for Demo-crats, independents and many Re-publicans desperate to end Trump’s reign of incompetence and all-around nastiness. Where do we start?

How about Bloomberg’s brilliant decision to buy an ad during “Fox & Friends,” Trump’s premier safe space? Trump blew his top. He went on a not-entirely-coherent tirade, something about Bloomberg playing the other Democrats for “clowns” and how, in the end, he will “consider himself to be the biggest clown of them all.”

After Trump bought a one-min-

ute ad to air during the Super Bowl, Bloomberg purchased his own $10 million minute. It will undoubtedly call the pres-ident corrupt, a danger to national security, an envi-ronmental Neanderthal, a killer of the people’s health care, a failure in business, mentally unsta-ble or some combination of the above.

That move unleashed another attack tweet from

Trump, which Bloomberg met with mockery: “Glad to see you’re watch-ing our ads.”

Of course, Bloomberg has bought airtime in West Palm Beach, Florida. That way, Trump won’t miss his ads while at Mar-a-Lago.

Dropping $1 billion on the 2020 campaign would hardly make a dent in Bloomberg’s net worth of around $60 billion. The founder of a finan-cial services empire, Bloomberg has recruited thousands of highly professional staffers focused on data. And they’re everywhere. Bloomberg has 80 staffers in North Carolina and 60 in Arizona alone.

Bloomberg is not blessed with the arresting speaking style of Trump or Bernie Sanders. Then again, he got himself elected mayor three times in a city of waving arms and yelling. And he did so running first as a Repub-lican, then as an independent and finally as a Democrat. You can call that wide appeal.

Bloomberg is now framing eco-

nomic inequality as one of the great challenges of our age. He’s been a ti-ger on global warming, having served as United Nations special envoy for climate action. And he’s for giving all Americans the option of signing up for government-run health coverage. Good progressive stuff.

While other candidates are focused on a sliver of very liberal voters in Iowa and New Hampshire, Bloomberg is going to Rust Belt Ohio and soybean Minnesota. He’s been campaigning in Texas with Judge Judy at his side, thus reaching the regular folks who watch daytime tele-vision. He’s advertising in Pennsylva-nia, Utah, Oklahoma and Idaho.

A late entry into the campaign, Bloomberg is placing his bets on the Super Tuesday vote on March 3. That’s when 40 percent of the conven-tion delegates will be chosen. But he plans to keep spending whoever the Democrats nominate.

Do I like the idea of a rich person inserting so much money into an elec-tion? I do not. I am grateful, however, that unlike another prominent rich New Yorker, Bloomberg is on the side of good. And he has single-handedly canceled Trump’s money advantage.

To borrow from my Republican friends in 2016, this will be a Flight 93 election. It is absolutely essential for the survival of the republic we love that Trump be shown the gangplank from the ship of state.

Froma Harrop, a syndicated colum-nist, writes for the Providence (Rhode Island) Journal. Her e-mail address is [email protected].

Patrick Buchanan

Froma Harrop

The DispaTch • www.cdispatch.com Tuesday, January 28, 2020 5A

Josephine TeasleyVisitation:

Tuesday, Jan. 28 • 5-7 PMWednesday, Jan. 29 • 12-1 PM

2nd Ave. North LocationServices:

Wednesday, Jan. 29 • 1 PM2nd Ave. North Chapel

BurialMemorial Garden Park

Oktibbeha County

Royce ButlerIncomplete

2nd Ave. North Location

memorialgunterpeel.com

Josephine “Jo” TeasleyJosephine Petty Teasley, 93, passed away Sat-

urday, January 25, 2020, at her residence in Co-lumbus, MS. Services will be held Wednesday, January 29, 2020, at 1:00 PM at The 716 2nd Ave North Chapel of Memorial Gunter Peel Funeral Home, with Rev. Sammy Crawford officiating. Burial will follow at Memorial Garden Park, Starkville MS. Visitation will be held Tuesday January 28, 2020, from 5 PM until 7 PM and again Wednesday one hour prior to service at the funeral home.

Mrs. Teasley was born on Thursday, Decem-ber 16, 1926 in Starkville, MS to the late Joe and Beulah Langford Petty. She was a member of Fairview Baptist Church serving as a Greeter and on the decorating committee for 55+ Club for many years. She was retired from United Tech-nologies after 34 years.

In addition to her parents, she was preced-ed in death by her husband, Ernest W. Teasley; daughter and son-in-law Susan Westbrook and Jerry; son and daughter-in-law, Michael Teasley and Glenda; and brother J.D. Petty.

She is survived by her daughter, Teresa Youngblood (Derek), Florence, MS; 4 Grand-children, Joy Hollingsworth (Caleb), Lara Gar-rard (Chris), Jeremy Westbrook (Mallory) and Jonathan Youngblood (Whittney); and 10 Great grandchildren.

Pallbearers will be Jonathan Youngblood, Jer-emy Westbrook, Chris Garrard, Caleb Holling-sworth, Landon Forstner, and Jackson Forstner.Honorary Pallbearers will be the 55+ Club at Fairview Baptist Church.

Sign the online guest book at www.memorialgunterpeel.com

716 Second Avenue North • Columbus, MS

AreA obituAriesCOMMERCIAL DISPATCH OBITUARY POLICYObituaries with basic informa-tion including visitation and service times, are provided free of charge. Extended obituaries with a photograph, detailed biographical informa-tion and other details families may wish to include, are avail-able for a fee. Obituaries must be submitted through funeral homes unless the deceased’s body has been donated to science. If the deceased’s body was donated to science, the family must provide official proof of death. Please submit all obituaries on the form provided by The Commercial Dispatch. Free notices must be submitted to the newspaper no later than 3 p.m. the day prior for publication Tuesday through Friday; no later than 4 p.m. Saturday for the Sunday edition; and no later than 7:30 a.m. for the Monday edition. Incomplete notices must be re-ceived no later than 7:30 a.m. for the Monday through Friday editions. Paid notices must be finalized by 3 p.m. for inclusion the next day Monday through Thursday; and on Friday by 3 p.m. for Sunday and Monday publication. For more informa-tion, call 662-328-2471.

Dorothy MooreSTARKVILLE —

Dorothy Ree Moore, 78, died Jan. 21, 2020.

Services will be at 11 a.m. Thursday at Second Baptist Church of Starkville, with the Rev. Joseph Stone and Mack Henry officiating. Burial will follow at Ok-toc Memorial Gardens Cemetery. Visitation will be from 12:30-5 p.m. Wednesday at Cen-tury Hairston Funeral Home. Century Hair-ston Funeral Home of

Starkville is in charge of arrangements.

Mrs. Moore was born Oct. 22, 1941, in Sidona, to Ceolia Henry and Lee Ethel Steel.

She is survived by her children, Cassandra Moore Washington of Greenwood, John F. Moore Jr. of Cherry Valley, California and Ricardo D. Moore of Starkville; siblings, Pauline White, the Rev. Mack Henry and Dennis Henry, all of Greenwood; 10 grand-children; and two great-grandchildren.

Lafayette Cheatham

NOXUBEE — Lay-ette Cheatham died Jan. 25, 2020.

Arrangements are incomplete and will be announced by Car-ter’s Funeral Home of Macon.

Tony FarmerNOXUBEE — Tony

Farmer, 43, died Jan. 25, 2020.

Arrangements are incomplete and will be announced by Car-ter’s Funeral Home of Macon.

Jerry Owens Sr.COLUMBUS — Jer-

ry Boyd Owens Sr., 86, died Jan. 27, 2020, at Baptist Memorial Hos-pital-Golden Triangle.

Arrangements are incomplete and will be announced by Lown-des Funeral Home of Columbus.

Harvey Gates Sr.MEMPHIS, Tenn. —

Harvey Lee Gates Sr., 83, died Jan. 20, 2020, at Methodist University Hospital in Memphis, Tennessee.

Services will be at noon Saturday at Cedar Grove Baptist Church in Aliceville, Alabama. Burial will follow at New Zion Baptist Cem-etery in Macon. Visi-tation will be from 3-6 p.m. Friday at Laven-der’s Funeral Service. Lavender’s Funeral Service of Aliceville, Alabama is in charge of arrangements.

Royce ButlerASHEVILLE, N.C.

— Royce Butler, 70, died Jan. 27, 2020, at Mission Hospital in Asheville, North Caro-lina.

Arrangements are incomplete and will be announced by Memori-al Gunter Peel Funeral Home and Crematory, 2nd Avenue North location.

Jerry BaswellCOLUMBUS — Jer-

ry Baswell, 72, died Jan. 26, 2020, at Baptist Me-morial Hospital-Golden Triangle.

Services will be at 2 p.m. Thursday at Dowdle Funeral Home of Millport, Alabama. Burial will follow at Ebenezer Cemetery. Visitation will follow services at the funeral

home chapel. Dowd-le Funeral Home of Millport, Alabama is in charge of arrange-ments.

Mr. Baswell was born to the late Floyd and Louise Baswell. He was an U.S. Army veter-an and was formerly employed as a comput-er programmer.

He is survived by his wife, Faye Arentson Basewll; stepson, Ken Smith; and siblings, James Baswell, Mary Ann Blanton and JoAnn White.

By JENNIFER PELTZ The Associated Press

NEW YORK — State and federal authorities sued imprisoned entre-preneur Martin Shkreli on Monday over tactics that shielded a profitable drug from competition af-ter a price hike made the so-called “Pharma Bro” infamous.

Shkreli was scorned as the bad-boy face of phar-

maceuticals profiteering after he engineered a roughly 4,000 percent in-crease in the price of a de-cades-old medication for a sometimes life-threat-ening parasitic infection.

Monday’s lawsuit, filed by the New York attorney general’s office and the Federal Trade Commis-sion, centers on subse-quent actions by Shkreli and his former company.

They “held this crit-ical drug hostage from patients and competitors as they illegally sought to maintain their monopoly,” Attorney General Letitia James said in a statement.

At least four potential competitors have so far been kept from making cheaper generic versions of the medication, the suit says.

Lawyer Benjamin Brafman said Shkreli “looks forward to defeat-ing this baseless and un-precedented attempt by the FTC to sue an indi-vidual for monopolizing a market.”

Shkreli, 36, is serv-ing a seven-year prison sentence for a securi-ties-fraud conviction re-lated to hedge funds he ran before getting into the pharmaceuticals in-dustry.

Shkreli was CEO of Turing Pharmaceuti-cals — later called Vyera Pharmaceuticals LLC and Phoenixus AG — in 2015, when it acquired the rights to a drug called Daraprim. It is used to treat toxoplasmosis, an in-fection that can be deadly for people with HIV or other immune-system problems and can cause

serious problems for children born to women infected while pregnant. Hospitalized patients typ-ically take the drug daily for several weeks, and sometimes for months or even years, according to the lawsuit.

The company boosted the cost from less than $20 to $750 per pill.

“Should be a very handsome investment for all of us,” Shkreli put it in an email to a contact at the time.

The increase left some patients facing co-pays as high as $16,000 and sparked an outcry that fu-

eled congressional hear-ings.

Then the company “kept the price of Dara-prim astronomically high by illegally boxing out the competition,” FTC official Gail Levine said in a state-ment Monday.

The drug’s patent pro-tection had expired, but the company used what’s known as a “closed distri-bution system” to restrict who could buy it — mean-ing that companies inter-ested in making a gener-ic version of Daraprim couldn’t get enough pills to do required testing, ac-cording to the lawsuit.

NY, feds sue ‘Pharma Bro’ for ‘scheme’ to keep drug price up

By DAKE KANG The Associated Press

BEIJING — As hundreds of Americans prepare to evacuate Wuhan, the central Chinese city at the heart of a new virus out-break that has killed over 100, San Francisco native Doug Pe-rez is staying behind.

It’s not that he’s uncon-cerned. Perez, 28, and his girl-friend have hunkered down in their apartment for the past five days. They’ve argued. They’ve fretted over missed food deliver-ies. They’ve dubbed their Labra-dor, Chubby, “Apocalypse Dog,” venturing out for short walks on deserted streets only after fit-ting him with a mask.

But Perez won’t leave because his girlfriend, a Chinese citizen, won’t be allowed on the plane.

“A lot of foreigners are stuck here,” Perez said. “There is no way on Earth many of us, includ-ing myself, are going to leave our loved ones.”

As China rolls out contain-ment measures unprecedented in modern history, locking down more than 50 million people in 17 cities, foreigners trapped in the quarantine zone are wonder-ing when they can return home.

The U.S. government is char-tering a flight on Tuesday night to take several hundred diplo-mats, family members and other Americans out of the country to Ontario, California. The plane will refuel in Anchorage, Alas-ka, where the passengers will be rescreened, according to the Alaska Department of Health and Social Services.

But Americans in Wuhan estimate there are more than a thousand U.S. citizens in the city, meaning most will be left behind.

“It’s like a sinking ship,” Pe-rez said.

The day the lockdown was announced, Perez and his girl-friend got in a fight — “a plate was destroyed” — over wheth-er to venture to a supermarket to buy food. His girlfriend, who doesn’t want to be named, won the argument, and the couple began ordering food online. The streets went quiet. They stay in every night, spending hours a day on social media checking up on the latest news and fielding calls from worried relatives.

On Monday evening, guards barred him from leaving his apartment compound, leaving

him wondering what’s next.“That’s kind of dawned on

me, like how bad this could get,” Perez said. “Who knows what will be next week. Will it be po-lice, will it be soldiers? Will we physically not be able to leave our building?”

Japan, South Korea, France and other wealthy governments are also planning evacuations. But for many from other coun-tries, there are no plans for evac-uations at all, leaving them total-ly stranded.

Another American, who de-clined to be identified out of fear of online and government

harassment, said she was choos-ing to stay behind because she has a cough and was told she would likely be quarantined at the Wuhan airport by Chinese authorities.

But for Priscilla Dickey, 35, from South Burlington, Ver-mont, trying to get on the plane was a no-brainer because of her 8-year-old daughter, Hermione, who she worries could be vul-nerable to the virus. On Monday afternoon, the consulate phoned Dickey and told her she and her daughter had seats.

After packing a bag with three shirts and a pair of pants,

Dickey stayed up until two in the morning trying to figure out how she would get to the airport amid a transportation shutdown. She “stress cleaned” her apartment in the morning, she said, before getting in an airport-bound car, waves of emo-tion washing over her.

“I was feeling guilt,” Dickey said, speaking by phone on her way to the airport. “Excitement, guilt, stress — all of it.”

Dickey plans to stay with rela-tives in the Cincinnati area after a 3- to 14-day quarantine, she says, adding that she was “very grateful” to be on her way out.

As US rescues some from virus in China, others left behind‘A lot of foreigners are stuck here. there is no way on earth many of us, including myself, are going to leave our loved ones.’

San Francisco native Doug Perez

Asian demand for face masks soars on fears of Chinese virusThE AssocIATED PREss

TOKYO — Panic and pollution drive the market for protective face masks, so business is booming in Asia, where fear of the virus from China is straining supplies and helping make mask-wearing the new normal.

Demand for face masks and hand sanitizing liquid has soared, as both local residents and visitors from China stock up on such products as a reassuring precaution.

Factories are rushing to boost production as the number of infections and deaths from the new virus first found in the central Chinese city of Wuhan climbs. In some parts of Asia, wear-ing of surgical masks has become mandatory, for now.

“Sales of disinfectant products and hygiene masks have been rising since last week. First Chinese tourists came to our store to buy these

products to bring back with them. They bought in bulk, like two or three boxes per person,” said Varumporn Krataitohg, an employee of the NanBhesaj drugstore in central Bangkok.

The outbreak began before the Chinese Lu-nar New Year, when tens of thousands of Chi-nese tourists visit Thailand, Japan and other parts of Asia. Demand has risen by 80 percent starting with this past weekend’s Chinese New Year, said Varumporn.

“Now we are out of disinfectant gel for hands. The maker just sent just new lots this morning and by noon we were sold out,” she said. “People keep coming and asking for these products.”

Japanese often wear surgical masks to pro-tect against colds, flu or hay fever. Shelves of some stores were scooped bare as Japanese health officials confirmed four cases of the vi-rus.

36-year-old currently serving a seven-year prison sentence for a securities-fraud conviction related to hedge funds

The DispaTch • www.cdispatch.com6A TUESDAy, JAnUARy 28, 2020

Health tips from Dr. Oz and Dr. RoizenHealth heaLth tiP

■ You don’t need to eat every 2–3 hours: Some people believe that having smaller, more frequent meals may help them lose weight. However, some studies suggest that meal size and frequency have no effect on fat burning or body weight. Eating every 2–3 hours is inconvenient and completely unnecessary for the majority of people. Simply eat when you’re hungry and be sure to choose healthy and nutritious foods.

Source: healthline.com

What causes kidney stones?

People love Top 10 lists, like Billboard’s Year-End Top 10 songs, Listverse’s 10 Hilarious Historic Predictions of Life in the 2000s and Google’s Top 10 searched-for health top-ics of 2019.

This year’s Google 10 included topics we’ve covered recently, from how to lower blood pressure (No. 1), to how to get rid of hiccups (No. 3) and what causes them (No. 5). But No. 6 on the Google list was “What causes kidney stones?” That’s a topic we haven’t addressed since 2016, and clearly it’s a medical problem that’s on your mind!

In fact, according to Cleveland Clinic urolo-gist Dr. Sri Sivalingam, “With the declining health of the American public [that’s the epi-demics of obesity and diabetes] ... over the past five to 10 years, we’ve

seen an increase in the preva-lence of stones, with more rapid increases among women and kids.”

So, here are the causes of kidney stones, and the steps to take to avoid them:

■ Obesity is a trigger. The solution? Maintain a healthy weight to avoid bodywide inflammation and diabetes, which is strongly linked to kidney stone formation.

■ Ditto dehydra-tion. The solution? The American Urological Association says that if you’re prone to or have had kidney stones, you should drink 84 ounces of fluid daily.

■ Excess salt is another trigger. It causes an increase in calcium in

the urine, which can lead to stones. The solution? Avoid fast food and canned or ultrap-rocessed foods.

■ Add-ed fruc-

tose/high fructose corn syrup is another culprit. The solution? Ditch foods with added fructose, sugars and syrups. For sweets, eat more citrus fruits; they help prevent stone formation.

Early exposure to cigarette smoke linked to hyperactivity

In 2010, a 2-year-old Indonesian boy, Aldi Suganda, made headlines when a video showing him smoking went viral! The poor kid was reportedly so addicted to nicotine that he was smoking up to 40 ciga-

rettes a day, and would throw tantrums and hit his head against the floor whenever his parents tried to get him to cut back. Although this is a more-than-extreme case, it clearly shows how harmful smoking can be to a kid’s mental and physical health — and that’s true even when the exposure is from strictly secondhand smoke.

A new study published in the Journal of Child Psychology and Psychi-atry that looked at more than 1,000 children backs this up. It found that kids exposed to secondhand cigarette smoke in the first four years of life (even when their mom didn’t smoke while pregnant) are more likely to develop signs of hyperactivity and other behavioral problems. That’s because the smoke affects brain development in regions related to hyperactivity and impulsivity.

This is on top of other smoke-exposure-related

health problems among young kids, including lower respiratory tract infections, severe asthma attacks, ear infections and sudden infant death syndrome.

When it comes to secondhand smoke, there is no such thing as a risk-free level of expo-sure (for kids or adults) and thirdhand smoke is also toxic — that’s the residue in upholstery, clothing, etc. The bottom

line: Keep your home a smoke-free environment, and avoid spending time in places where smok-ing is permitted. Do not permit anyone to smoke around your children.

Mehmet Oz, M.D. is host of “The Dr. Oz Show,” and Mike Roizen, M.D. is Chief Wellness Officer and Chair of Wellness Institute at Cleveland Clinic. To live your healthiest, tune into “The Dr. Oz Show” or visit www.sharecare.com.

Drs. Oz and Roizen

Projectscontinued from Page 1a

munications manager of International Paper.

“We’ve had proba-bly four derailments and blocks (within the last year),” Kim said. “The last dera i lment was four hours.”

T h e blocks im-pact em-ployees who are eager to go home to their fam-ilies after working 12-hour shifts at the plant, Kim said. Sometimes, she said, people had no choice but to bypass the blockage by driving through the neighboring properties.

David Phillips, mill manager at International Paper, said the company also needs an alternative road for safety concerns.

“If somebody gets hurt,” Phillips said, “you can’t get an ambulance in there.”

The proposed 17-month project would extend the existing Manufacturers Drive for 1.2 miles and connect it with Artesia Road to the north. The new two-lane road would loop around the wastewater treatment plant to the east of the company and merge with Bent Oak Road. The two entryways should be far enough apart to prevent a blockage to both, Higgins said.

The other project in Lowndes County would finish paving the re-maining 8,400 feet of Charleigh Ford Jr. Drive, which would connect the south end of the road with Artesia Road. The improvement project of the entire gravel road has been receiving funding from different sources, Higgins said, but the pav-

ing of the section requires another $3.1 million.

“We’ve been cob-bling money together for years on Charleigh Ford (Drive),” Higgins said. “We have just nickeled and dimed and begged and pleaded to get money for the rest of it.”

In 2018, Lowndes County received $1 mil-lion from the BP oil spill settlement fund allocat-ed by the state to extend Charleigh Ford Drive from Mims Road to Ar-tesia Road. The money was used to widen and build the base of the ex-tension, Higgins said. Most recently, the county also issued almost $1.3 million in bonds in May to help pay for the paving and other improvements of the road.

The extension and pavement of the last sec-tion of the road would close the loop around the 1,144-acre Infinity Meg-asite, the third LINK-de-veloped megasite in Lowndes County.

The entire road would be a two-lane road that connects Artesia Road and Airport Road, but could be expanded to four lanes in the future, Higgins said. Improving road conditions and put-ting in place public infra-structure ahead of time would make the site more attractive to businesses looking for potential loca-tions across the country, Higgins said.

“We feel like we can be more competitive if we can get those things built upfront,” Higgins said. “They can ... increase our chances of being picked.”

Among other pro-posed projects Higgins addressed is the improve-ment of Sudduth Road in Starkville near the devel-oping North Star Indus-trial Park at Highways 389 and 82.

“It’s in absolutely atro-cious shape,” Higgins said.

The estimated $1.9-million project would reconstruct more than 4,000 feet of the two-lane road and offer a second route in and out of the industrial park, which has already attract-ed its first tenant, Garan Manufacturing, Higgins said. The park could also be the site of a $1 billion investment as part of a $3-billion project in the Golden Triangle, he said last week.

Projects in Clay Coun-ty include a $258,000 project that would turn the Eshman Avenue ramp onto Yokohama Boule-vard into a two-way road to meet the needs of driv-ers going both ways. An-other $1.7 million water main extension along Yo-kohama Boulevard would connect the pipeline on Highway 45 with the one on Eshman Avenue.

Legislators respondRep. Kabir Karriem

(D-Columbus) said he is hopeful in securing the funding for projects and would advocate for fund-ing for economic develop-ment projects.

“I’m very optimistic with the revenue the state has gathered and the tight-knit delegation that we do have…,” Karriem said. “We want to make projects in the Golden Triangle very success-ful.”

Rep. Cheikh Taylor (D-Starkville) said state funding could come from the BP settlement funds or revenue from the sale of lottery tickets. The state Legislature passed a bill in 2018 that allowed an annual lottery pro-ceeds of up to $80 mil-lion to fund for roads and bridges.

Rep. Gary Chism (R-Columbus) told The Dispatch he will intro-duce a bill in the House Ways and Means Com-mittee that would request for the full amount of

funding for all five proj-ects, and the mon-ey might come from s t a t e - i s -sued bond p a ck a ge s . H o w e v e r , he said, getting the full funding from the state Legis-lature may be chal-lenging.

“I feel like that maybe a quarter of a million for each site might be the op-t i m u m a m o u n t , ” Chism said.

S e n . C h u c k Y o u n g e r ( R- Colum-bus), said he hopes lawmakers from the Golden Triangle area can work together and pro-pose the funding for all five projects as a package. Younger also said he’s always supported a fuel tax increase, and the tax revenue could help more comprehensively repair roads and highways state-wide.

“We are the third lowest on fuel tax in the state,” Younger said. “I’m a Republican, I know Re-publicans aren’t supposed to be for taxes, but it’s the fairest way to pay for it. ... I think I’ve been getting a little bit bald back here because my head hits the damn roof in my truck when I’m going to Jack-son every time when I’m on (Highway) 25.”

Sen. Angela Turn-er-Ford (D-West Point) and Rep. Dana McLean (R-Columbus) both also attended the breakfast.

Chism

Taylor

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Phillips

Kim

Younger

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MISSISSIPPI STATE WOMEN’S BASKETBALL

Jim Lytle/Dispatch file photoMississippi State head coach Vic Schaefer talks to JaMya Mingo-Young during the first half of Sunday’s game against Ole Miss at Humphrey Coliseum in Starkville.

Bulldogs finding an identity as heart of conference play looms

BY BEN [email protected]

STARKVILLE — Mississip-pi State coach Vic Schaefer sim-ply shook his head.

Sitting at the podium in the underbelly of Humphrey Col-iseum, Schaefer was asked whether Sunday’s 80-39 shel-lacking of in-state rival Ole Miss and games against No. 1 South Carolina and Vanderbilt had helped him sure up what has been a revolving door of a rotation this season.

“It’s hard,” Schaefer said through a grimace. “I feel like I’m pretty comfortable with Xaria (Wiggins) being our first 3 or 4 coming off the bench, but up to game time today we’d have had a lineup you’d have gone, ‘Now what?’”

While the Bulldogs have seemingly turned a corner in recent weeks — most notably last week’s 81-79 near-miss against the Gamecocks — the pieces of a coherent rotation that MSU could boast into the

heart of conference play has also come into focus.

For starters, the emergence of backup guards Aliyah Matha-ru and JaMya Mingo-Young are impossible to ignore.

Through 21 games, Matha-ru has been a fluctuating mix of dynamic scoring ability and a first-year player who looks lost defensively. That’s begun to change. Over the past three games Matharu has totaled a plus-minus rating of plus-22 while recording seven steals — four of which came against Vanderbilt — in that same span.

With her defense now find-ing its footing, the former five-star recruit has seen her offen-sive game flourish. Matharu notched double-digit scoring outputs in each of her past three games, and her 10-point burst in just under three min-utes against South Carolina kept MSU within striking dis-tance heading into the fourth quarter in Columbia.

“I think you’ve seen Aliyah improve lately,” Schaefer said

last week. “I think that’s a mark of what we’ve done here at Mis-sissippi State — we develop players … We don’t apologize for being demanding. She’s learning the importance of de-fending; now she’s learning to try and take care of the ball.”

“Once I get my defense go-ing, the offense is just another part of my game,” Matharu add-ed.

Mingo-Young has been sim-ilarly productive over the past week, as she’s carved out a firm hold on the backup point guard duties behind sophomore Myah Taylor — though whether she’ll stay a No. 2 remains to be seen.

A gritty defender and phys-ical driver off the bounce, the Bogalusa, Louisiana, native has played 48 minutes over the past three games, bumping her av-erage number to 13.3 minutes per night.

And while Mingo-Young was held scoreless against Vander-bilt and Ole Miss, she still fin-ished with a combined plus-mi-nus of plus-5.

In addition to Schaefer’s bouncy freshmen, Wiggins has been a welcome surprise to the lineup over the past two weeks as well. Since notching a sea-son-high 13 points at Georgia on Jan. 5, Wiggins is averaging 7.4 points per game, compared to her season average of 4.6.

And though Wiggins’ of-fense has been an added bonus, it’s her defense that has given Schaefer added flexibility in his rotation. At 6-foot-1, Wiggins can guard anywhere from point guards to power forwards — a trait Schaefer lauded following Sunday’s win over the Rebels.

“She wasn’t playing that great earlier in the year,” he said. “But she put in the time and has been doing some good things in practice, and then she’s been given some oppor-tunities during ballgames, and she’s come through.”

“I definitely think I’m playing pretty well right now just get-ting the confidence from being on the court,” she added. “Just my teammates sitting here and

supporting me and pushing me every day definitely helps too.”

Sitting at 6-1 in SEC play entering Thursday’s contest against Auburn, MSU is near-ing a brutal February stretch that includes games against No. 13 Kentucky, No. 15 Texas A&M and No. 22 Tennessee.

And while Schaefer contin-ues to manage a roster that can go as deep as 12 players, the eighth-year head coach is find-ing a semblance of positivity in his ongoing battle with finding the correct formula night to night.

“I kind of like it,” he said. “I like the kids competing in prac-tice knowing that nothing is set in stone, and you want to en-courage those young kids that maybe aren’t playing as much as they thought they might or should or did in the summer — you want to encourage them, don’t slot yourself in a position where you think, ‘This is where I am, and this is where I’m go-ing to stay.’ You’ve got to keep working.”

Area basketball players, coaches react to Bryant’s tragic deathBY ThEO [email protected]

NEW HOPE — Jaylen Smith was sitting on his couch on Sunday afternoon, scrolling through his phone, when he came across something he nev-er expected.

“BREAKING: Kobe Bryant Has Died In A Heli-copter Crash,” the New Hope High School se-nior guard read in a tweet from the tabloid news site TMZ shortly after 1:30 p.m. Sunday.

“‘Alright, man, that’s gotta be a joke or something,” Smith said to himself. “‘I don’t believe it.’”

Shortly afterward, the shock-ing story had been corroborat-ed by other news outlets. But Smith was still skeptical.

“I was like, ‘It still can’t be true,’” he said.

Then ESPN reporter Adri-

an Wojnarowski, known for his basketball scoops, confirmed it: Bryant, the NBA legend, had died in a helicopter crash in Southern California on Sunday.

“‘It’s gotta be true,’” Smith realized.

He wasn’t the only one to come around to the shocking reality. Columbus High boys basketball coach Phillip Morris said the report from ‘Woj’ sold him on the news, and so did Smith’s senior teammate, RL Mattix.

‘When Woj tweeted it, that’s when I believed it,” Mattix said.

Smith went into the kitchen to discuss the news with his family, including his 14-year-old brother, Jakobe — a Lakers fan. Jakobe was silent as the Smiths processed the tragedy.

“He didn’t show a lot of emotion,” Jaylen said. “He just didn’t talk. That was his favor-ite player.”

Jakobe wasn’t the only one impacted by Bryant’s death. Jaylen said Bryant, LeBron

James and Kevin Durant were the few players he watched night in and night out. Mattix grew up a Lakers fan like his fa-ther, RL Mattix Sr., and Bryant was the younger Mattix’s favor-ite player — and a lot more.

“He was a mentor,” Mattix said. “A lot of people looked up to him. He played with a lot of fire.”

Bryant’s loss was felt by basketball players and coaches from around the area, many of whom grew up alongside Bry-ant and watched him play for years.

Morris, who also said Bryant was his favorite player, wore the No. 33 jersey in AAU ball — the same number Bryant wore at Lower Merion High School in Ardmore, Pennsylvania.

“My grandmother started me watching basketball, and Kobe was her favorite player,” Morris said. “He was the rea-son I really wanted to play bas-ketball.”

New Hope boys coach Drew

McBrayer, the same age as Bryant, got to see the Laker legend’s career play out — and took some lessons from it in the process.

“I remember watching him as a rookie and thinking, ‘Wow, he competes his tail off,’” Mc-Brayer said. “He never took a minute off while he was in the game, and that has a lot to do with the way I coach our young athletes today. We really em-phasize, ‘Work your tail off and compete like crazy.’”

McBrayer saw the news when it came across on his ESPN app Sunday afternoon, but only later did he find out the full story behind the trag-edy. Bryant’s 13-year-old daughter Gianna was among the nine people who died in the crash, along with Orange Coast College baseball coach John Altobelli, his wife Keri and his daughter Alyssa, Sarah and Payton Chester, Christina Mauser and pilot Ara Zobayan. McBrayer’s daughter Madyson,

a freshman basketball and vol-leyball player at New Hope, is around Gianna’s age, and the tragedy struck a chord with the coach.

“You really start to think about how precious life is,” Mc-Brayer said. “It’s not just a leg-end going down and all that; it ended up being three different families. It definitely hit home pretty hard last night.”

For Caledonia basketball coach Gary Griffin, who grew up part of Bryant’s generation, the sad feeling was the same.

“He meant so much to bas-ketball and humanity,” Griffin said. “It’s been a sad day. The day felt like he was like family.”

Griffin got to watch Bryant emulate his idol, Michael Jor-dan, on the court; Griffin, too, patterned his game after Jor-dan’s when he played competi-tive basketball.

“We both grew up watching Michael Jordan’s greatness,” Griffin said. “Kobe became

Bryant

See BRYANT, 4B

TodayPrep Boys Soccer

Clinton at Starkville, MHSAA Class 6A playoffs, 6 p.m.Lafayette at New Hope, MHSAA Class 5A playoffs, 6 p.m.Caledonia vs. Ripley at Corinth High School, MHSAA Class 4A playoffs, 7 p.m.

Prep Girls SoccerCaledonia at Corinth, MHSAA Class 4A playoffs, 5 p.m.Starkville at Clinton, MHSAA Class 6A playoffs, 5:30 p.m.

Men’s College BasketballMississippi State at Florida, 6 p.m.Auburn at Ole Miss, 8 p.m.MUW at Pensacola Christian, 7:30 p.m.

Prep Girls BasketballWest Point at Columbus, 6 p.m.Caledonia at South Pontotoc, 6 p.m.Grenada at New Hope, 6 p.m.West Lowndes at Nanih Waiya, 6 p.m.Lamar School at Heritage Academy, 6 p.m.Starkville Academy at East Rankin Academy, 6 p.m.Indianola Academy at Oak Hill Academy, 6 p.m.Kemper Academy at Columbus Chris-tian Academy, 6 p.m.Hebron Christian at Newton Academy, 6 p.m.Choctaw County at Noxubee County, TBA

Prep Boys BasketballCaledonia at South Pontotoc, 7:30 p.m.West Point at Columbus, 7:30 p.m.Grenada at New Hope, 7:30 p.m.West Lowndes at Nanih Waiya, 7:30 p.m.Lamar School at Heritage Academy, 7:30 p.m.Starkville Academy at East Rankin Academy, 7:30 p.m.Indianola Academy at Oak Hill Academy, 7:30 p.m.Kemper Academy at Columbus Chris-tian Academy, 7:30 p.m.Hebron Christian at Newton Academy, 7:30 p.m.Choctaw County at Noxubee County, TBA

COLLEGE BASKETBALL (MEN’S)5:30 p.m. — Villanova at St. John’s, FS15:30 p.m. — Texas A&M at Tennessee, SECN6 p.m. — Florida State at Virginia, ESPN6 p.m. — Mississippi State at Florida, ESPN26 p.m. — SMU at Cincinnati, ESPNEWS6 p.m. — Michigan at Nebraska, ESPNU7:30 p.m. — Georgia at Missouri, SECN8 p.m. — Butler at Georgetown, CBSSN8 p.m. — Pittsburgh at Duke, ESPN8 p.m. — Auburn at Ole Miss, ESPN2

NBA BASKETBALL6:30 p.m. — Boston at Miami, TNT

TENNIS2 a.m. — The Australian Open: Quarter-finals, Melbourne, Australia, ESPN26 p.m. — The Australian Open: Quarter-finals, Melbourne, Australia, TENNIS8 p.m. — The Australian Open: Quarter-finals, Melbourne, Australia, ESPN2

CALENDAR

oN ThE AiR

bRiEfLyCollege BasketballEMCC women edge Northeast; men routed

The East Mississippi Community College women’s basketball team clung to a narrow lead Monday against Northeast Mississippi Community College in Booneville, eking out a 61-60 road win.

The Lions (15-2, 6-0 MACJC North division) are on a 10-game win streak, their longest since the 2008-09 season.

Freshman Ja’Mia Hollings from West Point High School led EMCC with 19 points on 9-of-10 shooting. Tye Metcalf scored 12 points and had five assists and four steals, and Maddie Riley scored 11 points and grabbed seven rebounds.

The EMCC men were routed 96-53 in Monday’s road contest against Northeast in Booneville.

The Lions (12-5, 5-1 MACJC North division) trailed by just four points at halftime, 34-30, but the Tigers poured it on offensively in the second half.

Romeo Sanders and Danny Washington each scored 10 points to lead EMCC. Jakorie Smith had nine points and nine rebounds, and Arecko Gipson Jr. had seven points and seven rebounds.

EMCC will host Mississippi Delta Community College on Thursday in Scooba.

Prep SoccerNew Hope girls eliminated from playoffs

The New Hope High School girls soccer team was eliminated by Saltillo in the first round of the MHSAA Class 5A playoffs Monday night in Saltillo.

The Trojans lost their match to the Tigers, 5-1.New Hope faced a 2-1 deficit at halftime, but Saltillo

pulled away.The Trojans’ season ended with a 9-7-1 record.

Prep BasketballHeritage Academy swept in Tuscaloosa

The Heritage Academy boys and girls basketball teams each suffered a close loss at Tuscaloosa Acade-my (Alabama) on Monday in Tuscaloosa, Alabama.

Jared Long led the way with 19 points as the Patriots boys lost 56-50. Trey Naugher added 11 for Heritage Academy.

The Pats girls dropped their contest 42-40.Heritage Academy hosts Lamar School today in a

district matchup.

Noxubee County splits with Potts CampThe Noxubee County girls basketball team beat

Potts Camp 68-47 on Monday in Potts Camp.Na’Kailya Mason had 30 points for the Tigers.

Jakeia Walker scored 16, and Jaden Fortner had nine.The Noxubee County boys lost their game 65-64.

Dantavian Davis had 28 points, Demond Cunningham had 14, and Jadakiss Williams had 10.

Noxubee County will play at Kosciusko on Thursday.

SOURCE: From Special Reports

The DispaTch • www.cdispatch.com2B Tuesday, January 28, 2020

Pro BasketballNBA Glance

EASTERN CONFERENCEAtlantic Division

W L Pct GBToronto 32 14 .696 —Boston 30 15 .667 1½Philadelphia 30 17 .638 2½Brooklyn 19 26 .422 12½New York 13 34 .277 19½

Southeast Division W L Pct GBMiami 32 14 .696 —Orlando 21 27 .438 12Washington 15 30 .333 16½Charlotte 15 31 .326 17Atlanta 12 35 .255 20½

Central Division W L Pct GBMilwaukee 40 6 .870 —Indiana 30 17 .638 10½Chicago 19 30 .388 22½Detroit 17 31 .354 24Cleveland 13 34 .277 27½

WESTERN CONFERENCESouthwest Division

W L Pct GBDallas 29 17 .630 —Houston 29 17 .630 —Memphis 22 24 .478 7San Antonio 20 26 .435 9New Orleans 18 29 .383 11½

Northwest DivisionW L Pct GBDenver 32 14 .696 —Utah 32 14 .696 —Oklahoma City 28 20 .583 5Portland 20 27 .426 12½Minnesota 15 32 .319 17½

Pacific DivisionW L Pct GBL.A. Lakers 36 10 .783 —L.A. Clippers 33 14 .702 3½Phoenix 19 27 .413 17Sacramento 17 29 .370 19Golden State 10 37 .213 26½

Sunday’s Games

Denver 117, Houston 110Toronto 110, San Antonio 106New Orleans 123, Boston 108New York 110, Brooklyn 97L.A. Clippers 112, Orlando 97Memphis 114, Phoenix 109Atlanta 152, Washington 133Portland 139, Indiana 129

Monday’s GamesCleveland 115, Detroit 100Miami 113, Orlando 92Dallas 107, Oklahoma City 97Sacramento 133, Minnesota 129, OTChicago 110, San Antonio 109Houston 126, Utah 117

Today’s GamesGolden State at Philadelphia, 6 p.m.New York at Charlotte, 6 p.m.Atlanta at Toronto, 6:30 p.m.New Orleans at Cleveland, 6:30 p.m.Boston at Miami, 7 p.m.Denver at Memphis, 7 p.m.Washington at Milwaukee, 7 p.m.Phoenix at Dallas, 7:30 p.m.

Wednesday’s GamesChicago at Indiana, 6 p.m.Detroit at Brooklyn, 6:30 p.m.Memphis at New York, 6:30 p.m.Utah at San Antonio, 7:30 p.m.Houston at Portland, 9 p.m.Oklahoma City at Sacramento, 9 p.m.

Thursday’s GamesCharlotte at Washington, 6 p.m.Toronto at Cleveland, 6 p.m.Philadelphia at Atlanta, 6:30 p.m.Golden State at Boston, 7 p.m.Sacramento at L.A. Clippers, 9:30 p.m.Utah at Denver, 9:30 p.m.

College BasketballMonday’s Scores

EASTAmerican U. 77, Lehigh 56Morgan St. 56, Md.-Eastern Shore 50

SOUTHAlcorn St. 63, Alabama St. 60Bethune-Cookman 78, SC State 74Coppin St. 82, Howard 75NC A&T 82, Delaware St. 67Norfolk St. 95, Florida A&M 67North Carolina 75, NC State 65Southern U. 67, Alabama A&M 46

MIDWESTIowa 68, Wisconsin 62

SOUTHWESTKansas 65, Oklahoma St. 50Prairie View 102, MVSU 83Texas Southern 68, Ark.-Pine Bluff 57

FAR WESTE. Washington 89, N. Colorado 84N. Arizona 69, Sacramento St. 54S. Utah 73, Idaho 45

HockeyNHL Glance

EASTERN CONFERENCEAtlantic Division

GP W L OT Pts GF GABoston 51 29 10 12 70 169 135Tampa Bay 49 29 15 5 63 177 140Florida 49 28 16 5 61 183 163Toronto 50 26 17 7 59 181 167Buffalo 49 22 20 7 51 145 152Montreal 51 22 22 7 51 157 161Ottawa 49 17 23 9 43 133 167Detroit 51 12 35 4 28 109 199

Metropolitan Division GP W L OT Pts GF GAWashington 50 34 11 5 73 181 146Pittsburgh 50 31 14 5 67 168 136N.Y. Islanders 49 29 15 5 63 143 132Columbus 51 27 16 8 62 138 130Carolina 50 29 18 3 61 159 132Philadelphia 50 27 17 6 60 158 150N.Y. Rangers 48 23 21 4 50 158 159New Jersey 49 18 24 7 43 130 176

WESTERN CONFERENCECentral Division

GP W L OT Pts GF GA

St. Louis 50 30 12 8 68 159 137Colorado 49 28 15 6 62 179 143Dallas 49 28 17 4 60 128 122Chicago 51 24 21 6 54 155 161Winnipeg 51 25 22 4 54 152 160Minnesota 50 23 21 6 52 156 166Nashville 48 22 19 7 51 158 159

Pacific Division GP W L OT Pts GF GAVancouver 50 28 18 4 60 165 150Edmonton 49 26 18 5 57 155 153Calgary 50 26 19 5 57 135 147Arizona 51 26 20 5 57 146 138Vegas 52 25 20 7 57 161 159San Jose 50 21 25 4 46 130 167Anaheim 48 19 24 5 43 122 150Los Angeles 50 18 27 5 41 125 158NOTE: Two points for a win, one point for overtime loss. Top three teams in each division and two wild cards per conference advance to playoffs.

Monday’s GamesWashington 4, Montreal 2New Jersey 4, Ottawa 3, SODallas 3, Tampa Bay 2, OTToronto 5, Nashville 2Vancouver 3, St. Louis 1Anaheim at San Jose, late

Today’s GamesOttawa at Buffalo, 6 p.m.St. Louis at Calgary, 8 p.m.

Wednesday’s GamesToronto at Dallas, 6:30 p.m.Nashville at Washington, 6:30 p.m.Arizona at Anaheim, 9 p.m.Calgary at Edmonton, 9 p.m.Tampa Bay at Los Angeles, 9 p.m.Vancouver at San Jose, 9:30 p.m.

Thursday’s GamesMontreal at Buffalo, 6 p.m.Nashville at New Jersey, 6:30 p.m.Los Angeles at Arizona, 8:30 p.m.

Friday’s GamesDetroit at N.Y. Rangers, 6 p.m.Philadelphia at Pittsburgh, 6 p.m.Vegas at Carolina, 6:30 p.m.Washington at Ottawa, 6:30 p.m.Boston at Winnipeg, 7 p.m.St. Louis at Edmonton, 8 p.m.Tampa Bay at Anaheim, 9 p.m.

TransactionsMonday’s moves

BASEBALLNational LeagueCINCINNATI REDS — Signed OF Nick Castella-nos to a four-year contract.MIAMI MARLINS — Agreed to terms with RHP Brandon Kintzler on a one-year contract.PITTSBURGH PIRATES — Traded OF Starling Marte and cash to Arizona for SS Liover Peguero, RHP Brennan Malone and international signing money.

FOOTBALLNational Football LeagueMINNESOTA VIKINGS — Promoted linebackers coach Adam Zimmer and defensive line coach An-dre Patterson to co-defensive coordinators, in ad-dition to their previous duties. Named Gary Kubiak offensive coordinator, in addition to his duties as assistant head coach. Named Phil Rauscher as-sistant offensive line coach. Reassigned Andrew Janocko to wide receivers coach.

HOCKEYNational Hockey LeagueARIZONA COYOTES — Recalled G Adin Hill from Tucson (AHL).COLUMBUS CREW — Signed F Eric Robinson to a two-year contract extension.TAMPA BAY LIGHTNING — Recalled F Mitchell Stephens and D Luke Schenn from Syracuse (AHL).

SOCCERMajor League SoccerCINCINNATI — Exercised its offseason buyout of F Fanendo Adi’s guaranteed contract.NEW YORK RED BULLS — Named Kari Cohen general counsel.VANCOUVER WHITECAPS — Acquired W Da-vid Milinkovic on a one-year loan from Hull City (Championship-England).

COLLEGEGRAND VALLEY STATE — Suspended offensive coordinator Morris Berger.MICHIGAN — Suspended G Zavier Simpson from the men’s basketball team.NEW MEXICO — Named Rocky Long defensive coordinator.

THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

MELBOURNE, Aus-tralia — Ash Barty is a step closer to ending a four-decade drought for Aussies at the national championship.

Top-ranked Barty saved set points in the 11th game and another in the tiebreaker before seizing the momentum against two-time Wim-bledon champion Petra Kvitova in a 7-6 (6), 6-2 quarterfinal win at the Australian Open on Tuesday.

The so-called Barty Party in 2019 ended in a quarterfinal loss to Kvitova. The start of a new decade is cause for a bigger celebration at Melbourne Park.

Barty next faces So-fia Kenin, who reached the semifinals at a ma-jor for the first time with a 6-4, 6-4 win over No. 78-ranked Ons Jabeur.

In a first set that last-ed almost 70 minutes, Barty fended off eight of the nine break-point

chances she faced be-fore finally getting the upper hand when she won a 22-shot rally, de-fending for much of it just to stay in the point, at 3-2 down in the tie-breaker.

“I was run ragged on that point — I just re-member trying to stay alive. I knew it was a big one. It was more surviv-al mode than anything else.”

She went on a roll to take a 4-0 lead in the second and take all the momentum away from Kvitova, who beat her here in the quarterfi-nals last year before los-ing the final to Naomi Osaka.

Barty rebounded from that to win her first major title at the French Open, where she beat Kenin in the fourth round. Until she arrived in Australia, Kenin’s run at Roland Garros — which includ-ed a third-round upset over Serena Williams — was her best at a Grand Slam.

There’s a lot of local expectation riding on Barty, who is aiming to be the first Austra-lian woman since Chris O’Neil in 1978 to win the Australian Open. The first major of the decade may see the end of the 42-year wait, and an Australian man hasn’t won since 1976. Barty is already the first Australian woman since 1984 to reach the semifinals of the home Open.

Barty doesn’t expect to feel the pressure. She won her first title on home soil in Adelaide in the lead-up to this sea-son’s first major.

“I’m not going to have anything but a smile on my face when I walk out onto this court,” she said.

Kenin and Jabeur were both into the quar-terfinals for the first time at a major.

For Kenin, who was born in Moscow but moved to the United States as a baby and grew up in Florida, the

degree of difficulty will only increase.

“I’m excited. Of course, she’s playing at her home, so it’s a lit-tle bit different,” Kenin said. “I played a lot of big names. I don’t think I’ve played anyone big in their home crowd. It’s going to be a differ-ent atmosphere obvi-ously. But it’s exciting. I’m really looking for-ward to it.

Kenin is playing her best tennis, too. Her best previous run at Melbourne Park ended in the second round, when she lost to Simona Halep last year.

She finished last year ranked 14th, and although she’s 1-4 in ca-reer meetings she was able to match Barty in one category: they were tied for most hard-court wins on the women’s tour last year with 38 wins each.

Kenin’s run here included a comeback win in the third round against 15-year-old Coco Gauff, when she

made only nine un-forced errors across the second and third sets.

In the second set against Jabeur, she saved three break points in a long sixth game, then broke serve in the seventh game to set up the win.

“It was a tough mo-ment,” Kenin said. “I didn’t know it was 10 minutes (but) it was pretty long, the game. After that I got my mo-mentum.”

Jabeur, a 25-year-old Tunisian, was the first Arab woman to make it to the last eight at a major.

“I think I proved that I can be in the quar-terfinals in a Grand Slam, even if I have a lot of things to improve probably physically and mentally,” she said. “But I’m happy that I pushed through a lot of things. I proved to my-self that I could do a lot of great things.”

TENNIS

Barty goes on at Australian Open, sets up semifinal vs. Kenin

NFL

THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

KANSAS CITY, Mo. — Fifty years later, Jan Stenerud still remem-bers just about every detail from the Super Bowl.

The longtime Kan-sas City Chiefs kicker remembers that they were almost two-touch-down underdogs to the Minnesota Vikings, whose fearsome de-fense line carried the nickname “The Purple People Eaters.”

He remembers that the weather wasn’t very good in New Orleans, and that the week lead-ing up to the game was spent listening to torna-do sirens.

The tarp used to cov-er the field at Tulane Stadium was filled with holes, leaving patch-es of the turf a muddy quagmire.

“When we had to kick extra points,” Stenerud recalled, “I told our coach, Hank Stram, that we had to move the ball to the side a bit because there was a big mud hole where I wanted to kick from. It was a real mess.”

More than anything else, though, the Hall of Fame kicker remem-bers never once think-ing that it would take one of the original AFL franchises a full five de-cades before it returned to the championship game.

“How could you?” said Stenerud, who also was a member of the team that lost to the Green Bay Packers in the first Super Bowl. “No, I never thought about it. It’s a long time. For me, it doesn’t seem as long as it does

for young people. You think about the next game — ‘Let me play.’ You don’t think about history at the time.”

As the Chiefs pre-pare to play the San Francisco 49ers on Sunday, Stenerud finds himself reflecting on history quite a bit these days. So many of his good friends and close teammates never lived to see the team return to the championship game, and many others are in failing health. Stram died 15 years ago this summer, and the team’s beloved found-er Lamar Hunt passed away the following year. Thousands of fans lived their entire lives with-out seeing the Chiefs in a Super Bowl.

Only the Lions and the Jets have played more seasons since they appeared in the championship game.

“To lose a Super Bowl is devastating. You have to explain that forever,” Stenerud told The Associated Press this week. “When we won the game, there was one guy who kept bugging me about the warm-up jacket I had on. It turned out the guy was Pat O’Brien, who had played Kn-ute Rockne in ‘Knute Rockne, All American.’ I just remember the to-tal, total elation when you win, and I also remember that I was thrilled as could be, and I remember all the people who had taken a chance on us.”

By the 1969 season, the Chiefs had a ros-ter filled with veterans — quarterback Len Dawson, tight end Fred

Arbanas and offensive lineman Ed Budde — who chose to play in the AFL when it was largely considered a second-ti-er league. Many of the players had followed the franchise from Dal-las, where it was known as the Texans.

They played with a chip on their shoulder, both because they lost that initial Super Bowl and because nobody expected them to win three years later. They were the underdogs when they went to New York to play the reign-ing champion Jets, and they had lost twice to Oakland in the regular season before beating the Raiders to reach the Super Bowl.

It was no surprise that the Chiefs were such heavy underdogs against the Vikings, who were led by coach Bud Grant and their fe-rocious defense. They had mowed through their schedule and beat-en the Rams and the Browns, giving them the chance to play the Chiefs for the final championship before the AFL and NFL offi-cially became one.

“Nobody gave us a chance,” Dawson told The AP a few years ago, when he stepped away from the broad-cast booth after a long second career with the Chiefs. “Everybody thought the Vikings were going to win.”

But the Chiefs were playing their best foot-ball of the season down the stretch, in part because Dawson was finally healthy after missing several games with a knee injury.

Third-string quarter-back Mike Livingston had kept them afloat by leading the Chiefs on a five-game win streak, but Dawson’s return not only marked the return of one of football’s best quarterbacks but also instilled in the team a profound sense of confi-dence that it could beat anybody.

For his part, Dawson took it upon himself to shoulder the burden of finally delivering a ti-tle. His longtime room-mate, Johnny Robinson, told The AP after the Super Bowl that Daw-son had “aged five years this week.”

“You looked into his face,” Robinson re-called, “and you knew it wasn’t the same Len Dawson.”

Much of the anxiety dissipated by halftime, though. Mike Garrett ran for a touchdown and Stenerud kicked three first-half field goals to send Kansas City into the locker room with a 16-0 lead.

The Vikings finally scored late in the third quarter, but Dawson an-swered with a 46-yard touchdown pass that all but put the game away. The quarterback who had put so much pres-sure on himself wound up being the MVP.

“I can’t take any credit,” Dawson said afterward. “It was the team, not me. They were fired up. They were ready.”

Dawson and many of the Chiefs from that championship team re-main close to the orga-nization, returning for anniversaries and oth-er celebrations. Nine

members of the team eventually made it into the Pro Football Hall of Fame, and Dawson made it as both a quar-terback and broadcast-er — Dan Dierdorf and Frank Gifford are the only others so honored.

When the Chiefs beat the Tennessee Titans in the AFC championship game to end their long and maddening Super Bowl drought, it was Hall of Fame linebacker Bobby Bell who stood on the stage as part of the tro-phy presentation.

“It was great to have Bobby up there. He’s special,” current Chiefs coach Andy Reid said. “They had some great talent there on that foot-ball team, and it was obvious by the champi-onship. He’s around, as a lot of players are. We encourage that. I like having the guys here. They bring great his-tory and energy to the guys. They’ve got a fel-lowship with the young guys and educate them on how great the city is and so on. It’s fun to have them here.”

Maybe that’s true. But it’s more fun to give them a long-awaited trip back to the Super Bowl.

“It’s been tremen-dously exciting,” Stenerud said. “You know, the offense, it’s so much speed and you have a phenomenal quarterback. It’s really exciting to watch, ob-viously. The defense is coming on and playing great football. They have good special teams. It looks like a real solid football team to me.”

50 years later, Chiefs relishing current Super Bowl run

The DispaTch • www.cdispatch.com Tuesday, January 28, 2020 3B

Tribute for Bryant kicks off Super Bowl media nightTHE ASSOCIATED PRESS

MIAMI — Chants of “Kobe! Kobe! Kobe!” broke a moment of a si-lence that kicked off a more subdued Super Bowl media night.

The NFL opened the most hyped week in pro-fessional sports with mixed emotions Mon-day night, one day after retired superstar Kobe Bryant, his daughter and seven others died in a he-licopter crash in Califor-nia.

The Kansas City Chiefs took the stage first on what typically is a wild evening filled with zany antics by quasi-media members. One television reporter wearing a short, white dress and sailor’s cap asked a few players to do the Floss dance with her but the atmosphere was mostly deflated.

Fans of the Chiefs and San Francisco 49ers made some noise. Still, it seemed there were more media than fans in the seats at Marlins Park, making it look a lot like a baseball game in the mid-dle of summer than the NFL’s annual version of a music festival.

Players tried to soak in the excitement of their first trip — for many — to the Super Bowl while struggling with the news of Bryant’s death.

“I wasn’t lucky enough to get to meet Kobe,” Chiefs quarterback Pat-rick Mahomes said. “But the impact that he made in my life, it was huge. The way he was able to go about every single day, when I was a kid, and the work ethic and the in-tensity that he had to be great every single day.

“Even to this day, I still

watch videos on YouTube the day before games and just listen to him talk and how he puts everything in perspective of being great on and off the field with his kids, and his business ventures and then, obvi-ously, his play. It’s a tragic thing. Prayers to his fami-ly, but he made a huge im-pact in my life, for sure.”

Mahomes was the one who broke the news to teammate Tyreek Hill on the team’s flight to Miami.

“It was like, ‘Man do you believe this?’ And I was just like waking up. So I was like ‘Dude, I don’t want to see that right now,” Hill said. “He was like ‘Dude, wake up, wake up, wake up!’ and I saw it. I was like, ‘No, I don’t be-lieve it because you know you see stuff online and it be like fake ... especially someone like that. Man, that’s Kobe man. He’s a

role model. He’s a GOAT. You don’t expect noth-ing like that. Someone who has as much money as him, as much fame as him, to go down the way he did him and his fami-ly. I don’t know, bro. I just hate talking about stuff like that personally man because sad you know.”

Richard Sherman, the Niners’ five-time Pro Bowl cornerback, had a personal relationship with Bryant. They spoke soon after Sherman tore his Achilles tendon in No-vember 2017 with Bryant sharing advice on his re-covery from the injury.

“He was a competitor, I think that’s the best word,” Sherman said. “He was one of the most unique people I have had the honor to have met.”

Asked what Bryant’s message to him this week would’ve been, Sherman

said: “He would have told me to push forward. I have tried to apply a lot of the parts of his game to mine. I believe I have done that. His aggressive-ness, ability to finish, un-derstanding of the game. His cerebral approach, even in his older age, I think I have tried to do that in my game, too.”

Chiefs coach Andy Reid knew Bryant from his years coaching the Philadelphia Eagles. Bry-ant went to high school in a Philly suburb and had a love-hate relationship with fans in the city be-cause he played for the Los Angeles Lakers. But he was a die-hard Eagles fan and his reaction on so-cial media after the team won its first Super Bowl title two years ago en-deared him to many. The city mourned his loss as one of its own.

“It’s sad,” Reid said. “A great person, man. I feel bad for his family, sick for his family. They’ll re-bound. They’re strong. They’ll live up to his strength.”

Niners running back Raheem Mostert called Bryant “a transcendent man, a true legend.”

Reid is the seventh coach in league history to lead two teams to the Su-per Bowl. His Eagles lost to the New England Patri-ots 15 years ago.

The Chiefs are making their first appearance in the NFL title game in 50 years, seeking their sec-ond championship.

The 49ers are going for their sixth win in sev-en trips. Their only loss came against Baltimore in their previous appear-ance seven years ago.

Ratings up, future bright: NFL rebounds off troubled seasonsNFL

THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

The most compelling drama in the NFL this season unfolded on the field, not off it.

And any thought that the league was in jeop-ardy of losing its spot as America’s favorite sport has been set on the back burner, which is mostly where the domestic abuse cases, national anthem controversies and even the concerns about player safety resided for the bulk of the season.

To be sure, 2019 was far from perfect. Anto-nio Brown, a handful of overmatched officials and even a cameo appearance by Colin Kaepernick kept a spotlight on the warts this behemoth of a league will always carry. And certainly the Super Bowl will offer an opportunity to discuss Chiefs receiver Tyreek Hill’s history with domestic violence and the NFL’s response to it.

But for the better part of the season, the stickiest topics have included the quarter-back- turned -pitchman Baker Mayfield, and his overrated Cleveland Browns, the underachiev-ing Cowboys and the pos-sible end of the Patriots’ dynasty, to say nothing of a legion of rising young stars who were scattered throughout the league. It is led by Patrick Ma-homes, the 24-year-old quarterback who brought the Chiefs to the Super Bowl to face the 49ers, the team trying to com-plete the NFL’s version of a fairy tale by going from 4-12 to hoisting the Lom-bardi Trophy in the span

of a year.America’s ever-ex-

panding gambling land-scape, the continued strength of fantasy foot-ball, the league’s steady growth in Britain and oth-er countries, along with a fair share of good games placed in the correct time slots and made available on a growing number of platforms also played roles in keeping eyeballs focused on the games.

It all helps explain the league’s back-to-back 5% TV ratings increases — two straight years with an uptick after a two-year stretch (2016-17) during which the NFL’s status as the king of American sports took a hit, due in part to President Donald Trump’s withering criti-cism and, more broadly, to the league’s problem-atic handling of myriad problems that came fast and furious. The league accounted for 47 of the 50 most-watched shows on TV last year.

“The NFL is in a better space leading up to the ... Super Bowl, than they have been in a few years,” said Bettina Cornwell, the academic director at Uni-versity of Oregon’s War-saw Sports Marketing Center. “Less limelight can be a good thing.”

While staying out of the constant crisis-man-agement loop, the league took advantage of trends that have been evolving for a decade or more.

The NFL’s embrace of fantasy football at the beginning of the 2000s — replete with in-stadi-um Wi-Fi advances, stat-heavy tickers and updates

that permeate the tele-casts and both league and team endorsements with fantasy websites — set a template that, in turn, positioned the league to take advantage of the more recent expansion of legalized gambling.

Long the most reluc-tant (and hypocritical) of the American pro leagues when it came to acknowledging the reali-ty that gambling is a key driver of fan interest, the NFL signed a marketing deal with Caesars Enter-tainment at the start of 2019. A handful of teams have inked their own ca-sino deals, as well. Next

season, the Raiders are moving into a $1.8 billion stadium in Las Vegas — a city that NFL officials worked hard to keep at arm’s length for decades.

“They were probably the last one at the table, but they took the most in from what other leagues are doing,” marketing expert Joe Favorito said. “They’re doing it with fan engagement on mobile phones, games that give fans ability to win money or prizes, games where it’s as easy as trying to predict what’s going to happen on the next play.”

This season also marked the beginning of a changing of the guard, of sorts, among the star set.

Mahomes dethroned Patriots QB Tom Brady as the league leader in jersey sales, according to the NFLPA. Seven of the top 12 on the jersey list, including Mayfield, Cowboys running back Ezekiel Elliott, Ravens quarterback Lamar Jack-son and Giants running back Saquon Barkley, were 26 or younger. Only four of the top 10 were quarterbacks — a low-er-than-usual number that could be a subtle sig-nal of a generational shift in the fan base.

With one year left be-fore the end of the cur-rent collective bargaining

agreement, there appears to be far less friction be-tween the league and its union than last time they reached this point, in 2010.

And if the tacit ac-ceptance of gambling felt like a seismic shift, the next contract could bring another: Last year, the league and union an-nounced the formation of a committee to study and assess alternatives to painkillers — a signal that a long-sacrosanct ban on marijuana could soon be relaxed.

All of which bodes well for the league as it approaches the end of its current TV contract. The $1.9 billion-a-year deal with ESPN for Monday

Night Football expires af-ter the 2021 season, and the approaching deadline brings with it the possibil-ity that the league might want to open up bidding on all its contracts for a full reset. No surprise, then, that among the thorniest issues in the new CBA will be the NFL’s desire to add a 17th regular-season game and the players’ hard stance against it because of the health concerns it pres-ents.

“Questions about the next round of (TV) ne-gotiations have already become an overhang for many of our media com-panies, as investors de-bate which package will end up where and at what cost,” the analysts at the media research group MoffettNathanson wrote in a September newslet-ter.

During the season, the NFL accounts for 25% of ESPN’s and CBS’ aggre-gate gross ratings points and 24% of NBC’s, the analysts wrote — a sign of the outsize impact the NFL has on an ever-splin-tering TV landscape.

All the attention-shift-ing choices out there for U.S. sports fans only in-crease pressure on the NFL to keep its house in shape — and to be sure, there are still plenty of festering issues that could derail it.

— This year’s officiat-ing was widely regarded as below-par, in large part hampered by the league’s new pass interference rule that allows calls and non-calls to be reviewed; it created confusion

across the board and didn’t necessarily solve any big-picture problems.

— The NFL is still grappling with how to make its game safer in the wake of an epidemic of head injuries that has forced rules changes and is chipping away at the sport’s grass roots in key areas.

— The league contin-ues to struggle in how it vets and disciplines its players, as illustrated by the ongoing cases involv-ing Brown (cut by the Pa-triots after being accused of rape) and Hill (not dis-ciplined by the league af-ter authorities declined to charge him with domestic abuse).

— Kaepernick, whose hastily scheduled and relocated “workout” in November turned into a circus that brought every-one’s intentions into ques-tion, has not disappeared. Nor has the cause he pro-moted — a greater spot-light on social justice and police violence against African Americans.

— Next season will also take place during an election year. It was the Trump vs. Hillary Clinton race, along with Trump’s disdain for the league in the wake of the national anthem controversy fu-eled by Kaepernick, that got some (deserved) cred-it for some of the NFL’s diminished popularity in 2016 and 2017.

“A fun Super Bowl matchup, betting and in-ternational games may drive interest and oppor-tunity,” Cornwell said, “but big issues continue to percolate.”

The NFL is in a better space leading up to the Super Bowl than they have been in a few years. Less limelight can be a good thing.Bettina Cornwell, academic director at the Universi-

ty of Oregon’s Warsaw Sports Marketing Center

The DispaTch • www.cdispatch.com4B Tuesday, January 28, 2020

SudokuSudoku is a num-ber-placing puzzle based on a 9x9 grid with several given numbers. The object is to place the numbers 1 to 9 in the empty spaces so that each row, each column and each 3x3 box contains the same number only once. The difficulty level increases from Monday to Sunday.

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Sudoku YESTERDAY’S ANSWER

Sudoku is a number-placing puzzle based on a 9x9 grid with several given numbers. The object is to place the numbers 1 to 9 in the empty spaces so that each row, each column and each 3x3 box contains the same number only once. The difficulty level increases from Monday to Sunday.

Log cabinWHATZIT ANSWER

what we all wanted to be … like Mike, a giant and legend of the game.”

Bryant’s impact was felt on the younger gener-ation as well — New Hope sophomore Caleb Parr de-scribed the huge impact the Lakers star had on him.

“He was someone I looked up to, someone I tried to model my game after,” Parr said. “He’s definitely going to be missed.”

Before a recent game, Parr sat in the practice gym watching videos of Bryant talking and break-ing down game film on his ESPN show titled “Detail.” Parr and his fa-ther both thought Bryant would go on to become an NBA coach someday, and Parr knows the enormity of Bryant’s death.

“I think it’s pretty huge because even though he retired, he definitely

wasn’t finished with bas-ketball,” Parr said.

Bryant stayed active on social media, started the Mamba Sports Acad-emy in Thousand Oaks, California, and worked to promote basketball around the world, includ-ing in Asia. Mississippi State men’s basketball coach Ben Howland point-ed out Monday that the most popular basketball player in China isn’t Yao Ming — it’s Bryant, for all the time he spent there.

“He was such an inter-national figure,” Howland said. “He was the player that everybody loved …”

Howland coached at UCLA for 10 seasons, all of which coincided with Bryant’s time as a Laker. After he was given the word of Bryant’s death, Howland gathered his team in the weight room and broke the news. The Bulldogs held a moment

of silence and a prayer for the Bryant family.

“I was just really hol-low the rest of the day,” Howland said. “I feel ter-rible. It also makes you realize that you never know when God’s gonna call you home, and you’ve gotta enjoy and be thank-ful for every day and be secure in your belief in the Almighty and His son who came to save us.”

Columbus girls coach Yvonne Hairston ex-pressed her sorrow at Bryant’s passing, but she celebrated the star for all he brought to basketball, including his fealty to his team.

“He stayed loyal to the Lakers,” Hairston said. “In today’s time, that’s very hard to find. He acknowledged wom-en’s sports; he celebrated them. He was an advocate for it, and that’s a bless-ing to have a public figure

say that women can play just as well as men, that the game of basketball is universal ... He put a posi-tive light on being a father as an African American man. He was there sup-porting his family, his daughters, and showing that you can be profes-sional and loving all at the same time.”

But now Bryant is gone, and the sports world is grieving — and remembering what he meant.

“He is one of the great-est competitors that I have ever seen in any sport,” McBrayer said. “As you watch TV today and see all the players talk about his legacy, you realize how special he was beyond basketball and what he meant to this generation of players. He was so inspirational and will be greatly missed by fans around the world.”

BryantContinued from Page 1B

Contacting the Sports DepartmentIf you need to report game scores or statistics, you can call us at 662-327-2424 ext. 126. If you need to reach

sports editor Garrick Hodge, email him at [email protected]. If you need to reach sports writer Ben Portnoy, email him at [email protected] or sports writer Theo DeRosa, email him at [email protected].

Game Coverage / ResultsHigh school football coaches who don’t speak to a reporter from The Dispatch are asked to email information

to the sports department from their games. The Dispatch will include its prep football coverage in Sunday’s edition, so we will contact coaches Friday night or Saturday to get details. Coaches, please let us know what is the best time for us to contact you.

ThE assOCIaTED PREss

LOS ANGELES — The chants rose in the plaza across from Staples Cen-ter. “Kobe!” and “MVP! MVP!” They came from hundreds of fans gath-ered to mourn the death of Kobe Bryant.

Candles burned alongside hand-lettered messages scrawled on signs and the pavement. Bunches of flowers piled up, some with purple-and-gold balloons attached.

Men, women and chil-dren of every ethnicity milled around, drawn to the heart of downtown Los Angeles where they had once celebrated five NBA championships won by Bryant and the Lakers.

This time, they were united in shock and sad-ness hours after Bryant, his daughter Gianna and seven others were killed in a helicopter crash northwest of the city on Sunday.

Like many Angelenos, Bryant was a transplant. Born in Philadelphia, he spent some of his earli-est years in Italy, where he learned the language while his father played pro basketball. He later returned to the Philadel-phia area and starred at suburban Lower Merion High, becoming the top prep player in the country.

But he was most close-ly identified with LA, where the city’s adopted son thrilled fans with his All-Star moves for the Lakers over 20 seasons.

Bryant came to the NBA straight out of high school, a quiet kid of 17 whose parents had to co-sign his contract until he was able to sign his own when he turned 18. He was so young the Lakers training staff needed per-mission from his mother to treat him with medica-tion.

At the time, few in Los Angeles thought anyone would assume Magic Johnson’s mantle, he of the “Showtime” Lakers and incandescent smile.

In fact, Bryant was always more Michael Jordan than Johnson. Bryant’s killer instinct, tireless work ethic and in-tolerance for giving any-

thing less than the best in practice and games most closely hewed to the atti-tude of his idol Jordan.

Still, Bryant’s audaci-ty appealed to laid-back Angelenos. At times, it clashed with Shaquille O’Neal, who shared an uneasy spotlight with Bry-ant while winning three NBA championships from 2000 to 2002.

It wasn’t until O’Neal was traded away in 2004 that Bryant took over as the Lakers’ cornerstone, and Johnson endorsed him as a worthy succes-sor. Bryant became his era’s Jordan to his fellow players, while segueing into a beloved icon, em-braced across his adopted city.

“He grew up there,” Golden State Warriors general manager Bob Myers said. “He grew up and matured and changed and evolved. I’m sure they felt like they grew up with him.”

Away from the court, Bryant briefly fell from grace in 2003 after being accused of sexual assault at a Colorado hotel. He lost sponsors and fans and his reputation was tarnished. The case was eventually dropped, and Bryant and his accus-er settled her civil suit against him.

There were other per-sonal problems. Bryant’s wife, Vanessa, filed for divorce in 2011, but they reconciled a year later. There were disagree-ments with his parents, too. They initially op-posed his marriage and didn’t attend the wedding. Bryant’s mother tried to auction memorabilia of his in 2013, and he suc-cessfully challenged her.

Those stumbles only served to humanize Bry-ant among his fans. If they could have relation-ship and family problems, so could he.

Some of Bryant’s most storied moments occurred inside Staples, where he scored 81 points on Jan. 22, 2006, sec-ond-most in NBA history. He led the Lakers to two more NBA titles, parad-ing the trophy past thou-sands of rapturous fans in the streets.

Bryant was in the news less than 24 hours before his sudden death. Cur-rent Laker LeBron James overtook him as the NBA’s third all-time lead-ing scorer during a road game in Philadelphia. Once famously compet-itive, Bryant had grown comfortable in the elder statesman’s role, and his last tweet congratulated James on the achieve-ment.

Long before he retired, Bryant and his wife start-ed a foundation with the goal of helping families and children. Bryant said he was prompted to act after seeing homeless people in the streets out-side the arena on his way home to Orange County from games.

“He wasn’t just an ath-lete,” fan Jason Ackerman said outside Staples. “He gave the city hope.”

Ackerman said he was saddened about not be-ing able to see what else Bryant would have done, whether it was in film, charity or owning a local sports team.

Bryant further blurred the lines between sports and entertainment af-ter injuries hastened the end of his playing days in 2016. He immediate-ly switched his laserlike focus to his love of story-telling in film, books and online.

“He was so intense about business,” Phila-delphia 76ers co-owner Michael Rubin said. “He would ask 50 different questions in a day about how could he win in busi-ness.”

It didn’t take long for Bryant to make an impact in Hollywood. He won an Oscar for best animated short two years ago as a producer of “Dear Bas-ketball,” based on a poem Bryant wrote before he re-tired from the court.

He launched Granity Studios, a multimedia company that creates content for young adults. He had begun a publish-ing career as well. Last year was the debut of his young adult book series that mixed fantasy and sports.

“Kobe’s death is espe-cially wrenching know-

ing what he was capable of and what he might have accomplished in his post-NBA life,” said Arn Tellem, Bryant’s former longtime agent. “He was already well on his way.”

Steven and Diana Brugge joined the throng outside Staples in their matching Bryant jerseys.

“He was the soul of LA,” Steven Brugge said. “He meant so much to this city, and not just because he won championships.”

Brugge admired the way Bryant carried him-self as a person and a professional: “That’s the kind of guy you want rep-resenting your city.”

When he wasn’t work-ing, Bryant would pop up at women’s pro and col-lege basketball games in Los Angeles, often with 13-year-old Gianna in tow. The second oldest of Bry-ant’s four daughters took up her father’s sport, and he proudly coached her AAU team. He talked up the women’s game, too, giving it a boost.

With Staples Center hosting the Grammys on Sunday, fans got as close to the arena as they could, standing under video boards with his face and the message: “In Loving Memory of Kobe Bryant.”

Together, they shared memories in quiet voices. Some shed tears. Others held their head in their hands.

Inside the arena, Bry-ant’s two retired numbers in the rafters — 8 and 24 — were bathed in light.

“We’re literally stand-ing here heartbroken in the house that Kobe Bryant built,” host Alicia Keys said in opening the Grammy telecast. “We love you, Kobe.”

At Bryant’s Mamba Sports Academy in Thou-sand Oaks, not far from the crash site, Renee Tab arrived with her young son, carrying purple and yellow flowers.

“We love Kobe Bry-ant,” she said. “He is quintessentially LA. Our LA hero, our LA legend.”

Perhaps Leonardo Di-Caprio summed it up best.

“LA will never be the same,” the actor tweeted.

Los Angeles unites in grief for adopted son Kobe Bryant

nBA

The DispaTch • www.cdispatch.com Tuesday, January 28, 2020 5B

Comics & PuzzlesDear AbbyDILBERT

ZITS

GARFIELD

CANDORVILLE

BABY BLUES

BEETLE BAILEY

MALLARD FILLMORE

HoroscopesTODAY’S BIRTHDAY (Jan.

28). Even though the early weeks pop with excitement, the real surprise will be the thrill that comes from being needed. The more you do for others, the better you feel. And as you execute your plans, you’ll notice who you inspire. Your past and your professional life merge in helpful and lucrative ways. Scorpio and Pisces adore you. Your lucky numbers are: 9, 2, 18, 44 and 6.

ARIES (March 21-April 19). The bottom line is important, but it’s rarely what a situation is really about. To know what really matters to people, study interactions. Inside the smallest gestures will be the gift of every-

thing. TAURUS (April 20-May 20).

You’ve decided to get good at something. It doesn’t matter how far off you are from the mark right now. Figure out what small part of it you can learn. You only need to get 1% better at a time.

GEMINI (May 21-June 21). You don’t like to start a thing unless you think you can finish it. The rookie move is to put together the puzzle before you notice how many pieces will be involved.

CANCER (June 22-July 22). What do you have to do to make your heart a zone of peace? And can you do it alone? No. That’s as impossible as harmonizing

with yourself in real time. LEO (July 23-Aug. 22). A

ring of fire is an enduring sym-bol. Johnny Cash sang about it, circus cats jump through it and, recently, it was found illustrated on an ancient Egyptian map. In some way, you’ll be jumping through such a burning loop today.

VIRGO (Aug. 23-Sept. 22). Sure, maybe you could be going faster, more efficiently and doing it in better form. But that’s not the point. The point is movement. Forget what it’s supposed to look like, just make it count.

LIBRA (Sept. 23-Oct. 23). In every moment, you have choices. Being too aware of that fact is paralyzing, and not being aware enough of it is worse. People get stuck when they mis-take sliding doors for walls.

SCORPIO (Oct. 24-Nov. 21). Something interdimension-al is occurring within. For this reason, you’ll make as much of an imprint on the world by observing passersby as you will by interacting with them or staying home.

SAGITTARIUS (Nov. 22-Dec. 21). Early judgment is ineffi-cient. Then comes opinions and disappointment. Then comes arguing with reality — what a waste. Before you judge, let reality show you what it is. Then accept that, and go from there.

CAPRICORN (Dec. 22-Jan. 19). Knowing what you need is not so easy. Most of the time, people just guess at it, get it wrong, and try again. A person who can accurately assess your needs is an invaluable gift and should be cherished as such.

AQUARIUS (Jan. 20-Feb. 18). Tolerance needs a better public relations campaign. It’s not regarded as particularly glamorous, and yet tolerance is the value most closely linked to “cool.” No one can be cool without allowing a wide range of life to happen.

PISCES (Feb. 19-March 20). You’re never really on a straight road. Even the most linear, endless unchanging line of pavement is subtly wrapping around the curvature of a spher-ical planet. Dips and climbs are inevitable.

SOLUTION:Mutiny on the Bounty

FAMILY CIRCUS

DEAR ABBY: My mother is in a

locked ward of a nursing home because she has Alzheimer’s and is a flight risk. My stepfather has begun dating her best friend. He doesn’t consider it dating because, at 85, he’s no longer capable of having a phys-ical relationship. However, taking someone to din-ner, the theater, church or to a movie constitutes a date to me. People in our small town are talking. I don’t care about that. It’s not their business.

I don’t begrudge my stepfather and his lady their relationship, but he no longer visits Mom as often as he used to. He looks for any excuse not to. An example: He will say he doesn’t want to drive in the rain, then drive in a downpour to go on a date with “The Other Woman.” He says Mom forgets he was there five minutes after he leaves, which, unfortunately, is true. But she lights up when she sees him, and it gives her a moment of joy to visit with him. She knows he’s her husband, and the last time we had a family visit, she snuggled up to

him and said, “I love you.”

Am I wrong to think my stepfather is not fulfilling his vows by neglecting his wife of 25 years? I truly do not mind that he’s lonely and dating, but I feel he should balance his time between the two women in his life. — FAIR-MINDED IN TEXAS

DEAR FAIR-MINDED:

You say you don’t begrudge your stepfather having a social life, and yet you call what he’s doing neglect. Whether your mother is aware of the fact that he’s spending time away from her is debatable. I assume she’s re-ceiving excellent care, and that both of you check to ensure it.

Quite frankly, what I think about this is irrelevant. The person with whom you should discuss this is your stepfather. Unless you have walked a mile in his shoes, I do not think you should judge him.

DEAR ABBY: I love my broth-er, but my sister-in-law, “Daisy,” drives me crazy. Luckily, they live in another state.

I want to see my brother, but getting together always involves his wife. When they travel to

see us, they stay for about a week. All Daisy wants to do when they are here is shop. My husband and brother have no interest in going, so it’s just the two of us.

My problem is, whatever I buy, she buys the same thing. Or, if she sees me wear something she likes, she looks for the same thing to buy. She thinks it’s OK because they live in a different state. Daisy does this with her other sister-in-law, too, and they live in the same city. We’re both fed up. What should we do? — COPIED IN FLORIDA

DEAR COPIED: It is said that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. Daisy may be insecure about her own fashion choices, which is why she cop-ies yours. Because this bothers you to the degree that it does, the direct way to deal with it would be to tell Daisy it makes you feel encroached upon. Ei-ther that or, when you take her shopping, tell her you are going along only to keep her company while SHE shops, and keep your wallet in your purse.

Dear Abby is written by Abigail Van Buren, also known as Jeanne Phillips, and was founded by her mother, Pauline Phillips. Contact Dear Abby at www.DearAbby.com or P.O. Box 69440, Los Angeles, CA 90069.

Dear Abby

COLLEGE BASKETBALL

Baylor remains No. 1 in AP Top 25 with few changes at topTHE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Baylor is No. 1 for a second straight week in an AP Top 25 poll that had no major changes at the top, a rare bit of stability in a wildly unpredictable season.

The Bears stayed well ahead of No. 2 Gonzaga in Monday’s poll, part of an unchanged top seven for the first time this season. The only change in the top 10 came with Villano-va moving up a spot to No. 8 to swap positions with No. 9 Duke. That comes in a season that has seen seven different teams reach No. 1 this season, matching a record set during the 1982-83 sea-

son.Baylor (17-1) hopped

over Gonzaga last week to reach No. 1 for the second time in program history, though the Bears lasted only a week on top in its previous stint in Janu-ary 2017. This time, they earned 44 of 64 first-place votes to keep a firm hold on the top spot after beat-ing Oklahoma and Flori-da last week.

“I think our staff’s done a better job this time with (avoiding) all the dis-tractions and more focus on we want to be No. 1 at the end of the year,” coach Scott Drew said after the win against the Sooners.

So far this season, Michigan State, Ken-

tucky, Duke, Louisville, Kansas and Gonzaga have seen time at No. 1 before Baylor made its jump to the top. The Zags stayed on top for four con-secutive weeks, but none of the other top-ranked teams lasted more than two weeks at No. 1.

The top tierGonzaga (21-1) earned

19 first-place votes to re-main either No. 1 or No. 2 in the poll since the mid-dle of December. Mark Few’s Zags have won 13 straight games since suf-fering their only loss to MIchigan in the Battle 4 Atlantis championship game in the Bahamas.

Kansas was third, fol-lowed by San Diego State — the last unbeaten team in Division I — and Flori-da State. Louisville, Day-ton, Villanova, Duke and Seton Hall rounded out the top 10.

RisingHouston made the

biggest jump in a week that featured only mod-est climbs or slides, ris-ing four spots to No. 21. No. 20 Colorado moved up three spots, while No. 12 West Virginia, No. 13 Kentucky, No. 15 Mary-land and No. 19 Illinois each rose two spots.

In all, nine teams moved up in this week’s

poll.

SlidingMichigan State and

Butler had the biggest slides of the week.

The Spartans — who started the year at No. 1 — fell three spots to No. 14 after losing at Indiana. The Bulldogs also fell three spots to No. 16 after losing to Villanova, the final loss in a three-game skid that had dropped Butler from No. 5 two weeks ago.

Welcome (back)No. 22 LSU, No. 23

Wichita State and No. 24 Penn State were the week’s new additions,

re-entering the poll after appearances earlier this season.

Farewell (for now)Texas Tech (No. 18),

Memphis (No. 20) and Arizona (No. 22) fell out of the rankings. The Ti-gers had been ranked all season, while this is the second time that the Red Raiders and Wildcats have fallen out of the poll.

Conference watchThe Big Ten had more

than double the number of ranked teams than any other conference with six. The Atlantic Coast, Big 12, Big East and SEC each had three.

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Legal Notices

State of MississippiCounty Of Lowndes

NOTICE OF SALE LIQUIDATION

WHEREAS, the following ten-ants entered into leases withThe Grove Mini Warehouses forstorage space in which to storepersonal property and

WHEREAS, default has beenmade in the payment for rentand The Grove Mini Ware-houses pursuant to saidleases is authorized to sell thepersonal property to satisfy thepast due rent and othercharges owed to it by the fol-lowing tenants:

Marguita StallingsA1$150.85

Synetra NealA2$141.85

Jason HinesA8$106.85

Angel JonesA18$106.85

Brenda DavidA23$217.40

Tata VaughnA26$106.85

Sonja HoltA31$186.85

Lonnie Sanders Jr.A32$126.85

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Marissa PerkinsB25$119.85

Arline HughesB38$206.85

Walter Smith Jr.C5$307.95

Donald HenleyC9$126.85

Cheryl FergusonC13$203.70

Cancance PerryC14$256.85

Lassandra JacksonC14$186.85

Greg MooreC26$126.85

NOW, THEREFORE, notice ishereby given that The GroveMini Warehouses liquidationsale will take place at 510Lehmberg Road, Columbus, MS39702 on February 15, 2020at 10:00 A.M.

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