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Rangers acquire starting pitcher Jordan Montgomery and reliever Chris Stratton from the Cardinals

Published Fri, 21 Feb 2025 10:53:51 GMT

SAN DIEGO (AP) — The AL West-leading Texas Rangers continued to load up on pitching Sunday by acquiring left-hander Jordan Montgomery and reliever Chris Stratton from the St. Louis Cardinals.The deal came a few hours after Texas announced the addition of three-time Cy Young Award winner Max Scherzer from the New York Mets. Also on Sunday, the Rangers placed ace Nathan Eovaldi on the 15-day injured list with a right forearm strain, retroactive to July 27.Texas sent left-hander John King, minor league infielder Tommy Saggese and Double-A right-hander T.K. Roby to the Cardinals. To make room on the 40-man roster, the Rangers designated right-hander Joe Barlow for assignment. “I’ve heard nothing but great things about the guys in Texas,” Montgomery said, before referring to popular Rangers pitching coach Mike Maddux. “Having Mad Dog there will be great.“I was kind of prepared for it. Just excited to join the new team. It’s been fun being here. Stratton is one of my best friends here — i...

Delays expected as Floyd Hill construction project on I-70 enters new phase

Published Fri, 21 Feb 2025 10:53:51 GMT

CLEAR CREEK, Colo. (KDVR) -- The five-year project at Floyd Hill enters a phase this week that could impact your commute.The project, estimated at several hundreds of millions of dollars, will expand parts of Interstate 70 in the high country.The "daytime impacts" will happen due to rock scaling and blasting that starts this week along the construction route.The project runs between Evergreen and Idaho Springs.Between 9 a.m. and 3 p.m. Monday through Thursday, and 9 a.m. to noon on Friday, drivers could expect a 45-minute delay, according to the Colorado Department of Transportation."It's a longer-term project, we'll have construction going on through 2028," Presley Fowler, a spokesperson for CDOT, said.Floyd Hill will be much wider, until then, look for slowdowns and construction."We're going to minimize traffic impacts by working what's considered off-peak travel times," Fowler said.The work on the Floyd Hill project will not impact your rush-hour commute, according to CDOT."Avoid...

Crocodile sighting prompts hours-long closure of Joe DiMaggio Park in Hollywood

Published Fri, 21 Feb 2025 10:53:51 GMT

Joe DiMaggio Park in Hollywood was closed for several hours after a crocodile was spotted a little too close for comfort to nearby homes, raising safety concerns among area residents.A pictures of the scaly intruder show the animal swimming in the park, Sunday afternoon.Speaking with 7News, area resident Harel Pinhasi described the moment he first spotted the reptile.“We looked, and I saw a head,” said . “I was just driving around, like, in my golf cart with one of my friends in the park, and then we looked in the water, ’cause we usually just look for, like, fish.”Pinhasi said he saw the creature at around 12:45 p.m.“I took a closer look, and then saw it, and then I just drove away and just told my mom,” he said.The family called it in to authorities.According to an email sent to residents of the Harbor Islands community, the crocodile “seems to have gained access through The Estates’ intercostal seawall.”“Pretty sca...

White House watching rising gas prices ‘very carefully’

Published Fri, 21 Feb 2025 10:53:51 GMT

(CNN) — The White House is watching rising gas prices “very carefully,” as President Joe Biden’s top advisers are briefing him regularly on the situation, a senior administration official told CNN.At present, top advisers to Biden believe the situation is steady, the official said, considering it’s the height of air conditioning and driving season and given the strength of the economy, which drives up demand for travel and energy usage.“The irony is the strength of the economy brings higher prices,” the official told CNN. “The better the president (and his agenda) performs, the higher the price is going to go.”The average price of retail gasoline nationally rose two cents per gallon Friday to $3.73, according to AAA, after seeing the biggest one-day spike since June 2022 earlier in the week. The national average price for a gallon of regular gasoline climbed to $3.69 on Wednesday, according to AAA, up by 5 cents from Tuesday. That jump came just a day after a 4-cent increa...

Fire leads to evacuation at assisted living facility in Lauderhill; no injuries

Published Fri, 21 Feb 2025 10:53:51 GMT

A fire that broke out inside an assisted living facility in Lauderhill led to some frightening moments for its residents.The blaze ignited in an apartment at the facility, located along Rock Island Road, Sunday morning.Some residents were evacuated from the four-story building, while others had to shelter in place.Fortunately, no one was hurt.The cause of the fire remains under investigation.

‘The family feels like he got trapped’: How a low-profile Mar-a-Lago employee got tangled up in Trump’s legal problems

Published Fri, 21 Feb 2025 10:53:51 GMT

(CNN) — A day after he was named as a co-defendant in the criminal case against Donald Trump for mishandling classified documents, a picture is starting to emerge of Carlos De Oliveira, the little known Mar-a-Lago employee accused of trying to delete security camera footage at Trump’s Florida resort after the Justice Department issued a subpoena for it last year.A number of people close to Trump, as well as people who know De Oliveira personally, describe him as someone outside of the former president’s inner circle who has been caught up in Trump’s legal problems. Unlike Walt Nauta, Trump’s former White House aide and valet who is also charged in the documents case, De Oliveira is not someone who is known by Trump’s close confidants or, according to people who spoke to CNN, anyone who was typically in close proximity to the former president.In conversations with eight current and former Trump aides and allies who frequently visited Mar-a-Lago, De Oliveira, who is listed as the “Pro...

The EU’s reply to Qatargate: Nips, tucks and paperwork

Published Fri, 21 Feb 2025 10:53:51 GMT

STRASBOURG — The European Parliament’s response to Qatargate: Fight corruption with paperwork.When Belgian police made sweeping arrests and recovered €1.5 million from Parliament members in a cash-for-influence probe last December, it sparked mass clamoring for a deep clean of the institution, which has long languished with lax ethics and transparency rules, and even weaker enforcement. Seven months later, the Parliament and its president, Roberta Metsola, can certainly claim to have tightened some rules — but the results are not much to shout about. With accused MEPs Eva Kaili and Marc Tarabella back in the Parliament and even voting on ethics changes themselves, the reforms lack the political punch to take the sting out of a scandal that Euroskeptic forces have leaped on ahead of the EU election next year.“Judge us on what we’ve done rather [than] on what we didn’t,” Metsola told journalists earlier this month, arguing that Parliament has acted swiftly where it could. While t...

Michael Gove wants Britain to have more houses — but isn’t meeting the builders

Published Fri, 21 Feb 2025 10:53:51 GMT

LONDON — He may be promising to tackle the U.K.’s housing crisis, but homebuilders say Michael Gove keeps giving them the cold shoulder.According to quarterly transparency data published by his department, Britain’s housing secretary did not log a single meeting with any of the U.K.’s major house builders or their industry groups in the first quarter of this year.Industry reps expressed dismay at the data, accusing Gove of “pandering” to Conservative MPs spooked by local anger at developments. His department pushed back strongly, and pointed to a string of meetings between junior ministers and the sector.British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak — alongside Gove — made a major announcement last week in which the pair promised to meet a Conservative manifesto promise to have delivered one million new homes by the next election.The announcement was widely viewed as an attempt to jolt the government’s faltering efforts to tackle a long-running housing short...

Why Ukrainians see no sense in negotiating with Russia now

Published Fri, 21 Feb 2025 10:53:51 GMT

Andreas Umland is an analyst at the Stockholm Center for Eastern European Studies at the Swedish Institute of International Affairs.One can safely assert that the Ukrainian people and their leaders want a durable peace with Russia, more than the West and others around the world. So, then why is it that Kyiv is not at the forefront of exploring a compromise with Moscow?The truth is that Russia’s current war against Ukraine can’t easily end via negotiations. It falls into a long historical pattern of Russian behavior, part of a larger pathology making stable peace unfeasible — or at least most Ukrainians and other Central Europeans believe it to be so.The present-day attack is neither Moscow’s first assault on the Ukrainian nation, nor is it the Kremlin’s only ongoing expansionist operation in Russia’s former empire.Powerful lessons from Ukraine’s own past, as well as its neighbors’ history and present, have taught Ukrainians that Moscow can’t be trusted. And according to their experi...

Nigel Farage, the ‘disingenuous grifter’

Published Fri, 21 Feb 2025 10:53:51 GMT

Jamie Dettmer is opinion editor at POLITICO Europe. Britain’s elite Coutts Bank pinned several labels on Nigel Farage when deciding to drop him as a customer earlier this month — including those of “racist” and “xenophobe.” But it’s really the characterization of him as a “disingenuous grifter” that the former politician has done everything to prove since being de-banked.After all, a grifter isn’t only a swindler and a con artist but also the operator of a circus sideshow, and since Brexit — when he was front and center — the populist provocateur has struggled to attract a crowd and move his act back to the main stage.Farage has cast around for a compelling soapbox issue since Britain left the European Union, failing to gain much traction with his various campaigns, including, for a time, migrants crossing the English Channel and his opposition to lockdowns during the pandemic. But nothing took flame. The pandemic came and went, and Britain has somewhat moved on from worrying a...