Hundreds of schools were closed Monday morning in Oklahoma and Kentucky while thousands of teachers rallied at their state capitols, CBS News correspondent Omar Villafranca reports. They’re demanding higher pay and increased school funding.
Art teacher Laurissa Kovacs says her kids aren’t even getting the basics at Puterbaugh Middle School.
“The chairs are in awful condition,” Kovacs told Villafranca. “They’re broken and they literally hurt the kids to sit down. If you look through the stacks, you can just see how many of the broken areas and cracks that will pinch you and jagged tops.”
Kovacs says she’s had to bring in folding chairs from home to give her students a proper place to sit. She can’t take the frustration any longer.
LOS ANGELES — A 13-year-old boy who apparently fell into a drainage pipe at a park while spending Easter with his family has been rescued after a frantic search. CBS Los Angeles reports Jesse Hernandez was found just before 5:30 a.m. local time, nearly 13 hours after he was first reported missing. Investigators believe he was playing in the area with other children when he fell through the roof of a 20-foot concrete building into a drainage sewage system below.
“A tremendous team effort over the past 12 hours resulted in the best outcome, Jesse Hernandez was found alive this morning,” the Los Angeles Fire Department said in a statement.
More than 100 members of the Los Angeles Fire Department and personnel from several agencies assisted in the search.
“From start to finish, this was an unprecedented team effort,” the fire department said.
When state dog wardens fan out across Westmoreland County over the next two weeks to check whether more than 40,000 dogs have current licenses and rabies vaccinations, they won’t choose communities haphazardly, according to Kristen Donmoyer of the Department of Agriculture.
Checks will begin Tuesday and continue the week of April 9.
“Most residents are cooperative, but not all. If a person is uncooperative, the warden can’t just barge in,” she said. “People can tell us to take a hike or get off their property.”
In those instances, the warden leaves a request for the homeowner to provide the required information by mail.
SCALP LEVEL BOROUGH, Pa.. – A 22-year-old Windber man died Friday in a bicycle accident.According to Coroner Jeff Lees, Matthew B. Thacker was riding his bike on Main Street in Scalp Level Borough when he went down a steep hill, lost control and struck a wall.
Thacker was not wearing a helmet, and died as a result of a head injury and the death was deemed accidental.
The men and women salute in honor of their country at the Punxsutawney Community Center Wednesday morning. The same group will soon put their lives on the line. They’re the 665 Engineer Utilities Detachment and they will be deployed to Iraq
The army reserve soldiers will be overseas for about a year, completing construction related missions.
“It is a bittersweet moment because the soldiers are going and but yet they’re going to do something that’s worthy,” says the 665th Detachment Commander, CPT John Kennelly.
A battle to take down a statue of President William McKinley in the small Northern California city of Arcata reflects a growing debate around the country on monuments that honor those who helped bring about the deaths of Native peoples.
No other city has taken down a monument to a president for his misdeeds. But Arcata is poised to do just that. The target is an 8½-foot bronze likeness of William McKinley, who was president at the turn of the last century and stands accused of directing the slaughter of Native peoples in the U.S. and abroad.
Steven Bochco, who wrote and produced some of the most memorable shows in television history, died Sunday after a lengthy battle with leukemia.
Though best-known for his cop dramas, Bochco was also behind the more comic “Doogie Howser, M.D.” and the high-profile flop “Cop Rock,” which attempted to marry gritty police work with Broadway show tunes.
The activist, Wanda Cleveland, 61, was there to remember the death of an unarmed black man at the hands of Sacramento police officers. But during the vigil for Stephon Clark, she was struck by a Sacramento County Sheriff Department vehicle.
The collision occurred on Saturday night. One video shared on Twitter shows people carrying signs of protest around sheriff vehicles. A voice on a megaphone says, “Back away from my vehicle” four times. Another voice can be heard saying, “Back away from my car” before the activist is knocked down to the curb.
Severe Weather Team 11 is finalizing the changing forecast, for Channel 11 Morning News starting at 4:30 a.m.
Despite it being the start of April, a quick-moving snowstorm will race eastward from the Ohio Valley through the mid-Atlantic and southern New England into Monday morning.
To the north of the storm’s track, a narrow swath of snow is expected. The band of accumulating snow will be no more than 100-150 miles wide, so a 25-mile north-to-south distance could mean the difference between a coating of snow and up to a half a foot.
“This snow event will last 8 hours or less in any one community, but that will be enough time to whiten the ground with some areas also facing slick travel,” AccuWeather Senior Meteorologist Kristina Pydynowski said.
Most communities along the path of the storm will receive 3-6 inches, but there can be localized amounts up to 8 or 9 inches in parts of central Pennsylvania.
Below are some questions and answers about the station, its re-entry and the past and future of China’s ambitious space program
No one knows for sure. However, on Friday, before updating the latest time window, the Aerospace Corp. said the debris would most likely descend into the Pacific Ocean.
When the space station’s fall was forecast for noon EDT on Sunday (Aerospace has since moved its forecast back four and a half hours), an expert told Space.com that Tiangong 1 would likely begin its re-entry over Malaysia, and rain debris into the Pacific Ocean.
Earlier, the Aerospace Corp. also said it could land along a strip of the U.S. that includes the southern Lower Peninsula of Michigan. That prompted Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder to activate the state’s Emergency Operations Center to monitor the station.
Capt. Chris A. Kelenske, Michigan’s deputy director of emergency management and homeland security, said “the chances are slim that any of the debris will land in Michigan, but the state is monitoring the situation and is prepared to respond quickly if it does.”
What will happen and how great is the danger?
China’s chief space laboratory designer Zhu Zongpeng has denied Tiangong was out of control, but hasn’t provided specifics on what, if anything, China is doing to guide the craft’s re-entry.
Based on Tiangong 1’s orbit, it will come to Earth somewhere between latitudes of 43 degrees north and 43 degrees south, or roughly somewhere over most of the United States, China, Africa, southern Europe, Australia and South America. Out of range are Russia, Canada and northern Europe.
Based on its size, only about 10 percent of the spacecraft will likely survive being burned up on re-entry, mainly its heavier components such as its engines. The chances of anyone person on Earth being hit by debris is considered less than one in a trillion.
“This is a big thing the size of a school bus. Most of the stuff in it will just burn up in the atmosphere,” Mordecai-Mark Mac Low, curator of astrophysics at the American Museum of Natural History, told CBS New York.
Ren Guoqiang, China’s defense ministry spokesman, told reporters Thursday that Beijing has been briefing the United Nations and the international community about Tiangong 1’s re-entry through multiple channels.
How common is man-made space debris?
Debris from satellites, space launches and the International Space Station enters the atmosphere every few months, but only one person is known to have been hit by any of it: American woman Lottie Williams, who was struck but not injured by a falling piece of a U.S. Delta II rocket while exercising in an Oklahoma park in 1997.
Most famously, America’s 77-ton Skylab crashed through the atmosphere in 1979, spreading pieces of wreckage near the southwestern Australia city of Perth, which fined the U.S. $400 for littering.
The breakup on re-entry of the Columbia space shuttle in 2003 killed all seven astronauts and sent more than 80,000 pieces of debris raining down on a large swath of the Southern United States. No one on the ground was injured.
In 2011, NASA’s Upper Atmosphere Research Satellite was considered to pose a slight risk to the public when it came down to Earth 20 years after its launching. Debris from the 6-ton satellite ended up falling into the Pacific Ocean, causing no damage.
China’s own space program raised major concerns after it used a missile to destroy an out-of-service Chinese satellite in 2007, creating a large and potentially dangerous cloud of debris.
What is Tiangong 1 and what was it used for?
Launched in 2011, Tiangong 1 was China’s first space station, serving as an experimental platform for bigger projects such as the Tiangong 2 launched in September 2016 and a future permanent Chinese space station.
The station, whose name translates as “Heavenly Palace,” played host to two crewed missions that included China’s first female astronauts and served as a test platform for perfecting docking procedures and other operations. Its last crew departed in 2013 and contact with it was cut in 2016. Since then it has been orbiting gradually closer and closer to Earth on its own while being monitored.
The station had two modules, one for its solar panels and engines, and one for a pair of astronauts to live in and conduct experiments. A third astronaut slept in the Shenzhou spaceships that docked with the station, which also contained facilities for personal hygiene and food preparation.
How advanced is China’s space program?
Since China conducted its first crewed mission in 2003 – becoming only the third country after Russia and the U.S. to do so – it has taken on increasingly ambitious projects, including staging a spacewalk and landing its Jade Rabbit rover on the moon.
China now operates the Tiangong 2 precursor space station facility, while the permanent station’s 20-ton core module is due to be launched this year. The completed 60-ton station is set to come into full service in 2022 and operate for at least a decade.
China was excluded from the 420-ton International Space Station mainly due to U.S. legislation barring such cooperation and concerns over the Chinese space program’s strong military connections. China’s space program remains highly secretive and some experts have complained that a lack of information about Tiangong 1’s design has made it harder to predict what might happen upon its re-entry.
A mission to land another rover on Mars and bring back samples is set to launch in 2020. China also plans to become the first country to soft-land a probe on the far side of the moon.
Visitors sit beside a model of China’s Tiangong-1 space station in 2010, at the 8th China International Aviation and Aerospace Exhibition in Zhuhai in southern China’s Guangdong Province. As forecast, China’s defunct Tiangong 1 space station re-entered Earth’s atmosphere Sunday. Kin Cheung/AP
Patric Hornqvist picked up his 200th career goal and the two-time defending Stanley Cup champion Pittsburgh Penguins clinched their 12th straight playoff berth with a 5-2 victory over the Montreal Canadiens.
BY WILL GRAVESAP Sports Writer
March 31, 2018 11:17 PM
Updated March 31, 2018 11:18 PM
PITTSBURGH
Mike Sullivan knew the Stanley Cup hangover was coming. Even if the Pittsburgh Penguins coach danced around the phrase whenever the subject came up during the opening three months of the season as the two-time defending champions alternated between sizzling and sleepy.
“The first part of the year was a bit of a struggle,” Sullivan said. “It wasn’t anything we didn’t anticipate as a coaching staff going into it.”
Sullivan didn’t panic — to be fair, he never really does — and instead offered a reminder to his team that nothing was inevitable.
Maybe not. It just sort of feels that way in Pittsburgh when Sidney Crosby and the Penguins are involved.
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The proof came on Saturday night, when a pair of third-period goals by the NHL’s best power play pushed Pittsburgh to a 5-2 victory over Montreal to clinch a franchise-record 12th straight postseason berth.
