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College Quarantine Breakdowns Leave Some at Risk by Natasha Singer (The New York Times)

The article is mainly about students opinions on how colleges and universities try to get Covid-19 under control on campus. Several students from various universities, like UNC, Notre Dame, etc, have been interviewed. The general opinion seems to be that students who get tested positive get quarantined or isolated quickly but the conditions in those isolation and quarantine areas are bad. Students in quarantine who don’t know if they have the virus get roomed together with students who got positive test results. Those students get unnecessary exposure to the virus even though they might not have it themselves. Many universities don’t have any staff in those areas. The food is bad and conditions in general are bad. A lot of quarantined students also use the same laundry rooms that all the other students use. There was one example given of a plan that appears to work pretty well: Tufts University near Boston has significantly reduced dorm occupancy and is testing all students for the virus twice a week. It has also installed modular residential units on tennis courts and a parking lot for up to 225 students with infections, rather than house them in a dorm. That way, the lack of elevators in resident halls is not going to be a problem and in emergency situations, the patients room is easily accessible. On top of that everyone gets tested twice a week. In short, universities are doing a good job for people who want to take initiative and don’t want to spread the virus, but they are letting too much stuff fly under the radar and they don’t consider the mental health of affected students.

The article’s lead basically mentions the most important information. But I feel like the article repeats itself several times. In my opinion, there were too many too similar examples. The article could have been a little shorter if the journalist would have summarized some similar examples or used one example as the main example and then only added parts from other examples that differ from the main example. If I would have written the article, I might have put the student’s quote in the end (“They are doing a good job for people who want to take initiative and don’t want to spread the virus,” Mr. Hennen said. “But I think they are letting too much stuff fly under the radar.”) and another quote from a different student (“One thing that needs to be taken care of more is the mental health aspect of it all because it is very, very scary having coronavirus,” Ms. Terry said of her isolation experience. “We’re college students. We just moved away from our homes and it’s very stressful.”) closer to the top, because I like to write articles using the inverted pyramid and those quotes summarize students’ opinion very well.

Gas flooded sewer lines for two blocks around 48th Street and Correctionville Road.

Gas got on streets, ditches and sewer lines according to police reports. The situation was serious for two hours until the gas was flushed away.

Four families were evacuated because of the sewer-line gas and Cars were rerouted through side streets.

The cause of the spilled gas was a Texaco gasoline truck that overturned on outskirts of the town.

            Fire Chief Charles Hochandel said: “The firemen followed catastrophe and hazmat procedures set up beforehand for just such an occurrence.”

A fire fighter fell out of a tree when he tried to rescue a cat.

Fire fighter Bob Harwood climbed 50 feet in an oak tree to get a cat. He dropped the last 15 feet when a dead limb broke.

Harwood broke his left leg in the fall. He was admitted at St. Luke’s Hospital and said he is doing “just fine”.

The calico cat landed on Harwood and is fine. It belongs to Suzanne and Samantha Decker, Charlie and Kim Decker’s twins.

The accident happened at 102 11th Ave.

Women’s soccer in various countries, mainly the US and the UK, is having a big year filled with major signings for British soccer clubs and accomplishments in the National Women’s Soccer League in the US.

The National Women’s Soccer League (NWSL) was the first U.S. pro sports league to start and complete a quarantined tournament. July’s Challenge Cup was a success and drew record TV ratings according to Axios Media.

The league has already started on September 5 and will end on October 17 with 18 matches in total. Thanks to the delay of the football season by the SEC, openings were created on CBS which were filled by the NWSL. CBS will continue to stream a Game of the Week till the end of the season.

Another positive development for the NWSL was its announced expansion in the next two years. Racing Louisville FC will join the league in 2021. A Sacramento team will debut in either 2021 or 2022. A team from Los Angeles which is nicknamed Angel City will debut in the league in 2022.

The LA team is owned by a group of almost entirely women. According to CNN, 31 founding investors are listed on the team’s website and only four are men. The group of investors include some Hollywood stars, including Natalie Portman, Jennifer Garner, Eva Longoria and Jessica Chastain.

Angel City’s President Julie Uhrman told CNN Sport about Portman’s commitment that: “You can see that she really gets behind causes that are important to her and she does meaningful work for those causes.” Uhrman added: “she [Portman] wanted to take her commitment to elevate women’s athletics, to address pay equality and to make it public and meaningful.”

Serena Williams and 14 former US soccer women’s national team (USWNT) players are part of the founding group as well. This results in a large group of tens of millions of followers on social media which is going to give women’s soccer in the US a new publicity which hasn’t existed for this sport before.

California will get two more professional soccer teams throughout the next three years, one of them being a men’s soccer team in Sacramento that will join Major League Soccer (MLS) in 2023 according to CBS. The original date of the team’s debut got pushed back due to Covid-19.

A report from The Athletic states that a women’s expansion Sacramento team could join the NWSL in 2021. The date might get pushed back considering that the men’s side has already made that decision due to the global pandemic. The men’s team is set to play at Papa Murphy’s Park which is a stadium that holds 11,500 visitors. This capacity meets NWSL expansion guidelines, but the stadium lacks proper locker room facilities.

British women’s soccer is doing well too. Last year, Barclays made the “largest single investment in British women’s sports”, signing a three-year, $11 million deal to rename the league.

This year, several Barclay’s FA Women’s Super League (WSL) teams made some major signings according to Sky Sports. Four USWNT players are set to join two British teams: Sam Mewis and Rose Lavelle signed contracts with Manchester City while their rivalling team Manchester United is expected to sign players Tobin Heath and Christen Press.

Chelsea signed Pernille Harder, a Danish striker, from UEFA Women’s Champions League (UWCL) finalist Wolfsburg for $355,000, a record for women’s soccer. She was UEFA’s player of the year in 2018 and she complemented WSL saying: “The English league, it’s so exciting at the moment and I’m really looking forward to it.”

Several Australian players signed contracts with some major British women’s teams as well and some England national team players including Lucy Bronze are likely to move back to WSL.

Homeland Security Blocked Warnings of Russian Campaign Against Biden by Zolan Kanno-Youngs (The New York Times)

This article is about an intelligence bulletin, titled “Russia Likely to Denigrate Health of U.S. Candidates to Influence 2020 Election,” that was drafted to inform state and local law enforcement officials that Russian state media agencies were posting “allegations about the poor mental health of 2020 Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden”. The rest of the article goes more into depth about what exactly happened and who was how involved. The main information and basically the only information that stuck with me personally though, was everything that was said in the lede. Most of the rest of the article goes too much into detail for me. I don’t know most of the mentioned people and politics is not my strong suit. Still I feel like I got the most important parts because of the clear and concise lede.

A South Iowa City man died and three others got injured in a car accident on Highway 28.

Moyer Quick, 65, died in the collision. The autopsy shows that Moyer had a heart attack which may have been the cause of the accident.

His wife, Dorothy Quick, 61, who is from South Iowa City as well, is reported to be in “good” condition. Maxine Steuerwald from Lawton, the other passenger in the car and Dorothy Quick’s sister, is in “fair” condition. Quick has already been released and Steuerwald is scheduled to be released.

Randy Radin, 17, from Swan Lake, who drove the other vehicle is in “critical” condition having suffered some major injuries.

The car accident happened two miles east of Sioux City on Highway 28.

Patrick Stewart, a South Iowa Patrolman, said Quick hit Radin’s truck when passing. The collision sent both vehicles in the ditch on the north side of the road causing Quick’s car to roll over.

A ban of hand-held radar guns has been ordered for the South Iowa Highway patrol due to health concerns.

The south Iowa patrol has 70 radar guns which will have to be withdrawn from service, because there are concerns that troopers might develop cancer from longterm exposure to the radiation waves emitted by the guns. The ban has been issued in Sioux City, Iowa.

State troopers will continue to use radar units with transmitters mounted on the outside of their cruisers.

The ban was ordered as a precaution while studies are conducted into the possible links between cancer and the use of such guns. The studies are being conducted as a result of the compensation claims by three municipal officers in Cedar Rapids who claimed that they “developed cancer from using the hand-held units.”

Adam Smith, the highway patrol spokesman, said: “The feeling here is to err on the side of caution until more is known about the issue. The whole situation is under review.”

Russia Rejects Calls for Investigation of Navalny Poisoning by Andrew E. Kramer (New York Times)

The article is basically about the “poisoning” of Alexei A. Navalny and its investigation. Navalny is a leading opposition figure in Russia who is against Putin. He got sick during a flight from Siberia. Russian doctors said that he had a metabolic disorder that was caused by low blood sugar, but Navalny’s family still wanted to have him moved to Germany. There, doctors found out that he had indeed been poisoned, although they are not sure what exact poison had been used. Tests have shown that chemicals were used that are usually being used to treat Alzheimer’s and other types of dementia. The German chancellor issued this in a statement and added that Russia should investigate. Other countries like France and the US support Germany’s position. But the lack of evidence for a specific poison that had been used on Navalny, the Russian government rejects any requests like that saying that they don’t understand why everyone is so keen to use the word poison as the substance hasn’t even been identified. They also denied a pattern of poisoning or getting rid of other important Russian opposition figures.

This article started with a description of what has happened throughout the last few days concerning the Poisoning of Navalny. Then, it kept jumping between statements from a Russian spokesman and mainly German doctors and the chancellor. It also included a statement from an American spokesman as this article is in an American newspaper. It seems like Peskov basically just kept repeating the same thing over and over again while just changing the way he said it but not the actual content. As far as I could tell, the author was pretty objective. He didn’t favor any party, statement, or opinion in this article.