Omar King USA TODAY Thursday 20240620

Billy Mays, a legendary baseball player, is considered by some to be the greatest player of all time. His famous catch in the 1954 World Series and his impressive career numbers solidify his greatness. Mays' career was impacted by various factors, but he still managed to hit 660 home runs and excel in multiple statistical categories. A recent study has also discovered a genetic trait that could delay the onset of Alzheimer's disease, offering hope for future treatments. The research focused on a Colombian family with a genetic mutation that puts them at risk for early onset Alzheimer's. The findings could lead to the development of drugs that replicate the protective effects of the genetic variant. This program is intended for a print-impaired audience and is brought to you by the Georgia Radio Reading Service, GARS. Welcome to our reading of the USA Today. I'm Omar King for the Georgia Radio Reading Service. Today is Thursday, June 20, 2024. Our first article comes to us from the front page. Billy Mays, 1931-2024, timeless legend, with one catch, one stat, it's easy to analyze enduring greatness by Gabe Lacks of the USA Today. It's a blessing and something of a curse that in nearly 150 years of Major League Baseball, there's endless methods to disseminate, dissect, and analyze this absurd game. Ultra-modern stat-cast metrics and expected statistics. The meat and potatoes of batting average, home runs, RBIs, colorized restorations of forgotten eras crisply produced by Ken Burns. Hey, knock yourself out. Yet it is Billy Mays' ultimate gift to us that you really only need two timeless swatches of history to put his greatness into context. One grainy black and white highlight, the back of his baseball card, strangely, that's almost all that's required to credibly pronounce Mays the greatest player of all time. Combine the two and, oh, we're not here for another odious GOAT debate, as the acronym mercifully didn't even exist for most of Mays' life, nor are we here to steal another one's joy. You can have your Babe Ruth dominating the pre-integration diamond on both sides of the ball, or your Barry Barnes, great enough on his own, greater still with a little help, Henry Aaron, Shohei Ohtani, Mickey Mantle, Ken Griffey Jr., Ted Williams, Frank Robinson, they all mean different things to different people, and if one of them strikes you as the very best, there's no need to argue. But it says here that Billy Mays was the greatest of them all. Catch of a lifetime, Mays died Tuesday at 93, a day baseball fans long dreaded even before its timing was downright heartbreaking. Major League Baseball is honoring Mays all week at Rickwood Field in Birmingham, Alabama, where Mays made his professional debut as a teenager in 1948 with the Birmingham Black Barons of the Negro Leagues. One year later, he was in the New York Giants organization. Six years later, a sprint into the polo grounds, nether reaches made him an athletic immortal. You've seen it enough, yet it's still not enough. They just don't build ballparks like the polo grounds anymore, where a dead center field is 483 feet away and the alleys around 450 feet. The better to accommodate the New York football giants and competitively balance the absurdly short dimensions down the lines. It is an almost impossible expanse for a center field to cover. When Cleveland's Vic Wertz came to bat in the eighth inning of game one of the 1954 World Series, two runners were on base, one man was out, and the score was tied 2-2. Under these circumstances, a slightly above average play might be cause for partial veneration. By the time Wertz's bat smashed the ball just to the right of dead center, and Mays sprinted on a dead run and hauled in the ball over his shoulder, he was an estimated 460 feet from home plate. Consider that on Tuesday night, a few hours after Mays died, the powerful Otani crushed a ball 476 feet into the trees beyond Coors Field's center field wall and was rightfully celebrated on social media. After all, it was the longest home run hit the big leagues this year. Now watch the ball disappear into the trees and imagine Mays, minus the wall, and the faux forest running it down. Hey, that's just five yards deeper than his polo grounds catch. Had that merely been a one-off event, it would have ensured Mays a spot in baseball lore. We, of a certain generation, still remember plenty of mortals, from Jim Edmonds to Gary Matthews Jr. to Mike Trout, making catches that defy belief. Now consider that this one saved a World Series game the Giants would eventually win in ten innings on their way to a sweep. Cleveland is still awaiting its next World Series trophy. Numbers game. It is when we marry the physically preposterous nature of that catch with Mays' career numbers that we are again taken beyond belief. Let's not overthink this. That the man who made that catch was physically capable of hitting 660 home runs in the major leagues is preposterous. That the man who made that catch, at various points in time, led the major leagues in batting average, and on base percentage, and slugging percentage, and stolen bases, and won a dozen Golden Glove awards, and didn't win 15 or 16 only because they didn't start passing them out until 1957. Mays' 660 home runs ranked third all time when he retired, and not unlike Williams missing three entire seasons to fight in World War II, Mays ran into plenty of drags on his production, like awaiting baseball's slow integration, as he spent 1948 with the Black Barons one year after Jackie Robinson broke the major league's color barrier, or missing nearly two full seasons to military service as the Korean War unfolded. On the field, hitting in windswept Camelstick Park during what was still the prime of his career was a bummer for a power hitter. Still, the greatness endured. In 1965, as a 34-year-old, Mays hit 52 home runs, posted a major league leading OBP .398, and OPS .1043 totals, and had a career best 185 adjusted OPS, hitting 52 bombs in the Camelstick will do that for a guy. It's an exercise in frustration to figure out how many home runs Mays might have hit if not for those factors, and every player has their pitfalls, be it injury, or an unfriendly home ballpark, or a terrible team around them. Yet you wonder, if Mays somehow ran into 40 more home runs over his 23-year career, how he might have been perceived in an even grander light. Odd that 660 home runs would be received with less fanfare than, say, 700. But think about that for a minute. 700 home runs. That catch. Those golden gloves. A career that stretched from the Negro Leagues to divisional play, from the Polo Grounds to the multipurpose stadia of the 1970s. Mays will get plenty of props this week and forever, but reaching one more round beyond the numbers, a summit only Aaron and Ruth had bonds reached, might have ended any debate for all time. We'll never know Mays' sprint speed, or exit velocity, or route efficiency, numbers that when applied to the merely ordinary, read like so much minutia. But with Mays, we never really had to know. A snippet from a black and white NBC broadcast and an enduring greatness that spanned for decades is more than enough. The article includes a picture of President Barack Obama as he presents the Presidential Medal of Freedom to baseball great Willie Mays at the White House in Washington on November 24, 2015. This has been the reading of Willie Mays, 1931-2024, timeless legend. With one catch, one stat, it's easy to analyze enduring greatness. By Gabe Lacks of the USA Today. Also from the front page, Alzheimer's study, genetic trait may forestall disease, findings might lead to drugs to delay onset. By Ken Altucker of the USA Today. Researchers have discovered a rare genetic trait that could delay the onset of Alzheimer's in people who face an overwhelming risk of developing the mind-robbing disease. A study published Wednesday in the New England Journal of Medicine reported that 27 people from an extended Colombian family who carried a genetic variant called Christchurch developed Alzheimer's disease several years later than expected. The findings build on earlier research in 2019 from a unique family predisposed to pass on the disease. The researchers found that a woman who had the same genetic trait delayed the onset of Alzheimer's by about three decades. Scientists from Mass. General Brigham believe the evidence could be used to develop an Alzheimer's drug or medication that replicates the protective effects of the Christchurch genetic variant. Co-author of the study, we have enough evidence and now the focus should be on trying to leverage this discovery to our therapies, said Dr. Joseph Albreleta Velasquez, a scientist at Mass. General Brigham who co-authored the study. The aim is huge, he said. How can we learn from the protective effects of Christchurch to develop new therapies that will help everybody? Why did researchers focus on a family in Colombia? The research was isolated to South America where participants worked with a rare set of data. More than 1,000 members of an extended family in Colombia carry a genetic mutation that puts them at near certain risk of developing early onset Alzheimer's disease. The symptoms usually begin when the relatives are in their mid-40s. The mutation carriers are part of an extended family of about 6,000 people who live in and around Medellin, Colombia. In the 1980s, a University of Antioquia neurologist, Francisco Lopera, discovered the family had been afflicted with this inherited mutation passed from generation to generation for decades. Using advances in genetic testing, doctors identified the inherited mutation that triggered early onset Alzheimer's in these family members. It was called the PESA mutation, named after the inhabitants of the region. What did the study examine? From 1995 through 2022, researchers from the University of Antioquia in Medellin collected detailed information about the family members who participated in a series of medical studies. The family members underwent medical exams, genetic testing, and neuropsychological assessments. Researchers examined detailed information of family members who carried the PESA mutation. The family members knew the PESA mutation carriers typically developed memory and thinking problems in their mid-40s and typically died more than a decade later. In 2019, researchers discovered a woman who carried the PESA mutation and did not experience symptoms of Alzheimer's until she reached her 70s, about three decades later than the symptoms have typically appeared among PESA mutation carriers. Genetic testing revealed this woman also had two copies of the Alzheimer's gene APOE3 variant called the Christchurch variant. In the study published this week, researchers examined whether Christchurch offered extra protection to people who have the PESA mutation. They found 27 people with the PESA mutation and one copy of the Christchurch variant. Those individuals preserved normal memory and thinking longer than a comparable group who had just the PESA mutation. The group that only had PESA showed signs of disease at a median age of 47, while people who carried Christchurch and PESA did not exhibit memory and thinking problems until they were 52, five years later. Yaquil T. Quiroz, a study co-author and clinical neuropsychologist and neuroimaging researcher at Massachusetts General Hospital, said the research findings suggest the potential for delaying cognitive decline and dementia in older individuals. Quiroz added that findings can be used to develop effective treatments to prevent Alzheimer's dementia. What's next for drug development? Alboleta Velazquez, who works as a Harvard Medical School associate professor of ophthalmology, said the laboratory is using these findings to develop potential antibody drugs to combat Alzheimer's disease. His goal is to begin testing medications in human clinical trials by 2026. Eric Riemann, executive director at Banner Alzheimer's Institute in Phoenix and a co-author of the study, said the study bolsters the idea that this rare variant of the major genetic risk factor for Alzheimer's disease plays a protective role in the development of Alzheimer's. Riemann said further research is needed into the underlying role of APOE on hallmarks of the disease, including beta-almohaloid plaques and tau tangles found in Alzheimer's patients. The Christchurch study provides further support for the idea of targeting APOE in the treatment and potential prevention of Alzheimer's disease. This concludes our reading of Alzheimer's study, Genetic Trait May Forestall Disease, Findings Might Lead to Drugs to Delay Onset, by Ken Altucker of the USA Today. The article includes a photo of a caretaker in El Retiro, Colombia. As he is among those who participated in the Alzheimer's study, new research found a genetic trait among that extended family could delay Alzheimer's disease. Our next article comes to us from the money section of the USA Today. You can call it a comeback. Flip phones are back in style as some dump their smartphones, by Jennifer Jolly, special to the USA Today. Flip phones are having a moment, it's true. People are snatching up those basic clamshell throwbacks of the early 2000s faster than a bag of discounted Reese's the day after Halloween. The reason is simple, we're burnt out on our smartphones, social media, and passively allowing years of our lives to melt away mindlessly stuck on screens. According to the latest statistics, the average person spends nearly five hours a day on their smartphone, which equals six days a month, and a mind-boggling 12 years of a lifetime. Our human willpower and Band-Aid fixes, like built-in social media app limits, don't help. If you took an alcoholic who had a problem with an alcohol and couldn't control that, then the best thing to do is get the alcohol out of the house, right? So that was sort of how I looked at it, tech entrepreneur Will Brawley said from his home office in Waxhaw, North Carolina. The article includes a picture, in black and white, of Will Brawley as he sits at his home office after he switched back to a flip phone, and it has made him less stressed. Brawley, who created and co-owns the popular restaurant management software company Schedule Fly, went cold turkey and replaced his iPhone 11 with a basic Verizon flip phone exactly four years ago this month. He says he does not miss it at all. I didn't like who I was when I had an iPhone, he said. I wasn't present with other people. I was constantly checking emails, texts, sitting at a stoplight, looking at my phone, and just constantly grabbing the phone, being distracted, and being distracted when I was with my wife and my kids. Now having just a flip phone has been a mental health boon for me, he said. The small inconveniences are so enormously outweighed by the positive outcomes for just my presence, my mental health, my anxiety. All of that has improved dramatically. Fed up with nine hours a day on my iPhone. I'm feeling more people can relate to this. Lately, I've felt as if hours spent on my smartphone is a never-ending hamster wheel loop of time wasting. I hate it, and I want to change, but I just don't. Fed up by spending nearly nine hours a day engaging with my iPhone, recently on emails, texting, social media, binge-watching Baby Reindeer, and listening to podcasts or audiobooks, I've switched to using a prepaid total by Verizon Nokia 2760 Flip during off-work hours at night and on weekends. I've already cut my smartphone time in half, which the Screen Time Calculator says gives back about six years of my life overall. My friends and family have the number if there's an emergency. Searches for and sales of flip phones surge. Sales of simple flip-featured phones, not the snazzy new Samsung Galaxy Flip 5 or Fold 5 smartphones, are up in the U.S. for the second year, according to the tech news site ZDNet. Sales for the flip phones are also surging up 15,369% over the past year among Gen Z and younger millennials, writes contributor Ari Beattie. Some people credit Gen Z TikTok influencers, such as Sammy Palazzolo, who garnered more than 17 million views in 2022, when, as a college student, she posted about why she only takes a flip phone when she goes out for the night. The gist? It keeps her and her friends more present, eliminates drunk texts and bad hookups, and all of the bad things about college, and all the good things about a phone, which is connecting with people and taking photos and videos, she wrote. Others point to the nostalgia for all things retro, just like we've seen the comeback of the Sony Walkman and instant cameras in the past, but the biggest reason for a swell in digital downgrading seems to be more akin to why I've snagged a simple flip phone. I've refused to let a $1,000 gadget make me feel powerless over my time, focus and energy. Williams, college student Wyatt Olson, 20, feels the same way. He said spending too much time on his smartphone really hit him in late 2023. I felt like every single second of downtime I had spent on my phone, he said, whether it be walking in between classes or like I just finished up a class, and when I would look up and look around, everyone else was on their phone too. Olson tried many other tricks to spend less time on his phone that I've been talking about since 2018. He set his phone to greyscale. He set up app time limits. It wasn't enough. On January 1st, 2024, he left his iPhone at home with his mom and sister in Maryland and set out for a semester of self-improvement time with a Nokia 2760 Flip. I love it. I've always been a phone call person, and this actually makes it easier for me to talk to my friends rather than text. I have a legitimate excuse because I'm not going to spend two minutes texting you back, Olson says. He misses streaming music from his phone, which he now does with his laptop. Navigating without Waze or Google Maps can be a challenge too, but honestly, it feels empowering, he said, doom-scrolling out, dumb phones, digital detoxes in. The subreddit rdumbphones is in the top 2% of most engaged communities on the platform, with nearly 60,000 members. It's hands down the best place to research dumb phones online. The moderator, 28-year-old church pastor Jose Briones, took over that role in early 2020 after switching to a light phone, a simple e-ink screen phone to call and text in 2019. Before that change, Briones logged 12 or 13 hours of screen time a day. Just pretty much every waking hour I was just spending online, he said, and I didn't want to do that, you know? I didn't want to change how I interacted with the world with all online activity and miss out on so many more rich life experiences. Briones also had created a helpful tool called the Dumb Phone Finder to help people figure out how much they can and cannot live without. You take a short quiz with questions and options such as, do you want smart apps? And choose your preferred style, flip phone, candy bar, touch screen, and it might recommend the CAT S22 Flip or TCL Flip 2. Since taking the helm at the rdumbphones, Briones says he's surprised by how widespread his problems of people feeling addicted to their smartphones. Most people think it's a device problem, but it's a lifestyle problem, he says. The tech is designed to amplify our vulnerabilities and get all of our attention, the most it possibly can. I want to choose what I pay attention to. I don't want a device to dictate that. Is a digital downgrade right for you? Briones recommends taking baby steps before you switch entirely, such as using a $49 3D printed device called the Brick. It's a little plastic magnet about the size of an AirPod case. You download a corresponding app on iOS or Android, select which apps and features you want to block, calls, messages, Instagrams, TikTok, and YouTube, then tap the little brick like you do when you pay for something with your phone. All those features remain blocked until you physically tap the brick again. I bought one about two months ago and highly recommend it, as long as you're good about putting it in another room so you don't deactivate it at the slightest twitch. The minimalist phone app works well on many Android phones, turning flashy apps, icons, and backgrounds into boring grayscale. The website, Dumb Wireless, is another good resource for checking out options when it comes to digital downgrading. It features everything from the more pricey LitePhone 2, $299, and the AGM M9, $50. If you're considering buying a dumb phone, I recommend starting like I did with an inexpensive device that costs very little and uses prepaid wireless plan. That way, if it works great, if it doesn't, you're out less than the cost of a nicer dinner. If you want the broadest overview in general though, go with Breons and our dumb phones. Bottom line, you don't need to spend a big wad of cash to save you from yourself. One more perk of paring down is that it saves money, about $3,000 over two years. This concludes the reading of the first article from the money section. You can call it a comeback, flip phones are back in style as some dump their smartphones, by Jennifer Jolly, special to the USA Today. Our second article from the money section of the USA Today, Economic Plans of Biden, Trump Split, Candidates Pushing Contrasting Blueprints, by Paul Davison of the USA Today. President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump have laid out starkly contrasting blueprints for the US economy as they vie for a second term in November. Trump has said he would seek to extend and expand his 2017 tax cuts, severely restrict illegal immigration, while deporting millions of foreign-born residents, impose tariffs on all US imports, and roll back much of Biden's initiatives to transition the nation to clean energy. Biden would extend some of the Trump tax cuts, but not for wealthy individuals and corporations, establish more targeted tariffs on Chinese imports, and toughen immigration constraints, but not nearly as dramatic as Trump. He also would push a lengthy wish list of social service programs that would make child care more affordable, provide free college tuition, cancel more student loan debt, and lower drug prices, among other proposals. But analysts say they're unlikely to pass a divided Congress. Biden's policies are better for the economy, says Mark Zandi, chief economist of Moody's Analytics. They may lead to more growth and less inflation. According to a Moody's study, Trump's plans would trigger a recession by mid-2025 and an economy that grows at an average of 1.3% annually during his four-year term, vs. 2.1% under Biden. The later is in line with the average growth in the decade before the pandemic. year, under a Trump administration, inflation would rise from the current 3.3% to 3.6%, well above the 2.4% forecast under Biden. The Moody's analysis shows, compared with Biden, the U.S. would have 3.2 million fewer jobs and a 4.5% unemployment rate, and a half percentage point higher at the end of the Trump tenure. The Moody's projections defy polls that have consistently shown Americans rate Trump a better steward for the U.S. economy than Biden. Forty-six percent of respondents trust Trump on the economy, and 32% trust Biden, according to the ABC-IPSOS poll in late April. Their views on the economy are expected to be a major focus of a June 27 debate between the two candidates hosted by CNN. Even right-leaning economists agree Trump's trade and immigration policies would hobble the economy. Scott LeCion of the libertarian Cato Institute says they would be highly damaging to the U.S. and global economies, he adds. However, that specific forecast should be taken with a grain of salt. Chris Edwards, another Cato economist, says Trump has an edge over Biden on the economy because Biden has used trade rules, narrow tax breaks, corporate subsidies, regulations, antitrust, labor union rules, and other measures to centrally plan manufacturing, tech, and other industries that should be left to free markets. Moody's study assumes a Biden administration would be dealing with a Democratic majority House and a Republican Senate as party control over the two chambers flips, while Trump would enjoy a Republican House and Senate based on models that predict the likeliest election scenarios. Such estimates aren't an exact science and changes in the proposals would modify the economic impact, but they're crunched by computer models that are based on similar policies over the past 75 years. Here's a breakdown of how their plans are projected to affect the economy. Tariffs. Trump's plans, Trump has signaled he would double down on the trade war he waged in his first term. Then he imposed tariffs on one-tenth of U.S. imports, but they were limited to products such as steels, washing machines, solar panels, as well as many goods from China. For the long term, a study by the Tax Foundation found that $80 billion in tariffs would cut the nation's gross domestic product or output by 0.21% and reduce employment by 166,000 jobs. Trump is now saying he would impose a 10% tariff on all U.S. imports in an effort to protect U.S. manufacturing workers and narrow the nation's trade gap. Biden's plan has kept most of Trump's initial tariffs in place and recently imposed targeted tariff increases, such as a 100% levy on Chinese electric vehicles and solar panels. He probably would continue to use such tailored tariffs to help U.S. companies compete with the government-subsidized Chinese companies, Moody says. In fact, the effects of Biden's tariffs on the broader economy would be minimal, Zandi says, but as businesses pass their higher costs to consumers, Trump's sweeping tariffs would increase annual inflation, now at 3.3%, by nearly three-quarters of a percentage point next year and half a point in 2026, the Moody's estimate shows. The new costs would weigh on households as well as thousands of U.S. manufacturers that rely on imports of parts and raw materials to make their products, yet the levies won't notably cut the U.S. trade deficit as intended, Moody says, by reducing imports and triggering higher inflation and interest rates. The tariffs would strengthen the U.S. dollar, which makes the nation's exports less attractive to companies overseas. That would hurt U.S. manufacturers and workers and widen the trade gap. I think it would be bad for workers and bad for consumers, says Michael Strain, director of economic policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank. By 2028, the policy would translate to 2.1 million fewer U.S. jobs and 1.7% smaller economy, according to the Moody's estimates. That doesn't include the probability that other countries would retaliate and set their own tariffs on U.S. exports, further damaging the U.S. economy and payrolls. Taxes Trump's plans Trump probably would work with the Republican Congress to extend his signature tax cut and jobs act for lower and higher income households, whose reduced tax rates are both set to expire in 2025, as well as for corporations. Trump also has discussed reducing the corporate tax rate, which the act permanently slashed from 35% to 21% to as low as 15%. Extending the legislation also would allow companies to continue to deduct new investments from their taxes immediately, rather than over many years. Lower taxes would be only partly offset by higher tariffs, and so would add to the $34 trillion national debt, nudging up long-term interest rates, such as for mortgages. Over time, the Moody's study says, Biden's plan would extend the lower personal income tax rates only for individuals earning less than $400,000 a year, trimming the deficit and curtailing inflation, Zandi says. Lower earning households are also more likely to spend, rather than sock away, their tax savings, more efficiently goosing the economy. Biden separately wants to raise the corporate tax rate from 21% to 28%, but probably would not have the votes in Congress, Zandi says. Black economic studies disagree about whether the tax cuts have spurred more business investment as intended, but while extending the cuts would lead to more capital spending, the economic growth, the benefits would be limited because the economy is already at full employment, and it's still tough for companies to find workers, Zandi says. As a result, the tax cuts would further push up still-high inflation, and the Federal Reserve is trying to tame. That would force the Fed to raise interest rates again or leave them higher for longer, increasing corporate borrowing costs and at least partly offsetting the benefits of companies would derive from lower taxes. A bigger deficit and higher interest rates would spook financial markets, and so the lower taxes overall would crimp economic growth despite the new businesses' spending they generate, Moody says. But by sparking more investment and fattening corporate profit margins, they eventually should lead to more hiring and fewer layoffs. By 2028, Trump's tax cuts should mean about 450,000 more jobs than the Biden plan, Moody estimates. The inflation impact for the tax changes would be higher under Trump in 2025 and 2026, but modestly lower the next two years as stronger investment lifts productivity and curbs price pressures. Cato's lyceum favors Trump's plans, saying a tax cut is the most effective way to incentivize business investment that can increase productivity and production and prod companies to locate in the U.S. rather than overseas. But he agrees the move would spark higher inflation without similar-sized spending reductions. Immigration. Trump's plan has pledged to deport millions of undocumented immigrants, the largest such effort in U.S. history. He also would reinstate his Remain in Mexico program that forces non-Mexican asylum seekers trying to enter the U.S. at the southern border to wait in Mexico for their cases to be resolved. And Trump would restore COVID-19-era Title 42 policy, which allowed U.S. border authorities to quickly return immigrants to Mexico without the chance to claim asylum, he told Time magazine in an interview. Trump could take these steps through executive actions without congressional approval, Moody says. Biden has been criticized for a surge in illegal immigration that has created a crisis at the southern border. There have been eight million encounters at the U.S.-Mexican border since 2021, compared with 2.3 million during Trump's term, the Moody study says. Biden's plan would significantly toughen border enforcement. Earlier this month, he issued an executive action barring migrants who cross the border illegally from receiving asylum when the border is overwhelmed. Trump assailed the policy and said he would reverse it even though it mirrors Trump-era policies. For the long term, Biden is seeking funding from Congress for more Border Patrol agents, immigration judges, and asylum officers to handle higher volumes of undocumented immigrants and asylum seekers. At the same time, Biden's proposed budget would increase the number of refugees admitted to the U.S. to as much as 125,000, double the 2023 level, according to Moody's. And on Tuesday, he announced a new policy protecting the undocumented spouses of U.S. citizens from deportation. In fact, Trump's policies would reduce net immigration to the U.S. from about 3.3 million last year to just around a few hundred thousand annually, compared with about one million, the historical average under Biden's plan, according to Moody's. Immigrants, both legal and undocumented, have powered labor force growth that has eased pandemic-induced worker shortages the past couple of years. That in turn has slowed wage growth that has helped fuel inflation. Undocumented immigrants alone accounted for about a third of U.S. employment gains last year, or about one million jobs, RBC Capital Markets estimates. Severely constraining immigration, as Trump is proposing, would reverse those gains, especially in industries that rely heavily on foreign-born labor, such as agriculture, construction, restaurants, hotels, and retail, Moody says. That would dampen economic growth as companies rely on fewer workers to make products and services. It also would reignite inflation as wages climb, forcing the Fed to raise interest rates again or wait longer before cutting rates. This concludes the reading of the second article from the Money section of the USA Today, Economic Plans of Biden-Trump Split, Candidates Pushing Contrasting Blueprints, by Paul Davison of the USA Today. From the Sports section of the USA Today, PGA Tour Creates Lifetime Exemption for Tiger Woods by Scooby Axin of the USA Today. Tiger Woods has received a Special Lifetime Sponsor Exemption from the PGA Tour, allowing him to compete in its eight signature events. According to a memo to our tour members Tuesday night, first obtained by ESPN.com, the PGA cited Woods being given the exemption because of his exceptional lifetime achievement. Woods is a winner of 15 major championships, the last coming in the 2019 Masters, after he suffered major injuries in a car crash in February 2021. He has not played enough golf to qualify for some of the high-purchased events. The eight signature events at the Century, the AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am, Genesis Invitational, Honor Parma Invitational, RBC Heritage, Wells Fargo Championship, Memorial Tournament, and Travelers Championship. The Travelers is the last signature event this year and begins this week at TPC River Highlands in Cromwell, Connecticut. The purse is $20 million, with the winner receiving $3.6 million. Woods, 48, said he plans to play in the next major, the British Open, starting July 18th at Scotland's Royal Troon golf course. The second change for the signature events is an increase in the minimum field size for these tournaments to 72. With massive purses, players who qualify for the signature events nearly always play in them. Starting next season, there will be an alternate list. If a player withdraws before the event begins, his spot will be given to the highest-ranked player on the AON Next 10 list, who is not already in the field. Woods has 82 PGA Tour wins, including eight at the Honor Palmer Invitational and five at the Memorial Tournament. So starting in 2025, he has spots locked up in the field at the Masters and PGA Championship as a past champion, along with exemptions into the PGA Tour's marquee events. His five-year exemption into the US Open, earned by winning the 2019 Masters, ran out after the 2023 US Open at Los Angeles Country Club. However, the USGA gave the three-time US Open winner a special exemption into last week's tournament at Pinehurst No. 2. As a past champion at the British Open, Woods is exempt into the 2024 tournament at Royal Troon and all future British Opens until he turns 60. This concludes the reading of an article from the Sports section of the USA Today. PGA Tour Creates Lifetime Exemption for Tiger by Scooby Axon of the USA Today. Our next article also comes to us from the USA Today Sports section. Blaney Looks to Put Heat into Cup's Summer Stretch by Kelly Crandall of Racer.com via the USA Today Network. Ryan Blaney's victory Sunday night at Iowa Speedway accomplished more than getting the No. 12 team back to victory lane. It checked the box that the reigning NASCAR Cup Series champion has prioritized this season. Jonathan Hassler, Blaney's crew chief, was quick to acknowledge this after the checkered flag in the Iowa Corn 350. Hey, we talked about being a team of the summer, Hassler said. We did it. Per the calendar, the summer doesn't officially start until June 20th. Blaney's victory was June 16th. But in NASCAR, the summer stretch has always seemed to begin after Memorial Day weekend when the sport's longest race, the Coca-Cola 600, goes into the books. This week, the series is at New Hampshire Motor Speedway in Luden for the USA Today 301 on Sunday. Regardless of whether summer begins at the beginning of the or the end of June, it's not a stretch Blaney and his team have enjoyed. Last year, Blaney had four top ten finishes. Three were ninth place results in the 12 races following the Coca-Cola 600 through the end of the regular season. In six of those races, Blaney finished 22nd or worse. If you look back to last year, we won the Coca-Cola 600, had a decent run at Gateway, St. Louis, and then I think we had a month and a month and a half struggling to find our way, Hassler explained. It wasn't until early in the middle of the first round of the playoffs, somewhere in there, that we really got things rolling again. We wanted to be better earlier in the year. We wanted to improve our road course program. If you look at last week's Sonoma, we've done that. That's a big part of the summer. So yeah, I'm excited with where we're at now. Blaney jumped from 12th in the championship standings to 7th with his victory at Iowa. He led 222 laps in the last three races, which began the week after the Coca-Cola 600. It puts him well above how he netted out in those 12 summer races last year when he led a combined 112 laps. We didn't have a great summer last year, Blaney says. Under Gateway last year, we had like two months of just not running at good at all. No pace, not finishing races, I had to hear stuff from you all all summer that we sucked, and we did. We just weren't very good. And we were trying some stuff, but we fixed that. We talked about that during the offseason, and hey, let's focus on these summer months. Let's not go through that little dip like we did last year. Let's utilize the summer months as a little better than we did last year. That was cool that we were able to achieve that because we worked really hard on that, tried to be better at this point of the year, and at a better time than last year. So hopefully that continues. The victory at Iowa was a long time coming. Blaney carried the Ford Banner earlier in the season, even leading the point standings in March. With the speed and consistency, his team had stopped short for one season or another being good enough to win. Ironically, the week after Blaney crashed at the Coca-Cola 600, it was St. Louis where he looked like it was finally going to come together. Blaney was leading to the white flag when he ran out of fuel. Sonoma Raceway, a save-and-place finish, and the Iowa, the win, are the first back-to-back top-10 finishes Blaney had since March. And after the rough way May ended, Blaney admitted the push through the summer began came up in conversation. Yeah, it came up when we had a few bad races in a row, got wrecked out, stuff like that, he said, but it was mainly talks with our groups, our whole team, about looking forward to being a summer team every off-season. You try to fix things. So it's nice when you set goals like that as a team and then you achieve them. That part is good. This concludes the reading of our second article from the sports section of the USA Today. Blaney looks to put heat into Cup's summer stretch. By Kelly Crandall from Racer.com via the US Today Network. From the life section of the USA Today, streaming news and views. This Dragon Murder Went Too Far by Kelly Lawler of the USA Today. Spoiler alert, the following contains details from the Season 2 premiere of The House of Dragons. I didn't sign up for this. HBO's House of the Dragon returned for Season 2 on Sunday with a premiere episode that had all the hallmarks of stories in the deadly and brutal Rustorosi world. Loyalties were tested, wars were planned and people died, Reneria Emma Darcy plotted against her half-brother, Aegon Tom Glynn Kearney, while they both claimed to be the reigning monarch, just another day in the neighborhood when you live with dragons. Except no, not really. The final moments of Dragon are spent on scenes of hapless and idiotic assassins dispatched by Daemon Targaryen, Matt Smith, trying to kill his nephew-brother-in-law, Aemon Ewan Mitchell, who in turn killed Daemon's stepson, Lucius Targaryen, played by Elliot Gryllheart, in Season 1's finale, Admin's own nephew, just to keep this incestuous family even more confusing. But those assassins didn't kill a fully grown man with a silver hair and an eyepatch as a Daemon instructed. Instead, after wandering around an empty castle, all those guards and ladies-in-waiting seemingly evaporated when the plot needed them to. The assassins decided they'll just kill another son of this tribe of Targaryens. Instead, they capture Aegon's wife's sister, Haenla, played by Thea Sabin, in her twin toddler's nursery. Tell them which of the twins is the prince and heir, they say, or they will kill both children and the mother. Haenla points at her son and scurries away with her daughter. The assassin then beheads the child, and while it happens off screen, his small cries and squelching and thawing sound effects are loudly heard. Children die all the time in Dragon and Thrones. Why is this different? Thirteen years since Thrones premiered and introduced this world of brutality onto our screens, the world of Westeros finally has gone too far. The scene in Dragon didn't have to be that bad. The death could have occurred further off screen. The Sophie Choice element could have been removed. The assassins could have come up against any level of resistance to add in-universe logic back to the script. The child could have been older, but the Dragon Riders went for shock over sense, feeling, or substance. House joins an unhappy club this year with FX's Shogun, an adaptation of James Clavel's novel that takes place in 17th century Japan. In the first episode of that series, a man pledges to die by seppuku and kill himself after he has disgraced his honor. He also commits to end his line, meaning his infant son must also die in the ceremony. In that series, we see a broken down mother holding her baby moments after he is taken to his death. The baby death in Shogun was shocking and distressing, but at the very least was done entirely off camera, silently, and spoke to the greater themes of emotions of Shogun. It was a way to establish the foundational importance of honor in this society, one that has deadly and far-reaching costs. What's the point in dragging? Having seen 4 of the 8 episodes to review them, I can tell you yes, this death becomes paramount to the plot, but the randomness of it, the logical fallacies required for it to happen, and the unnecessarily graphic sounds make it feel far more egregious than any part of Shogun. What's the point of art if it doesn't make us feel something? Shogun made me feel dismay and horror, sure, but House just gave me nausea. Modern TV is filled with pointless savagery. In a world with hundreds of TV shows and dozens of networks, channels and streamers to choose from, TV series often go big to stand out. Sometimes that means big special effects and glitzy costumes and A-list celebrities, and sometimes that means big violence and shocking content. Most of our celebrated modern shows are full of barbarism and continual bloodshed. Showtime's Yellowjackets strands teenage girls in the wilderness where starvation turns them into cannibalism. The Handmaid's Tale was tortured Elizabeth Moss' June more times than you can count. Netflix's three-body problem sliced an oil-tankered foot of hundreds of families and children in a half-cocked plan to save the world from a theoretical alien invasion. When this violence serves a purpose greater than shock and awe, it makes sense. Body is about sacrificing now to save those in the future. Yellowjackets dares to ask how far one would go to survive, but Handmaid's has seemingly run out of story ideas that don't involve physical and emotional pain. Now I can feel the naysayers whipping out their keyboards, telling me I'm a wimp. I shouldn't watch these shows and that I'm bad at my job as a TV critic for daring to be affected and offended by the death of children, however fictional it may be. Go ahead, insult me for my humanity. I dare you. This kind of violence is painful for the characters and painful for the viewers. There's a reason one entertainment show's don't regular show the murder of children and babies week to week. It's reprehensible, it's disturbing, it's indecent. TV is meant to be about escapism, and we hear about the deaths of children in real news constantly. We shouldn't have to be assaulted with it when we're trying to relax. It's no coincidence that arbitrary violence on TV goes hand in hand with bad writing, and when you don't have deeper, more thoughtful ideas for your story, it is easy and lazy to fall back on cruelty for cruelty's sake. Show blood and maybe your audience will forget there is no substantive story behind it, but I'm not forgetting. This concludes the reading of Streaming News and Views, This Dragon Murder Went Too Far by Kelly Lawler of the USA Today. Horoscopes Aries, March 21st, April 19th Hello Cancer Season, ready to focus on family and foundation? Tend to your roots, home is where the heart is. Taurus, April 20th, May 20th Confess your feelings openly with loved ones. Cancer Season gives you the stage to share how you truly feel. Gemini, May 21st to June 21st Cancer Season is here. Your relationship with financial security steps into the spotlight. Cancer, June 22nd to July 22nd The solstice ushers in Cancer Season, a rush of vitality that aims at filling your cup. Leo, July 23rd through August 22nd Solstice Blessings, Cancer Season opens up the door to your subconscious, ready to dive in and explore your mystical side. Virgo, August 23rd through September 22nd The company of the friends warms your heart. Cancer Season is your time to socialize. Call up your support system. Libra, September 23rd through October 23rd Cancer Season radiates light on your professional satisfaction. Notice what comes up. Scorpio, October 21st to November 21st Happy Solstice! Feel your need for expansion growing? Cancer Season is your invitation to open doors beyond the known. Sagittarius, Get to the heart of the matter. Personal relationships can transform during Cancer Season. Capricorn, Solstice is here. Relationships step into the foreground during Cancer Season. Cultivate nourishing emotional bonds with the ones you love. Aquarius, Cancer Season encourages you to prioritize your need for everyday well-being. Show yourself love. Pisces, Solstice brings your inner child out. What are they craving? Let your heart take the lead during Cancer Season. That concludes our reading of the USA Today. This has been Omar King for the Georgia Radio Reading Service. Thank you for listening to GARS.