California Earthquake; Woodstock's Melanie Dies at 76; Cicada Mating Season; and More

Florida: Real And Imagined

A preliminary 4.2-magnitude earthquake rattled San Bernardino Wednesday evening, the United States Geological Survey reported.

The temblor struck at 7:43 p.m. about 1.864 miles southwest of San Bernardino. No injuries or structural damage were immediately reported.

"It was close to the surface but also in a populated region, so San Bernardino County has plenty of people so they're going to feel it, definitely," said Dr. Allen Husker of CalTech’s Seismological Laboratory.

Residents outside the epicenter reported feeling the jolt, in areas including Burbank, Santa Fe Springs, Chino, Fontana and more.

Melanie, the singer who performed at Woodstock in 1969 and had major pop hits with “Brand New Key” and “Lay Down (Candles in the Rain)” in the early ’70s, died Tuesday at age 76. News of the death came from her publicity firm, Glass Onyon PR.

No information on the cause of death was immediately given. But Melanie — full name Melanie Safka — had been in the studio earlier this month working on a new record of cover songs, “Second Hand Smoke,” for the Cleopatra label; it would have been her 32nd album, the label said.

Her three children, Leilah, Jeordie, and Beau Jarred, posted a message on Facebook, writing: “We are heartbroken, but want to thank each and every one of you for the affection you have for our Mother, and to tell you that she loved all of you so much! She was one of the most talented, strong and passionate women of the era and every word she wrote, every note she sang reflected that. Our world is much dimmer, the colors of a dreary, rainy Tennessee pale with her absence today, but we know that she is still here, smiling down on all of us, on all of you, from the stars.”

This year's Oscar nominees have been unveiled.

Oppenheimer led the race with a whopping 13 nominations, followed by the Emma Stone-starring Poor Things, which earned 11. Killers of the Flower Moon meanwhile received 10 nominations, and last year's biggest hit Barbie scored eight. American Fiction, starring Jeffrey Wright, netted five nominations.

Biggest Snubs of 2024 Oscar Nominations: Leonardo DiCaprio, Fantasia Barrino, Saltburn and More

The 96th annual Academy Awards will be held Sunday, March 10, at the Dolby Theatre at Ovation Hollywood and will air live on ABC. The show will be hosted by Jimmy Kimmel, his fourth time in the gig.

At last year's ceremony, Everything Everywhere All at Once swept with seven wins, including Best Picture.

Former President Donald Trump has begun his bid for a third Republican nomination with wins in Iowa and New Hampshire, bringing him closer to a rematch with President Biden. But Nikki Haley, Trump’s lone remaining challenger, has vowed to stay in the race through at least the South Carolina GOP primary on Feb. 24.

Up next is Nevada, which is holding both a Republican primary (on Feb. 6) and caucus (Feb. 8). After that, South Carolina and Michigan will hold GOP primaries, followed by Super Tuesday —when more than a third of all GOP delegates will be up for grabs — in early March.

Before you know it, it will be summer, when both parties hold their conventions. And after the presidential debates — which are still on the schedule despite Trump’s unwillingness to participate in the GOP debates — it will be Election Day.

Here are just some of the key dates in the 2024 political calendar, a few of which are subject to change.

2024 election calendar

• Jan. 15: Iowa GOP caucuses

Trump scored a decisive victory, while Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis edged out former U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Nikki Haley for second place. Entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy finished a distant fourth, suspended his campaign and endorsed Trump.

• Jan. 23: New Hampshire primary

Trump defeated Haley, his lone remaining challenger in the GOP race after DeSantis dropped out two days before the primary. But Haley vowed to stay in the race through at least the South Carolina Republican primary. Biden won in New Hampshire despite not being on the ballot due to a rift between the Granite State and the Democratic National Committee, which decided to make the South Carolina Democratic primary on Feb. 3 its first formal contest.

• Feb. 3: South Carolina Democratic primary

• Feb. 6, Feb. 8: Nevada primary and caucuses

• Feb. 13: Long Island special election

Voters in New York’s Third Congressional District will pick a successor to George Santos, who was expelled from Congress in December following a scathing House Ethics Committee report that concluded he “blatantly stole from his campaign.” The candidates are former Democratic Rep. Tom Suozzi, who won the seat in 2022 before leaving to run for governor, and Republican Mazi Melesa Pilip.

• Feb. 24: South Carolina Republican primary

• Feb. 27: Michigan primary

• March 4: Trump’s Jan. 6 trial

As of now, March 4 is the trial start date for the federal election interference case against Trump. The former president’s lawyers have sought to delay the trial until after the election.

• March 5: Super Tuesday

More than a third of all GOP delegates will be up for grabs on Super Tuesday, as 15 states — Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Maine, Massachusetts, Minnesota, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Vermont and Virginia — and one territory (American Samoa) hold their primaries or caucuses. Trump is not on the ballot in Colorado or Maine, where election officials declared him ineligible because of his role in the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol insurrection. Trump is appealing, and the cases could wind up in the Supreme Court.

Conventions

A massive display on the jumbotron at the United Center in Chicago promoting it as the site of the 2024 Democratic National Convention.

• July 15-18: Republican National Convention

The event will be held in Milwaukee, which hosted the 2020 Democratic National Convention during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic.

• Aug. 19-22: Democratic National Convention

The event will be held in Chicago, which has hosted 11 previous Democratic conventions — most recently in 1996, when Bill Clinton and Al Gore were nominated for reelection. It was also the site of the disastrous 1968 Democratic convention, which was held in the wake of the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy and marred by massive antiwar protests that turned violent.

Debates

• Sept. 16: 1st presidential debate

The Commission on Presidential Debates has scheduled three presidential debates, the first on Sept. 16 at Texas State University in San Marcos, Texas, as well as a vice presidential debate in late September.

• Sept. 25: Vice presidential debate

The lone sanctioned vice presidential debate will take place at Lafayette College in Easton, Pa., on Sept. 25.

• Oct. 1: 2nd presidential debate

The second presidential debate will take place at Virginia State University in Petersburg, Va., on Oct. 1.

• Oct. 9: 3rd presidential debate

The third and final presidential debate will take place at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City on Oct. 9, less than a month from Election Day.

• Nov. 5: Election Day

• Dec. 17: Deadline for electors to cast their votes

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Meet the Co-op delivery robots, used by the supermarket giant to bring items across a growing number of areas in the UK.

What are the Co-op robots?

The robots used by the Co-op were developed by Starship Technologies, an Estonian tech company with headquarters in San Francisco that specializes in autonomous delivery vehicles.

How do they work?

The robots are powered by batteries and travel at the same speed as pedestrians. The Co-op says the robots use "a combination of sensors, artificial intelligence and machine learning to travel on pavements and navigate around any obstacles".

They have "computer vision-based navigation" which helps them "map their environment to the nearest inch", the supermarket says. The idea is that the robots are kinder to the environment and reduce traffic congestion.

But there’s strong evidence that most of the money spent on carbon offsets doesn’t really do anything to help the climate.

One investigation from The Guardian last year found that as much as 90% of rain forest protection credits, which claim to spare carbon-reducing trees from logging, are effectively worthless because the areas they purport to have saved weren’t actually at risk of being cut down. Several other inquiries have come to a similar conclusion that, for all the money and hype, carbon offsets don’t actually offset much at all.

Why there’s debate

In light of these findings, many environmentalists argue that the whole practice of carbon offsetting needs to end. In their eyes, the entire system amounts to little more than “greenwashing” that allows people and companies to deflect criticism for their climate-warming actions while they avoid doing the work that will actually make a difference — cutting the emissions they produce in the first place.

Others argue that, even if every dollar somehow went to legitimate offset projects, it’s still a dangerous mistake to tell ourselves that we solve climate change by planting trees or siphoning methane from landfills, rather than doing the hard work of rebuilding the world economy around green energy.

But optimists say carbon offsets really can make a big difference if a better system is put in place to ensure that the money goes to high-quality projects. The biggest advocates argue that we have no choice but to make carbon offsets work because, even in the most optimistic future scenarios, we’ll still need ways to pull carbon out of the air to counter emissions from industries that can’t realistically go green, like airlines.

What’s next

Skepticism about the effectiveness of offset projects has hurt the value of carbon credits in recent years, but most forecasters still expect the carbon market to grow dramatically over the next few decades. One recent estimate predicted that as much as $250 billion a year could be spent on carbon offsets by 2050.

An innocent Texas man was arrested, jailed for nearly two weeks and sexually assaulted just before his release, all because facial recognition software mistakenly identified him as the suspect of a store robbery, a new lawsuit alleges.

When two men robbed a Sunglass Hut in Houston on Jan. 22, 2022, 61-year-old Harvey Murphy Jr. was in a jail cell 2,000 miles away in Sacramento, California, according to the lawsuit obtained by USA TODAY on Wednesday.

Using low-quality surveillance footage of the robbery, artificial intelligence software at the Sunglass Hut falsely identified Murphy as a suspect, which led to a warrant for his arrest, according to the lawsuit filed last week in Harris County District Courts in Houston.

Later when Murphy returned to his home state of Texas, he was arrested, and a witness to the robbery identified him as a suspect. Murphy was held in jail for nearly two weeks until officials realized his alibi proved it was physically impossible for him to be responsible for the robbery.

But in the hours just before his release from jail, "he goes into the bathroom, where he gets followed by three men, beaten, sexually assaulted and raped," Murphy's attorney, Daniel Dutko, told USA TODAY on Wednesday.

Murphy was later released from jail and the charges against him were immediately dismissed.

Murphy is seeking $10 million from New York-based Macy's and French eyewear company EssilorLuxottica, which owns Sunglass Hut.

Murphy was on probation for a history of non-violent burglaries in the 1980s and '90s, according to Dutko. He was pulled over, arrested and taken to jail in California for failing to report his whereabouts, an obligation under his probation.

If it wasn't for Murphy being in jail the day of the Texas robbery, then he would not have the rock solid alibi that proved his innocence, Dutko said. He added that Murphy said if he had "just been at home watching TV and not had an alibi, (he) would be in prison right now."

No one alive today will see it again—the convergence of two cicada broods that will practically shake the Midwest with their chirping.

The appearance of cicadas en mass is one of the most amazing natural phenomena of the insect world, and we Americans are uniquely positioned to witness it. But this spring, the synchronized emergence of Brood 13 and Brood 19 will fill the air from Iowa to Virginia with over a trillion bugs, an event not seen since Thomas Jefferson’s day.

1803 was the last time that this convergence occurred, and it involves the periodic cicadas of the 13-year brood and the 17-year brood,

It’s not true that the cicadas are born this way. They actually live their whole lives underground and then burrow up to the surface as part of a mass breeding and egg-laying frenzy.

Entomologists estimate that the two broods together will number more than 1 trillion bugs, enough to go to the moon and back, head-to-tail, 33 times.

The two broods will overlap in Iowa and Illinois, and the 17-year cicadas, confusingly called Brood 19 (XIX), will extend into Arkansas, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, Kentucky Tennessee, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Virginia, with a few also popping up in Louisiana.

The next time that these two will emerge together will be 2245.

Smithsonian Magazine provides this interesting tidbit that the decibel level of so many cicadas mating can reach the same as a motorcycle or chainsaw passing by your house.

They will emerge this spring, and shuffle off their mortal coils in July, during which time they will not sting, bite, envenom, or pass disease onto any human. Their emergence will aerate the soils of woodland, and their bodies will provide such a smorgasbord for wildlife, that even herbivorous animals like deer will begin to eagerly throw back the tasty morsels.