Thought of the Day

Courage is the root of change and change is what we chemically designed for.
Courage is the root of change and change is what we chemically designed for.
Meet Santana, an incredible survivor! He was found in a Walmart parking lot in critical condition, his life hanging by a thread. He was later diagnosed with Babesia, a serious tick-borne illness, and thankfully received the treatment needed & made an incredible recovery. He loves going to his physical therapy appointments where he is an aquatic treadmill superstar and gets an endless supply of pets and Easy Cheese.
In his foster home, Santana has flourished. This boy is a snuggle enthusiast, always ready to soak up affection. While cuddles and napping are his top priorities, he’s also a big fan of treats and never misses an opportunity for a snack. We affectionately refer to him as a ten-pound potato since he loves being on the couch so much, and thinks he fits in your lap! He also loves his peanut butter Kong and playing in leaf piles. Santana went to one agility class and now thinks he is a border collie…so he would love to show off his “moves” to you sometime, but please don’t tell him how clumsy and awkward he is, we don’t want to dim his shine! He must never know he’s actually just a bowling ball.
He is currently heartworm positive but has received his treatment and is responding well to it! Once he is healed, he would love to get back to going on walks and sniffing everything that the outdoors has to offer.
Santana is up to date on shots & preventatives and is microchipped and neutered. He is crate trained and has made impressive strides with his potty training. If you already have pets at home, we recommend introducing them to Santana gradually over time. He is currently in a foster home with two chill female dogs and doing wonderfully with a slow integration and shares the couch very nicely with his foster sisters. For households with children, Santana has done well with respectful kids over age 7, but supervision between animals and kids is always recommended.
Santana is currently in a foster home. To set up a meeting with his foster parents or to learn more, email [email protected] with the subject line “Santana 246899”.
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Veggie Pizza Appetizers Recipe from Mom On Timeout
Prep time: 10 minutes
Cooking time: 6 minutes
Serving size: 32 servings
LOS ANGELES (AP) — Gene Hackman, the prolific Oscar-winning actor whose studied portraits ranged from reluctant heroes to conniving villains and made him one of the industry’s most respected and honored performers, has been found dead along with his wife at their home. He was 95.
His dozens of films included Oscar-winning roles in “The French Connection” and “Unforgiven,” a breakout performance in “Bonnie and Clyde,” a comic interlude in “Young Frankenstein,” a turn as the comic book villain Lex Luthor in “Superman” and the title character in Wes Anderson’s 2001 “The Royal Tenenbaums.”
He seemed capable of any kind of role — whether an uptight buffoon in “Birdcage,” a college coach finding redemption in the sentimental favorite “Hoosiers” or a secretive surveillance expert in Francis Ford Coppola’s Watergate-era release “The Conversation.”
“Gene Hackman a great actor, inspiring and magnificent in his work and complexity,” Coppola said on Instagram. “I mourn his loss, and celebrate his existence and contribution.”
A plain-looking man with a receding hairline, Hackman held special status within Hollywood — heir to Spencer Tracy as an everyman, actor’s actor and reluctant celebrity. He embodied the ethic of doing his job, doing it very well, and letting others worry about his image. The industry seemed to need him more than he needed the industry. Beyond the obligatory appearances at awards ceremonies, he was rarely seen on the social circuit and made no secret of his disdain for the business side of show business.
“Actors tend to be shy people,” he told Film Comment in 1988. “There is perhaps a component of hostility in that shyness, and to reach a point where you don’t deal with others in a hostile or angry way, you choose this medium for yourself.”
He was an early retiree — essentially done, by choice, with movies by his 70s — and a late bloomer. Hackman was in his mid-30s when cast for “Bonnie and Clyde” and past 40 when he won his first Oscar, as the rules-bending New York detective “Popeye” Doyle in the 1971 thriller about tracking down Manhattan drug smugglers, “The French Connection.”
Jackie Gleason, Steve McQueen and Peter Boyle were among the actors considered for the role. Hackman was a minor star at the time, seemingly without the flamboyant personality that the role demanded. The actor himself feared that he was miscast. A couple of weeks of nighttime patrols of Harlem in police cars helped reassure him.
One of the first scenes of “The French Connection” required Hackman to slap around a suspect. The actor realized he had failed to achieve the intensity that the scene required, and asked director William Friedkin for another chance. The scene was filmed at the end of the shooting, by which time Hackman had immersed himself in the loose-cannon character of Popeye Doyle. Friedkin would recall needing 37 takes to get the scene right.
“I had to arouse an anger in Gene that was lying dormant, I felt, within him — that he was sort of ashamed of and didn’t really want to revisit,” Friedkin told the Los Angeles Review of Books in 2012.
Hackman also resisted the role which brought him his second Oscar. When Clint Eastwood first offered him Little Bill Daggett, the corrupt town boss in “Unforgiven,” Hackman turned it down. But he realized that Eastwood was planning to make a different kind of western, a critique, not a celebration of violence. The film won him the Academy Award as best supporting actor of 1992.
“To his credit, and my joy, he talked me into it,” Hackman said of Eastwood during an interview with the American Film Institute.
Eugene Alden Hackman was born Jan. 30, 1931, in San Bernardino, California, and grew up in Danville, Illinois, where his father worked as a pressman for the Commercial-News. His parents fought repeatedly, and his father often used his fists on Gene to take out his rage. The boy found refuge in movie houses, identifying with Errol Flynn and James Cagney as his role models.
When Gene was 13, his father waved goodbye and drove off, never to return. The abandonment was a lasting injury to Gene. His mother had become an alcoholic and was constantly at odds with her mother, with whom the shattered family lived (Gene had a younger brother). At 16, he “suddenly got the itch to get out.” Lying about his age, he enlisted in the U.S. Marines.
“Dysfunctional families have sired a lot of pretty good actors,” he observed ironically during a 2001 interview with The New York Times.
In 1956, Hackman married Fay Maltese, a bank teller he had met at a YMCA dance in New York. They had a son, Christopher, and two daughters, Elizabeth and Leslie, but divorced in the mid-1980s. In 1991 he married Betsy Arakawa, a classical pianist of Japanese descent who was raised in Hawaii.
When not on film locations, Hackman enjoyed painting, stunt flying, stock car racing and deep sea diving. In his latter years, he wrote novels and lived on his ranch in Sante Fe, New Mexico, on a hilltop looking out on the Colorado Rockies, a view he preferred to his films that popped up on television.
“I’ll watch maybe five minutes of it,” he once told Time magazine, “and I’ll get this icky feeling, and I turn the channel.”
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AP National Writer Hillel Italie in New York and Entertainment Writer Andrew Dalton in Los Angeles contributed to this report. Bob Thomas, a longtime Associated Press journalist who died in 2014, compiled biographical material for this obituary.
Don’t judge yourself on other people’s opinion.
Pressure Cooker Chili Recipe from The Food Network Courtesy of Alton Brown
Prep time: 15 minutes
Cooking time: 35 minutes
Serving size: 4 servings
By ELLEN KNICKMEYER and MATTHEW LEE Associated Press
WASHINGTON (AP) — The Trump administration said Wednesday it is eliminating more than 90% of the U.S. Agency for International Development’s foreign aid contracts and $60 billion in overall U.S. assistance around the world, putting numbers on its plans to eliminate the majority of U.S. development and humanitarian help abroad.
The cuts detailed by the administration would leave few surviving USAID projects for advocates to try to save in what are ongoing court battles with the administration.
The Trump administration outlined its plans in both an internal memo obtained by The Associated Press and filings in one of those federal lawsuits Wednesday.
The Supreme Court intervened in that case late Wednesday and temporarily blocked a court order requiring the administration to release billions of dollars in foreign aid by midnight.
Wednesday’s disclosures also give an idea of the scale of the administration’s retreat from U.S. aid and development assistance overseas, and from decades of U.S. policy that foreign aid helps U.S. interests by stabilizing other countries and economies and building alliances.
The memo said officials were “clearing significant waste stemming from decades of institutional drift.” More changes are planned in how USAID and the State Department deliver foreign assistance, it said.
President Donald Trump and ally Elon Musk have hit foreign aid harder and faster than almost any other target in their push to cut the size of the federal government. Both men say USAID projects advance a liberal agenda and are a waste of money.
Trump on Jan. 20 ordered what he said would be a 90-day program-by-program review of which foreign assistance programs deserved to continue, and cut off all foreign assistance funds almost overnight.
The funding freeze has stopped thousands of U.S.-funded programs abroad, and the administration and Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency teams have pulled the majority of USAID staff off the job through forced leave and firings.
In the federal court filings Wednesday, nonprofits owed money on contracts with USAID describe both Trump political appointees and members of Musk’s teams terminating USAID’s contracts around the world at breakneck speed, without time for any meaningful review, they say.
“‘There are MANY more terminations coming, so please gear up!”’ a USAID official wrote staff Monday, in an email quoted by lawyers for the nonprofits in the filings.
The nonprofits, among thousands of contractors, owed billions of dollars in payment since the freeze began, called the en masse contract terminations a maneuver to get around complying with the order to lift the funding freeze temporarily.
So did a Democratic lawmaker.
“The administration is brazenly attempting to blow through Congress and the courts by announcing the completion of their sham ‘review’ of foreign aid and the immediate termination of thousands of aid programs all over the world,” said Connecticut Sen. Chris Murphy, a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
The State Department said Secretary of State Marco Rubio had reviewed the terminations.
In all, the Trump administration said it will eliminate 5,800 of 6,200 multiyear USAID contract awards, for a cut of $54 billion. Another 4,100 of 9,100 State Department grants were being eliminated, for a cut of $4.4 billion.
The State Department memo, which was first reported by the Washington Free Beacon, described the administration as spurred by a federal court order that gave officials until the end of the day Wednesday to lift the Trump administration’s monthlong block on foreign aid funding.
“In response, State and USAID moved rapidly,” targeting USAID and State Department foreign aid programs in vast numbers for contract terminations, the memo said.
Trump administration officials — after repeated warnings from the federal judge in the case — also said Wednesday they were finally beginning to send out their first or any payments after more than a month with no known spending. Officials were processing a few million dollars of back payments, officials said, owed to U.S. and international organizations and companies.
But U.S. District Judge Amir H. Ali’s order to unfreeze billions of dollars by midnight Wednesday will remain on hold until the Supreme Court has a chance to weigh in more fully, according to the brief order signed by Chief Justice John Roberts.
Ali had ordered the federal government to comply with his decision temporarily blocking a freeze on foreign aid, ruling in a lawsuit filed by nonprofit groups and businesses. An appellate panel refused the administration’s request to intervene before the high court weighed in.
The plaintiffs have until noon Friday to respond, Roberts said.
The administration has filed an emergency appeal to the Supreme Court in one other case so far, arguing that a lower court was wrong to reinstate the head of a federal watchdog agency after Trump fired him.
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Gary Fields and Mark Sherman contributed from Washington and Rebecca Boone from Boise, Idaho.
By JOSH FUNK and JOSH BOAK Associated Press
WASHINGTON (AP) — The Agriculture Department predicts the current record prices for eggs could soar more than 40% in 2025, as the Trump administration offered the first new details Wednesday about its plan to battle bird flu and ease the cost of eggs.
With an emphasis on tightening up biosecurity on farms, Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins said the USDA will invest another $1 billion on top of the roughly $2 billion it has already spent battling bird flu since the outbreak began in 2022. Officials had hinted at the plan earlier this month.
It’s not clear how much more farmers can do to keep the virus out.
Egg and poultry farmers have already been working to protect their birds ever since the 2015 bird flu outbreak by taking measures like requiring workers to change clothes and shower before entering barns, using separate sets of tools and sanitizing any vehicles that enter farms. The challenge is that the virus is spread easily by wild birds as they migrate past farms.
And the main reason egg prices have soared to hit a record average of $4.95 per dozen this month is that more than 166 million birds have been slaughtered to limit the spread of the virus after cases are found — with most of those being egg-laying chickens. Last month was the worst yet for egg farmers with nearly 19 million egg-laying chickens slaughtered.
The USDA now predicts that egg prices will increase at least 41% this year on top of the already record prices. Just last month, the increase was predicted to be 20%.
And the average prices conceal just how bad the situation is, with consumers paying more than a dollar an egg in some places. The situation is hurting consumers and has prompted restaurants like Denny’s and Waffle House to add surcharges on egg dishes.
The high egg prices, which have more than doubled since before the outbreak began, cost consumers at least $1.4 billion last year, according to an estimate done by agricultural economists at the University of Arkansas.
Egg prices also normally increase every spring heading into Easter when demand is high.
Rollins acknowledged that it will take some time before consumers see an effect at the checkout counter. After all, it takes infected farms months to dispose of the carcasses, sanitize their farms and raise new birds. But she expressed optimism that this will help prices.
“It’s going to take a while to get through, I think in the next month or two, but hopefully by summer,” Rollins said.
Rollins said she believes USDA will have the staff it needs to respond to bird flu even after all the cuts to the federal workforce at the direction of Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency.
“Will we have the resources needed to address the plan I just laid out? We are convinced that we will,” she said, “as we realign and and evaluate where USDA has been spending money, where our employees are spending their time.”
The plan calls for $500 million investment to help farmers bolster biosecurity measures, $400 million in additional aid for farmers whose flocks have been impacted by avian flu, $100 million to research and potentially develop vaccines and therapeutics for U.S. chicken flocks and explore rolling back what the administration sees as restrictive animal welfare rules in some states.
It’s not clear what the additional aid would be for because USDA already pays farmers for any birds they must slaughter due to the virus, and roughly $1.2 billion has gone to those payments.
The administration is also in talks to import about 70 million to 100 million eggs from other countries in the coming months, Rollins said. But there were 7.57 billion table eggs produced last month, so those imports don’t appear likely to make a significant difference in the market.
Trump administration officials have suggested that vaccines might help reduce the number of birds that have to be slaughtered when there is an outbreak. However, no vaccines have been approved and the industry has said the current prototypes aren’t practical because they require individual shots to each bird. Plus, vaccinated birds could jeopardize exports.
The National Turkey Federation said the plan Rollins outlined should help stabilize the market, but the trade group encouraged the USDA to pay attention to all egg and poultry farmers — not just egg producers.
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Funk reported from Omaha, Nebraska. Aamer Madhani contributed from Washington.
There are 360 trades; in every trade, there will be masters. – Chinese Proverb
Pistachio Biscotti Recipe from The Food Network Courtesy of Tyler Florence
Prep time: 20 minutes
Cooking time: 55 minutes
Serving size: 24 servings