Quick, name a Billboard Music Award winner. Yeah, we’d be hard-pressed to do it, too. As with most such shows, it’s the performances that get people talking. For USA TODAY, Brian Mansfield recaps the night’s musical numbers.
4 stars (out of four): Prince, “Let’s Go Crazy/FixUrLifeUp”
Phoenix lost two first-responders in separate incidents Sunday as a Phoenix firefighter died of injuries suffered when he was pinned between two emergency vehicles while fighting a fire and a police officer working a DUI stop was struck by a hit-and-run driver, authorities said.
Police Officer Daryl Raetz, a six-year veteran of the police department, was struck about 3:30 a.m. near 51st and Cambridge avenues, Phoenix Police Department spokesman Sgt. Tommy Thompson said.
TOPEKA, Kan. — A powerful storm system rumbled through the Plains and upper Midwest on Sunday, spawning tornadoes that damaged homes and buildings near Oklahoma City and put the Tulsa area on high-alert.
There were no immediate reports of injuries caused by any of the tornadoes that touched down in Oklahoma and Kansas, including one that hit the Oklahoma City suburb of Edmond before moving northeast toward Tulsa, 90 miles to the northeast.
ZEPHYRHILLS, Fla. — Some lucky person walked into a Publix supermarket in suburban Florida over the past few days and bought a ticket now worth an estimated $590.5 million — the highest Powerball jackpot in history.
But it wasn’t Matthew Bogel. On Sunday, he loaded groceries into his car after shopping at the Publix. He shook his head when asked about the jackpot.
At the time, it seemed audacious even to Paul Westphal, the first-year head coach who had guided the Phoenix Suns to the best record in the NBA during the 1992-93 regular season.
But in the first round of the 1993 NBA playoffs, the Suns lost the first two games of the best-of-five series against the Los Angeles Lakers, at home no less. No team in NBA history ever had escaped from such a fix.
Inside a Sun City West clubhouse one recent afternoon, Republican Gov. Jan Brewer stood before fellow Republicans, many of whom she once represented as a state lawmaker or county supervisor. She was there to explain why she had bucked many conservatives in her party to embrace Medicaid expansion, a signature piece of Democratic President Barack Obama’s health-care overhaul.
It was a tough sell for some in this crowd — just as it has been with many GOP state legislators, who are divided on whether to accept billions in federal funds under the Affordable Care Act to provide health coverage to tens of thousands of uninsured Arizonans.
Wildfires covering over 1,400 acres sparked up in the northwest and southern areas of the state, fire officials said.One fire in Black Rock, which is in Mojave County near the border with Utah, was sparked by lighting and spread Saturday to 1,235 acres about 25 miles southwest of San Carlos, according to officials from the Albuquerque, N.M.-based Southwest Coordination Center. The agency coordinates federal and state fire resources to combat wildfires.
Alaska’s remote Pavlof Volcano has been shooting lava hundreds of feet into the air, but its ash plume is thinning and is no longer making it dangerous for airplanes to fly nearby.
Geologist Chris Waythomas of the Alaska Volcano Observatory says a narrow ash plume extends a couple hundred miles southeast from the volcano, which is 625 miles southwest of Anchorage.
Six adults and one minor were arrested Friday as part of a human smuggling investigation, according to the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office.
The suspects were discovered while driving through northern Maricopa County, said sheriff’s Officer Chris Hegstrom. Five men, one woman and one 17-year-old were detained, Hegstrom said.
NASHVILLE, Tenn. — First lady Michelle Obama has some advice for some Tennessee high school graduates: Strike your own path in college and life and work to overcome inevitable failures with determination and grit.
Mrs. Obama spoke for 22 minutes to the graduates of Martin Luther King Jr. Academic Magnet High School on Saturday in her only high school commencement address this year. The ceremony took place in the gymnasium of nearby Tennessee State University.
DAMASCUS, Virginia — An emergency official says about 50 to 60 people were injured after a car drove into a group of hikers at a parade in a small Virginia town.
Washington County director of emergency management Pokey Harris said Saturday that no fatalities have been reported.
BEIRUT — Syrian President Bashar Assad said in a newspaper interview Saturday he won’t step down before elections and that the United States has no right to interfere in his country’s politics, raising new doubts about a U.S-Russian effort to get Assad and his opponents to negotiate an end to the country’s civil war.
In the capital Damascus, a car bomb killed at least three people and wounded five, according to Syrian state TV. It said bomb experts dismantled other explosives in the area.
Scottsdale police said a body that was pulled from a canal was a 78-year-old man who was reported missing Thursday.
Police said a police officer spotted Edward Allan Brawley’s body at about 7:30 a.m. while searching for him in the area of Hayden and Indian Bend roads, said department spokesman Mark Clark.
A man is extremely critical condition after he was hit by a car while crossing the street in Phoenix Friday night, according to police.
Police originally said that the man was dead, but later corrected their statement to say the man was still alive.
FAIRFIELD, Connecticut — Officials described a devastating scene of shattered cars and other damage where two trains packed with rush-hour commuters collided in Connecticut, saying Saturday it’s amazing that no one was killed.
Seventy-two people were sent to the hospital Friday evening after the crash, which damaged the tracks and threatened to snarl travel in the Northeast Corridor.
DES MOINES, Iowa — It’s all about the odds.
With the majority of possible combinations of Powerball numbers in play, someone is almost sure to win the game’s highest jackpot on Saturday night, a windfall of hundreds of millions of dollars — and that’s after taxes.
A US Express Airways plane made a “belly landing” in Newark, N.J. early Saturday morning after one or more landing gear failed to deploy.
Davien Anderson, an airline spokesman, said 31 passengers and three crew members were on board Flight 4560 from Philadelphia, Pa., to Newark. None of them was injured.
TUCSON — A group of wild turkeys is now roaming Mount Lemmon after being captured at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base.
Managers with the Arizona Game and Fish Department and the base’s cultural and natural resources office had been monitoring the birds’ movement through eastside neighborhoods until they were in a location where they could be captured without harm.
BULLHEAD CITY — Bullhead City police say a Craigslist ad for a cellphone is what led detectives to a man they suspect of counterfeiting.
Dean Everett Boyer was arrested earlier this week on charges of forgery, fraudulent schemes and possession of a forging instrument. He was booked into the Mohave County jail in Kingman.
KABUL, Afghanistan — Conservative religious lawmakers in Afghanistan blocked legislation on Saturday aimed at strengthening provisions for women’s freedoms, arguing that parts of it violate Islamic principles and encourage disobedience.
The fierce opposition highlights how tenuous women’s rights remain a dozen years after the ouster of the hard-line Taliban regime, whose strict interpretation of Islam once kept Afghan women virtual prisoners in their homes.
With its ranks deeply divided, the Boy Scouts of America is asking its local leaders from across the country to decide whether its controversial membership policy should be overhauled so that openly gay boys can participate in Scout units.
The proposal to be put before the roughly 1,400 voting members of the BSA’s National Council on Thursday, at a meeting in Grapevine, Texas, would retain the Scouts’ long-standing ban on gays serving in adult leadership positions.
NEWARK, N.J — An airline official says a US Airways flight with 34 people aboard was forced to make a belly landing at Newark International Airport after experiencing landing gear trouble. No injuries were reported.
US Airways spokesman Davien Anderson tells The Associated Press that a turboprop plane that left Philadelphia shortly before 11 p.m. Friday landed safely at Newark with its landing gear retracted at about 1 a.m. Saturday.
A 14-year-old girl took drugs and had sex with a stranger after walking away last month from a Scottsdale residential treatment center whose problems with runaways had been documented in an Arizona Republic report.
The middle-school student’s family placed her in the New Foundation’s facility for treatment after a previous sexual assault. The girl ran away from the facility in mid-April and went home with a 23-year-old man she met at a nearby park. She stayed with him in his trailer home for three days while they got drunk, smoked marijuana and twice had intercourse, according to police reports obtained by the newspaper. The man has since been criminally charged.
Arizona’s top National Guard officer on Friday released a package of reforms and training protocols designed to improve discipline and combat corruption documented by a Pentagon agency’s investigation.
At the direction of Gov. Jan Brewer, Maj. Gen. Hugo Salazar announced more than two dozen new initiatives that he described as “catalysts for broad, systemic program change.”
