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After talking Tarik Skubal and a few other early acquisitions in the preceding pod, Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley recap the rest of the trade deadline in detail, from Adell to Zeferjahn (with many non-ex-Angels in between): the biggest surprises, the winners and losers, and the various reminders that life comes at you fast. Audio intro: Garrett Krohn, “Effectively Wild Theme” Audio outro: Alex Ferrin, “Effectively Wild Theme” Link to Skubal trade EW discussion Link to Ben on the Skubal trade Link to Andy M. on the Brewers and Skubal Link to Brewers “we tried” article 1 Link to Brewers “we tried” article 2 Link to Hogg post Link to Roberts quote Link to Skubal quote Link to Dodgers super-rotation post Link to SP RoS projections Link to SP depth charts Link to Trueblood on the Brewers Link to mlb.com trade tracker Link to FG trade post round-up Link to FG winners/losers post Link to Ben on Spider-Man Link to Baumann’s Rockies headline Link to Wade/Ward wiki Link to Brebbia news Link to Harper OF move Link to May monthly award winners Link to Toboni comments Link to Elias comments Link to ZiPS deadline breakdown Link to Kostka tweet Link to FG farm rankings Link to “subtle” oblique strain Link to Lombard call-up Link to Lombard dinger Link to white flag trade Link to Law on Mayer Link to Partners INW Link to wildfire response fund Link to fire relief fund Link to Red Cross donation site Sponsor Us on Patreon Give a Gift Subscription Email Us: podcast@fangraphs.com Effectively Wild Subreddit Effectively Wild Wiki Apple Podcasts Feed Spotify Feed YouTube Playlist Facebook Group Bluesky Account Twitter Account Get Our Merch! var SERVER_DATA = Object.assign(SERVER_DATA || {}); Source

EU interior ministers express strong solidarity with Spain over its handling of the Ceuta migrant crisis. In a video conference, they commended the swift reaction of the authorities in Madrid to the influx of more than 70,000 Moroccans into the Spanish territory last week. The surge was blamed on disinformation and people smugglers. Also: The world's biggest oil producer, Saudi Arabia's Saudi Aramco, posts record profits as the Iran war sends prices surging, and despite Iran's blockade of the Strait of Hormuz. A mass funeral has taken place in Gaza for over 100 people whose bodies have been recovered from rubble nearly three years after they were killed in an Israeli attack. A man accused of pretending to be a judge is ordered to stand trial in Egypt. Prosecutors allege he bribed officials with $60,000 to gain access to the Cairo courthouse where he had himself filmed as if he was presiding over trials. And we hear from one of the stars of The Odyssey -- Matt Damon's stunt double -- all 1.30m of her. The Global News Podcast brings you the breaking news you need to hear, as it happens. Listen for the latest headlines and current affairs from around the world. Politics, economics, climate, business, technology, health – we cover it all with expert analysis and insight. Get the news that matters, delivered twice a day on weekdays and daily at weekends, plus special bonus episodes reacting to urgent breaking stories. Follow or subscribe now and never miss a moment.Get in touch: globalpodcast@bbc.co.ukPhoto: Migrants wait in line to receive food and beverages from the Red Cross, following mass crossings of migrants on foot and by sea from Morocco into Spanish territory, in Ceuta, Spain, August 3, 2026. Credit: REUTERS/Violeta Santos Moura

Can grief cause physical symptoms? Learn how loss may affect cortisol, inflammation, hormone balance, heart health, sleep, energy, and the nervous system. Grief is not only an emotional experience. It can affect the brain and body, yet many people feel pressured to stay strong, move on, or process their loss alone. In this episode, grief expert David Kessler explains what grief does to us physically and emotionally, why grief must be witnessed, and how meaningful healing can begin.We explore the five stages of grief, why they are not linear, and the misconceptions surrounding denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. David also shares how losing his 21-year-old son led him to identify meaning as the sixth stage of grief and explains why meaning is not found in the tragedy itself, but in what we choose to do afterward.David and Dr. Taz discuss the physical symptoms of grief, broken heart syndrome, post-traumatic growth, isolation, grief in men, and what to say when someone you love is grieving. They also explain why grief can result from divorce, betrayal, job loss, illness, lost identity, or the loss of the future you expected, not only the death of a loved one.This conversation is for educational purposes and should not replace individualized medical or mental health care. Chest pain and other concerning physical symptoms should always be evaluated by a qualified healthcare professional.Subscribe for weekly conversations about physical, emotional, and spiritual health, and comment below: What do you wish more people understood about grief?About David Kessler:David Kessler is one of the world's leading experts on grief and loss. He co-authored two books with Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, including On Grief and Grieving, and later introduced meaning as the sixth stage of grief in his bestselling book Finding Meaning.His first book, The Needs of the Dying, received praise from Mother Teresa. David has also served as an LAPD specialist reserve for traumatic events and with the Red Cross disaster services team. He is the founder of Grief.com, which provides resources, support groups, and training for people experiencing grief and the professionals who support them.Connect with David Kessler:https://grief.com/https://www.instagram.com/iamdavidkessler/https://www.facebook.com/IamDavidKessler/https://www.tiktok.com/@iamdavidkesslerAbout Dr. Taz:Dr. Tasneem Bhatia (Dr. Taz) is a triple board-certified integrative medicine physician, bestselling author, and founder of hol+, a multi-location integrative medicine practice.Learn more: https://doctortaz.com/aboutStay Connected:Connect further with hol+ at https://holplus.co/ and don't forget to like, subscribe, and hit the notification bell to stay updated on future episodes of hol+.Book a Hol+ Consultation:https://holplus.co/locations/virtual/Follow Dr. Taz on Instagram:https://www.instagram.com/drtazmd/https://www.instagram.com/liveholplus/Subscribe to the audio podcast:https://holplus.transistor.fm/subscribeSubscribe to the video podcast:https://www.youtube.com/@DrTazMD/podcastsProduced by https://ClipGrowth.com (Producer: Pat Gostek)

President Trump has said talks with Iran are going on right now. Speaking to reporters, he said Iran faced decapitation unless it agreed a deal. Mr Trump also said oil companies were making too much money, as a result of the shortages caused by the war. Also in the programme: Russian officials say seven people have been killed in a Ukrainian drone strike on a Black Sea beach resort; drought in eastern Europe and why it's having serious implications for Hungary and Romania's electricity generation; and we hear from Kim Aris after the Red Cross visits his mother Aung San Suu Kyi, who is a political prisoner in Myanmar.(Photo credit: Reuters)

Last time we spoke about autumn battle of Changsha. In late September and early October 1941, the Chinese commander Chen Cheng focused on Yichang, a crucial Yangtze stronghold whose loss would threaten China's position and the approach toward Chongqing. Chen Cheng's plan tightened a ring around the city while Chinese forces blocked Japanese reinforcement routes, including efforts to cut retreat lines at places like Jingmen and Dangyang. The battle's pressure was intensified by shifting momentum elsewhere. As the Japanese situation around Changsha became unstable—strained by supplies, exhaustion, and mounting casualties—the Japanese command began to withdraw north. Chiang Kai-shek used this to accelerate Chinese priorities, ordering rapid capture of Yichang within a tight deadline. Inside Yichang, the defense turned tragic as Japanese troops faced encirclement, heavy artillery barrages, and desperate street fighting.    #213 Blood, Rain, and Flags: The Last Struggle Around Yichang Welcome to the Fall and Rise of China Podcast, I am your dutiful host Craig Watson. But, before we start I want to also remind you this podcast is only made possible through the efforts of Kings and Generals over at Youtube. Perhaps you want to learn more about the history of Asia? Kings and Generals have an assortment of episodes on history of asia and much more  so go give them a look over on Youtube. So please subscribe to Kings and Generals over at Youtube and to continue helping us produce this content please check out www.patreon.com/kingsandgenerals. If you are still hungry for some more history related content, over on my channel, the Pacific War Channel where I cover the history of China and Japan from the 19th century until the end of the Pacific War. While the struggle around Changsha occupied one half of the battlefield, another contest of equal consequence was taking shape farther west at Yichang. The two operations were not separate stories. They belonged to the same campaign, and each influenced the fate of the other. If Changsha was the city whose danger was plain to every observer, Yichang was the stronghold whose importance weighed most heavily on the calculations of commanders. In the autumn of 1941, the outcome in one place could not be understood without the other. For Chen Cheng, Yichang was more than a military objective. It was a wound that had never closed. The city stood on the Yangtze at a point of major strategic value, tied not only to communications and transport but also to the defense of the river approach toward the wartime capital. When Yichang had fallen in June 1940, it had done more than alter the front line. It had left behind humiliation. Three Japanese divisions—the 3rd, 13th, and 39th—had seized the city after twelve days and nights of intense fighting. At five in the afternoon on June 11, a unit of the Japanese 13th Division under Tanaka Seiichi had broken in from the southeast. Chinese troops of the 18th Army under Peng Shan and Luo Guangwen's 18th Division fought a savage close-quarters battle inside the city for a full day and night, while Japanese forces of the 3rd and 39th Divisions pressed from the north. At four in the afternoon on June 12, with Deng Ping's battalion covering the withdrawal, the Chinese finally pulled out and Yichang was lost. Men in high command do not always remember defeat in the same way as the men who fight through it. Soldiers tend to remember heat, hunger, the dead, or the exact corner where a friend fell. Commanders also remember those things, but they remember something else as well: failure recorded in the language of responsibility. Chen Cheng could not forget that twenty Chinese corps had been beaten by three Japanese divisions. At the time, Li Zongren had commanded the operation. Now the chance to erase that old disgrace seemed to be passing into Chen Cheng's own hands. On September 20, he received two telegrams, one from the Military Commission and one from Chiang Kai-shek himself. From that point onward, Yichang dominated his thoughts. By September 23, the Military Commission approved Chen's request to transfer the 33rd Army Group of the Fifth War Zone into the Sixth War Zone for the coming attack. On paper, his position seemed powerful. He now had fourteen divisions at his disposal. Yichang itself was held only by Uchiyama Eitaro's 13th Division and the Hayabuchi Detachment, together amounting to roughly sixteen thousand men. Even granting the usual Japanese superiority in training, firepower, communications, and local tactical cohesion, the Chinese possessed absolute numerical advantage. By September 28, the Chinese units had reached their attack positions, and Chen Cheng set his operational design in motion. The forces on the right bank were to attack first and pull the main body of the Japanese 39th Division southward. The 33rd Army would strike toward Jingmen and Dangyang in order to cut off the enemy's routes of retreat and reinforcement. Once these movements took hold, Yichang itself would be enclosed and crushed. Li Jilan's 94th Army, Li Yannian's 2nd Army, Song Kentang's 32nd Army, and other formations advanced according to plan. On paper the arrangement had clarity. On the ground it had resistance. The Japanese defended from strong fieldworks, and progress came slowly. Earthworks, wire, trenches, and mutually supporting positions transformed every apparent advance into hard labor. The Chinese pushed forward, but not with the speed Chen Cheng wanted. Even a favorable comparison of troop numbers could not cancel the fact that an entrenched Japanese force, once determined to hold, could impose a terrible price on assault. By October 1, Japanese troops outside Yichang began withdrawing into the city proper. Chen Cheng responded by ordering all troops to complete the encirclement. At last the operation seemed to be reaching the decisive stage. The city was tightening under pressure. The ring was nearly closed. Yet at that very moment time began pressing harder on both sides. On October 2, both Chen Cheng outside the city and Uchiyama inside it received telegrams that sharpened the crisis. The message sent from the Japanese 11th Army headquarters in Wuhan informed Uchiyama that the famous Tokyo Asakusa Art Troupe was coming to Yichang to comfort the front-line troops. The Expeditionary Army Headquarters in Nanjing had decided that, for political reasons, the troupe could not be turned back merely because combat conditions were dangerous. Their purpose was morale. That such a message could arrive at such a time reveals much about Japanese wartime culture. Appearances, spirit, ritual reassurance, and the emotional theater of endurance still had to be maintained even when military reality was worsening by the hour. The telegram that Chen Cheng received was very different. Chiang Kai-shek's order stated with brutal directness: the Japanese in northern Hunan had begun to withdraw, and Chen was ordered to spare no effort to capture Yichang within three days. Chen stared at the message for a long time. There was no need for explanation. He understood at once what Chiang meant. The battle for Yichang had already consumed days of hard fighting. Chinese units had suffered substantial losses. But the essential fact stood over every map and every order: if Japanese forces disengaging from northern Hunan reached Yichang in time to reinforce it, then all the effort already expended might amount to nothing. The battle had become not only a contest of strength, but a race. At nearly the same time, the command post of the Japanese 11th Army at Yueyang was confronting the other half of the same problem. On the night of September 30, the headquarters was brightly lit as Chief of Staff Isamu Kinoshita arranged reports, reconnaissance findings, and field messages before the army commander. The Japanese still possessed a valuable advantage: they had access to Chinese communication codes. But such intelligence could not solve every operational problem. It could not conjure food where there was none, restore exhausted bodies, or stop the battlefield from changing shape. By then the Japanese situation around Changsha had become increasingly unstable. The Hayabuchi Detachment, after entering the city, was entangled in fierce urban fighting with the Chinese 6th Provisional Division of the 79th Army. By the evening of September 30, neither side had eliminated the other inside the city. Outside Changsha, the Japanese 3rd, 4th, 6th, and 40th Divisions had assembled and kept major Chinese forces at bay. One element of the 3rd Division had even moved south by truck to Zhuzhou, fifty kilometers away, and occupied the abandoned city. Yet these outward signs of success concealed a serious weakness. The Japanese rear was fraying. Ammunition and food were running low. Divisions operating that deep in hostile territory could not sustain a prolonged campaign under such conditions. More than ten days of uninterrupted movement and fighting had also produced rising non-combat casualties. Men were collapsing from fatigue along the march. Sickness increased steadily. Units that had looked formidable on the offensive were beginning to wear thin from inside. At the same time, Chinese remnants from earlier defeats, new reinforcements, and formations that had regrouped after being thrown back were all watching for signs of weakness. Even if the Japanese divisions in Hunan still had the strength to fight several more actions, another question overrode everything else: Yichang. Yichang was not simply another point on the map. It was a strategic stronghold on the Yangtze and one of the key places from which Japan threatened Chongqing. The city also carried institutional memory. After its capture in June 1940, the occupying troops had initially been ordered to withdraw for rest and reorganization. But Imperial General Headquarters had reversed that decision almost at once and demanded that Yichang be held after all. Troops already on the road had to turn back and retake a city that had been burned, stripped, and rendered difficult to occupy. Among those who had insisted most strongly that Yichang must be retained was Anami Korechika, then vice minister of the army. Now Anami faced the consequence of that earlier insistence. However attractive the gains in Hunan might appear, Yichang could not simply be sacrificed. Uchiyama's 13th Division was not strong enough to hold indefinitely without relief. Anami looked at Hunan on the map—a rich province, beautiful and militarily tempting, much of it seeming almost within reach. But strategy does not reward attachment. With great reluctance, he gave the order to retreat. On the morning of October 1, all Japanese divisions received the reversal instructions, and at four in the afternoon they began moving north. For Xue Yue, this altered the entire meaning of the campaign. Since the beginning of the battle, he had known frustration, disappointment, and anger. Whatever private calculations he may have made about Chiang Kai-shek's strategic direction, Chen Cheng's political influence, his own mistakes in the earlier phase of operations, or the rivalries that had long poisoned Republican military life, none of those feelings prevented him from seeing the opportunity now before him. Once the Japanese turned north, pursuit was no longer merely a matter of salvaging dignity. It became an operational necessity tied directly to Yichang. His staff quickly drafted a pursuit order defining routes, timings, and methods. The document explicitly called for tracking and pursuing, interception, flanking movement, ambush, and surprise attack. This was not to be a ceremonial following of a retreating enemy at a respectful distance. It was meant to be pressure—enough pressure, if possible, to delay Japanese movement back toward Hubei. Two hours after Xue issued the order, another telegram arrived from Chongqing. Chiang Kai-shek instructed that since the enemy which had advanced into northern Hunan had begun retreating toward Yueyang on the night of October 1, the Ninth War Zone was to exploit their fatigue, pursue boldly, seize Yueyang if possible, sabotage the Wuyue Railway, and launch attacks, ambushes, and fierce strikes along the retreat route to prevent the Japanese from regaining their former defenses or shifting quickly toward Wuhan. The purpose was stated clearly: to facilitate the operations of the Third, Fifth, and Sixth War Zones. Xue Yue understood the message at once. The support provided by the Third and Fifth War Zones had been limited and often symbolic. The operation that truly mattered now was Chen Cheng's assault on Yichang. Pursuit in Hunan was not simply retaliation for the threat to Changsha. It was an attempt to buy time in blood, mud, and delay. He adjusted the pursuit deployment and ordered commanders at every level to go forward and supervise their units in person. Autumn rain began to fall over northern Hunan. Hills disappeared in mist and drizzle. Along the roads leading north moved Japanese soldiers under the Rising Sun flag; behind them and beside them, often through fields, villages, and broken country, moved Chinese troops under the Blue Sky, White Sun, and Red Earth flag. Their uniforms differed, their languages differed, their causes differed—but the exhaustion in their faces must often have looked terribly alike. Both armies moved through damp air, hunger, uncertainty, and the constant expectation of another clash. The pursuit, however, revealed the limits of Chinese strength as well as its persistence. On October 2, the battered remnants of the Chinese 74th and 26th Armies cleared battlefields along the Liuyang and Laodao Rivers and found no Japanese left there. The 74th withdrew to Liling to regroup. The 26th halted at Changle Street for replenishment. Yang Sen sent the whole 27th Army Group after the retreating enemy. Ou Zhen's 4th Army attempted to intercept the Japanese 40th Division, but the Japanese maneuvered skillfully and escaped. Ou Zhen pursued them north of the Miluo River for three days, reached the Changshui River, and found the south bank empty. The 20th Army tried to cut off the Japanese 6th Division at Fulipu. At first they could not even locate the enemy, but they did collect large amounts of matériel left behind. Deputy Commander Xia Jiong remarked, with rough optimism, that the Japanese were still "steaming hot" and would certainly be caught. His men ran hard, crossed the Miluo River, and finally did catch a rearguard. Yet the Japanese, intent only on getting away, adopted what Chinese accounts described as a low-key method of not retaliating and not becoming decisively engaged. After crossing Gaoqiao they withdrew into their previous defensive area, and Xia could do little more than stop, rest, and continue to watch them. The 58th Army intercepted more than two thousand Japanese troops near Guanwang Bridge. For a moment it seemed a major clash might erupt. Instead the Japanese fled, leaving behind large quantities of supplies. The Chinese followed them as far as Taolin and then halted when it became clear that the enemy had regained strong ground. These episodes were frustrating, but they were not meaningless. They showed that many Chinese formations had been too badly mauled in the earlier phase of the campaign to sustain relentless offensive pressure. They also showed that the Japanese, though in retreat, were still disciplined enough to avoid disastrous entanglements while shedding matériel to gain speed. The Chinese units that struck hardest during this phase were not those most damaged at the beginning of the battle, but fresher formations such as Xia Chuzhong's 79th Army and Fu Zhongfang's 99th Army. Xia's men ambushed the Hayabuchi Detachment and nearly destroyed it, killing two of its three battalion commanders. Fu's 99th Army fought a series of clashes with the Japanese 3rd and 6th Divisions and with the Hirano and Araki Detachments. The Japanese, eager to keep moving, absorbed losses rather than pause for extended battle. The 99th Army captured so much matériel that transporting it became a problem in itself. On October 4, a squad leader of the 197th Division even shot down an aircraft with machine-gun fire. Yet even here success had limits. By October 9, the entire Japanese force in northern Hunan had crossed the Xinqiang River and reoccupied its original positions. Chinese attacks achieved nothing decisive. The river once again became, in military imagination, almost a fixed frontier. As gunfire subsided in Xiangbei, all attention turned toward Yichang. The encirclement of the city was completed at noon on October 4. Chen Cheng ordered a general offensive to begin at four in the morning on October 6. Outside the city, Li Yannian's 2nd Army held fast against the Japanese 39th Division, which was trying to come in from Jingmen. Altogether, the Sixth War Zone had committed fourteen divisions—more than one hundred thousand men—to the operation. What followed was the familiar but always arresting spectacle of a great battle gathering itself. Small detachments moved forward to cut wire and destroy fortifications outside the city. Artillery officers adjusted their fire with care. Ammunition boxes changed hands continuously. Telephone operators hurried back and forth laying lines. Engineers worked with picks and shovels. Trucks forced their way down crowded roads with horns blaring. Boats were requisitioned along the riverbank, and dark-skinned boatmen weathered by the Yangtze wind moved among soldiers and officers. Behind the assault units stood medical stations under Red Cross flags, waiting for the wounded they knew were coming. All the machinery of battle was in motion. Inside Yichang, meanwhile, another scene unfolded that could only exist in wartime Japan's peculiar mixture of militarism and performance. At the field hospital of the Japanese 13th Division on the campus of Mingde Middle School, wounded soldiers wrapped in white bandages stood, sat, lay on stretchers, or leaned on medical orderlies in the yard watching entertainers from home perform while the dull rhythms of artillery sounded in the distance. The Asakusa Art Troupe had been founded in the mid-1920s and had made its name by combining modern popular elements with traditional stage culture. It had first won over ordinary audiences and then, as its reputation rose, gained acceptance among official and elite circles as well. After the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War, it was gradually folded into the machinery of wartime propaganda, performing works meant to praise sacrifice, glorify the empire, and strengthen morale. When the delegation of more than thirty members arrived at the 11th Army headquarters in Wuhan, the army added a military band of more than twenty men to accompany them to Yichang. But by the time they reached the city, the battle had already drawn close. They could not visit forward positions. Instead they performed for the wounded. The last performance featured heavily made-up young men and women dancing a popular folk number. As the dance continued, the women bowed and invited medics and wounded men who could still move to join them. Kimono and military uniform mixed. Smiles appeared beside bandages. Music from the home islands drifted out beneath the sound of an approaching siege. Then war interrupted the scene completely. Before dawn on October 6, Chinese artillery opened on Yichang with a deafening bombardment, and the cries of attack rolled over the city. As day came up, the troupe members watched stretchers being rushed into the field hospital where they had only recently performed. One of the sixteen-year-old twin geisha sisters, Mihoko, asked the troupe leader Akizuru through tears whether they would ever be able to return to Tokyo. Qiuhe, the famous dance artist in her fifties, answered gently that they would. General Anami, she said, was leading brave troops there and would arrive in the next few days. The child must pray. The reassurance was human, but it was also part of the wartime language of consolation. Outside the city, reality was harsher. For two days and nights the fighting remained severe. The Japanese fell back toward the edge of the city and resisted with desperation. The Japanese 3rd Air Regiment in Hankou committed itself heavily to the defense, flying sortie after sortie over Yichang. Aircraft came so often that some made four round trips in a single day. On the morning of October 8, a unit of the Chinese 94th Army crossed by boat from the west bank, bypassed the Gezhouba area, and landed at the northern end of Huangcaoba. Advancing south along the embankment, it established positions on the Yangtze side only about half a kilometer from the city. This foothold effectively dominated Japanese positions west of Yichang. Mortar rounds crossed the water. Heavy and light machine guns pinned the defenders outside the walls. At the same time, the 9th Division of the 32nd Army and part of the 99th Army pressed inward as well. The ring tightened. October 9 was grave for both sides. The Japanese withdrawal from northern Hunan had by now produced a relief force. Anami assembled elite troops from several divisions into a rapid deployment column for Yichang. For the Chinese Sixth War Zone, however, victory seemed very near. Inside the city the Japanese situation was increasingly desperate. Casualties were severe. The field hospital yard was filled with groaning wounded. Uchiyama summoned support personnel, medics, cooks, ordnance repairmen, and any wounded men still capable of firing. He armed them all and formed an improvised reserve. Then, while this force was assembling, he heard the sound of a trumpet. One of the band members, still practicing as if battle had not reached its climax, reminded him that the more than twenty members of the 11th Army band were also soldiers in uniform. He added them as well, creating a special unit of 388 men. Hundreds of sacks of rice were taken from storage and piled around division headquarters as fortifications. Uchiyama then turned to Chief of Staff Akinaga and said, "Let's not believe any miracles will happen." The line was bleak, but lucid. It meant that there would be no rescue through wishful thinking. If they lived, it would be because they held long enough. If they died, they would die without pretending that destiny had cheated them. Outside the city, Chen Cheng faced a different but equally harsh pressure. On October 2, Chiang Kai-shek had ordered Yichang taken within three days. On the 4th, Chen requested an extension until the 8th; Chiang agreed, but warned that because the Japanese were retreating from northern Hunan, the city must be captured by then or all previous effort would be wasted. Chen launched the general assault on the 6th, but fierce resistance on the ground and in the air slowed him. By the 8th, the city still had not fallen. He requested another extension, asking to take Yichang by October 10. This time Chiang sent no reply. Chen understood the silence. It meant that no political room remained behind him. At 2:30 in the morning on October 10, the Sixth War Zone opened another general offensive. One hundred and forty artillery pieces joined the bombardment. Shells fell across every part of the Japanese defenses until the repeated flashes made it hard for the gunners to tell what had not yet been hit. Then the infantry went in. Men shouted and surged forward like water breaking through a barrier. Hidden Japanese machine guns cut them down in wave after wave, but more men followed behind. The dead piled on the approaches so thickly that nationality itself seemed to vanish in blood and mud. Under that fire, dawn rose red. Uchiyama watched the sunrise from the highest building in the city, the three-story Yichang Bank. After the war, he told a reporter that the sky, the earth, and even the Yangtze had all seemed red to him, as if the river itself were carrying the blood of Chinese and Japanese alike. According to a later Japanese account, messages reached him from every side that morning reporting collapse. Roughly 5000 men were estimated killed or seriously wounded. At eight o'clock Uchiyama went down to the operations room. Waiting there were his chief of staff and senior officers. At that moment the final ritual of battlefield defeat began. A farewell telegram to Anami Korechika was read aloud. Nearby stood the regimental flag of the 104th Regiment, entrusted to Captain Izumi Shigeru before the regiment's complete destruction. Uchiyama then took the 13th Division's own flag—the imperial military color—and laid it over the regimental flag. Officers and men wept, removed their caps, and bowed their heads. Uchiyama's hands trembled so badly that it took him three matches to set the flag alight. In Japanese military culture, burning a flag was among the sternest rites of defeat. The flag could not be allowed to fall into enemy hands. To destroy it was to acknowledge annihilation while presenting that annihilation as a final offering to the imperial state. When the flags had burned and places for seppuku had been chosen, the farewell message remained. It declared that all officers and soldiers had done their utmost for the empire in the final struggle, that military flags, confidential documents, and imperial edicts had been burned, and that it was deeply regrettable that overseas Chinese and the delegation in Yichang had also suffered this fate. Uchiyama then added one final sentence in red pencil: the soldiers of the empire had fulfilled their duty and died for their country amidst the heroic cries of "Long live the Grand Marshal!" At 8:50 the clerk began encoding the telegram. Then Uchiyama said quietly to the officers waiting to die: "Please wait a little longer." The words postponed death by minutes. There was still the narrow possibility that communication mattered, or that the battle had not yet reached its absolute end. Chief of Staff Akinaga summoned his adjutant, Sakata Ryūshirō, and ordered that if the division commander and chief of staff died before the telegram was sent, Sakata was to form a suicide squad, break out by any means possible, and report the division's fate to 11th Army headquarters. At ten in the morning, the Japanese 39th Division attacking from Jingmen launched a new assault under Anami's strict orders against Li Yannian's 2nd Army. One regiment used poison gas to break through part of the Chinese line and reached the outskirts of Yichang. Chen Cheng personally directed the Chinese response, using elements of the attacking force and the 2nd Army to surround and beat back the thrust. By two in the afternoon, only the Dongshan Temple line remained intact among the different sectors of the Japanese city defense. Chinese troops had penetrated the city and were fighting bitterly in the streets, moving steadily toward division headquarters. At four in the afternoon, more than 2000 Japanese rapid deployment troops from northern Hunan reached the northeast approaches of Yichang and at once joined the relief effort. Chen Cheng threw reserves in to block them, and both sides locked in combat six kilometers outside the city. As dusk fell, the Chinese assault units in the city had also suffered terrible losses. Chen Cheng ordered them to regroup, replenish, and launch a final attack after dark. Then, at seven in the evening, almost as the order was issued, a violent gale rose and torrential rain began to fall. Such heavy rain was unusual in the Yichang area in October, and to men who had been living for days under the pressure of siege, death, and deadline, it must have seemed uncanny. The Chinese attacked through the downpour, but progress was painfully slow. At the same time, more than ten thousand Japanese troops arriving from northern Hunan reached the outskirts, fought for over two hours in the rain, and finally broke into the city, linking up with what remained of the 13th Division. At eleven that night, Chiang Kai-shek ordered the attack on Yichang halted and instructed the Chinese troops to return to their original defensive positions. The battle ended not in a clear verdict, but in exhaustion. One elderly resident of Yichang, Huang Jupu, later left a memory of the aftermath more vivid than any headquarters summary. He recalled that the heavy rain began at nightfall on the twentieth day of the eighth lunar month—October 10 in the Gregorian calendar—and continued into the next afternoon. Rainwater soaked the corpses lying in the streets until the water became a deep brownish-red pool more than two feet deep before it drained into the Yangtze and changed the river's color. The next day, he said, both sides sent corpse-collection teams into the streets under Red Cross flags. They pushed carts and worked separately, avoiding conflict, though sometimes they spoke to one another when trying to identify bodies. The Japanese recovery party included Chinese helpers and local residents. They turned corpses over, looked at clothing and weapons, and tried to determine nationality. Some bodies were naked, perhaps stripped wounded, which made identification harder. Since Chinese and Japanese could resemble one another, neither side wanted to take the wrong dead, fearing that a mistake would disturb the heroic souls to whom each army believed it owed proper burial. In the end, Huang remembered, it was the people of Yichang who pooled their money to bury many of the dead north of the city. Later an unmarked stone was raised there, with a bowl of rice and a stick of incense set before it. That image does something military history often fails to do. It restores weight to the end of battle. Armies issue attack orders, counterattack orders, pursuit orders, and retreat orders. Staff officers mark arrows on maps. Commanders calculate reinforcement and delay. But after all of that comes the business of soaked bodies in the street, identification, carts, shallow graves, and local people forced to do what armies can no longer fully do for their own dead. Seen as a whole, the operations in Hunan and Hubei during these weeks form one connected historical drama. The Japanese advance toward Changsha was real and dangerous, but it failed to produce decisive strategic gain. The battle strained the Chinese defense badly. Some units collapsed. Others improvised and recovered. The city was entered, contested, and then fought over again. Behind the forward line, Chinese forces such as Yang Sen's 27th Army Group harassed Japanese communications and supply, turning depth into vulnerability. At the same time, Chen Cheng's offensive against Yichang transformed what might otherwise have remained a local success for Japan in Hunan into a strategic dilemma. Once Yichang came seriously under threat, the Japanese command could not continue to treat the Hunan offensive as self-contained. It had to weigh possession against preservation, momentum against strategic necessity. That calculation compelled the retreat from northern Hunan. The retreat in turn changed the meaning of Xue Yue's operations. Pursuit became valuable not mainly because it might recover wounded pride or even because it might damage the retreating enemy, but because every hour of delay imposed on Japanese units moving north was another hour in which Yichang might fall. Yet Yichang did not fall. That fact is central, but it must be interpreted carefully. Chen Cheng had numerical superiority and fought with determination, but numbers alone could not cancel the difficulty of assaulting a fortified Japanese position under air attack and against fanatical resistance. Time worked against him. Every day lost increased the chance that Japanese relief would arrive from Hunan. Chiang Kai-shek's increasingly urgent telegrams reflected strategic logic, but they could not abolish battlefield reality. Men still had to cross open ground, cut wire, silence guns, and survive fire. Inside Yichang, Uchiyama's defense reveals the same pressure from the opposite side. He understood that his task was simple in principle and terrible in practice: hold until relief arrived. That necessity drove him to arm cooks, medics, repairmen, musicians, and wounded men. It drove him to build fortifications from sacks of rice. It brought him to the point of burning flags and preparing for ritual death while still delaying the final act long enough to see whether rescue might come. The presence of the Asakusa Art Troupe inside the besieged city sharpened the tragedy. They had been sent for morale and appearance, as if cultural performance might reassure an empire already growing anxious about the costs of war. Instead they became trapped witnesses to near-annihilation. The young girl asking if she would ever return to Tokyo cuts through all rhetoric. It is the ordinary human question that waits behind every doctrine of heroic sacrifice. In the end, neither side obtained everything it sought. Japan failed to turn its push into Hunan into a decisive result. China failed to retake Yichang despite concentration of force and a window of opportunity that for a time seemed very real. But that does not mean the campaign resolves into stalemate in any empty sense. It revealed important truths. For China, it showed both weakness and development. Weakness appeared in broken lines, uneven coordination, exhausted pursuit, and the inability to convert superiority in numbers into victory at Yichang. But development appeared too: a greater ability to coordinate war zones, to pressure Japanese rear areas, to force the enemy into strategic compromise, and to sustain resistance under conditions that would once have threatened outright collapse. For Japan, the campaign exposed the narrowing gap between aggressive offensive action and dangerous overextension. Japanese divisions could still strike hard, move with speed, and defend with ferocity. Their aircraft could still exact terrible cost. But logistics, fatigue, sickness, and the obligation to rescue threatened positions like Yichang increasingly limited what offensive success could mean. The deepest memory of the campaign may belong not to generals, however, but to the smaller figures history often notices only in passing: the soldier chewing dry ration without water; the wounded man who blew himself up rather than submit; the old beggar who revealed a depot; the band member still practicing trumpet in a city preparing for death; the frightened girl from the troupe; the townspeople who buried the dead after rain washed blood into the Yangtze. These are not decorative details. They are what make the history real. The autumn of 1941 in Hunan and Hubei was not one clean victory, nor one clean defeat. It was a season in which pressure in one sector altered decision in another, in which tactical success did not always yield strategic reward, and in which endurance itself increasingly became a form of power. That is why the campaign matters. It shows a war whose balance had begun to change, not dramatically or conclusively, but perceptibly. China still suffered, improvised, and fell short. Japan still advanced, struck hard, and held important ground. Yet the margin between them was no longer what it had been in the earlier years of the war. History moved that autumn not by omen or destiny, but by the hard materials of war: supply, timing, weather, command, fatigue, communications, morale, and blood. In Hunan and Hubei, all of those forces converged. They carried armies north and west, into cities and out again, across rivers, through rain, and finally into memory. I would like to take this time to remind you all that this podcast is only made possible through the efforts of Kings and Generals over at Youtube. Please go subscribe to Kings and Generals over at Youtube and to continue helping us produce this content please check out www.patreon.com/kingsandgenerals. If you are still hungry after that, give my personal channel a look over at The Pacific War Channel at Youtube, it would mean a lot to me. As Chinese pressure tightened, Japan's wider situation around Changsha deteriorated—fatigue, supply strain, and losses accumulated. When the Japanese began retreating north, relief efforts turned Yichang into a desperate struggle marked by shifting fronts, poison gas, street fighting, and heavy bombardment. Chiang Kai-shek demanded a deadline, forcing Chen into final assaults that ultimately failed to secure a clean victory.  

The Red Cross of Utah is supporting residents...displaced by the apartment fire in Midvale this morning.  Joining me now LIVE with more...is CEO of American Red Cross Utah Nevada region Heidi Ruster 

Today on the Woody and Wilcox Show: Update on Woody's surgery; Fun With Golf Audio; Red Cross blood inventory is at crisis levels; Cleaning out things after person dies; What to watch; Hiker gets walking stick stuck in his body; And more!

Sylvia Turner, affectionately known to generations of Lafayette families as “Ms. T,” joins Discover Lafayette to reflect upon a remarkable life of teaching, music, faith, and service to others. For more than five decades, beginning in 1972, Sylvia taught children and adults to swim in the backyard pool of her Lafayette home. But anyone fortunate enough to have taken lessons from Ms. T knows she taught much more than swimming. She taught safety. She taught respect. She taught children to encourage one another, to follow rules, to appreciate their parents, and perhaps most importantly, to believe they could do things that initially frightened them. “One of my greatest compliments was when people would say, ‘You don't just teach swimming, do you?'” Sylvia recalls. “I said, ‘No, I don't. I teach everything I can while I can.'” Two Lives: Ms. T and Sylvia the Singer Many Lafayette residents knew Sylvia exclusively as Ms. T, the swim teacher who could spend long summer days in the pool working with one class after another. Others knew an entirely different Sylvia Turner, a classically trained singer whose musical life was intertwined with that of her late husband, John Turner. Sylvia grew up in Fort Worth, Texas, and came to Lafayette with John, who taught voice at UL for 34 years. Sylvia later received an opera scholarship, and the couple performed opera together as well as singing at university commencement ceremonies. She also became a fixture at the Order of Troubadours ball, serving as the opening soloist for “Make Believe” for 40 years. The separation between her two worlds occasionally created funny moments. Sylvia remembers singing at a commencement ceremony when a family approached her afterward, looking puzzled. “Ms. T, is that you? Did you sing?” “Yes,” she answered. “In the singing world, a lot of people didn't know that I taught swimming,” Sylvia says. “And then in the swimming world, a lot of people didn't know that I sang.” Sylvia Turner is an active member of Chorale Acadienne. She is pictured fourth from left in the photo. A Fear of Water Leads to a Lifetime in the Pool It is fitting that Sylvia ultimately devoted so much of her life to teaching people to be comfortable in the water, because she did not learn to swim herself until she was 11 years old. Her mother, Lucille, had nearly drowned at age 18. The experience was so traumatic that Sylvia grew up repeatedly hearing, “Don't go near the water.” Eventually, her mother enrolled her in Red Cross swimming lessons at a park pool. Sylvia loved the water immediately. At the end of the lessons, the instructor announced a swim meet. Sylvia entered, won a red ribbon for second place, and, as she puts it, “I was hooked.” Her mother began allowing her to spend time at the pool, where Sylvia became fascinated by a group of young men who were accomplished divers. She simply asked them if they would teach her. They did. Before long, Sylvia was diving from the three-meter board and later competed as a diver when she was 13 and 14 years old. Eventually, voice training began competing with diving for her attention, but her love of the water never disappeared. The Pool That Started It All Sylvia's path to becoming one of Lafayette's best-known swim instructors began with a frustrating afternoon at Riverside pool. Sylvia and her husband, John, were living in River's Bend with their three children when, on a beautiful sunny day, the lifeguard announced everyone had to leave the pool because he needed to take a test and there was no one qualified to substitute for him. Sylvia was not pleased. “I went home and I said to my husband, ‘You know, if I had a lifesaving badge, I could have gotten up on the stand and we could have kept the pool open.'” John's response was simple: go get it. Sylvia and a friend took a lifesaving class at Girard Park. At the conclusion of the course, the instructor assigned Sylvia two women from a mothers' swimming program to teach. “My ladies did beautifully,” she remembers. “And so I was further hooked.” As Sylvia and John prepared to build their new home, she began thinking about adding a swimming pool. The price gave her pause, particularly when they realized it would effectively double their house payment. Sylvia had an answer. “Oh, John, if I paid for it, could we do it?” How would she pay for it? “I could teach.” And that is exactly what she did. Sylvia began teaching swimming lessons in 1972. Her first student was a young man she met through the grocery store who was preparing to get married. His future wife could swim, he could not, and he did not want to be the person sitting on the beach while everyone else enjoyed the water. Sylvia taught him to swim. Years later, he returned with his children. It was the beginning of generations of Lafayette families learning from Ms, T. Safety Came First Before any child entered Sylvia's pool, there were rules. “Children like to know boundaries,” she says. Students first sat on the deck while Sylvia sat at their eye level and talked about safety. Then she walked them around the pool. Nothing was taken for granted. She showed them the skimmers. She explained the drain. She taught them what the various parts of the pool did and addressed fears children might be reluctant to express. That lesson came partly from the children themselves. One little boy looked across the pool at the dark opening of a skimmer and asked Sylvia, “Is that where you keep Jaws?” From that point forward, Sylvia opened the skimmers so the children could look inside. “I learned the children are great teachers,” she says. “I learned a lot from children.” Only after the rules and pool orientation were complete did everyone get into the water. Teaching Children to Respect One Another Ms. T in a photo taken by Jan Swift when she taught Kelly Swift, Jan’s daughter, to swim and dive….circa 2009. Sylvia's lessons were intentionally positive. “I had the children applaud each other all the time,” she says. “We applauded for everything. We didn't just applaud for excellence. We applauded for effort.” Criticism was not allowed unless it was constructive. Older swimmers were taught how to watch one another perform a stroke and offer feedback, beginning with something the swimmer had done well. Sylvia traces much of that philosophy to her mother, who was an exceptionally positive person, and to the instructor who taught Sylvia lifesaving at Girard Park. “She made you feel like you were the most special person in the world.” Sylvia wanted children in her pool to feel the same way. One experience still moves her. A little girl had missed the first day of lessons and joined the class on the second day. When it was her turn to get onto the diving board, she hesitated. Finally, she turned to Sylvia and asked, “Do they have to watch?” Before Sylvia could say anything, every child waiting nearby turned his or her back. “I can't tell that story without getting emotional,” Sylvia says. The children understood that their classmate needed to try something difficult without an audience. “A lot of times we have to do things without people watching.” “Are You the Boss of This Pool?” Boundaries mattered because safety mattered. During one family swim, a visiting child began running around the pool and jumping too close to other swimmers. Sylvia called him over and explained that the pool had rules. The boy looked at her and asked, “Are you the boss of this pool?” “Yes, I am.” “Oh.” That was the end of the problem. “Children want to know who's in charge,” Sylvia says. “And they want somebody to be in charge.” Those lessons stayed with her students long after class ended. One mother called Sylvia after taking her children to another pool. Her four-year-old son Nicholas noticed another little boy breaking pool safety rules and corrected him. The boy replied that his daddy owned the pool and he could do anything he wanted. He added that he took swimming lessons. Nicholas had an answer: “Well, obviously you don't take from Ms. T because you don't know the rules.” Relaxation and Rhythm For Sylvia, learning to swim rested on two fundamental principles. “The two most important things in swimming are relaxation and rhythm.” Relaxation came first. A tense body does not float well. Students learned to float before progressing incrementally through kicking, strokes, diving and more advanced skills. “You do it by stages,” Sylvia says. “And that's how you learn anything really, by little increments.” The same principle applied to diving. Sylvia never forced a frightened child from the diving board. Students progressed from a knee dive close to the water, to a falling dive, then standing, springing, and eventually diving from the board. Her goal was not simply for a child to acquire a skill. The child needed confidence in that skill. “If you have a skill without confidence, it's not really productive.” Teaching Adults and Overcoming Fear Although Ms, T is best remembered for teaching children, Sylvia loved teaching adults, particularly because, as she says, “They always have baggage.” Some carried a fear of water for decades. She taught men, women and couples, including two women who were 71 years old. But no adult student meant more to Sylvia than her own mother. Lucille's near drowning at age 18 had shaped Sylvia's childhood and her mother's lifelong relationship with water. Then, on her 70th birthday, Lucille surprised Sylvia by announcing a goal for the coming year. “I've decided I'm going to learn to swim.” Sylvia was stunned. Her mother continued: “I've decided that if anybody can teach me, it's you.” Sylvia responded, “Well, you'll never have to give me another compliment in your whole life.” Lucille was unable to make the trip to Lafayette that year, but the following year she came and took lessons from her daughter. By the end of the week, she could swim across the pool without assistance. Sylvia later asked whether she had finally lost her fear. Her mother answered, “I don't know, but I loved being in the water.” Sylvia thought that was enough. Of all the adults she taught, she describes teaching her mother as perhaps the most gratifying experience of all. Generations of Lafayette Families Sylvia never kept count of how many people she taught during her decades in the pool, particularly because so many students returned year after year and eventually brought another generation back with them. Her classes grew largely through word of mouth. Her youngest daughter attended Broadmoor Elementary, where Sylvia was heavily involved in the PTA. The principal, himself the father of seven children whom Sylvia eventually taught along with his wife, allowed her to distribute information about her lessons through the school. “And then word spread.” For younger children, particularly three and four year olds, Sylvia limited classes to six students and had another adult in the water with her. Older, accomplished swimmers could be taught in somewhat larger groups. Sylvia also encouraged parents to observe lessons so they understood what their children were learning and could reinforce those lessons away from the pool. The lessons often carried into everyday family life: respect your parents, appreciate what they do for you, respect other people, encourage others, follow the rules, and understand that safety is never something to take casually. The Teacher Who Never Taught School When asked how she defines herself after a lifetime encompassing swimming, opera, church music, family and community, Sylvia returns to teaching. “Every teacher I ever had told me that I was destined to be a teacher.” Yet she never became a traditional classroom teacher. “I taught Sunday school. I taught junior choir. I taught swimming. I'm an inveterate teacher.” She also remains a singer, grounded in the classical and religious music that has been part of her life since childhood. Sylvia grew up in the church. Her mother sang in the choir, her father was a deacon, and Sylvia herself began singing in choir at age 12. Faith remained a constant through the joyful times and the difficult ones. And that may help explain the extraordinary positivity so many people associate with Ms. T. Asked how she manages to remain positive, Sylvia acknowledges that it requires intention. “You have to work at it, I think, because it's easy to be negative.” Even in the hardest times, she says, there is something to hold onto. “Even in those darkest days, you have to find something. And gratitude is part of it.” Sylvia looks back on her life with gratitude for the people, experiences and opportunities she has been given, while acknowledging that her life has included hardship like anyone else's. “I've had some hard knocks, as everybody does during my life. I'm here to say that I overcame them.” Then she adds the foundation beneath it all: “With the help of my Lord.” For generations of Lafayette families, Ms. T will always be the woman who taught their children to swim. But her legacy reaches well beyond the pool. She taught children to be safe without being afraid, to respect rules and one another, to applaud effort rather than simply excellence, and to gain confidence one small step at a time. And she taught it all while making each child feel that, at that moment, they mattered.

This week, Kate has the story of Alfred Schofield who was born in England in 1867, had an adventurous life, and eventually settled in Haliburton County. He was instrumental in community development by bringing 2 Red Cross Outpost,Hospitals to the County as well as being active in the salvation Army. Plus, Paul has the last chapter in the arc of Canadian Confederation. This week it's Canada's 10th Province - Newfoundland. Kate Butler is the Director of the Haliburton Highlands Museum. Paul Vorvis is the host of the Your Haliburton Morning Show 7 - 9 a.m. Fridays on Canoe FM 100.9 and streaming on your devices. Haliburton County is in cottage country about 2 1/2 hours north of Toronto. You can contact us at timewarp@canoefm.com

State legislators from across the country are vowing to introduce legislation that makes it possible for residents to directly sue federal agents who violate their constitutional rights. State lawmakers also plan to introduce similar legislation in Illinois, Colorado and other states.Parts of the Boundary Waters Canoe Area are reopening to overnight camping today. With firefighters making good progress containing several wildfires in the region, the Forest Service is opening about 40 percent of the Boundary Waters to overnight visitors.The Forest Service says it's monitoring conditions daily for opportunities to open more of the wilderness. Many of the most popular entry points, including those at the end of the Gunflint Trail, remain closed. This summer, blood donations have hit a four-year low, worsening the ongoing emergency blood shortage. The American Red Cross declared a national "blood crisis" in early July as the number of donations have not kept pace with hospital demand. Extreme heat, poor air quality and widespread foodborne illnesses have led to lower donor turnout this season. The Red Cross for Minnesota and the Dakotas is asking individuals to donate all blood types, but there is an urgent need for O negative and O positive blood.St. Paul Mayor Kaohly Her is under investigation for alleged sexual harassment. According to reporting by the Star Tribune, Police Chief Axel Henry has filed a complaint against Her for allegedly sending sexually suggestive text messages to a city employee.A new report finds that federal immigration agents misused force more than 400 times since last summer. Physicians for Human Rights and the Human Rights Center at the UC Berkeley School of Law went through hours of video, legal filings and news accounts in their investigation. According to the report, Minneapolis accounted for a quarter of all cases where federal agents misused force on protesters. Minnesota, other states, will push for ICE protectionsBack into the BWCA: Canoeing campers return to the wilderness after wildfire closureThe American Red Cross for Minnesota and the Dakotas declares blood crisis due to shortageSt. Paul Mayor Kaohly Her under investigation for sexual harassment allegations

Fresh out of the studio at the Dataiku Summit Singapore 2026, Nur Hafiza Mutalif, Assistant Head of International Affairs at the Singapore Red Cross, joins us to explore why the humanitarian sector distrusts AI, and what her team built once they worked through that scepticism. Coming to this from international law rather than data science, Nur Hafiza explains why the sector's caution is a feature rather than a lag: humanitarian work rests on doing no harm and on neutrality, and any solution must clear that bar before it clears a business case. Dataiku cleared that bar. Its pro bono experts taught the team how the models worked and let them set the boundaries — which is what earned their confidence. Hafiza walks through the disaster surveillance pipeline that freed four people from daily collation, and the Thailand leptospirosis model forecasting outbreaks from case and climate data. She argues AI should never be justified on efficiency, that data efficiency itself carries risk, and that acting on a forecast demands low-regret choices. Closing the conversation, she shares why capability outlasts any model."We cannot see efficiency, too, I think what I should see, as a humanitarian organization, is datasets and the different cases around the world be compressed into something that simplifies value and help us better serve communities." - Nur Hafiza MutalifProfile, Nur Hafiza Mutalif, Assistant Head of International Affairs, Singapore Red CrossLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nurhafizaab/Episode Highlights: [00:00] Quote of the Day by Nur Hafiza Mutalif from Singapore Red Cross[00:55] Three angles: distrust, what they built, where the line sits[01:45] From international law to leading an AI project[02:53] What made a cautious team comfortable with AI[03:24] Pro bono experts who did not impose solutions[04:04] Attention is a luxury for humanitarian organisations[05:13] "We curate, we don't create" — countering compassion fatigue[05:59] Do no harm, neutrality, and innovating with care[07:06] Why AI must not be treated as an efficiency tool[07:55] Disaster surveillance: four people, days reclaimed quarterly[09:09] Does AI only automate the boring work?[10:24] The Thailand leptospirosis outbreak prediction model[11:21] Getting humanitarians comfortable acting on a prediction[12:47] Where AI changes the disaster cycle most[13:44] What outsiders get wrong about data efficiency[14:38] The line AI must not cross at the Red Cross[15:40] Why internal capability beats the models themselves[16:33] Where an organisation with no data team starts[17:19] The question people ask, and the one they should[18:04] AI as a cross-cutting theme over five years[19:01] ClosingPodcast Information: Bernard Leong hosts and produces the show. The proper credits for the intro and end music are "Energetic Sports Drive." G. Thomas Craig mixed and edited the episode in both video and audio format.

The Washington Post reports that the Red Cross's second-ever national blood crisis is being driven by a combination of extreme heat, poor air quality, foodborne illnesses, summer travel, and increased demand for blood transfusions. Donations have fallen to a four-year low, leaving supplies of key blood types critically low and prompting urgent appeals for donors nationwide. President Donald Trump is threatening to temporarily withdraw the nomination of Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche after two Republican senators continued blocking his confirmation, exposing a growing split within the GOP. Please Like, Comment and Follow 'Philip Teresi on KMJ' on all platforms: --- Philip Teresi on KMJ is available on the KMJNOW app, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube or wherever else you listen to podcasts. -- Philip Teresi on KMJ Weekdays 2-6 PM Pacific on News/Talk 580 AM & 105.9 FM KMJ | Website | Facebook | Instagram | X | Podcast | Amazon | - Everything KMJ KMJNOW App | Podcasts | Facebook | X | Instagram See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The Washington Post reports that the Red Cross's second-ever national blood crisis is being driven by a combination of extreme heat, poor air quality, foodborne illnesses, summer travel, and increased demand for blood transfusions. Donations have fallen to a four-year low, leaving supplies of key blood types critically low and prompting urgent appeals for donors nationwide. President Donald Trump is threatening to temporarily withdraw the nomination of Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche after two Republican senators continued blocking his confirmation, exposing a growing split within the GOP. Please Like, Comment and Follow 'Philip Teresi on KMJ' on all platforms: --- Philip Teresi on KMJ is available on the KMJNOW app, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube or wherever else you listen to podcasts. -- Philip Teresi on KMJ Weekdays 2-6 PM Pacific on News/Talk 580 AM & 105.9 FM KMJ | Website | Facebook | Instagram | X | Podcast | Amazon | - Everything KMJ KMJNOW App | Podcasts | Facebook | X | Instagram See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Meg Rossman of the Red Cross on blood shortages full 227 Thu, 30 Jul 2026 07:33:00 +0000 sskcsh6nGiZoIh3FboGdqvF3JvJyrvIQ news & politics,news WBEN Extras news & politics,news Meg Rossman of the Red Cross on blood shortages Archive of various reports and news events 2024 © 2021 Audacy, Inc. News & Politics News https://player.amperwavepodcasting.com?feed-lin

The news to know for Wednesday, July 29, 2026! We'll tell you about another escalation in the Middle East, as American, Saudi, and Iranian forces all launch new strikes. Also, another surge in the immigration crackdown, with more children and their sponsors being arrested. Plus, why the Red Cross is now offering gift cards for blood donations, how artificial intelligence is being used in job interviews, and the countdown to football season that starts now.   Those stories and even more news to know in about 15 minutes!    Join us every Mon-Fri for more daily news roundups!  See sources: https://www.theNewsWorthy.com/shownotes Become an INSIDER to get AD-FREE episodes here: https://www.theNewsWorthy.com/insider Get The NewsWorthy MERCH here: https://thenewsworthy.dashery.com/ Sponsors: For a limited time, get 60% off your first order, plus free shipping and free treats for life, when you head to Smalls.com/NEWSWORTHY. Search Whatnot—in the App Store, download, and you can sign-up and start selling right away! To advertise on our podcast, please reach out to ad-sales@libsyn.com    

The City of Broken Arrow faces an investigation after rejecting a mosque.Oklahoma's Red Cross is calling for blood donations amid a declared emergency.Cherokee singer-songwriter Kalyn Fay talks about her first album in seven years.You can find the KOSU Daily wherever you get your podcasts, you can also subscribe, rate us and leave a comment.You can keep up to date on all the latest news throughout the day at KOSU.org and make sure to follow us on Facebook, TikTok and Instagram at KOSU Radio.This is The KOSU Daily, Oklahoma news, every weekday.

A collective of charity op shops has banded together to shout about their significance to New Zealand. ReUse Aotearoa was launched last night at Parliament. Habitat for Humanity, Hato Hone St John, Hospice NZ, Red Cross, Salvation Army, SPCA and St Vincent de Paul are all involved. Their aim is to highlight their impact on the economy, community and environment. Gareth Marshall is the ReUse Aotearoa collective chairperson, he's also The Salvation Army Family Store's National Manager, he chats to Jesse.

Segment 1: Red Cross Declares National Blood Shortage Host Charlie James brings on Jamie Raychel from the American Red Cross (South Carolina Upstate Chapter) to address a critical national blood emergency. Raychel confirms that blood supplies have plummeted to a four-year low, leaving many hospitals with less than a single day's supply of O-positive blood—the most common type used in emergency transfusions. She emphasizes that because blood cannot be manufactured and has a limited shelf life, regular public donations are essential to save lives. Callers express support for the cause, noting local drives at churches and military bases, while encouraging listeners to make appointments online to help rebuild the supply. Segment 2: Public Backlash Over Pandemic Mask Policies The conversation shifts to growing public frustration regarding COVID-19 pandemic protocols, specifically mask mandates. Charlie highlights a newly referenced March 2020 internal NIH email sent to Dr. Anthony Fauci, which acknowledged early on that community mask-wearing showed negligible differences in overall infection rates. Callers voice their dissatisfaction with public health officials, pointing to state and national leaders who enforced strict lockdowns and mandates despite conflicting data. A caller shares an anecdote from his dentist comparing cloth masks to "a chain-link fence trying to stop water," reflecting a widespread sentiment that many health policies were driven more by control than efficacy. Segment 3: Dr. Fauci Invokes the Fifth Amendment Charlie delves into the legal fallout surrounding Dr. Anthony Fauci, who invoked his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination 121 times during a recent hearing. The host analyzes the legal tension between a presidential pardon and the Fifth Amendment, referencing historic Supreme Court precedents (United States v. Wilson, Burdick v. United States) establishing that accepting a pardon implies an admission of guilt and waives Fifth Amendment protections. Charlie ponders whether Fauci's reliance on the Fifth Amendment effectively rejects his presidential pardon, leaving him exposed to potential legal accountability. Callers weigh in on potential civil lawsuits, corporate accountability for pharmaceutical companies, and the long-term impact on public trust.

Host Charlie James speaks with Jamie Rachel from the American Red Cross Upstate South Carolina Chapter regarding a severe national blood shortage that has dropped local hospital supplies to critical levels. Rachel emphasizes the urgency for public donations and outlines how residents can easily make appointments. Following the interview, callers chime in to debate health policies, express frustration over past COVID-19 mandates, and discuss local political leadership and public health appointments in South Carolina.

These are the top headlines from Arab News, the Middle East's leading English-language daily, on Tuesday July 28 at 6am GMT. - New round of Israel-Lebanon talks set August 4: US official - Trump says he is ready for military action if Iran talks fail, Axios reports - Netanyahu arrives in the US, says Iran is top agenda in meeting with Trump - Israel releases 60 Palestinian detainees as Red Cross facilitates Gaza transfer - Rights group warns of mounting health risks in wake of Israeli closures around Nablus Check out the latest updates on https://arabnews.com

Rodolfo Gonzalez has been charged with intentional homicide, arson, and mutilating a corpse for allegedly fatally stabbing his mother, covering her head with cat litter, and then setting fire to her New London apartment Sunday.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Last time we spoke about the Japanese offensive at Changsha. In late September 1941, fighting in China had become a brutal struggle of endurance. Japanese forces kept pushing forward, but China—though battered by heavy losses—refused to yield. Help from abroad was slowly beginning to matter. American aid reached China through groups like the Red Cross, and volunteers later associated with the Flying Tigers offered crucial support to Chinese operations. Against this backdrop, Changsha in Hunan became the center of a dangerous autumn campaign. Chiang Kai-shek and the Nationalist leadership treated the city as strategically vital, knowing that its fate could influence the wider course of the war. In the end, the resistance at Changsha showed China's key advantage: resilience. The city's defense helped slow the Japanese advance, break up momentum, and create uncertainty as the campaign continued.   #212 The Autumn Battle of Changsha, 1941 Welcome to the Fall and Rise of China Podcast, I am your dutiful host Craig Watson. But, before we start I want to also remind you this podcast is only made possible through the efforts of Kings and Generals over at Youtube. Perhaps you want to learn more about the history of Asia? Kings and Generals have an assortment of episodes on history of asia and much more  so go give them a look over on Youtube. So please subscribe to Kings and Generals over at Youtube and to continue helping us produce this content please check out www.patreon.com/kingsandgenerals. If you are still hungry for some more history related content, over on my channel, the Pacific War Channel where I cover the history of China and Japan from the 19th century until the end of the Pacific War. In late September 1941, the war in China had already entered its fifth year. By then the conflict had lost whatever remained of novelty and had settled into something harsher and more exhausting: a long war of attrition fought across enormous distances, under conditions of chronic shortage, strategic uncertainty, and repeated local catastrophe. Japan still possessed formidable military strength. Its armies could strike hard, move fast, and exploit superior firepower, air support, and communications in individual campaigns. Yet the larger shape of the war had begun to change. China had not collapsed. The Nationalist government still stood. Chinese armies, however battered, still held the field. The line between survival and defeat remained dangerously thin, but it had not broken. This was the situation in which the autumn campaign in Hunan and Hubei unfolded.   The struggle around Changsha did not occur in isolation. It belonged to a wider military and political moment. In Europe, the war had already expanded into a continent-wide convulsion. Germany and the Soviet Union were locked in a massive struggle after the German invasion in June. Leningrad was under threat, Kiev had become the scene of disaster, and the approach of the battle for Moscow suggested that still greater bloodshed lay ahead. Stalin had pressed Churchill to open a second front in Europe and had been refused. The global balance of war was shifting, but not yet in any way that guaranteed relief to China.   In Asia, Japan continued to press forward. The pressure on China remained immense. Yet by mid-1941 China's position, though still precarious, no longer looked quite as desperate as it had in earlier years. International sympathy had grown. Material aid, however limited, was beginning to take more concrete form. In July, the American Red Cross sent China medical supplies worth millions of dollars. In August, more than a hundred retired American pilots and mechanics came together to aid China against Japan. The air unit they formed, later celebrated as the Flying Tigers, meant more than aircraft and personnel alone. It signaled that China's war was no longer quite so isolated. That change in atmosphere did not produce calm in Chongqing. It sharpened urgency.   For Chiang Kai-shek, the possibility that the international situation might slowly improve for China carried with it a hard implication: China had to endure long enough to benefit from it. That meant surviving not in abstract terms, but in particular places, against particular offensives, at moments when a local defeat might have consequences far beyond the immediate battlefield. In the autumn of 1941, one of those places was Changsha. Changsha had long occupied an outsized place in the military geography of the war. It stood as the capital of Hunan, a hinge between regions, and a vital position in the defense of central China. Its security affected the Xiang River basin, communications across the province, and the broader defensive posture shielding approaches toward the wartime capital. To lose it, even temporarily, would be more than a symbolic blow. It would threaten the larger balance of the front in south-central China and test whether Japanese offensives could still force dramatic strategic results.   At the same time, the battle for Changsha was not a simple contest between one Chinese army and one Japanese army facing each other across a fixed line. It was part of a larger operational struggle linking the Ninth War Zone with supporting actions from the Third, Fifth, and Sixth War Zones. It involved frontal resistance, hurried reinforcement, mobile defense, rear harassment, and the constant effort to turn Japanese momentum into Japanese overextension. Chinese commanders were trying not merely to survive a blow, but to absorb it, stretch it, and eventually strike back against an enemy whose speed could become a liability once supply lines lengthened and formations dispersed. This was the burden resting on the Military Commission in Chongqing.   There, while reports arrived in fragments and maps were revised hour by hour, Chiang Kai-shek spent long stretches in the operations room watching the situation in Hunan and Hubei develop. He had already ordered the various war zones to support the Ninth War Zone's operations, and now he followed the campaign with intense concentration. His attention moved repeatedly toward reports from the Sixth War Zone and Chen Cheng's counteroffensive toward Yichang, for Yichang was tied not only to local fighting in Hubei but also to the defense of the Yangtze approach and therefore to the security of Chongqing itself. In his mind, Hunan and Hubei had become the focal point of China's war effort in that season.   Meanwhile at the front, the situation was deteriorating fast. Japanese forces pressing into northern Hunan had already imposed severe strain on the Chinese defense. Blocking units had been battered back. Communications were uncertain. Some formations fought stubbornly but could not hold; others dissolved more quickly than hoped. The Japanese advance toward Changsha created exactly the kind of crisis Chinese commanders feared most: one in which the enemy moved with enough force and speed to threaten a major city before a coherent defensive response could be reassembled. Chinese units had to be thrown into action as they arrived, often after exhausting marches, often with incomplete knowledge of the situation, and often under immediate pressure from artillery, aircraft, and aggressive infantry assaults. Yet even at this dangerous stage, the campaign contained an opportunity as well as a threat.   The deeper Japanese units pushed into Hunan, the more exposed their rear became. Supply depots, transport lines, and communications stretched farther behind the spearhead. Chinese formations that had been driven aside were not always destroyed; some remained capable of reappearing to strike roads, depots, and isolated detachments. If Changsha represented the visible center of the struggle, the enemy rear represented its hidden vulnerability. The Chinese aim, therefore, was not simply to defend passively around the city. It was to combine stubborn resistance in front with harassment and disruption behind, so that Japanese advance would become increasingly difficult to sustain. The battle that followed unfolded under these pressures: a threatened city, a strained but unbroken defense, commanders forced to improvise under severe danger, and a wider international war that made every local decision feel heavier than the ground on which it was taken.   This subtle improvement in China's larger situation did not mean safety. China was still battered, under-resourced, and vulnerable. Japanese forces still possessed enormous advantages in mobility, firepower, and air power in many sectors. Large parts of the country remained occupied or threatened. Yet by mid-1941 something in the atmosphere had changed. In July, the American Red Cross sent China medical supplies worth millions of dollars. In August, more than a hundred retired American pilots and mechanics came together to aid China in its struggle against Japan. The air unit they formed would become famous under the name by which China knew them: the Flying Tigers. Their significance exceeded their immediate tactical value. They represented a visible sign that China was not entirely abandoned to isolation.   For Claire Chennault, romantic, aggressive, and optimistic by temperament, the new situation encouraged increasingly bold thoughts. For the first time he included in his planning the idea that Japanese home territory might one day be bombed from bases in China. Such schemes were ambitious and perhaps premature, but their very existence reveals an altered horizon of possibility. A country that imagines striking back is already psychologically in a different position from one concerned only with preventing collapse.     Yichang mattered directly to the fighting in Xiangbei, but it also mattered independently. It was tied to the security of the Yangtze approach and therefore to the defense of Chongqing. It belonged not only to the immediate problem of battlefield maneuver but to the larger question of whether China could do more than absorb Japanese offensives. Could Chinese forces exploit enemy overstretch? Could Japanese advances be turned into liabilities? Could local counterattacks and rear harassment generate effects greater than the raw size of the forces involved? By September 1941, these questions were no longer hypothetical. They were urgent. In Chiang's mind, Hunan and Hubei had become the focal point of China's war effort in that season.   The struggle around Changsha was central to that effort. From Chongqing, Chiang telegraphed Commander Xue Yue of the Ninth War Zone with instructions that made both the danger and the opportunity plain. The message emphasized that the enemy in northern Hunan, though still pressing hard, had already been bravely intercepted by Chinese units and was now exhausted, with lines of advance increasingly difficult to sustain. This, Chiang argued, created an excellent opportunity for Chinese forces to strike at the enemy's rear and seek annihilation rather than mere delay. He urged officers and soldiers alike to remain determined to destroy the enemy. Even if Japanese troops advanced to the vicinity of Changsha itself, Chinese forces were to renew their efforts, maintain their confidence in victory, and prevent the enemy from establishing a foothold.   The telegram also pointed to the broader operational picture. Japanese troops drawn from the sectors of the Fifth and Sixth War Zones had been committed to the invasion of northern Hunan, leaving their rear areas dangerously exposed. The Third, Fifth, and Sixth War Zones had launched supporting offensives on the twenty-third. Therefore, the Ninth War Zone had to strike resolutely and fiercely, preventing the Japanese from coordinating their forces and frustrating any attempt to occupy Changsha. The message was at once exhortation and operational logic. It reflected the core Chinese problem in the campaign: the Japanese thrust was dangerous and had to be blocked, but the very speed and depth of that thrust could also expose the attacker. Yet by the time Chiang sent his instructions, the danger around Changsha was already severe. After the 74th Army had been beaten back, there was no major Chinese force north of the city that could confidently block the Japanese advance in a straightforward, stable line. The Japanese 4th Division, together with the Hayabuchi Detachment, had defeated the 95th Division of the Chinese 37th Army and pushed toward Changsha. The prospect that the city might fall, at least temporarily, was no longer remote.   In response, Xia Chuzhong's 79th Army from the Sixth War Zone was ordered to move toward the city. Its vanguard was Wang Jiaben's 98th Division. That movement was a forced march in the literal sense. It was not a flourish of language but an admission of emergency. Troops were pushed beyond ordinary endurance because there was no time to gather strength under favorable conditions. Changsha could not wait for convenience, rest, or ideal concentration. Either reinforcements arrived in time to fight immediately, or they arrived too late to matter. Wang Jiaben was no stranger to battle. A veteran officer from the Yunnan Army, he had fought the Japanese repeatedly—more than twenty times since the outbreak of the War of Resistance. He belonged to that generation of commanders who had been shaped by the fragmented military politics of Republican China but whose careers were now being rewritten by the national emergency of the anti-Japanese war.   During the First Battle of Changsha, he had already distinguished himself. He led troops in a counterattack along the Tongcheng line in southern Hubei and intercepted retreating Japanese forces at Longmenchang and Changshoujie, killing more than a thousand enemy soldiers. He had experience, reputation, and a sense of what it meant to fight in the Changsha theater. This time he marched from Changde, driving his division forward with all possible speed. By noon on September 26 the 98th Division reached a position about two kilometers northeast of Changsha. There was scarcely time to settle the men. No careful preparation was possible. They had arrived because the city was in danger, and battle began almost at once. At dusk the division engaged the Hayabuchi Detachment.   The fighting continued until late in the night without decisive result. That in itself was costly enough. Troops who have just completed a punishing march are already close to the limits of their endurance. To be thrown immediately into combat magnifies every weakness: thirst, fatigue, confusion, and the difficulty of building fieldworks under pressure. What the soldiers of the 98th Division could do that night, they did with their hands and whatever tools they had. They scraped positions out of the earth. They assembled makeshift cover. Officers moved along the line trying to impose order on terrain that had become a battlefield almost as soon as it was occupied. At dawn on September 27 the Japanese intensified the pressure from the air.   More than twenty aircraft bombed the 98th Division's positions, tearing apart the earthworks that officers and soldiers had spent the night constructing. Bombing had a double effect. Physically, it damaged positions, wounded men, and disrupted preparations. Psychologically, it reminded defenders that they were being observed from above and struck by an enemy against whom they could often do little in the sky. Immediately after the bombing came a fierce infantry assault. Wang Jiaben and several other commanders went down to their respective regiments to supervise the fighting personally. This was dangerous, but under such circumstances commanders often believed that presence itself mattered. When fieldworks are collapsing, shell bursts are continuous, and communications are unreliable, authority must sometimes be carried by a body rather than a wire. The defenders held.   Again and again the Japanese attacked. Again and again they were repulsed only to reorganize and come on once more. Every minute the Chinese line remained in place was bought with blood. Fallen and wounded men were carried rearward in what seemed an endless stream. The cost of resistance accumulated visibly before the eyes of those still fighting. By noon even water could no longer be delivered to the front. That detail reveals the intensity of the battle more clearly than many grander statements could. A line that cannot be supplied even with water has reached a condition of severe strain. During brief pauses in the fighting, officers and soldiers pulled out dry rations and chewed them slowly, swallowing with difficulty while they waited for the next attack. Such moments are among the most characteristic in battle: not the long, smooth continuity imagined in peacetime rhetoric, but brief interludes of miserable necessity between explosions. At two in the afternoon the crisis deepened sharply.   A unit of the Japanese 4th Division worked its way behind the 98th Division's position and attacked from the rear. This was the kind of tactical development every defending commander dreads. A force can endure heavy frontal pressure if its line remains coherent and its rear reasonably secure. But when enemy troops appear behind a position, the entire structure of defense begins to dissolve. There, behind the line, were more than a hundred Chinese wounded awaiting evacuation. Japanese soldiers attacked them with bayonets. One of the wounded Chinese soldiers, already beyond ordinary capacity for resistance, rushed forward and detonated a grenade against a Japanese attacker. It was an act of desperation, but also of defiance. The episode captures something essential about the tone of the battle around Changsha. This was not a neat engagement between organized lines alone. It was a desperate collision in which even the badly wounded were drawn into last resistance. For Wang Jiaben, however, the tactical reality was impossible to deny. If he stayed where he was, the division might be annihilated. Personal courage could not alter encirclement. Resentfully, bitterly, and under the kind of pressure that leaves permanent scars on a commander's memory, he ordered retreat. When he led the survivors off the battlefield, fewer than half his men remained.   Reinforcements from another direction now entered the struggle. The Provisional 2nd Army of the Seventh War Zone dispatched the Provisional 8th Division under Zhang Junsong. At seven in the evening on September 27, Zhang's force arrived at Zuojiatang on the eastern outskirts of Changsha. Personnel of the Ninth War Zone waiting there reported grim news: a Japanese detachment had already entered the city that afternoon, and another detachment was only three kilometers away. The situation invited rashness. A commander arriving near a threatened city at dusk, with reports that the enemy is already inside, may feel compelled to hurl troops forward immediately in a gesture of resolution. Yet night fighting in an urban approach without adequate reconnaissance can turn courage into waste. Zhang Junsong considered the matter carefully. He concluded that to rush blindly into the city at night would likely produce confusion and heavy losses. Instead he first sought to strike the enemy outside the city. His troops deployed quietly and crept forward through the darkness, launching a probing attack. But they soon discovered that the Japanese were fully prepared and not vulnerable to easy surprise. The line could not be broken. With no prospect of success, the force withdrew.   The moment is revealing because it shows how narrow the margin had become. Chinese commanders were trying to recover initiative while still groping through uncertainty. Reports were incomplete, Japanese dispositions difficult to fix, and every hour dangerous. On the evening of September 28, the 79th Army's 6th Provisional Division occupied Yuelu Mountain west of Changsha. From that height officers and soldiers looked across the Xiang River toward the city. Changsha, for the first time, was in Japanese hands. The emotional force of that sight can only be imagined. Changsha had lived for years under threat. It had been defended, contested, prepared, and feared. The possibility of its loss had hovered over military planning and public consciousness alike. Now the danger had become fact. A city that had stood as an object of effort and anxiety was visibly occupied by the enemy. No single feeling could have governed the men who saw it. There must have been anger, shame, weariness, and dread—but also stubbornness. For in war a city seen in enemy hands is not always simply lost. Sometimes it is a summons.   Late that night Zhao Jiping, commander of the 6th Provisional Division, received a telegram from Xue Yue. He read it and then stood before the map for a long time. Days of anxiety began to lift. He was not alone in that reaction. Many Chinese generals involved in the campaign had felt that they were fighting a confused and chaotic battle. Japanese movements had been broad, rapid, and difficult to pin down. The Ninth War Zone had thrown numerous units into blocking actions, yet both well-regarded formations and weaker, improvised units had repeatedly failed to hold. After ten days of combat, Chinese losses were heavy. But Japanese forces too had been worn, stretched, and damaged. Only now, as the Japanese reached the apparent culmination of their advance, did the Ninth War Zone begin to recover rhythm. Chaos did not disappear, but it became more legible. The possibility of a more ordered counteroffensive emerged.   In the early hours of September 29, Zhao Jiping issued the order to force a crossing of the Xiang River and attack the enemy in Changsha. The preparations consumed the entire day. River crossings under combat conditions are among the most delicate operations in war. Boats must be assembled or found. Units must be organized into waves. Timing matters. Surprise matters. The location of landing points matters. The men themselves matter most of all, because they must sit exposed in fragile craft knowing that the real test will begin not in the middle of the river but at the far bank. Late that night the division crossed secretly by boat in six groups. The crossing itself went well enough. The river did not betray them. The groups made progress in darkness. Yet everyone involved understood that smooth movement on the water did not guarantee success. The crucial question was what waited at the landing points. It was expected that the troops going ashore at Daximen would be first to meet the Japanese. Once battle began there, the rest of the crossing accelerated.   Chinese soldiers landed, attacked fiercely, and drove the enemy back from the riverbank. The momentum of the assault mattered. In such moments hesitation on shore can doom an entire crossing, but aggression can seize a foothold before the defender fully stabilizes. By the time Chinese forces entered the city, dawn was breaking. Then came street fighting. Changsha had ceased to be an objective on a map. It became again what cities become in war: a place of corners, walls, alleys, debris, smoke, and sudden death. Fighting in a city strips away much of the abstraction through which campaigns are often remembered. Streets channel movement. Buildings become cover, obstacles, or traps. Distances shrink but danger multiplies. A few men behind masonry can delay many more. Noise magnifies confusion. The city itself seems to fragment into a hundred separate battlefields. For Changsha, the long season of anxious anticipation ended in direct flame.   Yet to understand the campaign only through the struggle at Changsha would be incomplete. While the city drew attention as the central prize, another set of operations was unfolding across Hunan and Hubei—less dramatic in appearance perhaps, but strategically significant. These were the actions of the 27th Army Group under Yang Sen. If the fighting around Changsha demonstrated the pressure of frontal battle, Yang Sen's operations illustrated another principle entirely: the stubborn, opportunistic use of weaker forces to harass, sting, and trouble a stronger enemy from behind. The 27th Army Group was composed largely of Sichuan troops. Their presence speaks to one of the larger political transformations of the war. Republican China had long been fractured by regional militarism. Armies had often owed stronger loyalty to commanders, provinces, or local power structures than to any unified national command. Yet the anti-Japanese war compelled a partial reordering of those loyalties. Many warlord forces, however imperfectly integrated, now turned their weapons outward under Nationalist command.   There were exceptions. Some men, like Han Fuqu, had preserved their own strength at the cost of military responsibility and lost both opportunity and honor in doing so. But in the main, especially among middle and lower-ranking officers and ordinary soldiers, the imperative of national survival overrode provincial identity. Men from distant regions marched and fought in terrains not their own because the war no longer permitted a narrow conception of interest. Yang Sen himself was an old warlord soldier, one of those figures formed in the fractured military world of earlier decades. By 1941 he was deputy commander of the Ninth War Zone and commander-in-chief of the 27th Army Group. Along the Hunan-Hubei-Jiangxi border he had long been cautious in his operations.   At the beginning of the northern Hunan battle, his troops proved unable to withstand the force of the Japanese offensive and retreated in disorder into mountains and forests. That fact should not be softened. They were pushed back. But retreat did not mean disappearance. This is where Yang Sen's role became important. Once the main Japanese force had advanced far ahead, the troops that had scattered began to reemerge. They knew the terrain. They knew the roads, villages, passes, and wooded approaches. If they could not defeat the Japanese in a grand collision, they could search for openings behind the advancing columns.   On September 20, as the Japanese main force drove into the heart of northern Hunan, Yang Sen led elements of the 4th, 58th, and 20th Armies in pursuit for an entire day. The main body of the 4th Army had already been badly beaten at the Xinqiang River line, and only the 60th Division, recently transferred from the 37th Army, remained relatively intact. That single fact sharply defined the weakness of his means. He was not pursuing with fresh and powerful forces prepared for a decisive encounter. He was pursuing with fragments, survivors, and such units as still retained some offensive potential. But the Japanese, intent on rapid advance southward, paid too little attention to what followed behind them. That was the opening Yang Sen needed.   On the morning of September 21, the 60th Division acted on information supplied by an old beggar. Such details often sound almost literary, but they remind us that war in China was never fought by armies alone. Villagers, refugees, peddlers, guides, boatmen, and the destitute all participated in the circulation of military knowledge. A beggar could see what a reconnaissance officer had missed. On the basis of that tip, the 60th Division launched a surprise attack on the supply depot of the Japanese 40th Division at Zhangjiayuan. Division Commander Dong Yu led the action.   The Chinese quickly overwhelmed the more than three hundred Japanese troops guarding the depot. Once they broke in, they discovered an astonishing quantity of matériel: shell boxes, ammunition, food, medicine, gasoline, explosives, protective clothing, telephone wire, body bags, stretchers, and more, all stacked beneath heavy canvas. For men accustomed to scarcity, it must have seemed almost unreal. Dong Yu, delighted, is remembered as exclaiming to his deputy commander, "It's practically a department store!" The line has a momentary comic brightness in the middle of war, and that is part of why it survives. But its deeper significance lies in what it reveals. A modern army advancing deep into hostile territory is sustained by accumulation—ammunition, fuel, wire, medicines, rations, transport materials. To seize such a depot is not merely to take objects. It is to grasp the hidden skeleton of movement. Dong Yu then issued a one-word order: "Move."   At once the whole division became a swarm of carriers. Officers and soldiers grabbed whatever they could and began hauling the captured supplies away. The scene must have been one of extraordinary improvised energy—riflemen transformed into laborers, war reduced for a moment to the brute physical act of lifting, dragging, and carrying. They moved like ants dismantling a storehouse. But there was too much to remove and too little time. Before even two regiments had completed the work, the Japanese returned in force. Enraged, they sent more than a dozen aircraft to bomb the troops carrying off the captured crates, while over a thousand infantrymen rushed in on the ground. Dong Yu immediately ordered the men to abandon what remained and destroy it. Amid deafening explosions, the 60th Division withdrew from Zhangjiayuan. The Japanese pursued hard, driving them back into the mountains before finally stopping. Measured purely in terms of territorial occupation, the action changed little. The Chinese did not hold the depot. They were forced back again. But judged in operational terms, the raid mattered. Supplies had been captured, destroyed, or disrupted. Japanese rear security had been embarrassed. Time and energy had been consumed in response. In a campaign where the Japanese were racing south and depending increasingly on stretched lines, such harassment was not trivial.   After September 23, Yang Sen expanded these efforts. He sent whole divisions to harass the Japanese rear while also dispatching battalions and companies to ambush supply columns and disrupt transport lines. This was not the kind of warfare that produces neat dramatic maps in conventional military histories. The actions were scattered, local, opportunistic, and often inconclusive. Yet precisely for that reason they can be misunderstood. Not every useful military action ends in the destruction of an enemy division. Sometimes its value lies in forcing a stronger opponent to spend attention where he had hoped to spend only momentum. These operations were costly and uncertain. Small Chinese units striking roads and depots risked encirclement or aerial punishment. Yet they possessed one advantage: they did not need to win a grand battle to matter. They needed only to make movement harder, supply more precarious, and the rear less secure.   On September 25, even after the 26th and 37th Armies had suffered defeat elsewhere, Yang Sen gathered the troops that still retained some offensive capacity and launched another attack. In these actions, the 90th Division captured Wukou; the 59th Division reached the north bank of the Miluo River; the 60th Division advanced to Donggang; and elements of the 58th Army controlled the Yuanba–Zheyangqiao highway line by the twenty-sixth. These gains were not the dramatic centerpiece of the campaign. But they formed part of the cumulative pressure on Japanese operations. Every road contested from the rear, every convoy threatened, every depot exposed, and every forced diversion of troops weakened the enemy's ability to convert tactical advance into stable success.   The battlefield was fluid enough that Yang Sen's headquarters itself had to keep moving—from the Miluo River northward to Pingjiang. Mobile headquarters in such conditions lived under constant uncertainty. Reports arrived late or contradictory. Rumors outran facts. The front could bend in unpredictable ways. A command post that seemed safely behind the line in the morning might by afternoon lie only a few kilometers from enemy forces. Years later Mao Jiuyin, who had then served as an operations staff officer under Yang Sen, recalled the old commander's outward behavior in those dangerous days. Yang Sen, Mao remembered, was always joking with the people around him and could still laugh and talk during battle. On one occasion he even joked with his bodyguard about putting chili oil in his tea. To younger staff officers, such behavior appeared almost absurd.   Yet they knew how dangerous their situation often was. Sometimes they were only a few kilometers from the main Japanese forces. There is more than anecdote in this memory. Old commanders often cultivated a style of ease under danger not because they felt no fear, but because they believed visible calm itself was part of command. Men take emotional bearings from those above them. A commander who panics spreads panic faster than any enemy breakthrough. Yang Sen was sixty years old during the Second Battle of Changsha, and he liked to remark that he was five years older than Chiang Kai-shek. Age had not removed him from the front. His function in the campaign was not to shatter the enemy in one decisive frontal blow. It was to persist, reappear, sting, and remain troublesome. The 27th Army Group followed the Japanese nearly all the way to the outskirts of Changsha.   They did not fight many large set-piece engagements. That was never their main value. But the Japanese could not ignore them. If Japanese units turned and tried to hit them directly, they tended to dissolve into the landscape. If the Japanese pushed on and ignored them, they reappeared to sabotage roads, hit supply lines, and create alarms in the rear. Even Japanese official histories later described them memorably. They called them "like a swarm of annoying flies." The phrase was meant as contempt. But as so often happens in war, an insult became an accurate description of effect. If these Chinese troops could not be tigers in formal battle, they could still become intolerable as flies. And under certain conditions—fatigue, heat, uncertainty, stretched supply, shaken morale—flies can become more oppressive than an enemy would like to admit.   When later generations look back on campaigns, they often search for a single explanatory image. But the fighting of September 1941 resists reduction to one symbol alone. What gives the campaign its force in memory is not one isolated episode, but the convergence of several pressures at once: a city under threat, a command trying to coordinate multiple fronts, exhausted reinforcements thrown directly into battle, Japanese forces advancing quickly but becoming increasingly vulnerable the farther they pushed, and Chinese troops in the rear refusing to disappear after defeat. Seen from Chongqing, the campaign was a matter of telegrams, maps, and the management of strategic risk. Seen from the front, it was a matter of thirst, mud, broken fieldworks, sudden bombing, exhausted marching, and the uncertainty of whether the next order meant reinforcement, retreat, or death. Seen from the Japanese side, it was initially an aggressive advance toward an important objective, but one increasingly troubled by stretched supply, difficult terrain, and the persistent reappearance of Chinese forces behind the line of movement.   At the same time, the campaign reveals a Chinese war effort that had become more resilient than in the earliest years of the conflict. The Japanese advance toward Changsha was dangerous and at moments appeared close to success. Chinese blocking forces suffered severe defeats. Units arrived exhausted and were hurled into action at once. Commanders lost men at devastating rates. Changsha itself briefly fell into enemy hands. And yet the city was not simply surrendered as an accomplished fact. Chinese forces regrouped. Orders were coordinated across war zones. Reinforcements marched at desperate speed. Counterattacks were mounted. Forces west of the Xiang prepared and crossed back into the city. Elsewhere, troops under Yang Sen gnawed at the Japanese rear and made advance more costly than a map of front lines alone might suggest. This combination of desperate frontal resistance and incessant rear harassment was one of the characteristic strengths of China's resistance in this stage of the war. China could not always match Japanese power in one concentrated blow. But it could absorb, delay, fragment, and trouble that power across space and time. That is why the struggle around Changsha in late September 1941 deserves to be remembered not merely as a sequence of engagements, but as a layered event in which tactical battle, morale, logistics, political endurance, and international context all converged.   I would like to take this time to remind you all that this podcast is only made possible through the efforts of Kings and Generals over at Youtube. Please go subscribe to Kings and Generals over at Youtube and to continue helping us produce this content please check out www.patreon.com/kingsandgenerals. If you are still hungry after that, give my personal channel a look over at The Pacific War Channel at Youtube, it would mean a lot to me. In late September 1941, Japan pushed deeper into China, but Chinese forces—supported gradually by international help—kept resisting. Changsha in Hunan became the central point of the conflict, seen as vital to strategic control in south-central China. Meanwhile, elsewhere in Hunan and Hubei, Yang Sen's 27th Army Group—often using smaller, opportunistic actions—reappeared behind Japanese lines to disrupt depots and convoys. Even when Chinese gains were temporary, the cumulative pressure delayed Japanese momentum.       

Find out more on the extreme need from Carrie Carlson Guest on the WCCO Morning News.

Find out more on the extreme need from Carrie Carlson Guest on the WCCO Morning News.

The American Red Cross is warning of a national blood emergency after the nation's blood supply dropped nearly 25%, raising concerns that lifesaving blood may not be available when patients need it most. This as hospitals brace for the busiest weeks of summer trauma season, the stretch between Memorial Day and Labor Day when emergency room volume normally spikes by 15% to 27%. All blood types are urgently needed, with immediate demand highest for Type O, B negative, and AB plasma. FOX's Tonya J. Powers speaks with Dr. Courtney Lawrence, Red Cross Division Chief Medical Officer, who explains why donations are urgently needed now, who is at greatest risk, and what people can do today to help prevent a worsening blood shortage. Click Here⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ To Follow 'The FOX News Rundown: Evening Edition' Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The American Red Cross is warning of a national blood emergency after the nation's blood supply dropped nearly 25%, raising concerns that lifesaving blood may not be available when patients need it most. This as hospitals brace for the busiest weeks of summer trauma season, the stretch between Memorial Day and Labor Day when emergency room volume normally spikes by 15% to 27%. All blood types are urgently needed, with immediate demand highest for Type O, B negative, and AB plasma. FOX's Tonya J. Powers speaks with Dr. Courtney Lawrence, Red Cross Division Chief Medical Officer, who explains why donations are urgently needed now, who is at greatest risk, and what people can do today to help prevent a worsening blood shortage. Click Here⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ To Follow 'The FOX News Rundown: Evening Edition' Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The American Red Cross is warning of a national blood emergency after the nation's blood supply dropped nearly 25%, raising concerns that lifesaving blood may not be available when patients need it most. This as hospitals brace for the busiest weeks of summer trauma season, the stretch between Memorial Day and Labor Day when emergency room volume normally spikes by 15% to 27%. All blood types are urgently needed, with immediate demand highest for Type O, B negative, and AB plasma. FOX's Tonya J. Powers speaks with Dr. Courtney Lawrence, Red Cross Division Chief Medical Officer, who explains why donations are urgently needed now, who is at greatest risk, and what people can do today to help prevent a worsening blood shortage. Click Here⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ To Follow 'The FOX News Rundown: Evening Edition' Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

In the final hour Jeff trolls Mayor Wimpy some more then chats with Jonathan McNamara from the Red Cross.

Amy King hosts your Wednesday Wake Up Call. Amy opens the show talking with ABC News correspondent Jordana Miller, reporting live from Jerusalem, about the latest coming out of the Middle East. On this week’s edition of ‘Amy’s on It’ she highlights the ‘X-Files.’ Due to the national blood shortage and Amy’s conversation with the Red Cross yesterday, today she speaks on Fullerton Fire holding a Gift of Life Blood Drive happening July 29th. The Show closes with Amy talking with the Media Manager for Friends of Big Bear Valley Jenny Voisard about how Jackie, the viral bald eagle, is doing after being rescued and now recovering in critical condition at the Ojai Raptor Center in Ojai, CA.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

It's Tuesday, July 21. Here are today's top stories around Central Indiana. Want to go deeper on the stories you hear on WFYI News Now? Visit wfyi.org and follow us on social media to get local news every day. WFYI News Now is hosted by Barb Anguiano and produced by Zach Bundy. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.

Amy King hosts your Tuesday Wake Up Call. ABC News White House correspondent Karen Travers discussing President Trump’s remarks regarding the service members who were killed by Iranian attacks. Amy talks with the Divisional Chief Medical Officer at the American Red Cross Dr. Courtney Lawrence about the shortage of blood donations nationally and how you can help. Bloomberg’s Denise Pellegrini joins the show to talk about data canters power use projections, LA’s $1.2BIL ‘Graffiti Towers,’ and why one person has to be miserable for everyone else to have fun at Disney parks. The show closes with Amy talking with the Executive Director & Co-Founder of Midsummer Scream David Markland about the upcoming Halloween & Horror Convention at the Marriott Long Beach Downtown.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Ken Quintanilla, executive director of the Guam Red Cross, delivers recovery updates after Super Typhoon Bavi; animal researchers Dr. Lisa "Cali" Crampton and Justin Hite raise awareness about the decline of Kauaʻi's native birds.

Amy talks with the Divisional Chief Medical Officer at the American Red Cross Dr. Courtney Lawrence about the shortage of blood donations nationally and what you can do to help. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Jonathan McNamara from The Red Cross talks with Gary about the blood shortage in Richmond.

The Red Cross, Amnesty International, Doctors Without Borders, Human Rights Watch, UNICEF and more — they're treated by governments and the media as neutral humanitarians working for everyone's rights and welfare. But as Danielle Haas tells Brian, a new investigation by her organization EiGHT found them rife with bias, particularly against Jews and Israel. It uncovered charities refusing to acknowledge atrocities committed by Hamas, while ostracizing and even dismissing workers who dared speak up about human rights violations and blatant antisemitism, including within the organizations themselves. EiGHT, made up of former NGO leaders, is calling for transparency and oversight for charities whose discrimination goes largely unscrutinized, despite raking in billions of dollars in donations and funding. (Recorded July 17, 2026) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

BB28 Thursday Live Feed Update July 16, 2026 Big Brother 28 is full of chaos as alliances scramble and plans shift in the lead-up to eviction night. In this live feed update recap, hosts Rob Cesternino and Taran Armstrong break down the biggest drama from Day 9 in the house. All eyes are on the showmances and side swaps as the campaign to keep Ashley spirals out of control—threatening to expose big alliances and leave players stranded. The episode dives into the fallout from Dee’s HoH reign and the messy aftermath of her nominations, with Mallory securing the Veto and Ashley becoming the replacement. The push from key players like Drew, Barrett, and Dee to save Ashley quickly turns into chaos when Ashley’s campaigning exposes the major voting bloc known as the “Red Cross” (crossovers and Red Corner). Ashley's confusion and eagerness to please lead her to name names and pitch to everyone, scaring off swing votes like Melody and Lyric and setting off a wave of distrust. Meanwhile, Drew and Barrett try to play the middle, but get exposed as indecisive when pressed for loyalty by their alliance members. Rome continues to shape the house mood with his casual yet influential gameplay, and Dee struggles with how to handle potential tie-breaker votes. Ashley's indiscreet campaigning unintentionally exposes Drew, Barrett, and Dee's alliance, shifting the house's focus against her. Melody and Lyric's worries about “sides” in the house cause them to reconsider keeping Ashley, changing the vote math. Drew and Barrett get caught between alliances, forced to publicly commit on eviction plans after being pushed by Melody. Dee's reluctance to break a tie against Taylor shows strategic hesitation and raises questions about her loyalty. Rome's laid-back approach keeps him influential, while Devens makes key moves convincing others that targeting Ashley poses less risk. With alliances exposed and the house split, players now wonder if cutting Ashley keeps the peace or just sets up the next big battle. Can Dee and her allies recover from the messy vote math, or will another alliance take control next week? Tune in to hear the full day's drama and where the game might go from here. Chapters: 00:00 Big Brother 28 Day Nine Begins 06:10 Chaos Over Ashley's Campaigning 12:00 Two Sides Emerge in BB28 House 18:50 Ashley Reveals House Alliances 24:10 Melody Sparks Eviction Panic 30:45 Drew and Barrett at a Crossroads 36:00 Ashley Becomes the BB28 Pariah 41:00 Dee and Drew Ditch Ashley 46:30 Haley Confronts Ashley Over Names 53:10 Rome's Influence on BB28 Game 59:55 Devens Seals Ashley's Fate 01:05:00 Kamu and Rome's Strategic Bond 01:11:00 Devens' “Dad Move” in the House 01:17:00 Ashley's Last Stand Before Eviction Never miss a minute of RHAP's extensive Big Brother coverage! LISTEN: Subscribe to the Big Brother podcast feed WATCH:  Watch and subscribe to the podcast on YouTube SUPPORT:  Become a RHAP Patron for bonus content, access to Facebook and Discord groups plus more great perks!

BB28 Thursday Live Feed Update July 16, 2026 Big Brother 28 is full of chaos as alliances scramble and plans shift in the lead-up to eviction night. In this live feed update recap, hosts Rob Cesternino and Taran Armstrong break down the biggest drama from Day 9 in the house. All eyes are on the showmances and side swaps as the campaign to keep Ashley spirals out of control—threatening to expose big alliances and leave players stranded. The episode dives into the fallout from Dee’s HoH reign and the messy aftermath of her nominations, with Mallory securing the Veto and Ashley becoming the replacement. The push from key players like Drew, Barrett, and Dee to save Ashley quickly turns into chaos when Ashley’s campaigning exposes the major voting bloc known as the “Red Cross” (crossovers and Red Corner). Ashley's confusion and eagerness to please lead her to name names and pitch to everyone, scaring off swing votes like Melody and Lyric and setting off a wave of distrust. Meanwhile, Drew and Barrett try to play the middle, but get exposed as indecisive when pressed for loyalty by their alliance members. Rome continues to shape the house mood with his casual yet influential gameplay, and Dee struggles with how to handle potential tie-breaker votes. Ashley's indiscreet campaigning unintentionally exposes Drew, Barrett, and Dee's alliance, shifting the house's focus against her. Melody and Lyric's worries about “sides” in the house cause them to reconsider keeping Ashley, changing the vote math. Drew and Barrett get caught between alliances, forced to publicly commit on eviction plans after being pushed by Melody. Dee's reluctance to break a tie against Taylor shows strategic hesitation and raises questions about her loyalty. Rome's laid-back approach keeps him influential, while Devens makes key moves convincing others that targeting Ashley poses less risk. With alliances exposed and the house split, players now wonder if cutting Ashley keeps the peace or just sets up the next big battle. Can Dee and her allies recover from the messy vote math, or will another alliance take control next week? Tune in to hear the full day's drama and where the game might go from here. Chapters: 00:00 Big Brother 28 Day Nine Begins 06:10 Chaos Over Ashley's Campaigning 12:00 Two Sides Emerge in BB28 House 18:50 Ashley Reveals House Alliances 24:10 Melody Sparks Eviction Panic 30:45 Drew and Barrett at a Crossroads 36:00 Ashley Becomes the BB28 Pariah 41:00 Dee and Drew Ditch Ashley 46:30 Haley Confronts Ashley Over Names 53:10 Rome's Influence on BB28 Game 59:55 Devens Seals Ashley's Fate 01:05:00 Kamu and Rome's Strategic Bond 01:11:00 Devens' “Dad Move” in the House 01:17:00 Ashley's Last Stand Before Eviction Never miss a minute of RHAP's extensive Big Brother coverage! LISTEN: Subscribe to the Big Brother podcast feed WATCH:  Watch and subscribe to the podcast on YouTube SUPPORT:  Become a RHAP Patron for bonus content, access to Facebook and Discord groups plus more great perks!

Read more from VPM News:  Dominion Energy moves forward with plans for Cumberland natural gas plant  Cooling resources for Central Virginia's latest heat wave    Other links:  American Red Cross of Virginia: Emergency Blood Shortage  Legal challenge seeking to block Va.'s reproductive rights constitutional amendment dismissed (Virginia Mercury)  Demolition begins on Mayo Island as city plans new park (Richmond Times-Dispatch)*  Major Richmond apartment operator hit with multistate fair housing complaint (The Richmonder)  Red Cross of Virginia urges blood donations as emergency shortage strains national supply (WRIC)  Rotary Club places Imagination Library shipments on hold, cites funding shortfalls (29 News)  *This outlet uses a paywall.  Our award-winning work is made possible with your donations. Visit vpm.org/donate to support local journalism.

There is a massive shortage in blood donations in Minnesota and the surrounding states and Brice Johnson, Regional CEO for the Red Cross - Minnesota and Dakotas joins us to discuss the problems Red Cross is currently facing when it comes to the peak trauma season throughout summer and not enough blood to keep up and the need for donors to step forward, even offering up a movie incentive as a reward for donors in partnership with Fandango!

The Red Cross warns of a critical blood shortage, Prairie Plates visits Fargo's Burger Royale winner, Tom Isern rethinks Western history, and Texas faces new floods.

Jesús Tobías was born in Saltillo, Coahuila, Mexico. He graduated with a degree in Mechanical and Electrical Engineering from Tecnológico de Monterrey in 1989. Since his student days, he has invented various products, most notably the “non-jamming socket wrench,” for which he won the National Youth Award for Science and Technology in 1990. He presented his invention at the World Inventors Exhibition in New York in 1991 and later exported it to several countries. He has founded several companies in both Mexico and the United States. He has also had the opportunity to work and give lectures in countries such as Colombia, China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Switzerland, and Germany, among others. Since 1988, he has delivered countless lectures in various countries to governments, companies, and international organizations such as General Motors, General Electric, Rotary International, and the Red Cross. In January 2015, he became the co-founder and president of the first Society for Transcendence in the world. He is the author of several books and, more recently, has been presenting his international lecture The 7 Codes of Happiness in numerous venues. He intends to take this lecture around the world to help foster a kinder and happier humanity. Many people have described this lecture as the most important they have ever attended. Jesús Tobías maintains that “our lives are so short that we should do only what we love.” https://www.jesustobias.com/english   (English Version) 

Jesús Tobías was born in Saltillo, Coahuila, Mexico. He graduated with a degree in Mechanical and Electrical Engineering from Tecnológico de Monterrey in 1989. Since his student days, he has invented various products, most notably the “non-jamming socket wrench,” for which he won the National Youth Award for Science and Technology in 1990. He presented his invention at the World Inventors Exhibition in New York in 1991 and later exported it to several countries. He has founded several companies in both Mexico and the United States. He has also had the opportunity to work and give lectures in countries such as Colombia, China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Switzerland, and Germany, among others. Since 1988, he has delivered countless lectures in various countries to governments, companies, and international organizations such as General Motors, General Electric, Rotary International, and the Red Cross. In January 2015, he became the co-founder and president of the first Society for Transcendence in the world. He is the author of several books and, more recently, has been presenting his international lecture The 7 Codes of Happiness in numerous venues. He intends to take this lecture around the world to help foster a kinder and happier humanity. Many people have described this lecture as the most important they have ever attended. Jesús Tobías maintains that “our lives are so short that we should do only what we love.” https://www.jesustobias.com/english   (Spanish Version) 

Twenty-plus deployments across the country. Coast to coast. And this month, Elizabeth Quinn was on standby to fly to Guam via Hawaii for a Category 5 typhoon response. On this episode of The Valley Today, host Janet Michael continues her year-long Red Cross series with Deb Fleming, Executive Director of the Greater Shenandoah Valley Chapter, joined by Elizabeth Quinn — the Disaster Health Services Lead and a retired nurse who leads the volunteer nursing team responsible for the health side of every Red Cross disaster response, from home fires down the street to hurricanes across the country. Elizabeth walks through what the nursing deployment actually looks like: contact within 24 hours of a disaster to help families replace prescriptions, glasses, dentures, hearing aids, CPAPs and BiPAPs, and other health essentials the survivors probably haven't even started to think about yet. She explains the community-based model (RN-led, with physicians serving under nurse supervision — Elizabeth's favorite perk), the streamlined 8.5-hour training (down from 20), and the game-changing option most new nurse volunteers don't know exists: virtual deployments, where a nurse anywhere in the country can serve disaster survivors from their kitchen table for a scheduled shift. Plus a genuinely powerful story from a Mississippi shelter, where a nurse stayed two hours after her shift to help a gentleman who couldn't read reconnect with over $6,000 in back benefits he'd already earned. Deb closes with a national update — home fires, a hydrochloric acid train spill, flooding in Minnesota and Michigan, the Guam typhoon, blood donation shortages, and FIFA World Cup event support — and teases next month's guest: Dave, the volunteer who maintains Red Cross buildings across multiple regions (assuming she can convince him). WHO CAN VOLUNTEER AS A DISASTER HEALTH SERVICES NURSE • Registered nurses (RNs) • Licensed practical nurses (LPNs) • Physicians (serve under RN supervision in this program) • EMTs (locally within the state they are licensed) • Any licensed healthcare professional with a current, active license WHAT DISASTER HEALTH SERVICES ACTUALLY DOES • Contacts families within 24 hours of a home fire or larger disaster • Helps replace lost medications, glasses, dentures, hearing aids, CPAPs, BiPAPs, and other durable medical equipment • Provides emotional support, physical support, and health navigation during recovery • Coordinates with pharmacies, insurance companies, and case managers on disaster overrides and paperwork • Works local, national, and virtual deployments TWO WAYS TO DEPLOY IN PERSON Travel to shelters and disaster sites nationwide (typical two-week commitment). Elizabeth has completed 20+ of these across the continental U.S. Virutally serve clients from your home computer and phone, on shifts scheduled around your life. Same training requirements. Current biggest need. Same client outcomes without leaving home. Perfect for currently-working nurses, retirees who prefer to stay local, and anyone who wants to help without the travel commitment. HOW TO SIGN UP Call 1-800-RED-CROSS, or contact the Greater Shenandoah Valley Chapter directly Complete a short application and interview to identify your interests Nurse applications are routed to Elizabeth for a personal call Complete 8.5 hours of self-paced video training Attend one 90-minute live interactive online class Complete platform-specific computer training with Elizabeth Come onto the schedule — always backed by a seasoned nurse for as long as you need LINKS & RESOURCES • Sign up to volunteer: redcross.org → click "Volunteer" or call 1-800-RED-CROSS • The Greater Shenandoah Valley Chapter of the American Red Cross — contact for local nurse volunteer opportunities • Give blood (currently in national short supply): redcrossblood.org • Last month's episode with Jill Johnson (general volunteer): https://thevalleytodaypodcast.com/red-vest-ready-a-red-cross-volunteers-story THE VALLEY TODAY with Janet Michael — A decade of conversations. New podcast episodes drop weekdays at 11 AM. Catch the show on The River 95.3 and Fox Sports 1450 AM weekdays just after noon. Subscribe and listen at thevalleytodaypodcast.com — available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and wherever you get your podcasts. If you enjoy the show, please take a moment to leave a rating or review — it helps more listeners find us. Connect with us: Facebook — facebook.com/ValleyTodayFanPage Instagram — instagram.com/thevalleytoday

Minnesota Senator Rob Kupec is on Afternoons Live with Tyler Axness to tell us what he saw when he toured the Floyd Lake area this morning. You can help by calling the Red Cross 218-850-7354.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

— How many times have we remained silent when something important needed to be said? How often have we hidden our thoughts, emotions, needs, or truths out of fear of judgment, rejection, conflict, or simply not being heard? Many of us learn, often from an early age, that staying quiet is safer than speaking up. Over time, those patterns can become so familiar that we hardly notice them. We silence our ideas, our creativity, our boundaries, our needs, and sometimes even our authentic selves. But what is the cost of that silence? Today, we'll explore how silence shapes our lives, relationships, workplaces, and communities, and how we can begin to recognize and unlearn the unconscious patterns that keep us from fully expressing who we are. We'll discuss the courage required to speak our truth, the importance of creating spaces where all voices are welcomed, and how authentic self-expression can lead to greater connection, belonging, personal growth, and well-being. At its heart, this conversation is an invitation to reclaim our voice—not to speak louder, but to speak more honestly, more intentionally, and more fully from who we truly are. Valeria interviews Elaine Lin Hering  — She is the author of  "Unlearning Silence: How to Speak Your Mind, Unleash Talent, and Live More Fully." Elaine Lin Hering is a speaker, facilitator, and former Lecturer on Law at Harvard Law School. She works with organizations and individuals to build skills in communication, collaboration, and conflict management. She has worked on six continents and facilitated executive education at Harvard, Dartmouth, Tufts, UC Berkeley, and UCLA. She has served as the Advanced Training Director for the Harvard Mediation Program and a Managing Partner for a global leadership development firm. She has worked with coal miners at BHP Billiton, micro-finance organizers in East Africa, mental health professionals in China, and senior leadership at the US Department of Commerce. Her clients include American Express, Chevron, Google, Nike, Novartis, PayPal, Pixar, and the Red Cross. She was named a Thinkers50 global management thinker on the rise.  To learn more about Elaine Lin Hering and her work, please visit: https://elainelinhering.com/

US, Iran talks conclude in Doha, focused on Strait of Hormuz, myths of the founding of the U.S., and Red Cross offers tips to enjoy this 4th of July safely.

What if the biggest obstacle between you and the life you want isn't your circumstances but your brain? In this episode, Daniel Alonzo sits down with transformational speaker and mindset coach Nurhan Ora to explore why so many people remain stuck in careers, relationships, and routines they've already outgrown. After immigrating to the United States from Azerbaijan without speaking English, Nurhan built a remarkable career with UNICEF Australia, the Red Cross in Spain, and the tech industry before making the courageous decision to leave corporate life and pursue her purpose. Together, Daniel and Nurhan discuss the neuroscience behind fear, why the brain craves familiarity over happiness, and practical strategies for overcoming limiting beliefs, building mental resilience, and taking meaningful action. Whether you're an entrepreneur, professional, athlete, or someone navigating a major life transition, this conversation offers valuable insights into creating lasting personal and professional growth. In this episode you'll learn: • Why your brain resists change • How fear keeps you trapped in familiar situations • The power of visualization and mental rehearsal • Why successful people embrace uncertainty • How intuition differs from overthinking • Practical ways to build confidence and take action • Why taking risks is essential for long-term success If this episode inspires you, be sure to subscribe, leave a review, and share it with someone who needs encouragement to take the next step toward the life they truly want.

Lords: Cort Martin https://steamcommunity.com/app/2111550 Topics: What does Thomas The Tank Engine do when he gets an itchy nose? The end of Destiny Glittermitten Grove's undisclosed AI content Iroha https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iroha I need to add bears to my threat model What thing would you like to be entangled with? Microtopics: Setting arbitrary deadlines to get things done and taking them seriously. Lord Walker. Writing 20 songs in 12 hours. Schrodinger's Cat Burglar. A video game that everyone in the world will love. Jimbo and the Jet Set. Soulful butt-licking. Do Fish Itch? What twisted idiot god would make a fish itch. The cosmology of Thomas the Tank Engine. Itchy planes flying very close to a mountain so they can scratch their faces. Whether trains can die in the Thomas the Tank Engine universe. Trains trying to live up to human standards of beauty. Pixar Cars needing eye surgery. Destiny's Final Update. Patrolling the moon in search of wizards. T-shirts with the insignias of obscure PVP factions. The logo of a football team that doesn't exist. Destiny shipping as MusicPlayerDemo.exe. Six people at the peak of their skill doing weird crap. Extremely obscure, elaborate secrets in MMOs. The CEO wanting to write a bunch of game lore so the developers have to find a place for him to put it Deliberately burning yourself out on an MMO and then deleting it forever. Vaulting Justifications. Clarity of Biome. Great ideas for a company that has infinite resources. RuneScape Modern and RuneScape Classic. Quitting WoW with your fiancee because you have a wedding to plan. The additional fee Blizzard charges for hosting your wedding inside of World of Warcraft. Fantasy heroin vs. Sci-Fi heroin. Stephepoa, Jasquosius, Dovanice and Jixandlia. Little dudes persisting between missions, if they survive. Naming all the fish after your Kickstarter backers. Doing all the same things the target your satirizing does, except you're doing them ironically. Lemmings as a squad-based tactical war game. A joyous approach to an anti-war message that makes war seem like a ton of fun. Violating the Geneva Convention by putting the Red Cross in Duke Nukem 3D. The video game that has committed the most real life war crimes. Poems you can't look at. Arriving today at the deep mountains of evanescent existence. Perfect pangrams. How they decided on the order of the Japanese phonetic alphabet. Who does Shakespeare think he is? Localizing Buffalo Buffalo Buffalo Buffalo Buffalo Buffalo Buffalo Buffallo into foreign languages. Poorly localized advertising campaigns. Who is the Pilot? Reading Kingdom Hearts sequel titles as poetry. A Language Built for Poetry. Coyotes begrudgingly scampering away after you honk loud enough. A small family of black bears walking down your street and effortlessly demolishing all your trash cans. Dressing your dogs up like bear cubs so the mama bear takes care of them. How are you going to keep your trash safe? Trying to design a trash can lid that can be operated by a drunk human but not by a smart bear. Putting up bear crossing signs on every street in hopes that you'll discourage traffic driving through your neighborhood. What is this, an overpass for bears?! A salmon tube but for bears. Things in nature that want to kill you that you routinely interact with. Animals that are great except they have way too many legs. Entangled Burglars. Sharing thoughts and sensory inputs over long distances. Wrapping yourself in mummy wrappings so nobody can observe you directly. The Timid Butthole. Where does the cat end and the cat fur begin? Sneaking into the archives and discovering a picture of your dad's butthole in the files and wondering "How did they get this? Why do they have this?" The Three Names of an Elf. Why Cort is one of the most researched developers on Mobygames.

Sometimes the thing that almost ended your life becomes the chapter that defines it. By the time Devin Fish was 18, he had moved 16 times, attended seven different schools, and survived a childhood shaped by poverty, bullying, and his parents' struggles with addiction. He thought joining the Army would be the start of something better. Then in July 2017, a Red Cross message forced him to fly home to make the impossible decision of whether to keep his mother on life support. She passed away just days before his birthday. What followed was a slow, quiet spiral into self-hatred, isolation, and online blackmail that brought Devin to the edge of taking his own life. This conversation walks through the moment he self-admitted to the hospital, the two pamphlets he found there that changed everything, and the single question that became the foundation of his recovery. Devin shares how he learned to use one career goal to climb out of suicidal thinking, why writing Answering the Hard Questions in Kuwait forced him to revisit every dark moment on purpose, and how faith eventually rebuilt the parts of him that survival could not. Through grief, generational trauma, silence, and self-doubt, Devin's story is a reminder that the worst chapter of your life does not have to be the end of your book. Guest Bio Devin Fish is a U.S. Army veteran, debut author, and the youngest of two who grew up in Rockford, Illinois. His childhood was marked by instability, bullying, food stamps, and his parents' struggles with drug and alcohol addiction. By 18, he had moved 16 times and attended seven different schools. In 2017, while stationed at Fort Hood, Devin received a Red Cross message telling him his mother was dying. She passed away on July 9th, just days before his birthday. In the years that followed, unresolved grief, financial collapse, and a series of online blackmail scams pushed Devin to the edge, ultimately leading him to self-admit to the hospital with suicidal ideations. Devin served nearly ten years in the Army as a Cavalry Scout and Career Counselor, and in 2021 was awarded the 1st Cavalry Division Retention NCO of the Year. While deployed to Kuwait, he wrote his debut book, Answering the Hard Questions, turning his story into a roadmap for anyone still trying to find their way out. You'll hear About How Devin grew up moving 16 times in 18 years across Rockford, Illinois The day he came home from school and found his apartment surrounded by police Why he stayed silent about his trauma for most of his life Losing his mother and being the one to make the life support decision How online blackmail and isolation brought him to the edge of suicide The two pamphlets in the hospital that helped him rewire how he thought about depression The single question that became the foundation of his recovery How writing his book in Kuwait helped him heal what he had buried for years Why faith became the cornerstone of who he is today Chapters 00:00 Welcome and Episode Introduction 01:15 Meet Devin Fish 02:00 Growing Up in Rockford and 16 Moves in 18 Years 04:30 The Day His Father Was Hospitalized 08:00 Why He Suppressed Everything for Years 10:00 Losing His Mother and the Life Support Decision 13:00 The Blackmail Spiral and Suicidal Thinking 17:00 Thirty Seconds of Courage to Ask for Help 18:00 The Two Pamphlets That Changed His Life 20:00 Using a Single Goal to Climb Out of the Darkness 27:00 Reframing Trauma as a Chapter, Not the Whole Book 28:30 Writing Answering the Hard Questions in Kuwait 33:00 Coming Back to Faith 36:00 Devin's Message for Anyone Still Searching 38:00 Final Reflections and Key Takeaways Chuck's Challenge This week, ask yourself one hard question. Not a comfortable one. Not the one you already know the answer to. The one you have been avoiding because you are afraid of what it might say back. Maybe it is, "Why am I really staying in this?" Maybe it is, "What am I numbing right now?" Maybe it is the same one Devin asked himself: "Do I want to live, or am I just surviving?" Because as Devin shared, healing did not start when life got easier. It started the moment he stopped lying to himself in silence and answered honestly. Whatever your hard question is this week, do not run from it. Let it be the end of a chapter, not the end of the book. Connect with Devin Get his book: Answering the Hard Questions: Let It Be the End of a Chapter, Not the End of the Book Connect with Chuck Check out the website: https://www.thecompassionateconnection.com/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chuck-thuss-a9aa044/ Follow on Instagram: @warriorsunmasked Join the Warriors Unmasked community by subscribing to the show. Together, we're breaking stigmas and shining a light on mental health, one story at a time.

She saw the commercial — the one with the Red Cross volunteer in the red vest, hugging someone, handing over a blanket — and told her husband, "When I retire, I want to be that person." On this episode of The Valley Today, host Janet Michael continues her year-long Red Cross series with Deb Fleming, Executive Director of the Greater Shenandoah Valley Chapter, who brings along volunteer Jill Johnson — a retired teacher who has now been deployed five times (three nationally, two locally) and is on standby for another deployment as the conversation is happening. Jill walks through the surprisingly simple sign-up process at redcross.org, how the certifications stack (sheltering, feeding, and more), and the dual paths she's chosen: Prepare with Pedro, a K-2 disaster preparedness program she teaches in local schools, churches, and scout groups, alongside national deployments to Hurricane Ian in Fort Myers, the Southern California floods and mudslides, and Hurricane Helene in Asheville. She shares what it actually looks like inside a shelter — bearded dragons, dancing parrots, Tide trucks doing laundry, FEMA tents holding a thousand people for dinner — and why the Red Cross changed its pet policy after recognizing that families won't evacuate without their animals. Plus: Deb's good news that the chapter has already hit its volunteer recruitment goals for the year because so many people stepped up in unexpected ways. ABOUT THE GREATER SHENANDOAH VALLEY CHAPTER The American Red Cross Greater Shenandoah Valley Chapter serves the region with disaster response, blood services, military family support, health and safety education, and community preparedness programs. The chapter has met its 2026 volunteer recruitment goals — including a recent reduction in target numbers based on how well the local chapter has performed. ABOUT PREPARE WITH PEDRO A free Red Cross disaster preparedness program designed for children in grades K-2. The program uses books, videos, songs, and hands-on activities to teach kids the basics of home fire safety — including escape plans, meeting places, smoke alarm checks, the "get low and go" technique for smoke, and coping/breathing exercises that apply to disasters and everyday stressful moments. Available free to classrooms, scout groups, church groups, and any setting with children. Schools and groups can request a visit through their local Red Cross chapter. WAYS TO VOLUNTEER (THERE'S MORE THAN YOU THINK) • Direct disaster response — sheltering, feeding (local and national deployments, two-week commitments) • Disaster preparedness education — Prepare with Pedro, hands-only CPR, home fire safety • Smoke alarm installation in partnership with local fire departments • Behind-the-scenes — logistics, supply, planning, weather tracking, government operations coordination • Blood services support • Military family support (armed forces programs) • Local events and community outreach • Set your own schedule — volunteer as much or as little as your life allows LINKS & RESOURCES • Sign up to volunteer: redcross.org → click "Volunteer"  THE VALLEY TODAY with Janet Michael — A decade of conversations. New podcast episodes drop weekdays at 11 AM. Catch the show on The River 95.3 and Fox Sports 1450 AM weekdays just after noon. Subscribe and listen at thevalleytodaypodcast.com — available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and wherever you get your podcasts. If you enjoy the show, please take a moment to leave a rating or review — it helps more listeners find us. Connect with us: Facebook — facebook.com/ValleyTodayFanPage Instagram — instagram.com/thevalleytoday