Trevor Lawrence is only a college freshman, but on Monday night he looked like a future NFL superstar.
The Clemson quarterback took home the College Football National Championship offensive MVP award after leading the Tigers to a stunning 44-16 win over the Alabama Crimson Tide. Lawrence was spectacular, finishing 20-of-32 for 347 yards and three touchdowns.
While Lawrence thrived, his counterpart at quarterback, the highly decorated Tua Tagovailoa, struggled against the Tigers. That was in part due to a big game from junior cornerback Trayvon Mullen, who finished with an interception and a sack on his way to the defensive MVP award.
This article will be updated to provide more information on this story as it becomes available.
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We get it, cheapskates, free food is hard to resist.
Especially when it comes in the form of delicious chicken tenders, but Alabama authorities have warned people to not eat any from boxes that were spilled from a 18-wheeler truck on Sunday.
The crash on Highway 35 in Cherokee County prompted motorists to stop and pick up the truckload of spilled tenders, according to the Associated Press.
Quick to say nope was the Cherokee County Emergency Management Agency, who warned on Facebook that it’s a crime to stop and impede the flow of traffic with your chicken tender pilfering efforts.
The agency also cautioned that the cases of tenders had been on the ground for more than 24 hours, and are thus unsafe to eat. Food poisoning ain’t fun, people.
According to one commenter on the post, the exact location of where to get the free chicken was shared on the Dekalb Buy and Sell Facebook page.
“All the people commenting and the guy that posted it were so serious,” the commenter wrote. Seems like they weren’t the only ones who were keen.
Waiting for a rig hauling bbq sauce to get involved.
Yo before lil Wayne starting rapping at the halftime show of the national championship I straight up thought Mary j blige was walking out on stage https://t.co/O0aNj2nfk2
Yo before lil Wayne starting rapping at the halftime show of the national championship I straight up thought Mary j blige was walking out on stage https://t.co/O0aNj2nfk2
Yo before lil Wayne starting rapping at the halftime show of the national championship I straight up thought Mary j blige was walking out on stage https://t.co/O0aNj2nfk2
Yo before lil Wayne starting rapping at the halftime show of the national championship I straight up thought Mary j blige was walking out on stage https://t.co/O0aNj2nfk2
President Donald Trump has embarked on a one-man public-relations effort to sell the shutdown that has left some White House officials scrambling to catch up. | Alex Brandon/AP Photo
The president has griped about a perceived lack of public support for his shutdown stance and Syria withdrawal plan from within his administration.
Fighting a virtual one-man messaging battle for his border wall, President Donald Trump is growing frustrated that he doesn’t have more public defenders in his shutdown fight with Congressional Democrats.
Even by the standards of a president who prefers to deliver his own message rather than outsource it to surrogates, Trump is putting an unusually personal stamp on the White House’s public relations campaign to win more than $5 billion in border wall funding.
Story Continued Below
As the government shutdown dragged into its third week, with both sides conceding that little progress has been made in negotiations, the president announced Monday that he will make the fight the subject of his first Oval Office address to the nation on Tuesday evening. The White House also said that Trump will also travel to the U.S.-Mexico border on Thursday in what is guaranteed to be a media spectacle.
But a president who demands constant praise has a diminishing number of public defenders these days. The result is a manic, one-man public-relations effort to sell the shutdown that has left some White House officials scrambling to catch up. Trump has griped to associates that hasn’t seen enough administration officials on the airwaves defending him during the shutdown fight, according to three people close to the president. He is also angry that he didn’t get more backup for his mid-December decision to pull U.S. troops out of Syria.
So the president is increasingly stepping into the spotlight himself. Last Wednesday, he convened a cabinet meeting that metamorphosed into a 90-minute press conference during which he called his $5.6 billion wall funding request from Congress “a small price to pay for total security on the Southern border.” The following day, he made his first-ever appearance in the White House briefing room — flanked by a bevy of immigration hawks — to press the case further before a startled press corps. And on Friday, he held a press conference in the Rose Garden to announce he was considering declaring a national emergency in order build the wall.
“I have never had so much support, as I have in the last week, over my stance for border security, for border control and for, frankly, the wall or the barrier,” he told reporters. “I have never had this much support.”
Privately, however, he was thinking something different. “He’s sitting there going, ‘Why the fuck isn’t there anybody saying good stuff about me? Why is there nobody on TV that’s defending me?” said a former senior administration official.
The president has expressed increasing frustration with his press shop that he doesn’t see more of his defenders on television — a recurrent issue about which Trump has brooded in the past. Some of that frustration has focused on White House communications director Bill Shine, a former Fox News executive who joined the White House in July on the recommendation of his friend and longtime Fox News host Sean Hannity. Hannity touted Shine to Trump as an antidote to the torrent of negative media coverage the president receives, according to two sources familiar with the conversations, and suffered from an outsized expectation on the part of the president that Shine could stem the tide.
“He thought that as part of bringing Bill Shine in that he would get better coverage — that he would be able to solve some of these dilemmas,” said a Republican close to the White House. “Bill is working hard, but he is not a miracle worker. He’s been working to solve some of that but it’s a constant battle.”
A White House official pushed back on the notion that the president is frustrated with the diminishing number of defenders he sees on the airwaves, “We’re doing our very best to communicate with our surrogates and get the message out. The White House and the president always enjoy looking at the screen and seeing our surrogates and our friends on camera,” the official said.
Trump and Pence met on Monday with 20 outside surrogates about the shutdown and did the same before the Christmas holiday, according to a second White House official. Aides continue to show Trump television clips featuring outside advisers offering praise on cable news shows. And Trump has urged political allies like Corey Lewandowski, his former campaign manager, and David Bossie, his former deputy campaign manager, to keep up their on-air appearances. But he has cited the diminishing praise from within his own ranks, wondering why more of the people who work for him are not stepping up to defend him on the television airwaves.
There are notable exceptions — including Trump’s new acting chief of staff, Mick Mulvaney, who has hit several Sunday talk shows in recent weeks. But much of the backup for his position is coming from conservative Republicans in Congress, not from within his own administration’s ranks.
Aggravating the problem is the departure of a handful of administration officials who were once mainstays on the airwaves. They include the former director of legislative affairs, Marc Short, and United Nations ambassador Nikki Haley, who stepped down at the end of the year. Short’s replacement, Shahira Knight, is not a regular on the television news programs, while Haley’s successor, Heather Nauert — tapped for the job in part because of her comfort in front of the cameras — has yet to be confirmed by the Senate.
Meanwhile the White House’s once-daily televised press briefing — a reliable forum for the administration to broadcast its message — has also all but ceased. (Trump officials complained that reporters, especially star television correspondents, used the briefings to grandstand.)
The White House press office is pushing out fresh faces to carry the president’s message. Shine dialed up his former colleagues at Fox News last week, pressing them to conduct an interview with Vice President Mike Pence — who wound up appearing on Tucker Carlson’s prime-time show.
On Sunday, Mulvaney appeared on NBC’s “Meet the Press” as well as Jake Tapper’s CNN show, while White House press secretary Sarah Sanders sat down for a rare television interview with Fox News’ Chris Wallace (and endured a widely-noted grilling about Trump’s most dubious factual claims).
Largely, however, the president, is fending for himself in a media offensive that will culminate with Tuesday’s primetime address — one that the major television networks have not yet agreed to carry — and with his Thursday trip to the southern border.
Trump’s dictation of his own communications effort can sometimes produce curious results, leaving his aides seemingly flat-footed. During Wednesday’s Cabinet meeting, for instance, Trump puzzled observers by placing a life-sized, Game of Thrones inspired poster in the middle of the table during. The poster — which featured a stern-looking Trump and the slogan “Sanctions Are Coming” — touted economic sanctions the administration had already imposed on Iran two months earlier. The president made no reference to it, leaving its relevance — if any — far from clear.
Asked about it in an interview Thursday on Fox & Friends, White House counsellor Kellyanne Conway wasn’t able to provide a clear answer.
“Well I’ll let it speak for itself,” Conway said. “That’s certainly what people focused on, but we need border security.”
Impossible Foods is throwing a new party in your mouth, and this time everyone really is invited.
The company debuted a new version of its eponymous burger on Monday, and you can credibly call it an upgrade. In addition to having significantly less fat than beef burgers and zero cholesterol, the new plant-based patty is gluten-free, fixing a big criticism of the current (and increasingly popular) Impossible Burger. It’s also suited for all kinds of ground-meat dishes, from meatballs to sloppy joes, not just hamburgers, the company says.
The new burger also happens to be delicious. I got a chance to sink my teeth into Impossible’s new burger in the form of a slider at CES 2019, and the taste and texture is basically indistinguishable from a real burger. I’d even say it’s a slightly better simulation than the first version, which I also found to be a convincing simulation. The meat is solid but chewy, like a well-packed burger patty that isn’t too greasy. And the texture was spot on.
Impossible Burger 2.0 starts shipping Feb. 4 and replaces the original recipe. Restaurants that offer the burger will automatically start getting it after the ship date, and the company expects that all its partners will be serving it by March. A few restaurants, such as Saxon + Parole in New York City and Linger in Denver, will start serving the new recipe on Jan. 8.
Impossible Burger 2.0 uses soy protein instead of wheat protein, which is why it’s gluten-free. It contains no hormones, cholesterol, or antibiotics, the company claims, and it’s kosher- and halal-certified. A single quarter-pound patty contains 14 grams of fat and 240 calories, compared to 23 grams of fat and 290 calories (not to mention 80 milligrams of cholesterol) in a regular beef burger.
Impossible had previously said it would start selling its made-in-California burgers to select grocery stores in the U.S. The company didn’t give much of an update on that other than to say the Impossible Burger would be available to “millions” of home chefs. There’s also no definite time frame other than “this year.”
Impossible Foods was founded in 2011. Its big discovery: most of the taste of meat was attributable to a single protein molecule, called “heme.” The company genetically engineered a special form of yeast to produce a heme protein found in plants.
Impossible’s new recipe could go a long way toward winning over skeptics who prefer real meat
That innovation led to a plant-based alternative burger that’s received increasing attention from notable chefs and restaurants, including David Chang’s Momofuku Nishi in New York City, Traci Des Jardins’ Jardinière in San Francisco, and Tony Priolo’s Maillard Tavern in Chicago. You can also order an Impossible Burger in more than 100 restaurants in Hong Kong and Macau, and the company says it will soon expand to more markets.
The next hurdle Impossible needs to overcome is cost: Its burger is still more expensive than a meat patty. Looking at the menu of Cockscomb in San Francisco, an Impossible burger costs $19 while the regular burger is just $15.
But Impossible’s new recipe could go a long way toward winning over skeptics who prefer real meat. If it tastes just as good, why wouldn’t you want to make the switch to a healthier option? It’s not only better for you; it’s better for the planet — breeding cattle has well-documented environmental impact. Burgers are cheap, but they have one of the highest carbon footprints of anything on the menu.
Of course, only so many people will be motivated by environmentalism or better treatment of animals. But virtually everybody sets out to eat healthier at some point in their lives. Impossible’s new burger sends a message that cutting meat out of your diet doesn’t have to mean cutting taste out, too.
Kim and Xi met three times last year [File: Ju Peng/Xinhua via The Associated Press]
North Korean leader Kim Jong-un is visiting China at the invitation of Chinese President Xi Jinping, according to state media in both countries.
The Korean Central News Agency said on Tuesday that Kim departed for his fourth’s summit with Xi on Monday afternoon.
Kim, who was accompanied by his wife Ri Sol Ju and top North Korean officials, will stay in China until January 10.
China is North Korea’s key diplomatic ally and main source of trade and aid.
Last year, Kim travelled to China three times to meet with Xi before and after summits with US President Donald Trump and South Korean President Moon Jae-in.
The latest trip comes after US and North Korean officials are believed to have met in Vietnam to discuss the location of a second summit between Kim and Trump following their first meeting in Singapore in June last year.
At the time, the two leaders signed a vaguely-worded pledge on denuclearisation of the Korean Peninsula, but progress has since stalled with Pyongyang and Washington arguing over their agreement’s interpretation.
Christopher Hill, a former US ambassador to South Korea, said Kim’s visit to China may be Beijing’s way of ensuring it remains a player in any future developments with Washington.
“With the Trump administration, the [US’s] relationship with China has really gone very sour, and moreover as the Trump administration ramped up its North Korean contacts they did that without an effort to bring China in – and China is a very substantial country with 1.4 billion people and they really don’t want to be ignored,” he told Al Jazeera.
“So I think this is China’s effort to try and be part of this process and the key question of course is what is their message to the North Koreans,” Hill added.
“Are the Chinese going to encourage the North Koreans to do more? Or is North Korea going to continue a policy which essentially involves not testing any weapons during this time but hasn’t really involved much else.”
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![Kim and Xi met three times last year [File: Ju Peng/Xinhua via The Associated Press]](https://i0.wp.com/www.aljazeera.com/mritems/imagecache/mbdxxlarge/mritems/Images/2019/1/7/9ecc14636ba2439498b7856e28cc364a_18.jpg "North Korea's Kim visiting China for summit with Xi")
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