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How does Texas' Thanksgiving food compare to other parts of the US?

Published Fri, 21 Feb 2025 14:47:59 GMT

AUSTIN (KXAN) -- Thanksgiving is just around the corner, and millions of Texans will gather with family, friends and loved ones next Thursday to break bread and celebrate the blessings in their lives. But how does that dinner table spread compare to other parts of the country?While turkey is the centerpiece to many Americans' Thanksgiving meal, fried or smoked turkey are particularly popular in the Lone Star State, as documented by media platform Wide Open Country. Honey baked ham is also a common alternative for those who aren't much of a turkey eater.There are also Mexican dishes that have become cornerstones of the Texas Thanksgiving celebration, such as tamales or charro beans. Casseroles like sweet potato or green bean varieties are also particularly prevalent in Texas cooking, and pair well with biscuits and cornbread dressing.But no meal is complete without dessert, and pecan pie is a Texas staple that tends to make its way onto the menu alongside pumpkin and apple pies. Swee...

Letters: Summit’s an ‘avenue.’ A spur might make a better ‘trail’

Published Fri, 21 Feb 2025 14:47:59 GMT

Want a trail? Grab the spurI read that the Met Council has agreed that Summit Avenue is considered to be consistent with its policies as a regional trail system. What? A trail? I don’t know about you, but my interpretation of a trail is an unpaved path winding through the woods, with a compass or GPS device in hand.Last time I looked, Summit Avenue is an avenue, and my interpretation of an avenue is a road cleared and paved for motorized travel.If the Met Council wants to get in some good work, how about settle the purchase of the railway leaving the old Ford plant, now the site of the Highland Bridge project?The railway is owned by the Canadian Pacific railway and they have not surrendered their hold on the spur. Long abandoned and a bit long in the weeds, it looks like a dandy spot to run a bikeway for the two-wheelers. The Met Council must abandon setting their sights on the Summit and spur on the sale of the spur.Mark Kirchner, St. Paul Our discipline problemWe have a disci...

The U.S. just released a massive new climate change analysis. Here’s what it says about Colorado’s future.

Published Fri, 21 Feb 2025 14:47:59 GMT

Colorado is slated for a future with less water, shrinking snowpack, more disastrous wildfires and an unpredictable agricultural economy as climate change continues to drive warming and aridification across the state and region, according to a massive new federal climate report.The Fifth National Climate Assessment — released by the White House on Tuesday — combines thousands of studies and spells out the risks a warming world poses to American society. The last such assessment was released in 2018.Climate change is “harming physical, mental, spiritual and community health and well-being through the increasing frequency and intensity of extreme events, increasing cases of infectious and vector-borne diseases, and declines in food and water quality and security,” the assessment said.The lower 48 states since 1970 have warmed by 2.5 degrees compared to the global average of 1.7 degrees, according to the report. The warming has created rising sea levels, increased wea...

Improving Investor Behavior: 45 years, 20 lessons

Published Fri, 21 Feb 2025 14:47:59 GMT

A few weeks ago I attended the retirement party of a dear friend of almost 50 years. Long ago, we were both young financial advisors chasing similar career paths. We even migrated to independent businesses around the same time. His retirement prompted me to reflect with gratitude on all my opportunities and lessons from the past four decades.At the outset of my career, my goal was (and still is) to help people find their freedoms: freedom of time, freedom of work, freedom of relationships, and freedom of purpose. Along the way, I’ve learned the nuances that come with working toward those freedoms. With that focus on freedom, here are my 20 lessons to help improve your investor behavior, which I’ve learned over the last 45 years of working with clients. Some may seem to repeat a bit in theme, but that’s only because they reinforce behaviors that I see as crucial.Steve Booren1. Simplicity beats complexity. Complexity is harder to implement than simplicity, and it always sounds “smarte...

Denver schools swell with more than 2,000 new migrant students as district scrambles to meet kids’ needs

Published Fri, 21 Feb 2025 14:47:59 GMT

Nadia Madan-Morrow found herself in a bind Tuesday morning. She was short 11 teachers.Some accompanied fifth-graders on an overnight trip into the mountains, while others called out sick because they had COVID-19 — a sign that three years after the pandemic began, both the virus and the statewide shortage of substitute teachers continue to plague schools.But the principal of Denver’s Place Bridge Academy wasn’t just scrambling to staff classrooms last week. She faced another problem: The lunch period for seventh- and eighth-graders has swelled to more than 200 students — too many to supervise all at once — after an unprecedented number of migrant children enrolled in Place Bridge since the start of the school year.“This influx of kiddos is happening on top of all of the other challenges schools are facing after the pandemic,” Madan-Morrow said.Her school, which serves preschoolers through middle schoolers in southeast Denver, is on the frontline of the city&#...

Tensions flare in Denver neighborhoods with migrant shelters, but residents also find ways to help

Published Fri, 21 Feb 2025 14:47:59 GMT

A recently shuttered migrant shelter in a former school building heightened tensions in Denver’s Athmar Park neighborhood for months.An Nguyen said that, after the facility opened late last year, “there wasn’t any trouble” — at least, not initially. The owner of Savory Vietnam Restaurant in a plaza across the street, off West Alameda Avenue, empathized with the people staying there, most of them arrivals from Venezuela. Her parents immigrated to the United States as Vietnamese refugees, so Nguyen understood the feeling of coming to a new country with few possessions.But as spring turned into summer, Nguyen noticed more people gravitating from the shelter to the business plaza’s parking lot. Then, she found human feces on the side of her building, and tents popped up nearby. Her customers asked questions about the people loitering outside.Walking to her car at night, Nguyen said, “I did not feel safe.” The disruptions strained the Athma...

Denver-based Scholars Unlimited uses fun to boost kids’ literacy

Published Fri, 21 Feb 2025 14:47:59 GMT

When the most experienced flag football players in the game are in second grade, enthusiasm far outweighs skill.One player went the wrong way, nearly scoring a touchdown for the other team. Another was skipping far from the main fray. There was an injury timeout when a boy tripped over his untied shoelaces.The Denver Post Season To Share is the annual holiday fundraising campaign for The Denver Post and The Denver Post Community Foundation, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization. Grants are awarded to local nonprofit agencies that provide life-changing programs to help low-income children, families and individuals move out of poverty toward stabilization and self-sufficiency. Visit seasontoshare.com for more information.It doesn’t look much like literacy instruction, but it’s a vital part of Scholars Unlimited’s approach to bringing kids who are struggling with reading up to grade level, said Jennie Merrigan, the program’s senior director of programs and learning, as s...

Submit your own name idea for San Jose’s BART extension tunneling machine

Published Fri, 21 Feb 2025 14:47:59 GMT

It’s not every day that you get to suggest a name for a ginormous mechanical worm beneath your feet that’s creating the largest single-bore tunnel in the world.Now, here’s your chance.Until Nov. 26, The Mercury News is accepting submissions to name San Jose’s BART extension tunneling boring machine, or TBM, which will be carving out a 4.6-mile subterranean pathway below the city and creating a ring of transit around the Bay Area. Cities across the country undergoing similar infrastructure projects have historically named their TBMs after women of local significance. In 2012, Seattle named its device “Bertha” after their first female mayor, Bertha Knight Landes.Valley Transportation Authority purchased the custom-made, $76 million machine from Germany last week, and it is set to arrive in the South Bay in pieces before being assembled. Work is expected to start between the San Jose airport and Santa Clara University in 2025.What should Silicon Vall...

Wish Book holiday campaign celebrates 40 years of helping our neighbors

Published Fri, 21 Feb 2025 14:47:59 GMT

When Mercury News readers opened their newspapers on Sunday, Dec. 4, 1983, they were greeted with something beyond the big news of the day — a special section called Holiday Wish Book.Though it was designed like an upscale department store catalog, it didn’t showcase popular gifts like the new VCR or Ewok plush toy of the time. Instead, the inside pages were filled with touching stories about people in the valley who needed help and offered readers a way to make a difference.“This Wish Book is an unusual thing for a newspaper to publish,” then-Publisher Tony Ridder wrote in an introductory letter, “but these times demand that we all do what we can to alleviate suffering and to encourage those who are working in the front lines on the problems of the helpless, the hungry, the lonely and forgotten.”So much has changed in the valley over the past 40 years, but that suffering still lingers — and in some ways has become even more dire, as many struggle to re...

How a Stanford professor aims to organize the hunt for alien life

Published Fri, 21 Feb 2025 14:47:59 GMT

On a cold December night in 1977 in Council Bluffs, Iowa, a mysterious hovering object was reported to be flying overhead. Then a luminous hot molten rock fell to earth.What was it? Where did it come from? No one knows.But Stanford University immunologist Garry Nolan suggests one possible theory: It was a discarded part of a UAP, or “unidentified aerial phenomena,” the formal government name for objects previously called UFOs.Undaunted by the risk of professional stigma, the biotech entrepreneur is urging the creation of a “Stardust Repository,” where this and other pieces of mysterious materials of unknown origin would be stored for analysis.At a first-of-its-kind symposium on Friday and Saturday, hosted by Stanford, Nolan unveiled plans to bring scientific rigor to a realm that has long been home to kooks and wackos.“We’re here to professionalize and normalize this,” Nolan told a standing-room-only crowd of physicists, data scientists, tech entrepreneurs and others, representing s...