Beloved Arkansas police officer L.C. ‘Buckshot’ Smith dies at 95 [Video]

A recall on apple juice due to potentially harmful levels of arsenic has been expanded to include products sold at several national retailers.

The Senate has the potential for history-making this fall, with not one, but two, Black women possibly elected to the chamber, a situation never seen in America since Congress was created more than 200 years ago.Delaware's Lisa Blunt Rochester marks the milestone by saying that the reason she does this work is not about making history, "but to make a difference, an impact, on people's lives." Maryland's Angela Alsobrooks said that people like her, and stories like hers, don't usually make it to the U.S. Senate, "but they should."Related video above: Recent poll finds new lead in Maryland's U.S. Senate raceIf the two Democratic candidates prevail in their elections this November, their arrival would double the number of Black women from two to four who have ever been elected to the Senate, whose 100 members have historically been, and continue to be, mostly white men.Never in the Senate have two Black women served together at the same time."I have to pause and think, How is that possible?" asked Debbie Walsh, director of the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University."It's not that white male attorneys' perspective shouldn't be at the table," said Walsh, but "they shouldn't be the only thing at the table."To be sure, there are a many stairs to climb before Senate history would be made this election, where not only the White House, but control of Congress is being fiercely contested, and essentially a toss-up. The Senate races, in particular, are heated, grueling and costly.Blunt Rochester is almost assured to defeat the Republican candidate after Tuesday's uncontested primary for the seat held by retiring Democratic Sen. Tom Carper in the small state that is home to President Joe Biden and where she is the at-large representative to the House. But the race in Maryland between Alsobrooks and Republican Larry Hogan, the popular former governor, is expected to be tight to the finish and it could determine which party takes majority control in the Senate.Alsobrooks upended conventional wisdom to beat back wealthy David Trone in the primary to replace retiring Democratic Sen. Ben Cardin by amassing deep grass roots and party support, showcased in a notable campaign ad with hundreds of backers. She is the former State's Attorney for sprawling Prince George's County and is now its top County Executive.Video below: How Alsobrooks quickly changed Senate race trajectoryOn their private text chain Blunt Rochester says they call themselves "sister senator to be," as they run down-ballot from Vice President Kamala Harris a friend and colleague who became the second Black woman ever elected to the Senate when she won in 2016 in her own historic run for the White House. The first Black woman elected to the Senate, Democratic Sen. Carol Moseley Braun of Illinois in 1992, served a single term. Harris was the second. And a third Black woman, Sen. Laphonza Butler, was appointed to fill out the term of long-serving California Sen. Dianne Feinstein, who died in 2023. "People are anxious and excited at the same time," said Glynda C. Carr, the president and CEO of Higher Heights for America, an organization that works to elect Black women to office.What's striking about their campaigns is the way the two women embrace their own backgrounds but also, like Harris, don't dwell on the historic firsts they would bring to the job, leaving it to the voter to see their Blackness and hear their voices as women."The vast majority of us know that we have so much more in common than what separates us," Harris said on the debate stage this week, brushing past Trump as he revived questions about her race.On the campaign trail, Blunt Rochester has shared the story of the Reconstruction Era documents showing her great, great, great-grandfather, who had been enslaved in Georgia, as now having the right to vote.As she reminisces on that history, "what we've come through as a country," she said she also thinks of what she will pass on to her own new baby granddaughter."There isn't a cookie cutter way to run" for office, Blunt Rochester told AP. Blunt Rochester and Harris are close, both entering Congress the same year and often sitting together at Congressional Black Caucus events. "The most important thing is that we show up as our authentic selves," she said, adding, "because it requires all of our different and diverse lived and work experiences."Alsobrooks launched her campaign for the Senate in a video telling her family's story of leaving South Carolina for Maryland after her great-grandfather was shot and killed by a sheriff's deputy after a traffic stop. As a young prosecutor, she first met Harris, then attorney general in California, a friendship that formed more than a decade ago.But unlike 2016, when Hillary Clinton ran for president in a white suit symbolic of the suffragettes, the 2024 Senate candidates are positioning themselves more broadly in a way that may appeal to a wider electorate but also signals the cultural shift as the country becomes more diverse and Congress becomes more reflective of the electorate."We learned from 2016, we're not going to lead with identity in the same way that Hillary Clinton did," said Aimee Allison, founder of She the People, an organization that supports women of color in American leadership.Allison said a new generation of candidates is showing you can be "holding multiple identities" at once. "It's demonstrating you have a heart for people who you're not like ... but deserve to be served by government and deserve representation."The challenges Black women face to get to this point in the campaign are steep, rooted in a two-party political system that has often been slow to support Black women candidates and quick to doubt their ability to win statewide office, despite the qualifications.Over the years, the parties have not always shared ample resources with Black women candidates who strategists said proved they could have had more success in several close races, creating a Catch-22 loop that reinforces biased attitudes against their electability.In fact, the Senate may have been poised to swear in another Black woman, Rep. Barbara Lee, who ran for the open seat from California after Feinstein's death but fell short during a multi-candidate primary. Rep. Adam Schiff ran a strong campaign to become the Democratic front-runner with wide party support and is expected to handily win the seat that is now filled temporarily by Butler. With the Senate heading toward a 50-50 split, tens of millions of dollars are being spent in Maryland, where the popular Hogan was recruited by Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell to help the GOP win back the majority. Hogan and Alsobrooks appear to generally appreciate one another. Alsobrooks said Hogan was a good governor, but warns that in the Senate he would be a decisive GOP vote.Hogan's campaign said he greatly respects Alsobrooks, and is proud of the work they did together during his administration. "Our campaign has been laser-focused on Maryland and Marylanders their local concerns and priorities, and the opportunity to elect an independent swing vote who will put the best interests of the state above party-line politics," said Hogan campaign spokeswoman Blake Kernen.During the Democratic National Convention the two women candidates held an event at a historic Black history museum in Chicago with Moseley Braun delivering remarks and Butler introducing them.Blunt Rochester, noting her own powder blue power suit with its padded foundation, said she's standing on the shoulders of those who came before her and has strong shoulders ready for those who come next.

Children who used the weight loss drug liraglutide in a late-stage trial lost significantly more weight than children who got a placebo, according to a new study.Video above: Study suggests link between weight loss drugs, suicidal thoughtsDoctors say it can be extremely difficult for anyone with obesity to lose weight, no matter their age. Most adults and children 12 and older have access to highly effective new medicines called GLP-1 receptor agonists, but younger children must rely on lifestyle changes like diet, exercise and counseling alone to lose weight. Even with more aggressive interventions, children generally have only modest results, doctors say.The first study on the effects of the GLP-1 drug liraglutide, which is sold under the brand names Saxenda and Victoza, on younger children found that the medication could have a significant impact on their body mass index (BMI), the measure that practitioners use to determine whether a person has obesity.Liraglutide was approved by the US Food and Drug Administration in 2014 to help adults lose weight. In 2020, that approval was extended to children ages 12 to 17.The study was published Tuesday in the New England Journal of Medicine and presented at the annual European Association for the Study of Diabetes conference by its lead co-author, Dr. Claudia Fox, a pediatrician who works with the Center for Pediatric Obesity Medicine at the University of Minnesota Medical School in Minneapolis.The researchers looked at the effects of the drug on children between the ages of 6 and 12 who had what's considered to be a high BMI. The average 10-year-old in the study, Fox said, weighed about 155 pounds.The trial included 82 children, of whom 56 got a liraglutide injection once a day. The rest got a placebo. All of the children also got counseling to encourage a healthier diet and exercise of moderate to high intensity for at least an hour a day.The groups had significantly different results. In just over a year, the BMIs of the children who got the medicine fell 7.4 percentage points more than those in the placebo group. Children in the liraglutide group had a 5.8% drop in BMI. Those in the placebo group had a 1.6% increase.The study was funded by drugmaker Novo Nordisk.The results were in line with other studies done in teenagers, Fox said, but the younger children had stronger results."That to me was the most surprising, and it makes me think that maybe we should be intervening at younger ages," Fox said.The study does not directly compare weight loss among age groups, so more research would be needed to determine whether her theory could be correct.Liraglutide was considered safe for the young children in the study, but participants in both the placebo group and the medication group had some adverse events.Stomach problems like nausea, diarrhea and vomiting were more common in the group that got the medicine, but Fox said very few people dropped out of the study because of the side effects. Stomach problems tended to appear early in the study and decreased over time, she said.The research was also not designed to address how long children would have to stay on the drugs. When the trial period was over and the children were no longer using the medication or getting counseling, their BMI crept up again. However, the increase wasn't as significant for this younger age group as it was for teens in earlier studies, and that could mean the drugs have a more robust longer-term outcome if used earlier."We do know that obesity is a chronic disease," Fox said. "As soon as the intervention is over, the disease can come back, and that is true of any other chronic disease, whether it's diabetes, asthma, hypertension any chronic disease that requires chronic treatment."Any drug that could help children with obesity could make a big impact on the public's health. Obesity is considered the most common chronic health problem for children in the United States, with nearly 20% of all children having what's considered a high BMI. And the number has been growing, with the prevalence more than tripling since the 1970s, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.Obesity isn't just a problem in the short term, as children with obesity usually become adults with obesity and can face a lifetime of health problems related to it, Dr. Simon Cork, a senior lecturer in physiology at Anglia Ruskin University, told the Science Media Centre."The evidence that liraglutide is both safe and effective in children is positive," said Cork, who was not involved with the research.Developing anti-obesity medicine for children is complicated because children are still growing, he said. More studies that monitor children for longer periods will be needed to make sure appetite suppression does not have consequences later in development. There were no indications in the new study that liraglutide was detrimental for changes in height or child's puberty, but scientists will need to make sure that medicines don't stunt growth.Early puberty can be a problem for children with obesity, as can type 2 diabetes, and down the road they may develop heart problems, liver and kidney diseases and cancers. But a weight loss drug that proves to be effective in the long term could do a lot more for health than helping lose weight. Children with obesity can also face significant bias and stigma, studies show."Because treating children and adolescents living with obesity has the potential to have longer-lasting health benefits, although these medications are currently costly, their value for reducing risk of conditions associated with obesity and improving longer-term health must be considered," Dr. Nerys Astbury, an associate professor of diet and obesity at the Nuffield Department of Primary Health Care Sciences at the University of Oxford, told the Science Media Centre. Astbury was not involved with the new study.In December, draft guidelines from the US Preventive Services Task Force which influence whether insurance will cover medical care recommended that doctors provide intensive behavioral interventions to help children lose excess weight, but it did not recommend weight loss medications or surgery.The American Academy of Pediatrics, which updated its own guidelines on managing patients with obesity in 2023, recommended both options for some people.Although doctors and even parents don't always agree, Fox believes that weight-loss medications and surgical procedures such as gastric bypass or sleeve gastrectomy should be an option for children."There's a feeling among patients' families that they just need to work harder to lose weight, but going to the park more and eating better food isn't always enough," she said. "We can't just rely only on behavioral interventions for a biological disease and get significant improvement."

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