McClatchy Co., the second-largest newspaper company in the U.S., announced on Thursday that it has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.

The 163-year-old company, which owns prominent local newspapers including the Miami Herald, The Kansas City Star and The Sacramento Bee and 24 other publications in 14 states, said its Chapter 11 plan eliminates 60 percent of its debt while helping the company pivot to “a digital future.”

“The Chapter 11 filing will allow McClatchy to restructure its debts and, it hopes, shed much of its pension obligations. Under a plan outlined in its filing to a federal bankruptcy court, about 60 percent of its debt would be eliminated as the news organization tries to reposition for a digital future,” the bankruptcy announcement reads.

McClatchy had begun suspending some pension payments to former executives in January, opting to apply to the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation to assume control of its pension plan.

If a bankruptcy court accepts the Chapter 11 plan, the company would likely be led by hedge fund Chatham Asset Management LLC. McClatchy, a publicly traded company, would become a private company as a result.

“McClatchy’s plan provides a resolution to legacy debt and pension obligations while maximizing outcomes for customers and other stakeholders,” said Craig Forman, president and CEO. “When local media suffers in the face of industry challenges, communities suffer, polarization grows, civic connections fray and borrowing costs rise for local governments. We are moving forward with speed and focus to benefit all our stakeholders and our communities.”

Last year, New York Times Executive Editor Dean Baquet made the ominous prediction that “most local newspapers are going to die in the next five years.”

“The greatest crisis in American journalism is the death of local news,” Baquet said at the International News Media Association World Congress in New York City. “I don’t know what the answer is.”

“Their economic model is gone. I think most local newspapers in America are going to die in the next five years, except for the ones that have been bought by a local billionaire,” Baquet continued.

“I think that everybody who cares about news — myself included, and all of you — should take this on as an issue,” he added. “Because we’re going to wake up one day and there are going to be entire states with no journalism or with little tiny pockets of journalism.”

The local newspaper industry has been plagued by layoffs in the digital era, with several struggling publications sold to hedge fund-led entities in recent years.

A judge has hit pause on a major US government contract in a win for Amazon, which had challenged the award.

The tech giant, which had been favoured to win the cloud computing deal, sued last year after the US Defense Department gave the opportunity to arch-rival Microsoft instead.

Amazon has accused officials of bowing to pressure from Donald Trump.

The US president has often attacked Amazon and boss Jeff Bezos, who also owns the Washington Post newspaper.

Amazon had asked the court to block the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure contract, known as Jedi, which is worth up to $10bn over 10 years. The company is also seeking to question Mr Trump as part of the lawsuit.

On Thursday, Judge Patricia Campbell-Smith of the US Federal Claims Court agreed to the first demand, ordering the US to halt its Jedi activities, which are aimed at making the US Defence Department more technologically agile.

She also ordered Amazon to set aside $42m for costs if future proceedings found she was wrong to have issued the injunction.

Amazon declined to comment. In seeking the injunction the firm had said it was “important that the numerous evaluation errors and blatant political interference that impacted the Jedi award decision be reviewed”.

Microsoft said it was “disappointed with the additional delay”.

“We have confidence in the Department of Defense, and we believe the facts will show they ran a detailed, thorough and fair process,” it said.

The contract in question, for cloud computing services for the military, is among the Defense Department’s biggest and it drew legal challenges over the procurement terms even before it was awarded.

Among other things it is intended to improve the military’s remote access to data and technology, and help it host classified military secrets.

Amazon and Microsoft are industry leaders among cloud services providers.

Last year, Mr Trump told reporters that the US was looking closely at the contract, noting that he had been getting “tremendous complaints” from several companies about it.

The Defense Department has denied claims of bias.

It is not the first time a company has accused Mr Trump of improperly swaying the federal government’s decision-making due to his objections to media coverage.

Telecoms operator AT&T made similar claims after the US took action to block its takeover of Time-Warner, which owns CNN. The court blocked the firm from pursuing White House records, but ultimately approved that deal on other grounds.

NASA has confirmed that an asteroid larger than the tallest man-made structure in the world is currently travelling towards Earth at a speed of almost 34,000 miles per hour.

According to International Business Times, NASA’s Center for Near-Earth Object Studies (CNEOS) identified that the “potentially hazardous” asteroid could come close to intersecting with our planet’s path on February 15, 2020, at 6:05 a.m. (EST).

“Potentially Hazardous Asteroids (PHAs) are currently defined based on parameters that measure the asteroid’s potential to make threatening close approaches to the Earth,” NASA said in a statement.

The colossal space rock, which is expected to pass over our planet from a distance of around 3.6 million miles, is estimated to have a diameter of around 3,250 feet, making it large enough to potentially “trigger a nuclear winter and mass extinction events” should it collide with Earth.

For decades, films have dealt with the subject of potentially dangerous asteroid collisions. In fact, mankind was nearly destroyed by a giant space rock not once, but twice, in the 90s with Mimi Leder’s Deep Impact and Michael Bay’s Armageddon – but which of these apocalyptic flicks has stood the test of time?

If you’re thinking of going on a trip over the next few months, Southwest is having a fare sale right now that might be worth a look. The airline is offering one-way flights between a number of different destinations in the United States for $69 each way, making it so you can potentially go on that adventure for $138 or less.

Like most deals, there are a few caveats for this one. Tickets need to be purchased by February 20th at midnight and have to be made for a trip at least 21 days from now. Deals are specifically for travel in the continental U.S and inter-island Hawaii between March 3rd and May 20th, and for travel to/from San Juan, Puerto Rico between April 14 and May 14th.

Most of that discounted travel also has to happen on either a Tuesday, Wednesday, or Saturday.

You can find deals specific to your home airport here. That link will default to Oakland, but you can find your city in the drop-down menu under “Search for low fares.”

What’s offered varies from airport to airport. Some of the fare sales are also a bit more than $69 each way but still are pretty discounted from their regular price on Southwest.

Like all fare sales, it’s also with doing a little price comparison before you book. While the sale definitely represents a discount in terms of Southwest’s normal prices, you still might be able to find a better deal for some of these fares on another airline, especially if you’re able and willing to book a round-trip ticket instead.

Scientists have unearthed new fossils of one of the largest turtles that ever lived: a car-sized reptile which prowled the lakes and rivers of what is now northern South America from about 13m years ago to 7m years ago.

The fossils of the turtle – Stupendemys geographicus – were found in Colombia’s Tatacoa Desert and Venezuela’s Urumaco region, and for the first time provide a comprehensive understanding of the creature which grew up to 13ft (4 meters) long and 1.25 tons in weight.

Stupendemys males boasted sturdy front-facing horns on both sides of its shell very close to the neck. Deep scars detected in the fossils indicated that these horns may have been used like a lance for fighting with other Stupendemys males over mates or territory. Females did not have the horns.

Fighting occurs among certain turtles alive today, particularly between male tortoises, according to palaeontologist Edwin Cadena of the Universidad del Rosario in Bogotá, who led the research published in the journal Science Advances.

Stupendemys is the second-largest known turtle, behind seagoing Archelon, which lived roughly 70m years ago at the end of the age of dinosaurs and reached about 15ft (4.6 meters) in length.

The first Stupendemys fossils were found in the 1970s but many mysteries remained about the animal. The new fossils included the largest-known turtle shell – 9.4ft (2.86 meters) long, even larger than Archelon’s shell – and the first lower jaw remains, which gave clues about its diet.

“Stupendemys geographicus was huge and heavy. The largest individuals of this species were about the size and length of a sedan automobile if we take into account the head, neck, shell and limbs,” Cadena said.

“Its diet was diverse, including small animals – fishes, caimans, snakes – as well as molluscs and vegetation, particularly fruits and seeds. Putting together all the anatomical features of this species indicates that its lifestyle was mostly in the bottom of large freshwater bodies including lakes and large rivers,” Cadena added.

Stupendemys – meaning “stupendous turtle” – inhabited a colossal wetlands system spanning what is now Colombia, Venezuela, Brazil and Peru before the Amazon and Orinoco rivers were formed.

Its large size may have been crucial in defending against formidable predators. It shared the environment with giant crocodilians including the 36ft-long (11-meter-long) caiman Purussaurus and the 33ft-long (10-meter-long) gavial relative Gryposuchus. One of the Stupendemys fossils was found with a two-inch-long (5cm) crocodile tooth embedded in it.

About 50,000 years ago, ancient humans in what is now West Africa apparently procreated with another group of ancient humans that scientists didn’t know existed.

There aren’t any bones or ancient DNA to prove that theory, but researchers say the evidence is in the genes of modern West Africans. They analyzed genetic material from hundreds of people from Nigeria and Sierra Leone and found signals of what they call “ghost” DNA from an unknown ancestor.

Our own species — Homo sapiens — lived alongside other groups that split off from the same genetic family tree at different times. And there’s plenty of evidence from other parts of the world that early humans had sex with other hominins, like Neanderthals.

That’s why Neanderthal genes are present in humans today, in people of European and Asian descent. Homo sapiens also mated with another group, the Denisovans, and those genes are found in people from Oceania.

The findings on ghost DNA, published in the journal Science Advances, further complicate the picture of how Homo sapiens — or modern humans — evolved away from other human relatives. “It’s almost certainly the case that the story is incredibly complex and complicated and we have kind of these initial hints about the complexity,” says Sriram Sankararaman, a computational biologist at UCLA.

The scientists analyzed the genomes of 405 West Africans. Sankararaman says they used a statistical model to flag parts of the DNA. The technique “goes along a person’s genome and pulls out chunks of DNA which we think are likely to have come from a population that is not modern human.”

The unusual DNA found in West Africa isn’t associated with either Neanderthals or Denisovans. Sankararaman and his study co-author, Arun Durvasula, think it comes from a yet-to-be-discovered group.

“We don’t have a clear identity for this archaic group,” Sankararaman says. “That’s why we use the term ‘ghost.’ It doesn’t seem to be particularly closely related to the groups from which we have genome sequences from.”

The scientists think the interbreeding happened about 50,000 years ago, roughly the same time that Neanderthals were breeding with modern humans elsewhere in the world. It’s not clear whether there was a single interbreeding “event,” though, or whether it happened over an extended period of time.

The unknown group “appears to have split off from the ancestors of modern humans a little before when Neanderthals split off from our ancestors,” he says.

Sharon Browning, a biostatistics professor at the University of Washington who has studied the mixing of Denisovans and humans, says “the scenario that they are discovering here is one that seems realistic.”

Browning notes that the ghost DNA appears frequently in the genetic material. “That tells us that these archaic populations might have had some DNA that did some useful stuff that’s proved to be useful to the modern population,” she says.

But at the moment, Sankararaman says, it’s not possible to know what, if any, role these genetic materials have for modern humans who carry them. “Are they just randomly floating in our genomes? Do they have any kind of adaptive benefits? Do they have deleterious consequences?” he added. “Those are all questions which would be fantastic to start thinking about.”

He says there is likely evidence of other ghost populations in modern humans in other parts of the world. “I think as we get the genome sequences from different parts of the world at different points in time, there is always the possibility that we might discover these as-yet-unidentified ghost populations,” Sankararaman says.

It’s also possible that the ghost DNA found in this study comes from multiple groups, Browning added. “Within Africa, we don’t know how many archaic groups might have been involved, and the study doesn’t tell us that,” she says. “It tells us that there was integration, but it could have been from more than one archaic population, in theory.”

Compared with the Neanderthals, where there is abundant DNA fossil evidence, physical samples are much harder to come by in Africa. Browning says the climate on the continent has made it challenging.

“The conditions have to be right for the fossils to not totally disintegrate” in order to recover DNA, Browning says. Bones have been found in Africa from archaic populations, but no DNA has been recovered. Still, she adds, “the technology is continuing to improve, and people are still out there looking for more fossils.”

So what happened to this mysterious group of ancient humans? Scientists aren’t totally sure.

They might have died off, or they might have eventually been completely subsumed into modern humans.

One of the universe’s deep mysteries just got a lot stranger. Astrophysicists have discovered a clue that could help explain why, every once in a while, superfast bursts of radio waves flash across Earth from deep space. But the clue — a repeating 16-day pattern in one of the bursts, undermines one of the most popular theories for where the bursts are coming from.

Fast radio bursts (FRBs) have likely happened for billions of years. But humans only discovered them in 2007, and have detected only a few dozen of them since. And in June 2019, astronomers finally tracked an FRB to its home galaxy.

But no one knows what causes them. Because these bursts are so rare, unusual and bright — considering that they’re visible from billions of light-years across space — physicists have tended to assume they come from a cataclysmic event, such as the collision of stars.

This repeating pattern, however, suggests that something else is going on, that there’s some sort of natural machine in the universe for pumping regular shrieks of radio energy across space.

Researchers looking at data from the Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment Fast Radio Burst Project (CHIME/FRB) first spotted this FRB, known as FRB 180916.J0158+65, in 2019. In January 2020, they published a paper in the journal Nature that reanalyzed old data and found more than one burst from FRB 180916.J0158+65. They traced this FRB back to a relatively nearby spiral galaxy. What’s new in this latest paper, published Feb. 3 to the arXiv database, is the regular pattern in the bursts. The FRB, they found, goes through four-day cycles of regular activity, bleating out radio waves into space on an almost hourly basis. Then it goes into a 12-day period of silence. Sometimes the source seems to skip its usual four-day awake periods, or lets out only a single burst. CHIME/FRB is able to watch the FRB only some of the time, they noted, so it’s likely the detector misses many FRBs during the awake period.

No one knows what this pattern means, the researchers noted in a statement, but this pattern doesn’t fit neatly into any existing explanations for FRBs.

In general, patterns like this in astrophysics are often related to a spinning object or orbiting celestial bodies. Neutron stars often seem to strobe regularly from the perspective of X-ray detectors on Earth, because hot spots on their surface spin in and out of view like a lighthouse beacon. And tiny planets may dim the light of the stars they orbit everytime they pass between that star and Earth.

In other words, for astrophysics, patterns tend to indicate rotation. But no one knows if this pattern governs all FRBs or just some of them.

Shares of Sprint soared Tuesday after a U.S. district judge ruled in favor of its $26 billion deal to merge with T-Mobile.

The stock was up 77.7% Tuesday. It had risen in extended trading Monday after The Wall Street Journal reported the judge was expected to rule in favor of the deal. Shares of T-Mobile were up 11.8%.

The ruling clears one of the final hurdles for the deal, which still can’t close until the California Public Utilities Commission approves the transaction. Tuesday’s ruling also culminates a yearslong courtship between Sprint and T-Mobile, which have made multiple attempts over the years to merge, only to abandon their plans fearing regulatory scrutiny.

Attorneys general from New York, California, Connecticut, Hawaii, Illinois, Maryland, Michigan, Minnesota, Oregon, Wisconsin, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Virginia and the District of Columbia originally brought the lawsuit to block the deal following approval from the Justice Department and the Federal Communications Commission. The states had argued that combining the No. 3 and No. 4 U.S. carriers would limit competition and result in higher prices for consumers. The companies had contended their merger would help them compete against top players AT&T and Verizon, and advance efforts to build a nationwide 5G network.

In his decision filed Tuesday, Judge Victor Marrero wrote, “The resulting stalemate leaves the Court lacking sufficiently impartial and objective ground on which to rely in basing a sound forecast of the likely competitive effects of a merger.”

The judge laid out three points on which the court rejected the states’ objections to the merger. First, he said, they failed to convince the court that the merged party “would pursue anticompetitive behavior that, soon after the merger, directly or indirectly, will yield higher prices or lower quality for wireless telecommunications services.”

Second, the court rejected that Sprint would be able to continue operating effectively as a wireless services competitor without the merger.

“The Court is thus substantially persuaded that Sprint does not have a sustainable long-term competitive strategy and will in fact cease to be a truly national [mobile network operator],” the ruling said.

And finally, the court rejected the states’ argument that Dish Network “would not enter the wireless services market as a viable competitor nor live up to its commitments to build a national wireless network.” The deal called for Dish to step in as a new wireless player based on agreements with the DOJ and FCC. Shares of Dish were up 7.1% on the judge’s ruling.

In a statement after the ruling, New York Attorney General Letitia James, who helped lead the states’ push, said the states “disagree with this decision wholeheartedly, and will continue to fight the kind of consumer-harming megamergers our antitrust laws were designed to prevent.” She called the ruling a “loss” for Americans who rely on wireless networks and said the states will review their options, including a potential appeal.

“From the start, this merger has been about massive corporate profits over all else, and despite the companies’ false claims, this deal will endanger wireless subscribers where it hurts most: their wallets,” James said.

California Attorney General Xavier Becerra, who also led the states’ efforts, said in a statement: “Our fight to oppose this merger sends a strong message: even in the face of powerful opposition, we won’t hesitate to stand up for consumers who deserve choice and fair prices. We’ll stand on the side of competition over megamergers, every time. And our coalition is prepared to fight as long as necessary to protect innovation and competitive costs.”

Makan Delrahim, who leads the DOJ Antitrust Division, said in a statement he was “grateful that the judge recognized the expertise of the Department of Justice and the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) in his evaluation of the transaction.”

The case has seemed to escalate tensions between some of the state attorneys general and the DOJ, who are each pursuing investigations into Google. “As I have noted before, should a minority group of states, or even one, be able to undo the nationwide relief secured by the federal government, it would wreak havoc on parties’ ability to merge, on the government’s ability to settle cases, and cause real uncertainty in the market for procompetitive mergers and acquisitions,” said Delrahim, who is recused from the DOJ’s Google probe.

Top executives at T-Mobile and Sprint claimed a victory with the judge’s ruling.

″[N]ow we are finally able to focus on the last steps to get this merger done!” T-Mobile CEO John Legere said in a statement.

T-Mobile and Sprint agreed to certain concessions to the government before the agencies cleared the deal. The companies told the FCC they would deploy a 5G network covering 97% of the U.S. population within three years of closing the deal. Sprint also agreed to sell Boost Mobile, Virgin Mobile and other prepaid phone businesses, as well as some of its wireless spectrum to Dish for $5 billion before gaining approval from the Justice Department.

FCC Chairman Ajit Pai said in a statement that he was “pleased” with the court’s ruling and that the merger “will help close the digital divide and secure United States leadership in 5G,” calling it “a big win for American consumers.”

Dish co-founder and Chairman Charlie Ergen said in a statement that the ruling and approvals from the DOJ and FCC
“accelerates our ability to deploy the nation’s first virtualized, standalone 5G network and bring 5G to America.”

If approved by the California commission, the deal would create a new wireless competitor in Dish, which has tried for years to become a provider, spending billions on airwaves it has stored away. Under a previous deal between Dish and the DOJ and FCC, the company had a deadline this year to build a narrowband internet of things network connecting “people and sensors and microprocessors.” If the deal clears, Dish will instead focus its efforts on building a 5G network covering 20% of the country by June 2022 and 70% of the U.S. population by June 2023, with the consequence of facing a $2.2 billion payment to the U.S. Treasury if it fails to live up to its commitments.

Legere, the T-Mobile CEO, announced last year that he would step down from the role and be succeeded by President and COO Mike Sievert. Legere had been expected to leave once the company’s merger with Sprint was completed. Sprint and T-Mobile had initially said Legere would lead the combined company when they announced their intention to merge in April 2018.

Stop messing around on airplanes.

While airlines aren’t known for welcoming malarkey during the flight, one airline is taking a proactive approach to preventing it. During their pre-flight emergency briefing, passengers are specifically reminded to let flight attendants know about any “unwelcome behavior.”

A member of Southwest’s communications team confirmed the updated policy to Fox News. According to them, “Southwest’s pre-flight Emergency Briefing and Demonstration is now written to conclude with: ‘We are here for your comfort and safety. Please report any unwelcome behavior to a flight attendant.’”

Their statement continued to say, “This change reflects Southwest’s commitment to ensuring a safe and welcoming environment at all times for each of our customers and employees. Southwest’s intention is to remind our customers that flight attendants are a friendly, professional resource for reporting any unwelcome behaviors or conduct during a flight. Safety is always our uncompromising priority, and this new pre-flight reminder is one more way that we can support customers with our Southwest hospitality.”

According to protocol, Southwest Flight Attendants have several options for dealing with these sorts of situations, Travel Pulse reports. These responses include re-seating a passenger away from where the unwelcome behavior took place, requesting that the offending passenger stop the behavior, notifying the captain and even seeking law enforcement assistance upon landing in certain circumstances.

Southwest’s flight attendants are known for more than just stopping bad behavior.

The company recently made headlines after they helped a young boy who had lost his stuffed animal on their flight.

Grayson Mulligan, from Texas, was on a trip to New Orleans with his father over the Thanksgiving holiday when he lost his “very special teddy bear” on the plane,” his mom Chrissy explained on Facebook. After contacting the airline through their Facebook page, Chrissy says that they contacted the flight attendants from the flight, one of whom remembered turning the bear in to a staffer at New Orleans airport.

Unfortunately, the bear apparently didn’t make it to lost and found, so the airline sent the young boy a new bear, complete with a backstory explaining how he went from working at an airfield before making his way to Grayson’s house.

Sprint stock was up more than 60% in extended hours trading Monday after a report in the Wall Street Journal said that a U.S. District judge is expected to rule in favor of its ruling with T-Mobile. T-Mobile stock rose over 8% in extended trading.

CNBC ’s Andrew Ross Sorkin also confirmed the news in a New York Times article.

The decision is expected to be made public Tuesday, the reports said.

The third-largest U.S. wireless carrier by subscribers has been awaiting a decision from a federal judge on whether it can move forward with its $26.5 billion merger with Sprint.

However, a deal can’t close until the California Public Utilities Commission approves the transaction, which still hasn’t occurred nearly two years after its announcement. T-Mobile, Sprint and Dish Network, which is awaiting approval to start a new national wireless network, all haven’t seen the judge’s ruling, according to people familiar with the matter. The details and potential conditions of the transaction are essential to ensuring the deal still makes sense to all parties, the people said.

The merger was seen by many as a bellwether for the future of the U.S. wireless industry.

The carriers argued that the merger between the No. 3 and No. 4 wireless providers in the country would accelerate the timeline for 5G technology. The carriers also argued that there was sufficient competition in the wireless market, pointing to Dish, Comcast, and other satellite and cable companies that offer or plan to offer their own wireless subscription plans.

The merged company would compete with AT&T and Verizon in the U.S. wireless industry.

Previously, the DOJ and FCC had approved the merger after reaching a side deal with Dish Network, the satellite TV provider that wanted to develop its own wireless platform.

Multiple states had sued to block the deal, arguing it is anticompetitive and will raise prices for customers.