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FIVE QUESTIONS1 In 1974, Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson published the first version of which game that requires rolling a 20-sided die?2 Which movie character was made an official citizen of the Shinjuki section of Tokyo in 2015?3 Which hit song does Weird Al Yankovic paro-dy in the song “Tacky”?4 In what year was the world’s first nucle-ar-powered submarine, the U.S.S Nautilus, completed — 1944, 1954 or 1964?5 Which Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Robert Penn was made into a 2006 film with Sean Penn as the corrupt governor?

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LOCAL FOLKS

Sharon Richardson lives in Columbus. Her favorite thing about Columbus is the friendly people. “We really live up to ‘The Friendly City,’” Richardson said.

PUBLIC MEETINGSJuly 7: Colum-bus City Council, Municipal Complex, 5 p.m., facebook.com/CityofColum-busMS/July 15: Lown-des County Board of Supervisors meeting, 9 a.m., Lowndes County CourthouseJuly 21: Colum-bus City Council, Municipal Complex, 5 p.m. facebook.com/CityofColum-busMS/

FOCAL POINT Ringing in America’s 244th, See page 5B

Black organizers plan to address divisions within their communityBlack Panther Cmdr. Vashaun Ferguson: ‘We can’t just sit here and wait for somebody to come and help us’BY TESS VRBINtvrbin@cdispatch.com

Despite the turnout of a few thousand people at Starkville’s racial justice protest on June 6, Eric Chandler said many Black residents of the city did not attend the protest and did not feel their goals and in-terests were represented.

Chandler, who said he does not belong to any com-munity groups, organized an event called “Liberate with Love” that drew more than 30 Black locals to Moncrief Park on Friday to discuss the pursuit of racial justice. The event included two speakers from the Mis-sissippi chapters of Black-run nationwide groups that take a militant approach to fighting anti-Black racism, including the Black Panthers and the Huey P. Newton Gun Club.

The Black Panthers formed in Oak-land, California in 1966 and are no longer a political party but still advocate for racial justice. The Huey P. Newton Gun Club formed in Dallas, Texas in 2014 and was named after a Black Panthers co-founder. Both organizations believe in monitor-ing the police to prevent violence against Black Americans.

Chandler and the two speakers at the event — Commander Vashaun Ferguson of the Black Panthers and Commander Marcus Hunt of the Newton Gun Club — all said the top priority for Black people should be repairing divisions between them.

Ferguson and Hunt both added their organizations believe Black people should openly carry firearms and know how to use them so they do not shoot each other. Open carry is legal for those 18 and older in Mississippi.

Friday’s event included sign-up sheets for people to register to vote or join the Black Panthers or the Newton Gun Club. It also offered attendees an opportunity to eat dinner from a local food truck and so-cialize with their neighbors.

“(We’re) just trying to get Black people to come together so we can actually have

THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

House Speaker Philip Gunn said Sun-day that he had tested positive for the coronavirus as state health officials re-ported more than 200 new infections and five deaths linked to the pandemic.

Gunn, a Republican from the Jackson suburb of Clinton, said in a video posted

to Facebook that he got tested because he had been in close proximity to another member of the House who tested positive.

“I felt like I needed to go get myself tested just because I had been with this person and this morning was informed that I too have tested positive for COVID,” Gunn said. “I feel very fortunate that I don’t really have very many symptoms

and feel fine.”Gunn said he called ev-

eryone that he had been in close proximity to recent-ly to let them know of his diagnosis and planned to self-quarantine. He also called on the state’s res-idents to do the same if

they find out they’re infected: “We need to make sure that we do everything we can to get this past us as quickly as pos-sible.”

Gunn is the state’s highest-ranking po-litical figure to publicly disclose a positive test for the coronavirus. He did not say who the other House member was.

The Legislature is out of session now but had been meeting several days a week during the past month. While some legislators or others at the Capitol wore masks, many others did not while sitting in close proximity in the house and sen-ate floor and in committee rooms.

Mississippi house speaker tests positive for coronavirusPhilip Gunn: ‘We need to make sure that we do everything we can to get this past us as quickly as possible.’

Gunn

BY TESS VRBINtvrbin@cdispatch.com

T he COVID-19 coronavi-rus pandemic changed a lot of things in Omini

Parks’ life, she said, but “in some ways it’s been a god-send” for her and her 5-year-old daughter, Gibson.

Parks is a seventh-grade science teacher in the Starkville-Oktibbeha Consoli-dated School District. Teach-ing remotely while continu-ing to be Gibson’s primary caretaker was “definitely an experience,” but the past few months have been as refresh-ing as they have been anxi-ety-inducing, Parks said.

“Even though I still had teacher duties to keep up with, it gave me more time with (Gibson) to share some things with her that we both like,” Parks said.

Those activities include baking, painting and taking care of the extensive fruit and vegetable garden in their driveway and front yard. The plants range from collard greens, cabbage, cauliflow-er, eggplant, blackberries, strawberries, eight kinds of tomatoes and several herbs.

The project has been a great source of entertainment and education for Gibson, Parks said.

“She’s always asking about going out there to work in it and put on her little gardening gloves,” she said. “She likes to be able to help pull the tomatoes off the vines and clip the eggplants. It’s something to keep her busy, but it’s also a good experience for her.”

Parks hopes the garden “grows in abundance” so it can supply others in the

MONDAY PROFILE

Claire Hassler/Dispatch StaffOmini Parks and her daughter, Gibson, 5, pose for a portrait in their garden outside their home in Starkville on Thursday. Parks started the vegetable garden as an educational activity over spring break.

Teacher reflects on spending time with her daughter during pandemic

Starkville resident adds gardening, protesting to her methods of helping others

Claire Hassler/Dispatch StaffOmini Parks and her daughter Gibson, 5, prepare to repot tomatoes on Thursday outside their home in Starkville. Gardening is a fun activity for the two to do together “when Gibson listens!” Parks said.See PARKS, 3A

See GUNN, 3A

See PROTEST, 6A

Haddix

Ballard

The DispaTch • www.cdispatch.com2A MONDAY, JULY 6, 2020

THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

HOOVER, Ala. — A man has been arrested on a murder charge in connection with a recent shooting at an Alabama shopping mall that left an 8-year-old boy dead and three other people injured, authorities said Sunday.

Hoover police an-nounced the arrest of Montez Coleman, 22, in connection with the shoot-ing Friday afternoon the Riverchase Galleria Mall. The boy was identified by police as Royta Giles Jr., a rising third grader at a lo-cal elementary school.

Hoover Police Chief Nick Derzis said that Coleman, who had been sought on a capital murder warrant, also is charged with three counts of sec-ond-degree assault in the wounding of a man, wom-an and girl — all innocent bystanders. They were

each treated for gunshot wounds and subsequent-ly released from medical care.

“Our community is heartbroken,” Derzis said at a news conference, AL.com reported. “The officers who were on the scene will forever bear the image of an innocent child who died in their arms.”

Hoover is a suburban community about 10 miles (16 kilometers) south of Birmingham, Alabama’s biggest city.

Derzis told reporters the Jefferson County Dis-trict Attorney’s Office issued a capital murder warrant against Coleman on Saturday night and that he was taken into custody without incident.

It was not immediately known if Coleman had an attorney who could com-ment for him.

Derzis said officers who arrived at the mall

immediately after Friday’s shooting were alerted to reports of someone with a firearm running through the parking deck of a near-by hotel, adding investiga-tors later identified that person as Coleman.

He said an investiga-tion determined Coleman had gotten into an argu-ment with a group of other males near the mall food court on the first floor and fired a handgun that had been concealed in a back-pack. Derzis said several of the others had hand-guns and immediately re-turned fire.

Police have not said publicly who fired the shots that struck Royta and the other victims. At least three people fired guns, according to police, adding that multiple shots were fired in seconds and that the boy was shot in the head. The mall was evacuated afterward.

Derzis said investiga-tors are seeking to iden-tify the others involved in the shooting and asked for

the help of the public as they released surveillance video at the news confer-ence.

The mall in the subur-ban Birmingham area was the site of a 2018 police shooting where an officer fatally shot a Black man with a gun after mistak-ing him for the gunman in an earlier shooting at the mall. The shooting of 21-year-old Emantic “EJ” Bradford Jr. prompted a series of protests at the mall. The Alabama at-torney general’s office cleared the officer, saying he acted “reasonably un-der the circumstances” in that encounter.

Man charged in Alabama mall shooting that left boy, 8, deadPolice arrested Montez Coleman, 22, in connection with the shooting

Frederick Douglass statue vandalized in Rochester park

ROCHESTER, N.Y. — A statue of abolitionist Frederick Douglass was ripped from its base in Rochester on the anniver-sary of one of his most fa-mous speeches, delivered in that city in 1852.

Police said the statue of Douglass was taken on Sunday from Maplewood Park, a site along the Un-derground Railroad where Douglass and Harriet Tub-man helped shuttle slaves to freedom.

The statue was found at the brink of the Genesee River gorge about 50 feet (15 meters) from its ped-estal, police said. There was damage to the base and a finger.

In Rochester on July 5, 1852, Douglass gave the speech “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July,” in which he called the cele-bration of liberty a sham in a nation that enslaves and oppresses its Black citizens.

To a slave, Douglass said, Independence Day is “a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injus-tice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim.”

Carvin Eison, a leader of the project that brought the Douglass statue to the park, told the Roch-ester Democrat & Chron-icle another statue will take its place because the damage is too significant.

“Is this some type of

retaliation because of the national fever over confederate monuments right now? Very disap-pointing, it’s beyond dis-appointing,” Eison told WROC.

SOURCE: AP

‘Lift Every Voice and Sing’ hymn ignites hope across nationTHE ASSOCIATED PRESS

LOS ANGELES — The Black nation-al anthem was born more than a century ago, but the popular hymn within the Af-rican American community called “Lift Every Voice and Sing” has resurrected a beacon of hope during nationwide pro-tests.

In recent weeks, countless rallies were held from D.C. to Seattle with arm-locked protesters of different races reciting the song’s lyrics while marching against po-lice brutality of unarmed Black people. The demonstrations throughout the U.S. were ignited by the killing of George Floyd, who died after a Minneapolis po-lice officer pressed a knee into his neck for several minutes.

Some marches were peaceful, while others turned violent. But one common thread at protests were people chanting the anthem’s long-lasting message of faithfulness, freedom and equality.

“I saw whites singing that song saying ‘No justice, no peace’ and ‘Black Lives Matter.’ It’s something I didn’t see early in my career or even 15 years ago,” recalled the Rev. Al Sharpton, referring to pro-testers in Minneapolis in the aftermath of Floyd’s death. “You got to see people other than us appreciating our song, our anthem. This is just not a moment. This is a real movement.”

Growing up, Sharpton said he learned self-identity through the anthem, which was written as a poem by James Weldon

Johnson before his brother, J. Rosamond, turned it into music. The song was per-formed for the first time in 1900, not long after it was written.

The NAACP dubbed “Lift Every Voice and Sing” as the Black national anthem in 1919. The decision came more than a de-cade before “The Star-Spangled Banner” was adopted as the national anthem of the U.S.

During the civil rights movement, the song was popular during protests with the likes of “We Shall Overcome” and “Amazing Grace.” The latter was written by former slave trader John Newton, but the song helped define racial equality.

Sharpton said the ability of “ Lift Every Voice and Sing “ enduring several genera-tions speaks volumes.

“The fact that this song could survive us going from the back of the bus and the outhouse to the Truman Balcony at the White House, it shows that this song real-ly resonates in our hearts,” he said. “Very few songs would last through those kinds of changes in Black America. That’s why it’s a great barometer to the cultural shift.”

Protesters are certainly making the song heard. In Dallas, hundreds flocked to the plaza where John F. Kennedy was shot in 1963 to march before collectively taking a moment to sing the song. Pro-testers sang the song last month at the historic Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. The same happened in Los Angeles, Chicago, Baltimore and Minneapolis.

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Democrats, Biden look to accelerate Southern political shiftTHE ASSOCIATED PRESS

ATLANTA — From Missis-sippi retiring its state flag to local governments removing Confederate statues from pub-lic spaces, a bipartisan push across the South is chipping away at reminders of the Civil War and Jim Crow segregation.

Now, during a national reck-oning on racism, Democratic Party leaders want those sym-bolic changes to become part of a fundamental shift at the ballot box.

Many Southern electorates are getting younger, less white and more urban, and thus less likely to embrace President Donald Trump’s white identity politics. Southern Democrats are pairing a demographically diverse slate of candidates for state and congressional offices with presumptive presidential nominee Joe Biden, a 77-year-old white man they believe can appeal to what remains perhaps the nation’s most culturally con-servative region.

“There’s so much opportuni-ty for everyone in this region,” said Jaime Harrison, Democrat-ic challenger to South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham and a 44-year-old Black man.

Decades of economic devel-opment have coaxed new resi-dents to the area. That includes white people from other parts of the country, Black families returning generations after the Great Migration north during the lynching and segregation era, and a growing Latino popu-lation. Harrison noted that even younger native Southerners, Black and white, are less wed to hard-partisan identities than their parents and grandparents were.

“Sometimes we get held back by leadership that’s still anchored in old ways,” Harrison said. But “all of these changes are starting to move the dynam-ics in so many communities. … That’s not to say we’re forget-ting our past. But it won’t be the thing that’s dragging us back.”

The November elections will determine the extent of the change, with competitive races in the South affecting the pres-idency, U.S. Senate control and the balance of power in state-houses from Raleigh, North Carolina, to Austin, Texas.

Democratic victories would redefine policy fights over ex-panding health insurance ac-cess and overhauling criminal justice procedures, among oth-er matters. The general election is also critical because voters will elect the state lawmakers who will draw legislative and congressional boundaries after the 2020 census.

Republicans, for the most part, aren’t as quick as Dem-ocrats to frame 2020 as a re-defining year. Still, they ac-knowledge obvious shifts that began with suburban growth in northern Virginia and extended southward down the coastline and westward to Texas.

“North Carolina, Georgia, Texas – these are becoming real two-party states,” said Republi-can pollster Brent Buchanan, whose firm, Cygnal, aides GOP campaigns across the country.

Biden’s campaign manag-er, Jen O’Malley Dillon, talks eagerly of “an expanded map” that puts North Carolina and Florida in the same toss-up cat-egory as the Great Lakes states that sent Trump to the White House. Georgia and Texas, she adds, will be tighter than

they’ve been in decades.Buchanan said GOP-run

state House chambers in Geor-gia and Texas are up for grabs, as are Republican U.S. Senate seats in North Carolina, Geor-gia and perhaps Texas. Senate contests in South Carolina, Al-abama and Mississippi could be much closer than typical state-wide races in those Deep South states.

“Georgia and the South are changing faster than most peo-ple think,” said DuBose Porter, a former Georgia lawmaker and state party chair. “That was happening before Trump,” Por-ter said, but the president “has accelerated it.”

True two-party states in the Old Confederacy — at least be-yond Florida and Virginia and occasionally North Carolina — would be relatively newfound. For generations after post-Civil War Reconstruction, the “Solid South” was uniformly Demo-cratic, white voters’ visceral rejection of President Abraham Lincoln’s Republican Party. Beginning with the 1960s civil rights movement, most whites drifted to Republicans. That trend peaked during Democrat Barack Obama’s two terms as the first Black president. More than party identity, the com-mon controlling force was white cultural conservatism.

“Voters align first on princi-ples, then on policy,” Buchanan said.

Democrats see Biden as a party leader who can put a met-ro-based coalition over the top by mitigating margins beyond big cities and suburbs. “Biden is a safe vessel for these (white) voters who might have been OK with Trump when every-thing’s going well, but now are

just looking for a stable leader who’ll do the right thing,” said Zac McCrary, a Democratic pollster based in Alabama and whose firm is aligned with Biden’s campaign.

If Biden manages the feat, it would bridge the Southern appeals of the last three Dem-ocratic presidents. Jimmy Car-ter and Bill Clinton were native Southerners who, with whiter, less urban electorates, attract-ed white moderates and Black voters. Carter, for example, styled himself a racial progres-sive, yet courted Alabama Gov. George Wallace, a former seg-regationist, in the 1976 primary. Carter won across the South.

Clinton, who won several Southern states in 1992, cam-paigned seamlessly among Black voters yet made a show of his death penalty support by traveling back to Arkansas during the campaign for the execution of a Black inmate. Obama won North Carolina and Virginia in 2008, leaning more heavily on diverse cities and battleground suburbs.

Biden, putting his nee-dle-threading attempt on dis-play, has noted his list of po-tential running mates includes “several” Black women. He speaks about centuries of in-justice and systemic inequal-ities, most recently using an Independence Day address to describe American history as a “constant push and pull be-tween two parts of our charac-

ter, the idea that all men and women — all people — are cre-ated equal and the racism that has torn us apart.”

But with civil unrest spurred by the latest police violence against Black Americans, Biden has sought a middle ground, making clear he op-poses progressives’ calls to “de-fund the police.”

Confederate symbols, Biden has argued, should come down, but ideally not through mob action, and he’s drawn distinctions between memori-als to traitorous Confederates and those to national founders who owned slaves, including George Washington and Thom-as Jefferson. Their monuments, Biden said, should be protect-ed.

McCrary said that approach, with Biden’s center-left po-sitioning on policy, should prevent a white backlash that benefits Trump. Buchanan ar-gued it’s an open question of what uneasy white Southerners choose. “Those voters are still scared about the direction of their country,” he said.

In South Carolina, Harrison sees progress, even as more tangible policy fights remain.

“Almost all of my life, the Confederate flag flew over the state Capitol dome or on the grounds of the Statehouse,” Harrison said. “For my sons, they will have no memory of that.”

‘Sometimes we get held back by leadership that’s still anchored in old ways.’

Jaime Harrison, Democratic challenger to South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham

University renames hall after namesake called segregationist

JACKSON — A university in Mis-sissippi removed the name of a former president from a residence hall after a petition called the man a segregationist.

On Friday, Belhaven University in Jackson announced it would change the Guy T. Gillespie Hall to Lakeview Hall, news outlets reported. Gillespie served as president of the private Christian uni-versity for 33 years, starting in 1921.

According to the petition, Gillespie’s segregationist views from the 1950s “have no place” on the campus.

In 1954, Gillespie published “A Chris-tian View on Segregation,” where he argued against racial integration in schools based on biblical grounds, ac-cording to an article in The Journal of Presbyterian History.

The name change comes after Bel-haven officials joined other universities

and called for the retirement of the Mis-sissippi state flag.

According to a tweet from the univer-sity, the Gillespie family supported the name change.

Mississippi law enforcement searches for escaped prisoner

JACKSON — Law enforcement of-ficials are looking for a man who went missing Sunday morning from the Mis-sissippi State Penitentiary at Parchman.

Arthur Lestrick, 40, is believed to have escaped on foot from a work camp called Unit 28, the Department of Cor-rections said in a news release. Lestrick, who was sentenced Nov. 18, 2009, is serving a life sentence for a capital mur-der committed in Copiah County.

Officials are asking anyone with in-formation about Lestrick to call the de-partment.

SOURCE: AP

GunnContinued from Page 1A

Gunn, the presiding officer of the 122-member House, has sometimes worn a mask and some-times not.

In recent weeks he has been intimately involved in discussions over changing the state’s flag to get rid of the Confederate battle em-blem and had been one of

the key players in persuad-ing enough people to vote for the change.

The Mississippi Depart-ment of Health posted its latest coronavirus statistics Sunday. The state record-ed 226 new cases through Saturday bringing the to-tal number of confirmed and probable infections

to 30,900 across the state. Five more people also died from COVID-19. The deaths came in Harrison, Hinds, Lawrence, Lown-des and Walthall counties.

One other legislator has reported testing positive for the virus as well. Dem-ocratic Rep. Bo Brown of Jackson told the Clarion

Ledger on Thursday that he had received a positive test result for COVID-19. Brown, 70, told the Ledger he took a test about a week earlier because he was feel-ing a little unsteady and weak.

Mississippi’s top health official has repeatedly sounded the alarm over

COVID-19. Heading into the holiday weekend, Thomas Dobbs tweeted a chart showing the state’s spiking coronavirus case-load and called on people to only celebrate with mem-bers of their household.

“Please avoid parties, gatherings. Things are getting worse very quick-

ly,” he said.For most people, the

new coronavirus causes mild or moderate symp-toms that clear up in two to three weeks. For some, especially older adults and those with existing health problems, it can cause more severe illness and even be fatal.

ParksContinued from Page 1A

community with fresh pro-duce, she said. Giving back is especially appropriate since the garden began with Parks’ friends giving her several five-gallon buckets to use as planters, she said.

“With the pandemic going on, I know people have been a little wary about produce in the grocery stores,” she said. “Even if (the garden) only gives to a few people, that’s still some people we were able to give to.”

Helping and serving others

goes beyond teaching and gardening for Parks. She joined the racial justice ac-tivist group, Starkville Stand Up, that formed in late May in response to a renewed nation-wide outcry against systemic racism and police brutality against Black Americans.

Parks chaired the crowd safety and control committee while the group organized a protest in which thousands of people marched through downtown Starkville on June 6. She said her role was to

make sure that all the partici-pants were safe and would not create a “negative narrative” around the protest.

She said she believes Starkville Stand Up has a bright future and hopes more people get involved with it.

“We’ve been blessed with the eager hearts and hands that have come out, but the protest was just one leg of it and there’s still work to be done,” she said.

As for her regular work, Parks’ job is moving from

Armstrong Middle School (soon to be Armstrong Junior High) to the new Partnership School on the Mississippi State University campus. Gibson will start kindergarten at Sudduth Elementary School in August.

SOCSD has not yet an-nounced a plan to reopen school buildings, so the extent to which Parks and her daugh-ter might still be at home is still to be determined.

Teaching remotely invit-ed Gibson into her mother’s

workplace, another positive and unexpected result of the pandemic, Parks said.

“Every time we had a meeting, whether it was with coworkers or when I had virtu-al meetings with my students, they all know her and she knows them, so she always wanted to make sure she said her hellos,” Parks said.

Tess Vrbin is the Starkville and Oktibbeha County reporter for The Dispatch. Reach her at 662-323-2424 or follow her on Twitter at @tess_m_vrbin.

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OpinionPETER BIRNEY IMES Editor/PublisherBIRNEY IMES III Editor/Publisher 1998-2018BIRNEY IMES JR. Editor/Publisher 1947-2003BIRNEY IMES SR. Editor/Publisher 1922-1947

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POSSUMHAW

Hook, line and sinker“Do not tell fish stories

where the people know you. Particularly, don’t tell them where they know the fish.”

— Mark Twain, pen name for Samuel L. Clemens, author of “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer”

E ither fish or cut bait, means committing to doing something

productive or step aside and stop wasting time. Summer is here, it’s hot and muggy and we’re still in the midst of a pandemic, but there’s one productive activity that gets you outdoors and possibly nets food and fun for you and the family.

The Golden Triangle is blessed with lakes and ponds, gravel pits, creeks and rivers all offering opportunities to fish by a multitude of methods. The Tenn-Tom Waterway, especially at the Columbus “pool,” though intended for commercial use, offers recreational boating and prime fishing. Fishing is best away from water traffic, into back-waters and tributaries where there are plenty of old stumps, grasses, breaks of shallow and deep along the old river

runs — areas especially con-ducive for crappie fishing.

I’m no fisherman, though I did try crappie fishing for a bit. I’m simply not good at it. It takes learning techniques by book or, better yet, a crappie fisher-man, and lots of practice. Fortu-nately, there’s a fisherman in the house providing all the crappie we

and a few other families can eat. So, I cut bait and became productive by cooking crappie in a number of ways.

Here’s a few fishing tips learned from “Fishing for Dummies” and the crappie fisher-man. Water temperature is important for catching fish. Crappie thrive in water temperatures between 58 and 75. Summer crappie fishing is usually pret-ty good, though spring spawn is better.

The spawn is only better because crap-pie spawn habitat is pretty predictable. They move into the shallows.

Crappie, unlike catfish, don’t like moving water. Flood seasons are not optimal for crappie fishing, whereas summer fishing is more likeable. Areas

with deadfall limbs, logs, rocks and anything obstructing waterflow attract

crappie.

Crappie fishing is slow and methodical.

You would think a beautiful sunny day with

blue skies and white puffy clouds, mild temperatures

and a breeze would be good

fishing weather, but while it’s a great day for baseball, it’s often a poor fish-ing day. Fish seek shade from the sun where the water is a bit cooler. Shade offers some protection from overhead

predators like hawks, eagles and os-prey. Areas with grasses, bushes and tree overhangs attract insects which draw predator fish as well.

Learn to watch birds feeding along the waterways. Birds are indicators of

fish. Area blue herons are excellent fishermen. As are alligators, and don’t

think there aren’t any. Fishing can be as simple

as a bucket to sit on, a cane pole and live bait — worms, minnows, or crickets. It can also be as sophisti-cated as electronics with gauges for water temperature, structure sighting, even fish swimming. Just remember, because you can see them doesn’t mean you can catch them. That’s the challenge.

“Fishing for Dummies” suggested a DIY temperature gauge: Buy an inexpensive but accurate outdoor thermometer and tie it to the end of a fishing line. Estimate about 10 feet of line and attach a bobber at the 10-foot point. Drop the thermometer in the water, let the thermometer sink, then take the reading. Adjust the depth with the bobber as necessary.

Email reaches Shannon Bardwell of Columbus at msdeltachild@msn.com.

Habitual offender bill should be passedT he Mississippi Legislature

should pass House Bill 1024, which applies a 15-year time

limit on offenses that can be consid-ered under our state habitual offend-er laws. The bill also excludes non-violent crimes from being factored into the habitual offender calculation. These are reasonable reforms that will reduce Mississippi’s incarcera-tion rate, which is one of the highest in the world.

If Mississippi had an excellent prison system designed to rehabili-tate and reform, then perhaps a high incarceration rate wouldn’t be so bad. But our prisons are a mess. They are overrun with gang activity. They are grossly understaffed with poorly paid and poorly trained guards. They are full of misplaced mentally ill. The prison facilities are poorly main-tained. Given this, locking people away for life based on crimes that oc-curred decades ago makes no sense.

The habitual offender law is espe-cially cruel toward addicts. An addict can get convicted of felony posses-sion and be sentenced for life based on another felony drug possession conviction that occurred decades earlier. Three convictions spread out over a 50-year span could trigger a mandatory habitual offender life sentence. This is not only cruel and inhumane to the addict, but it further burdens an already overburdened state penal system. It put addicts in a place where little will be done to treat their addiction. In some cases, it puts addicts in a deadly situation where they can be abused by vicious gang members. Addiction is a mental ill-ness. Many addicts need treatment, not a death sentence.

The bill in its current state would not be retroactive, which we believe is a mistake. We not only need to prevent overuse of the habitual of-fender laws in the future, we need to correct our decades of past mistakes. Habitual offender laws were a knee-jerk political reaction to rising crime rates during the crack epidemic of the 1980s and 1990s. They take away discretion from our prosecutors, judges and parole officers and make managing prison populations even more difficult.

Our prisons are in horrible condi-tion, which is an indictment on our society and government. We need to acknowledge that habitual offender laws were a mistake and correct this mistake as soon as possible. Reduc-ing our prison population is a neces-sary step until we can get our prisons back into decent shape. Passing House Bill 1024 would be a step in the right direction.

Greenwood Commonwealth

STATE OF THE NATION

You can support your country or Trump, but not bothI t comes down to a

binary choice. Either he is a monster or an

ignoramus.Either Donald Trump

did nothing when informed that American intelligence believed Russia was paying a bounty to the Taliban for killing American military personnel in Afghanistan, or he had no clue, didn’t even know it was going on.

A monster or an ignora-mus? Well, if you believe Trump, he’s the latter.

Which makes you wonder if he understands how excuses work. Your excuse is supposed to exonerate you, show you innocent of all charges. His have a tendency to show him thick as a brick, stretching credulity like taffy.

He tweeted a thank-you to some guy caught on video yelling “White Power”? Oh, he didn’t hear that part.

He needed two hands to drink a glass of water? Oh, he didn’t want to mess up his tie.

He said he had the coronavirus pandemic under control? Oh, the death toll could have been much worse.

He suggested injecting household disinfectants as a cure? Oh, he was only joking.

He fired the prosecutor investigat-ing his personal lawyer? Oh, he was not involved in that.

Who can be surprised, then, that

Trump has responded to news of Russia putting a price on American heads by saying nobody told him?

Except that apparently, somebody did. The New York Times reports that two American officials say the information was includ-ed in late February in the President’s Daily Brief, a document summarizing national security concerns and assessments that is

prepared by the intelligence commu-nity each morning for the president to read. In all fairness, that last word is problematic with this particular president, whose impatience with the printed word is legendary.

And besides, he’s a busy man. In-deed, according to one of the Times’ sources, the specific date the Russian intel was included was February 27, a day Trump met with “Diamond and Silk,” two former Fox “News” person-alities famed for being black and loud while supporting him. Because, you know, priorities.

Presumably, the PDB he received that day would have told him how three marines were killed by a bomb last April. Presumably, it would have informed him that this tragedy has emerged as the focal point of a probe suggesting Russia put a bull’s-eye on Americans. Whereupon a normal president would surely have raised

the alarm, confronted the enemy or, at a minimum, acknowledged the crime.

But again, Trump is a very busy man, what with coronavirus blame to dodge and Confederate statues to defend.

And in the end, it doesn’t matter much whether he is a moral mon-ster or an utter ignoramus. Or both. What he undeniably is a man who has spent a lifetime oozing his way out of accountability. From his bone spurs to his broken marriages to his bankrupt casinos to his fraudulent university to his crooked charity to his failed meat company to his unpaid bills to the manifold debacles of his presidency, when has Trump ever had to stand up and take the weight? No, avoiding the weight is who he is, who he always will be.

Yet if this latest episode teaches us nothing new about Trump, one harbors a faint hope that it may be a Rubicon of sorts, a bridge finally too far, for some of his enablers, for the pundits, politicians and aides who serve as his unswerving amen corner, professing to divine perfume-scent-ed rainbows in the steaming piles of horse manure he leaves behind. One hopes they finally understand the bot-tom line here: you can support your country or Trump, but not both.

That, too, is a binary choice.Leonard Pitts Jr., winner of the 2004

Pulitzer Prize for commentary, is a columnist for the Miami Herald. Email him at lpitts@miamiherald.com.

Shannon Bardwell

Leonard Pitts

CARTOONIST VIEW

The DispaTch • www.cdispatch.com MONDAY, JULY 6, 2020 5A

Newspaper owner: Sorry for equating mask rule to HolocaustTHE ASSOCIATED PRESS

TOPEKA, Kan. — A Kansas county Republi-can Party chairman who owns a weekly newspaper apologized Sunday for a cartoon posted on the paper’s Facebook page that equated the Demo-cratic governor’s corona-virus-inspired order for people to wear masks in public with the mass mur-der of Jews by the Nazis during the Holocaust.

Dane Hicks, owner and publisher of The An-derson County Review, said in a statement on Facebook that he was re-moving the cartoon after “some heartfelt and ed-ucational conversations with Jewish leaders in the U.S. and abroad.” The newspaper posted the car-toon Friday, and it drew dozens of critical respons-es and international atten-tion. A blog post by Hicks on Saturday defending it also drew critical respons-es.

Hicks is the GOP chairman for Anderson County in eastern Kan-sas. The state party chair-man deemed the cartoon “inappropriate.” Gov. Lau-ra Kelly, who is Catholic, called for it to be removed and she and other critics called it anti-Semitic.

“I can acknowledge the imagery in my recent ed-itorial cartoon describing state government over-reach in Kansas with im-ages of the Holocaust was deeply hurtful to mem-bers of a culture who’ve been dealt plenty of hurt throughout history — people to whom I never desired to be hurtful in the illustration of my point,” Hicks said in his statement.

The cartoon depicted Kelly wearing a mask with

a Jewish Star of David on it, next to a digitally al-tered image of people be-ing loaded onto train cars. Its caption is, “Lockdown Laura says: Put on your mask ... and step onto the cattle car.”

Hicks said Saturday that he put the images together and planned to publish the cartoon in the paper’s next edition Tues-day.

His newspaper is based in the Anderson County seat of Garnett, about 65 miles (105 kilometers) southwest of Kansas City and has a circulation of about 2,100, according to the Kansas Press Associ-ation.

Kelly did not immedi-ately respond to Hicks’a apology, but her office said she could address

the issue during a news conference Monday.

The governor issued the mask order because of resurgence in report-ed coronavirus cases that increased the state’s to-tal to nearly 16,000 as of Friday, when Kansas fin-ished its worst two-week spike since the pandemic began.

State law allows coun-ties to opt out of her mask mandate, and Anderson County has done so. It has about 7,900 residents in a conservative swath of eastern Kansas, and Pres-ident Donald Trump car-ried it with nearly 73% of the vote in 2016. The state health department has reported only four corona-virus cases for Anderson County, all of them since May 8.

The DispaTch • www.cdispatch.com6A MONDAY, JULY 6, 2020

ProtestContinued from Page 1A

a conversation about the Black community and what needs to be done to better our situation — for our children, for our el-ders, for anybody,” Chan-dler told The Dispatch.

He said he hopes the event will become the first of many and encour-aged attendees to spread the word. He and other or-ganizers are working on forming a committee to coordinate their efforts.

The state Legislature’s decision last month to remove the Confederate battle emblem from the state flag was progress but not enough, Chandler said.

“We’re going to have to keep our knee on the neck of the establishment the same way they kept their knee on the neck of George Floyd and choked him out,” Chandler said, referring to a Black man killed by a white po-liceman in Minneapolis in May, an event that sparked protests nation-wide, including the one in Starkville.

‘Love for your own people’

Oktibbeha County NAACP president Yu-landa Haddix supplied protective face masks for the event to prevent the spread of the COVID-19 coronavirus. She and Rev. Joseph Stone, pastor of Second Baptist Church, both said they wanted to attend the event but were not available. They said they support the organiz-ers’ message of healing divisions within the Black community, even if they do not employ the same methods.

Haddix said the NAACP believes Black people should “control the crime in our community firsthand and only utilize the police when we need them.” She and Ferguson both said a relationship of mutual respect between the police and the public is key for lasting change.

Ferguson and Starkville Police Chief Mark Ballard have met periodically over the past several months to discuss ways to build this rela-tionship.

Ballard told The Dis-patch the best way to deal with suspicions and distrust about the depart-ment’s policies and pro-cedures is to meet them head-on.

“I always welcome the opportunity to be a trans-parent police department, and I think that’s the key to trust,” he said.

Chandler said reli-gious and political beliefs should be the first gaps the community bridges within itself.

“You’ve got some peo-ple that are Muslim, some that are Christian, some that are Rastafarian, and that divides us, especially when you start putting it at the forefront,” Chan-dler told the audience. “Let’s not make this movement about religion. Let’s make it about uni-ty and love for your own people, your brothers and sisters.”

Kamari Moore, who moved to Starkville from

Noxapater last year, told The Dispatch she agreed with the message of uni-ty and hopes it includes eliminating anti-LGBTQ sentiment within the Black community.

“In my personal opin-ion, I feel that Black ho-mophobes are no better than the white national-ists who hate us,” Moore said. “We’re all fighting the same battle (as Black people), so I’d like them to address that.”

‘Find some common ground’

Another source of con-tention within the Black community, Ferguson said, is the inability to accept constructive criti-cism that could redirect a young person who is on a path toward violence and legal trouble.

“Back in the day, you used to be able to tell somebody’s child not to do this or not to do that, but now… their whole family’s going to come and jump on you,” Fergu-son said.

Infighting and a lack of support for one another are why Black Americans are “losing the race war,” he said.

“If we keep killing each other and keep going to jail, we ain’t going to have nobody to fight with when it’s time to fight,” he said.

Haddix said Black people do need to stop in-fighting and come togeth-er as one, but the idea of everyone in the commu-nity having a gun is more difficult to swallow.

“I’m going to leave that to them because that’s what they do,” she said. “The NAACP preaches nonviolence all the way around, but we do have to work on our own com-munities. The Black Pan-thers’ mission is different than the NAACP. They’re more hands-on, but we’re going to try to work to-gether to come to some common ground.”

Hunt told The Dis-patch the Huey P. Newton Gun Club does not sup-port Black Lives Matter, though it does believe the statement that gives the movement its name. He said the movement

was “hijacked long ago” by anarchist and bil-lionaire-funded special interests, and he said Starkville’s protest in June “almost got into an All Lives Matter agenda, which hijacked the Black Lives Matter agenda.”

Haddix said Hunt is correct that the protest strayed from a strictly pro-Black message in order to make people of all backgrounds feel wel-come.

“We have to kind of tiptoe over saying cer-tain things because Black Lives (Matter) just can’t get the credit they need right now,” Haddix said. “If we don’t include ev-erybody, then we can’t get the things we need to get, and that’s going to include everybody at the table.”

Stone said he stands by the protest as it hap-pened because it “showed what we can be.” The group that organized it, Starkville Stand Up, is “putting our heads down” and “committed to doing the work” for racial jus-tice, he said.

He also emphasized he supports the organizers of Friday’s events in their efforts to unite the Black community.

“It’s going to take all of us, and we all may have particular parts to play, but I believe I’ve found my niche, and Starkville Stand Up has found their niche,” Stone said.

‘Do better as a whole’Hunt and Ferguson

both emphasized that they are simply against racism and police brutal-ity and not against any groups of people. Fergu-son also said Black peo-ple need to be their own closest allies.

“We have to do better as a whole,” he said. “We can’t just sit here and wait for somebody to come and help us. That’s not going to happen. We’ve been doing this for 400-plus years, waiting on somebody to help us.”

Chandler opened the floor for anyone who wished to express their own opinions, and An-drew Hines Jr. said he had hoped to see more people

at the event.“I understand the coro-

navirus (is a concern), but the coronavirus ain’t killing us,” Hines said. “We’re killing ourselves.”

Hines is 39 years old and spent 14 years in pris-on, and he said he is con-cerned that young Black people will follow their el-ders’ examples and go to prison themselves unless they are guided in anoth-er direction.

Kim Hill, a moth-er of two and a lifelong Starkville resident, told the audience it is “never too late to come together.”

“I know everyone’s tired of losing someone to the streets, the people that we know,” Hill said. “My own brother might shoot my cousin. We’ve got to stop all this and sit down and talk to the kids, talk to the parents, get to-gether as one.”

Tess Vrbin is the Starkville and Oktibbe-ha County reporter for The Dispatch. Reach her at 662-323-2424 or fol-low her on Twitter at @tess_m_vrbin.

Claire Hassler/Dispatch Staff

Shaimeka Hemphill, Eriel Monroe, 6

months, Marc Evans, Samuel Hill

and Willow Gillespie, 9, sit at a picnic table during the

Liberate with Love event on Friday

at Moncrief Park in Starkville. The event, organized

by the Mississippi chapters of the Black Panthers and the Huey P.

Newton Gun Club, encouraged Black

citizens to put aside their differences

and come together for racial justice.

SECTION

BSPORTS LINE662-241-5000Sports

THE DISPATCH n CDISPATCH.COM n MONDAY, JULY 6, 2020

HARVICK TAKES ADVANTAGE OF HAMLIN’S CRASH TO WIN BRICKYARDTHE ASSOCIATED PRESS

INDIANAPOLIS — Kevin Harvick turned up the pressure on Denny Hamlin late in the Brick-yard 400.

And on a cooling track, Hamlin’s worn tires sim-ply gave out.

As the sun set Sunday over Indianapolis Motor Speedway and Hamlin seven laps from one of the few victories that has eluded him, he went ca-reening into the first turn wall with a flat right front-side tire, and Harvick beat Matt Kenseth off the final restart to win his second straight Brickyard.

“We had great tire wear today, so I was able to really push my car as hard as I could,” Harvick said after his third 400 title. “I was able to push him a little harder that last run than earlier in the race and when the sun went down the track was cooling and speeds were going up in the turns.”

The strategy worked out perfectly — just like Stewart-Haas Racing’s holiday weekend.

Not only did Harvey race to his 53rd victory to move within one of tying Lee Petty for 11th on NA-SCAR’s career list, team-mates Aric Almirola and Cole Custer, a rookie, fin-ished third and fifth Sun-day. Fellow Stewart-Haas driver Chase Briscoe won the Xfinity Series race Saturday or the road course.

Harvick tied Hamlin with a season-high fourth

victory and lead in the points. The California driver has four straight top-10 finishes.

And for the third straight race, it looked as if it would be another one-two finish for Harvick and Hamlin.

But until the late, stun-ning twist, Hamlin looked as though he would take his first Brickyard.

“It’s just, it’s tough. I hate it for the FedEx team,” the frustrated Hamlin said. “It was just kind of roulette if it (the tire) stays together or not and mine didn’t.”

How dominant have Harrvick and Hamlin been recently?

After trading victories and runner-up finishes at Pocono last week and Sunday’s result, they’ve combined for seven of 12 victories since the season restarted at Darlington in mid-May and it’s only the second time in seven races Hamlin and his No. 11 Joe Gibbs Racing entry hasn’t finished in the top seven.

But as Childers plotted strategy and monitored tire wear, he sensed Ham-lin was on borrowed time.

“We tried to play it a little safe and we had backed down ours down a little bit to save our tires,” he said. “It just depends on how that situation

plays out at the race and it just so happened we were out there a long time on tires so backing down was the way to go.”

Kenseth couldn’t catch him.

“We were really fast,” the Chip Ganassi Racing driver said. “I think if we were in front, would have been tough to beat.

One person was notice-ably absent: Seven-time Cup champion Jimmie Johnson in No. 48 Hen-drick Motorsports car. Johnson watched the race from his Colorado home as the series’ longest ac-tive streak of consecu-tive and fifth-longest in series history ended at

663. Johnson was hoping to become the third driv-er to win five races on the 2.5-mile oval.

Instead, Justin Allgaier replaced him in the car and he didn’t stick around long.

Allgaier was involved in a six-car pileup near the entrance to pit road that brought out a red flag on Lap 16 when one of Ryan Blaney’s crew mem-bers was pinned between two cars. Track workers put Zachary Price on a stretcher. He was eventu-ally transported to a near-by hospital but there was no immediate post-race update.

Two laps later, Allgai-

er’s day was over.“I didn’t know if I got

the gentleman on the No. 12 or not,” Allgaier said. “Once the wreck started happening in front of us and we all got bottled up there, one car after anoth-er was getting run into. It’s just a shame. I hate it for these guys.”

Kurt Busch also had a rough day after making his 700th career start. After starting second, his hopes for winning one of the Cup’s crown jewels faded with an early pit stop mistake. A plane flew over the track during pre-race activities to cel-ebrate the milestone, which broke a tie with Hall of Famer Buddy Bak-er for No. 16 on the series career list.

NASCAR’s weather problems also continued, this time with the start delayed 55 minutes for lightning.

But once the race start-ed, it was clean sailing for Harvick. He led for most of the first stage before giving way to William Byron, who chose not to pit with nine laps to go, and then won the second stage before earning the big prize.

“We weren’t going to get by him (Hamlin) unless he made a huge mistake and obviously his tire was wearing out,” Harvick said. “His car was a little better than me on the long run. We were better on the restarts, so we would have needed a caution; we couldn’t have beaten him on a green.”

Hernández opts out of MLB season; Doolittle on fenceTHE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Former Cy Young Award winner Félix Hernández has joined the list of major leaguers opting out of the 2020 season due to the corona-virus pandemic, at least temporarily ending the 34-year-old’s bid to revive his career.

Stars Christian Yelich of the Milwaukee Brew-ers and Jose Altuve of the Houston Astros said Sunday they plan to play the 60-game season scheduled to start later this month. Reliever Sean Doolittle, who helped Washington win the World Series last year, plans to play but says that if he feels uncomfortable, he’ll opt out. He also won-dered if the United States has done enough to com-bat the pandemic to de-serve a return to sports.

As baseball prepares to start its season in less than three weeks while the coronavirus contin-ues to ravage the U.S., there is growing unease in many clubhouses. Even Mike Trout’s moth-er weighed in on Twit-ter, urging Americans to wear masks as the reign-ing AL MVP considers his options for the sea-son.

In Oakland, two pro-jected members of the Athletics’ starting rota-tion, ace Mike Fiers and Jesus Luzardo, were not on the field for a second straight day of the re-boot of spring training because of what manag-er Bob Melvin called a “pending” issue without elaborating, aside from saying it’s not injury-re-lated.

Fiers was the whis-tleblower of the Houston Astros’ sign-stealing scandal who pitched his

second career no-hitter last season. He and Lu-zardo were workout part-ners in Florida during the offseason and quarantine period.

The A’s, who have lost the AL wild-card game the last two seasons, are not confirming positive coronavirus tests.

Oakland was forced to push back its first full-squad workout because intake testing results for position players were not yet available following the July 4 holiday. The team expects to practice as a full unit Monday.

Atlanta Braves man-ager Brian Snitker said Hernández decided to opt out after he participated in workouts on Friday and Saturday at Truist Park. The decision came a day after Snitker an-nounced that four-time All-Star first baseman Freddie Freeman, pre-mier reliever Will Smith and two other Atlanta players tested positive for the virus.

Hernández, a six-time All-Star in 15 sea-sons with Seattle who won the 2010 AL Cy Young Award, needed a fresh start following his worst season. King Félix signed a one-year minor league deal with the de-fending NL East cham-pion Braves and made a strong early impression in spring training before the pandemic delayed the season.

Minutes after Nation-als manager Dave Marti-nez said two players out of 60 tested were positive for the virus, Doolittle lamented not having his test results back from Fri-day and implored base-ball to “clean this up.”

The 33-year-old said the Nationals still hav-

See MLB, 2B

DeChambeau wins Rocket Mortgage Classic by 3 shotsTHE ASSOCIATED PRESS

DETROIT — Bryson DeChambeau pounded protein shakes and lift-ed iron to transform his body, adding 40 pounds of mass, and changed his game to put a premium on power.

The plan is working.With jaw-dropping

drives and some clutch putts, DeChambeau won the Rocket Mortgage Classic by three strokes Sunday for his first vic-tory of the season and sixth overall. He became the first PGA Tour player since 2004 to lead a tour-nament in driving dis-tance, along with shots gained off the tee and putting.

“This is a little emo-tional for me because I did do something a little different,” the 26-year-old DeChambeau said. “I changed my body, changed my mindset in the game and I was able to accomplish a win while playing a completely dif-ferent style of golf. And, it’s pretty amazing to see that. I hope it’s an inspira-tion to a lot of people.”

DeChambeau shot a 7-under 65 at Detroit Golf Club, birdieing four of the first seven holes and closing with three straight. He finished at a career-best 23-under 265.

Matthew Wolff (71) was second. He started the day with a three-shot lead and hurt his chances with five bogeys over his first 10 holes. Kevin Kis-ner (66) finished another stroke back as part of a relatively weak field that continued to trend of ex-ceptional play since the

PGA Tour restarted.“The level of play on

tour in these first four weeks has been incredi-ble, cuts at 4 and 5 under every week,” Kisner said.

With a strong finish, DeChambeau removed all doubt that he would win the second Rocket Mortgage Classic.

He made a 30-foot bird-ie putt at No. 16, which he said was his shot of the day. He also had a short putt for birdie on the next hole. And finally, he un-corked a 367-yard drive to set up another short putt at 18.

DeChambeau came into the week with six straight top-eight finish-es and was the only play-er with top 10s in the first three events after the restart from the corona-virus pandemic. He won for the first time since the Shriners Hospitals for Children Open in Novem-ber 2018.

DeChambeau has dramatically altered his body, packing about 240 pounds on his 6-foot-1 body, and took advantage of the extra time he had to work on his physique during the COVID-19

pandemic.“He understands what

is the key to gaining the biggest advantage and that’s distance, and mega distance,” Kisner said. “He just has too much time on his hands. He needs to start getting married and having kids and feel like the rest of us.”

DeChambeau’s power was on full display in the Motor City with drives that went 351 yards on average after looking like he might swing out of his spikes.

When DeChambeau was on the tee box at the 399-yard, par-4 13th, he waited for the next group to leave the green before hitting his drive so that he didn’t hit any fellow competitors.

“No, I’ve never done that,” he acknowledged. “I really could have got-ten there.”

His drive on the 621-yard, par-5 fourth went way left and landed in greenside rough on an adjacent hole. He cleared towering trees and land-ed just short of the green, sending his approach 276 yards, and he two-putted

from 37 feet.“That was probably

my second best moment of the day,” DeChambeau said. “I got really quite honestly pretty lucky be-ing able to get over these trees and let it land and roll onto the front edge of the green.”

As his body and pow-er becomes a fixation for those who follow golf, more eyes are on him and it bothered him during the third round.

On Saturday, De-Chambeau had a testy exchange with a TV cam-eraman after a bogey on the sixth hole. After the third round, he bristled that it isn’t right showing a potential vulnerability and hurting someone’s image.

DeChambeau, though, tried to soften his stance on the issue Sunday by saying the cameraman was just trying to do his job.

During the final round, he was also briefly dis-tracted by a commotion outside the course.

While a Black Lives Matter protests was gath-ering outside the Detroit Golf Club, breaking the silence of the fan-free event with chants and air horns, DeChambeau took some time to reset before hitting a 366-yard drive.

“I know there’s a lot of strife and trouble going on right now,” he said. “I love that everybody’s voicing their opinion and I think that they deserve to do so.

“We’re golfers here trying to provide the best entertainment. I think that’s the most important thing that we can do.”

Junfu Han/Detroit Free Press via USA TODAY SportsBryson DeChambeau tees off on the 16th hole during the fourth round of the Rocket Mortgage Classic on Sunday at the Detroit Golf Club in Detroit.

Jenna Watson/IndyStar via USA TODAY SportsNASCAR Cup Series driver Kevin Harvick celebrates his win in the Brickyard 400 on Sunday in Indianapolis.

The DispaTch • www.cdispatch.com2B MONDAY, JULY 6, 2020

en’t received the respira-tor masks they were told were coming.

“It’s a little bit dis-organized,” Doolittle said. “We’re not getting tests back in time. They still haven’t sent us the PPE. We’re supposed to have N95 masks, stuff like that, gowns, gloves. We’re supposed to have that stuff, we don’t have that stuff. Those are the things it’s going to take for people to stay safe enough for us to continue this season.”

Doolittle said he’s still debating whether to play.

“There’s a lot of play-ers right now trying to make decisions that might be participating in camp that aren’t 100 percent comfortable with where things are at right now,” Doolittle said. “I’m planning on playing, but if at any point I start to feel unsafe, if it starts to take a toll on my mental health with all these things that we have to worry about and just kind of this cloud of uncertainty hanging over everything, then I’ll opt out.”

Doolittle also implored fans to take care of them-selves and attempt to stop the spread of COVID-19 to make sure baseball and other sports can re-sume.

“Sports are like the reward of a functional so-ciety, and we’re just like trying to bring it back even though we’ve taken none of the steps to flat-ten the curve or whatever you want to say,” he said. “We did flatten the curve for a little bit, but we didn’t use that time to do anything productive. We just opened back up for Memorial Day. We decid-ed we’re done with it.

“If there aren’t sports, it’s going to be because people are not wearing masks because the re-sponse to this has been so politicized. We need help from the general public. If they want to watch baseball, please wear a mask, social dis-tance, keep washing your hands.”

Yelich, the NL MVP in 2018, said he never thought of opting out but will support any player who does.

“For myself, it was an easy call,” he said Sunday. “Guys are all in different boats. If you choose to opt out or if we ever had anybody who chose to opt out, I would fully support that decision and under-stand where they were coming from.”

Altuve, the 2017 AL MVP, has two daughters at home, including one who was born this sum-mer.

Although he had con-cerns about returning to play, he said: “I asked our doctors and almost every-body how high-risk my baby and my wife could be because (the baby) is so young. The answer I got was they don’t qualify for the high-risk percent-age of people. So that’s why I decided to join my team.”

Indians manager Ter-ry Francona has been staying apprised on play-ers such as Los Angeles Dodgers pitcher David Price who have decided against playing.

“I have a feeling that there probably are more guys than have been list-ed that are probably along those categories that are thinking of things like that,” he said.

Rangers All-Star slug-ger Joey Gallo and first baseman Ronald Guzman haven’t taken part in the first three days of work-outs. General manager Jon Daniels said they are still in the intake testing process. Reliever Brett Martin tested positive on intake and allowed the Rangers to disclose that Friday.

Daniels said he didn’t plan to announce if the team has any more posi-tive tests.

Pittsburgh manager Derek Shelton said out-fielder Socrates Brito and pitcher Blake Cederlind tested positive for the coronavirus and allowed their names to be re-leased. Shelton indicated there are other players on the club who have tested positive but have not granted the team per-mission to announce the diagnosis.

Philadelphia ace Aar-on Nola is among the sev-en Phillies players who haven’t reported. The team is not revealing who is on the COVID-19 list. Seven players have test-ed positive, including the players who forced the shutdown of the team’s spring training complex a few weeks ago.

The Chicago White Sox said two players tested positive and are asymptomatic. They are isolated in Chicago.

Meanwhile, Trout’s mother, Debbie, tweeted a picture of her son with the caption: “If Mike Trout can wear a mask running the bases, you can wear a mask going out in public,” with the hashtag “WearAMask.”

Trout’s wife, Jessica, is expecting the couple’s first child in August and the Los Angeles Angels slugger has said he’s not comfortable with the cur-rent climate and might not play.

MLBContinued from Page 1B

Virus testing a stress threat for athletic budgetsTHE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Coastal Carolina al-ready had one of the smaller athletic budgets in the Football Bowl Sub-division, and that was before a 15% spending cut was ordered because of projected declines in state funding and student fees stemming from the coronavirus pandemic.

Facing the prospect of having to pay for test-ing of returning athletes and staff for the virus this summer, athletic di-rector Matt Hogue went to work finding a way to defray costs. His 19-sport program includes about 450 athletes, and with individual tests currently costing about $100, test-ing could cost hundreds of thousands of dollars by the end of the 2020-21 ac-ademic year.

Hogue found help from a local health care company — a longtime sponsor of Coastal Caro-lina athletics — that will provide free tests, at least while athletes are coming back to campus this sum-mer.

“Some of the tools and tactics you have to employ because you are at an institution where you have to watch your dollars, that already may have you prepared to see some solutions you might not if you’re at a school that can just simply write a check,” Hogue said. “We have to be creative.”

Athletic departments can’t always count on their insurance carriers or those of the athletes’ families to pay for test-ing. According to federal guidance issued June 23, insurers are required to cover individuals who show symptoms or have been exposed to some-one who is symptomatic; so-called surveillance testing is not part of the

mandate.A few hours’ drive

from Coastal Carolina, East Carolina is dealing with managing the cost of testing and safety proto-cols amid financial prob-lems that led the Ameri-can Athletic Conference school to cut four varsity sports in May. Athletic director Jon Gilbert said the school has already budgeted $100,000 for coronavirus expenses that include testing and supplies such as masks; he expects to exceed that amount and said some schools could end up spending $500,000, de-pending on the number of cases.

“It is extremely chal-lenging because of the unknown,” Gilbert said. “And the unknown is: We can bring a team back in August when school starts, and we can test them and everybody be negative – but as soon as they leave their bub-ble and they go into the general population, then we’re all vulnerable to be-ing infected.”

Nebraska’s $140 mil-lion budget in 2019-20 is more than five times greater than Coastal Car-olina’s $25.5 million. The Cornhuskers’ 24-sport program has about 600 athletes and is one of a handful that makes mon-ey. Though a 10% bud-get cut was announced recently, the program is able to absorb the cost of testing, in part because of its affiliation with the uni-versity’s medical school.

Athletic director Bill Moos and Hogue both said following best prac-tices for testing, as rec-ommended by NCAA and conference medical ex-perts, is the only option when dealing with the health of athletes.

“We’re not going to skimp,” Moos said. “That

is a legitimate expense, and it’s something we are prepared to incur.”

Coastal Carolina and Nebraska have taken similar approaches in bringing athletes back to campus for voluntary workouts. Each athlete is tested upon their re-turn and, if the result is negative, there is no plan to test the athlete again unless they show symptoms. Temperature checks are done on ev-erybody entering athletic facilities.

Neither school has announced plans for in-season testing proce-dures. Experts have said football players should be tested at least once or twice a week in order to be cleared to play in that week’s game.

The financial burden could be eased in time: Laboratories are devel-oping methods for test-ing multiple athletes si-multaneously, a process known as pooled testing and commonly used to screen blood donors for diseases such as HIV and hepatitis.

Sean Murray, presi-dent of Eurofins labora-tory in Des Moines, Iowa, said pooling screens a large group of asymptom-atic people when there is an expectation few of them will test positive; it would not save time or resources in virus hot spots.

An example: Nasal or saliva samples are taken from 10 athletes. Half of each sample is combined with the others and run through a singular test. If it comes back nega-tive, all 10 athletes are cleared. If it’s positive, the remaining sample from each athlete would be tested separately to identify the infected ath-lete or athletes.

Assuming the pool

test is negative, Murray estimated the cost at about $150 — $15 per ath-lete — to test 10 samples together as opposed to $1,000 to test 10 samples separately.

Labs offering sample pool tests for coronavirus would need to apply for emergency authorization from the Food and Drug Administration, which has not yet cleared the technique. The FDA is-sued some early guid-ance on the testing meth-od, but wants to first determine that mixing samples doesn’t reduce accuracy.

“That’s the big limit-ing factor from us actu-ally doing it,” said Brett Lewis, East Tennessee State director of sports medicine. “The people we go through right now, they prefer not to do it un-til the FDA kind of gives the go-ahead, like yeah, this is a good avenue to go through.”

Dr. Brian Hainline, the NCAA chief medical officer, said sample pool testing has proved suc-cessful when testing for HIV among pooled blood donors.

“Similar strategies, as-suming high sensitivity, are also very promising for COVID-19 testing,” he said.

Dr. Greg Stewart, team physician for Tulane athletics and the head of the American Athletic Conference’s COVID-19 medical advisory team, said sample pool testing makes sense and can save a “ton of money.”

Stewart did note the importance of timing: If a pool test were done the Thursday before a Satur-day game and it turned up positive, there might not be enough time to process the individual tests to identify the in-fected athletes.

Liverpool makes triumphant Anfield return as English champTHE ASSOCIATED PRESS

They walked out to another guard of honor, with a huge rectangular banner high up in the Sir Kenny Dalglish Stand reading: “Liverpool FC – Champions Again”.

Liverpool’s players were back home at An-field for the first time since winning a first En-glish league title since 1990.

It was a triumphant re-turn, too.

Lacking the inten-sity and precision that brought the team the title in devastating fashion, Liverpool still managed to eke out a 2-0 win over Aston Villa to move in sight of a slew of records to cap one of the best ever top-flight campaigns.

Second-half goals by Sadio Mane and Cur-tis Jones secured a 17th straight win at Anfield, with just two more need-ed — against Burnley

and Chelsea — to com-plete a 100% home record that would be unprece-dented in the Premier League. Four wins from the last five matches and Liverpool will also pass Manchester City’s record from 2017-18 of 100 points in one season.

Not that Jürgen Klopp is necessarily counting.

“The only thing I can say,” the Liverpool man-ager said, “is there’s no chance to win records if you constantly think about records.

“We don’t want re-cords. We want the three points.”

That’s something Liv-erpool almost always manage to obtain, howev-er it plays.

Eager to rebound from a 4-0 loss at Manchester City on Thursday where their attitude was wide-ly questioned, Klopp’s players were again not at their best without the backing of their fans in-

side an empty stadium.But they eventually

ground Villa down with a resilience and relent-lessness that Klopp has forged in his team.

Mane swept home a finish off the underside of the crossbar in the 71st for his 16th league goal of the season before Jones converted a shot from 10 meters out in the 89th af-ter a nod-down from Mo-hamed Salah for his first Premier League goal.

“Jürgen Klopp teams don’t take their foot off the gas,” Villa manag-er Dean Smith said, ac-knowledging the impact made by the three Liver-pool substitutes — Jordan Henderson, Georginio Wijnaldum and Roberto Firmino — who came on after an hour.

With second-place City losing 1-0 hours later at Southampton, Liverpool is on course to win the league by a re-cord margin. The lead is

currently 23 points, four more than the biggest ever final margin set by City in 2017-18.

Guardiola’s away bluesManchester City man-

ager Pep Guardiola has lost three straight away games in the league for the first time as a coach. That unwanted record was sealed by a first-half wonder goal from Che Adams.

The Southampton striker hadn’t scored in his debut season at the club but, on his 30th ap-pearance, he executed a lob from around 40 me-ters that sailed over City goalkeeper Ederson Mo-raes and curled into an unguarded net.

City’s players lacked the cutting edge they had in the 4-0 win over Liver-pool on Thursday, failing to score despite having 26 shots in the game in a dominant performance at St. Mary’s Stadium.

The DispaTch • www.cdispatch.com MONDAY, JULY 6, 2020 3B

Comics & PuzzlesDear AbbyDILBERT

ZITS

GARFIELD

CANDORVILLE

BABY BLUES

BEETLE BAILEY

MALLARD FILLMORE

HoroscopesTODAY’S BIRTHDAY (July

6). You are bound for excite-ment, and you will experience it this year. The investment is a lit-tle bit of planning, your creative imagination and a willingness to trade your work for unknown re-sults. Taurus and Gemini adore you. Your lucky numbers are: 8, 30, 10, 27 and 6.

ARIES (March 21-April 19). Being in charge requires a vari-ety of qualities. Knowing which is needed and when — that’s a skill in and of itself. Today you’ll employ masterly powers of discernment.

TAURUS (April 20-May 20). You’re not about to ask the crowd, “How do you like me now?” because you were never doing it for them. You will, how-ever, dig deeper into your own soul and pose that question.

GEMINI (May 21-June 21). What a feeling! Your strategy is working, and momentum is building. Your goal will move as rapidly toward you as you are moving toward it.

CANCER (June 22-July 22). Shadows tell you where the light is being blocked. If you want to get rid of the shadow, you don’t

try and move the shadow; you move yourself until you’re out of the way of looming obstacles. Find the light again.

LEO (July 23-Aug. 22). As an event draws near, you wonder if you’ll ever feel ready. Maybe not. It’s a good thing that readiness is irrelevant in acts of inevitability. Once you jump in, you are at the whims of the fall.

VIRGO (Aug. 23-Sept. 22). Throw some compassion back to your former self. Sympathize with the you who has been in difficult positions. With a soft heart, you’ll have few regrets, and the ones you do have will not carry much weight.

LIBRA (Sept. 23-Oct. 23). Twice-told tales change in the telling. Popular stories are told not twice but hundreds of times. The wise listener keeps an open mind, listening through the filters of fiction and metaphor instead of fact.

SCORPIO (Oct. 24-Nov. 21). Today’s cosmic boon is a gift for enjoying yourself, and it will work for others, too. What’s best for you will be what’s best for everyone around you today.

SAGITTARIUS (Nov. 22-Dec. 21). It’s a wonderful thing to find out that you need far less to live and enjoy yourself than you think. Life doesn’t have to give you a loss in order for you to come to the conclusion that you want to live lighter.

CAPRICORN (Dec. 22-Jan. 19). Which is needed most, courage or tact? Both take a great deal of energy. Tact takes more. In fact, in today’s case, tact may be the most coura-geous move of all.

AQUARIUS (Jan. 20-Feb. 18). Some of the ways you see yourself are well-supported, as they align with your talents and roles. Other identity markers are rather arbitrary, and you can change them at any point if you want to.

PISCES (Feb. 19-March 20). There’s a version of you that was in a relationship long ago. Now you are a new version and the relationship is in the process of updating to accom-modate the change. Hold on.

SOLUTION:Dog eat dog

FAMILY CIRCUS

DEAR ABBY: My husband of nearly

22 years and I divorced last year after he told me he didn’t want to be married anymore and didn’t know if he ever loved me. Since our split, he has bought a home with another woman — the same woman I suspected him of having an affair with, and the same woman he encour-aged me to befriend during our marriage. (I even took her on a trip to Europe.)

Our son is graduating from high school. We are planning a belated, socially distanced graduation party for my son, and my ex wants to bring her. My challenge is that I am with someone new as well, but he is someone who came into my life a couple of months after my ex and I separated. I want him to be at the party, but I don’t want her there. I feel our circumstanc-es are quite different.

My son is my priority, so I am leaning toward asking my new significant other not to attend, and then asking that she not at-tend either. I’m still hurt by their actions. What is the protocol here, and what should I do? — PROUD MOM MOVING ON

DEAR MOM: I understand your hurt feelings, but, as you

wrote, the party is a celebration of your son’s achievement and nothing else. If things turn out as it appears they will, your ex may marry this woman, and she would be to some extent in your life when your son marries, starts a family, etc. (Sorry!)

The saving grace through all of this is you have a new partner in

your life who can help buffer you. Fortunately, you will be social distancing, so you won’t have to spend much time in her space. While you don’t have to welcome this woman with open arms, please observe the social niceties and devote the majority of your time to mingling with the other guests.

DEAR ABBY: I met a man many years ago. Shortly after-ward, my husband passed away. I was in a tough spot, and this man came to my rescue. He offered me a place to live, but I refused. After a few months, I started receiving love letters from him. I carefully answered them, telling him I had gotten involved with someone else, but if it didn’t work out, I might consider dating him.

After about a month, he began showing up at my house. By then I was living with my new

man, “Roger.” I explained I was in love and he should leave, but he still showed up at my house every couple of months.

I was with Roger for 11 years, but after a battle with heart problems, he died. This man showed up while Roger was in a coma. I told him with much anger several times to please stop coming to my house.

Two days after Roger’s death, he again showed up. He asked if it was OK to take me on a date now, and I lost it. I or-dered him to never come to my door again and told him I would never date him. He has started sending me love letters again. I don’t answer them. He still calls or sends angry letters and still comes by asking if I would like to go on a date. Help! — FED UP IN WASHINGTON

DEAR FED UP: If you have a lawyer, have him/her write the man a formal letter telling him you have tried to politely discourage his attentions and that if he persists in harassing you, he will be reported to the police as a stalker. Then follow through by filing a report with the authorities.

P.S. If your home is not equipped with a security system, consider installing one. He is creepy.

Dear Abby is written by Abigail Van Buren, also known as Jeanne Phillips, and was founded by her mother, Pauline Phillips. Contact Dear Abby at www.DearAbby.com or P.O. Box 69440, Los Angeles, CA 90069.

Dear Abby

Indians manager Francona favors nickname change for clubTHE ASSOCIATED PRESS

CLEVELAND — Cleveland manager Terry Francona won’t sidestep the hot-button topic any longer. He believes the Indians need to change their contentious name.

“I think it’s time to move forward,” Francona said Sunday.

Francona’s comments came two days after the Indians, amid a nation-wide movement to erase racially insensitive sym-bols, released a statement saying the organization is “committed to engaging our community and ap-propriate stakeholders to determine the best path forward with regard to our team name.”

The team’s announce-

ment — an initial step toward a possible name change — came hours after the NFL’s Washing-ton Redskins said they will undergo a review of their name and logo. The Redskins announced their decision after sev-eral sponsors, including FedEx, which owns the naming rights to the team’s stadium, urged the franchise to change a nickname that has been deemed offensive for de-cades. Like Francona, Washington coach Ron Rivera has called for his team to change its name.

During a Zoom call fol-lowing a morning workout for his team at Progres-sive Field, Francona said he will no longer sidestep the subject of Cleveland’s

name or mascot. The team removed the highly debated Chief Wahoo logo from its game jerseys and caps last year, and now will consider changing a nickname that has been in place since 1915.

“I’ve been thinking about it and been think-ing about it before we put out that statement,” he said. “I know in the past, when I’ve been asked about, whether it’s our name or the Chief Wahoo, I think I would usually an-swer and say I know that we’re never trying to be disrespectful.

“And I still feel that way. But I don’t think that’s a good enough an-swer today. I think it’s time to move forward. It’s a very difficult subject.

It’s also delicate.”Francona acknowl-

edged his own past errors in judgment. He doesn’t want to be labeled as someone who can’t adapt or change with the times.

“Even at my age, you don’t want to be too old to learn or to realize that, maybe I’ve been ignorant of some things, and to be ashamed of it, and to try to be better,” said the 61-year-old, who guided the Boston Red Sox to two World Series titles. “I’m glad that we’re going to be open to listening, because I think that’s probably the most important thing right now, is being willing to listen, not necessarily just talk.”

Francona also said his longtime bench coach

Brad Mills has left the club to be with his fam-ily. Mills’ 18-month-old grandson, Beau, drowned during spring training.

“I think it was ago-nizing for him to leave home,” Francona said. “I think it was agonizing for him to leave here. But I know in my heart he made the right decision. If there’s ever a bittersweet moment, it was staying goodbye to him yesterday because I care about him enough that I know where he needs to be. He’s been, I don’t know if it’s my left or right hand, whichever one is better, that’s the one he’s been.”

Francona said his coaching staff will “div-vy up” Mills’ duties, but many of them will fall to

assistant Mike Barnett. Mills was in charge of organizing the re-start of training camp, which was halted in March because of COVID-19.

“No one person will replace what Millsy does, and we know that,” Fran-cona said. “And he knows that. I think it was a dif-ficult decision for him. I almost wish it hadn’t been so difficult because I think I know in my heart where he needs to be, and that’s home right now.”

NotesFrancona did not have

an update on outfield-er Delino DeShields Jr., who tested positive for COVID-19 and can’t join the team before twice testing negative.

The DispaTch • www.cdispatch.com4B MONDAY, JULY 6, 2020

memorialgunterpeel.com

Robbie UnderwoodVisitation:

Tuesday, July 7 • 9-10:45 AMCollege St. Location

Graveside Services:Tuesday, July 7 • 11 AM

Friendship CemeteryCollege St. Location

Spaghetti Western movie composer Ennio Morricone dead at 91THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

ROME — Oscar-winning Italian composer Ennio Mor-ricone, who created the coy-ote-howl theme for the iconic Spaghetti Western “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly” and of-ten haunting soundtracks for such classic Hollywood gang-ster movies as “The Untouch-ables” and the epic “Once Upon A Time In America,” died on Monday. He was 91.

Morricone’s longtime lawyer and friend, Giorgio Assumma, said the Maestro, as he was known, died in a Rome hospital of complications following a re-cent fall in which he broke a leg.

During a career that spanned decades and earned him an Os-car for lifetime achievement in 2007, Morricone collaborated with some of Hollywood’s and

Italy’s top directors, includ-ing on “The Untouchables” by Brian de Palma, “The Hateful Eight” by Quentin Tarantino and “The Battle of Algiers” by Gillo Pontecorvo.

The Tarantino film would win him the Oscar for best orig-inal score in 2016. In accept-ing that award, Morricone told the audience at the ceremony: “There is no great music with-out a great film that inspires it.”

In total, he produced more than 400 original scores for fea-ture films.

His iconic so-called Spa-ghetti Western movies saw him work closely with the late Ital-ian film director Sergio Leone.

Morricone was credited with nothing less than reinvent-ing music for Western mov-ies through his partnership with Sergio Leone, a former

classmate. Their partnership included the “Dollars” trilogy starring Clint Eastwood as a quick-shooting, lonesome gun-man: “A Fistful of Dollars” in 1964, “For a Few Dollars More” in 1965 and “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly” a year later.

Morricone was celebrated for crafting just a few notes, like those played on a harmonica in Leone’s 1984 movie “Once Upon A Time in America,” which would instantly become the film’s motif.

The movie is a saga of Jew-ish gangsters in New York that explores themes of friendship, lost love and the passing of time, starring Robert De Niro and James Wood. It is consid-ered by some to be Leone’s masterpiece, thanks in part to Morricone’s evocative score, in-cluding a lush section played on

string instuments. “Inspiration does not exist,”

Morricone said in a 2004 in-terview with The Associated Press. “What exists is an idea, a minimal idea that the composer develops at the desk, and that small idea becomes something important.”

In a later interview, with Ital-ian state TV, Morricone cited “study, discipline and curios-ity” as the keys to his creative genius. “Writing music, like all creative arts, comes from a long path” along life’s experiences, he said.

In his late 80s, Morricone provided the score for “The Hateful Eight,” Tarantino’s 2015 70-mm epic and the first time in decades that he had composed new music for a Western. It was also the first time Tarantino had used an original score.

In accepting Morricone’s Golden Globe for the music in his place, Tarantino called him his favorite composer.

“When I say ‘favorite com-poser,’ I don’t mean movie composer. ... I’m talking about Mozart, I’m talking about Beethoven, I’m talking about Schubert,” Tarantino said.

Italy’s head of state, Presi-dent Sergio Mattarella, in a con-dolence message to the com-poser’s family, wrote: “Both a refined and popular musician, he left a deep footprint on the musical history of the second half of the 1900s.”

Morricone’s sound tracks, Mattarella said, “contributed greatly to spreading and rein-forcing the prestige of Italy in the world.”

COMMERCIAL DISPATCH OBITUARY POLICYObituaries with basic information including visitation and service times, are provided free of charge. Extended obituaries with a pho-tograph, detailed biographical information and other details families may wish to include, are available for a fee. Obituaries must be sub-mitted through funeral homes unless the deceased’s body has been donated to science. If the deceased’s body was donated to science, the family must provide official proof of death. Please submit all obituaries on the form provided by The Commercial Dispatch. Free notices must be submitted to the newspaper no later than 3 p.m. the day prior for publication Tuesday through Friday; no later than 4 p.m. Saturday for the Sunday edition; and no later than 7:30 a.m. for the Monday edition. Incomplete notices must be received no later than 7:30 a.m. for the Monday through Friday editions. Paid notices must be finalized by 3 p.m. for inclusion the next day Monday through Thursday; and on Friday by 3 p.m. for Sunday and Monday publica-tion. For more information, call 662-328-2471.

Allen FranklinCOLUMBUS — Allen Franklin, 79, died July 5,

2020, at his residence. Arrangements are incomplete and will be an-

nounced by Lowndes Funeral Home of Columbus.

Australia to shut state border as Melbourne infections surge

MELBOURNE, Aus-tralia — Australian au-thorities were prepar-ing to close the border between the country’s two largest states, as the country’s second-largest city, Melbourne, recorded two deaths and its high-est-ever daily increase in infections on Monday.

The border between the states of New South Wales — home to Sydney — and Victoria — home to Melbourne — is due to be shut late Tuesday.

New South Wales Pre-mier Gladys Berejiklian was a critic of states that closed their borders to her state when Sydney had Australia’s largest number of coronavirus cases. But she said she changed her stance be-cause the situation in Melbourne was unprece-dented and indicated the pandemic was in a new phase.

The overwhelming majority of new infections detected in Melbourne in recent weeks were from community transmission.

Everywhere else in Aus-tralia, the vast majority of people who tested pos-itive for the virus were infected overseas or had been infected by a re-turned traveler, Berejik-lian said.

“What is occurring in Victoria has not yet oc-curred anywhere else in Australia,” she said Mon-day. “It’s a new part of the pandemic and, as such, it requires a new type of re-sponse.”

The Victorian govern-ment locked down 36 of the most virus-prone Mel-bourne suburbs last week and at the weekend add-ed another four suburbs because of the disease spread.

Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews said of the 127 new cases record-ed overnight, 53 were among 3,000 people who have been confined by police to their apartments in nine public housing blocks since Saturday.

Australia’s Acting Chief Medical Officer Paulk Kelly has described the high-rises as “vertical cruise ships” because of the high risk of virus spread.

Police allege a 32-year-old man bit a police officer on Monday as he attempt-ed to leave a high-rise in the suburb of Fleming-ton. He would be charged with assault, resisting police and attempting to breach a pandemic order, Police Chief Commission-er Shane Patton said.

The infections an-nounced Monday sur-passed the first surge of infections in Melbourne that peaked on March 28 at 111 cases recorded in a day.

Daniels said he agreed with Berejiklian and Prime Minister Scott Morrison, a Sydney res-ident, that the border needed to close. Three in five Australian resi-dents live in Sydney or Melbourne and the air services between the two cities before the pandem-ic were among the busiest in the world.

SOURCE: AP

The DispaTch • www.cdispatch.com MONDAY, JULY 6, 2020 5B

Ringing in America’s 244th

FOCAL POINT A photo exploration of life inside the Golden Triangle

Photos and captions by Claire Hassler/Dispatch Staff

T his year’s Fourth of July celebrations looked a little different due to the COVID-19 pandemic but were no less festive. Instead of large gatherings, families

celebrated with small cookouts and quick outings.Some in Starkville browsed the Community Market in

the morning and then went home to relax. Rhonda Jones said buying produce at the market was the main way she was celebrating. She’d been planning to have a cookout with friends, but they decided to cancel when coronavirus cases began rising again.

Many families in Columbus stopped at the Crescent City Carnival set up along Highway 45 to pick up festive food for the holiday. Brandy Gardner said visiting the carnival was a good way to do something for the holiday at a social distance. Her only other plans for the day were to shoot fireworks off at home with her kids Skylar, 6, and Chris-tian, 15.

Others took to the outdoors with friends for something to do. Bonnie Partridge, Brenda Johnson and Betty Gill started their Fourth at 6:30 a.m. with an 11.5-mile run. The day also saw scattered thunderstorms, but that didn’t pre-vent people from enjoying boat and jet ski rides on Colum-bus Lake or pool parties in their backyards.

COVID-19 forced adapted celebrations throughout the day, but fireworks still lit the evening sky. People sat in isolated clusters or stayed in their cars at the Starkville Sportsplex during a fireworks show.

ABOVE: Alvin Jones grills before a family cookout in Columbus. Jones was the self-appointed Grill Master. He started around 1 p.m. for the family to eat around 7 p.m. BOTTOM LEFT: Fireworks light up the sky at the Starkville Sportsplex. Families watched from their cars or in clusters near their cars in light of COVID-19. BOTTOM RIGHT: Skylar Gardner, 6, stands in line for snacks at the Crescent City Carnival set up off of Highway 45 in Columbus. Skylar came to the carnival with her mom, Brandy Gardner, and her brother, Christian Gardner, 15.

Jimmy Davidson starts up his jet ski to celebrate the Fourth of July on Columbus Lake. It began thunder storming right as Davidson was heading out, but he said that wasn’t going to stop him

Kids splash during a pool party at John and Liz Fields’ house. The Fields had friends over to swim in their pool and have a cookout.

Charles Glenn, 8, rests on a popsicle floaty during a pool party at John and Liz Fields’ house. Charles and his friends spent their Fourth doing flips off the diving board and racing down a waterslide.

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SudokuSudoku is a num-ber-placing puzzle based on a 9x9 grid with several given numbers. The object is to place the numbers 1 to 9 in the empty spaces so that each row, each column and each 3x3 box contains the same number only once. The difficulty level increases from Monday to Sunday.

Sunday’s answer

ACROSS1 Feel nostalgic for5 Reduced amount9 Like some toothpaste10 Sports setting12 Fiery crime13 Elementary14 Complains16 Fitting17 Rock growth18 London’s river21 Museum focus22 Fancy flap-jacks23 “Common Sense” writer24 Title holders26 River blocker29 Enjoy a bookstore30 Sub shop31 Equip32 Steals34 Choose to participate37 Plain to see38 Paris’s river39 Talks crazily40 Mailed41 Ceases

DOWN1 Vanity feature2 Be adamant3 Ceases4 “Auld Lang —”5 Chemist’s place6 Memorable time7 Bagel choice8 Wesley of “Blade”9 Molten rock11 Play parts15 Zebra fea-tures19 Egg layers20 Gorilla, for

one22 Engine parts23 Fido’s foot24 “Jeepers!”25 Immobilize26 Rely27 Tips off28 View obscur-ers29 Abbr. in com-pany names30 Backless sofa33 Dressed in35 Travel stop36 Badminton need

Sunday’s answer

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179638254

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Difficulty Level 7/04

Sunday’s Cryptoquote:

Sudoku YESTERDAY’S ANSWER

Sudoku is a number-placing puzzle based on a 9x9 grid with several given numbers. The object is to place the numbers 1 to 9 in the empty spaces so that each row, each column and each 3x3 box contains the same number only once. The difficulty level increases from Monday to Sunday.

Log cabinWHATZIT ANSWER

General Help Wanted

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FREON WANTED: We pay $$$ forcylinders and cans. R12 R500 R11 R113R114. Convenient. CertifiedProfessionals. Call 312-779-0402 orvisit www.RefrigerantFinders.

Week of July 5, 2020

M e d i c a l S u p p l i e s

S e r v i c e s - G e n e r a l

S e r v i c e s - L e g a l

M i s c e l l a n e o u s

I n s u r a n c eC l a s s e s / T r a i n i n g

F o r S a l e

Wa n t e d To B u y

S e r v i c e s - G e n e r a l

Advertising Solution! Statewide Classifieds!

90+ newspapers for one low rate!

To order your advertising, call:

Mississippi Press ServicesSue Hicks, 601-981-3060

Five Questions:

1 Dungeon & Dragons or D&D

2 Godzilla

3 “Happy”

4 1954

5 “All the King’s Men”

emPloymentcall uS: 662-328-2424

General Help Wanted

Experienced Cabinet As-sembler: 1+ years experi-ence recommended as wellas a good knowledge ofother woodworking tasks.Must be able to operatepower tools & have validdriver’s license.Call 662-245-04007:00am-5:00pm, Monday-Thursday to speak withGreg or Thomas.

Experienced Cabinet andMill Work Installer: 2+years experience highly re-commended. Must have avalid driver’s license & bewilling to travel overnight.Must have own tools.Call 662-245-04007:00am-5:00pm, Monday-Thursday to speak withGreg or Thomas.

AREA BUSINESSis seeking a mature,

motivated person whoenjoys interacting withpeople, being outdoorsand multitasking. Skillsrelated to maintaining

equipment and/or farmwork are desired but not

required. Person needs tobe flexible enough to pitchin where ever needed but

also keep their coreresponsibilities in mind.

If you enjoy a different ex-perience on the regular,meeting new people and

believe in customersatisfaction this job might

be for you.Please submit resume to:

Blind Box 675 c/o TheCommercial Dispatch

PO Box 511Columbus, MS 39703

CALEDONIA BUSINESSneeds General Laborer.Experienced weed-eater,$10-12/hour. Valid driver'slicense, transportation &experience helpful. CallJesse & Beverly's LawnService at 662-356-6525.

THE COMMERCIALDISPATCH seeks a motiv-ated, contracted carrier forthe Brooksville & Maconarea. Excellent opportunityto earn money for college.Must have good transporta-tion, valid driver's license& insurance. Delivers onSunday morning and Mon-Fri afternoons. Apply at TheCommercial Dispatch, 516Main Street in Columbus.No phone calls please.

rentalSaDS Starting at $25

Apts For Rent: West

VIPRentals

Apartments & Houses

viceinvestments.com327-8555

1 Bedrooms2 Bedroooms3 Bedrooms

1, 2, & 3 BathsLease, Deposit& Credit Check

Furnished & Unfurnished

Apts For Rent: Caledonia

2 BR, 1 BA w/ W/Dconnections. ApplicationFee, Background and CreditChecks required. $500.00662−436−2255

Apts For Rent: Other

COLEMANRENTALS

TOWNHOUSES & APARTMENTS

1 BEDROOM2 BEDROOMS3 BEDROOMS

LEASE,DEPOSIT

ANDCREDIT CHECK

662-329-23232411 HWY 45 N

COLUMBUS, MS

© Th

e Disp

atch

Houses For Rent: North

HOUSE FOR RENT BY

OWNER. 220 MclemoreRoad, Columbus. 1750sqftBrick house in quiet neigh−borhood. 3 bedrooms & 2full baths. No HUD,Columbus City schooldistrict. $1000/mo with1 mo deposit. Seriousinquiries only please. Call662−574−3202 to see thehouse or make application.

HOUSE FOR RENT

2−3 Bedroom w/ 1.5 BathFenced in yard. $675.

662−549−9555.Ask for Glenn or text.

HOUSE FOR RENT.

56 Mason Dr. No HUD. Nopets. 3BR/1.5BA. Asking$760/ per month. Dep.$760. 662−549−9298.

Houses For Rent: East

3BR 2B House for rent

New Hope School district.No pets. No HUD. Available

late July. $790/mo.Call 662−549−0144.

Houses For Rent: Other

248 BYRNES CIR. 3BR/2BA with extra room. $650rent + $650 dep. Call 662−364−7969 for more info.

Mobile Homes for Rent

RENT A CAMPER!

CHEAPER THAN A MOTEL!

Utilities & cable included,from $145/wk − $535/moColumbus & County Schoollocations. 662−242−7653

or 205−442−2011.

real eStateaDS Starting at $25

Lots & Acreage

1.75 ACRE LOTS. Good/Bad Credit Options. Goodcredit as low as 20% down,$499/mo. Eaton Land,662−361−7711.

merchanDiSeaDS Starting at $12

Appliances

CENTRAL AC UNIT. Onlyused 1 day, too small forspace. Revolv brand, 2.5btu, 208−230 voltage.$900. Crawford, MS.662−497−2754.

General Merchandise

2018 40FT Gooseneck

Trailer w/ 5ft dovetail, 12ton axles, 10−4inch straps& tarps. $7,000.662−251−3001.

HORSE SADDLE

with all attachments. $250OBO Call 662−328−9316.

WHITE POSTER BOARD

$0.50 each − 24"x23"Visit 516 Main Streetor call 662−328−2424

vehicleSaDS Starting at $12

Auto Parts

NEW INTERIOR ’94 indypace car. Fits ’94−’96Mustange. Set of 4 tire.Call 815−546−71−42leave message. Located inNew Hope.

Campers & RVs

2002 SUNNYBROOK LITE

RV FOR SALE:

RENOVATED FARMHOUSEINTERIOR DESIGNEDCOMES WITH: QUEEN SIZEDYNASTY MATTRESS, TWINSIZE SOFA MATTRESS,GALLEY SUPPLIES, TV,NEW BATTERY, DININGCHAIRS, OUTSIDERECLINERS. $6,500.00662−251−9915

communityaDS Starting at $12

Good Things To Eat

RED & GREEN TOMATOES.

Other vegetables comingsoon. 662−251−1000 or662−855−0085.

Travel & Entertainment

PUBLIC CATFISH POND

@ 130 Hillcrest Drive.Open Tues−Sat, 7a−5p

662−386−8591Call for pricing.

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