U.S. Politics

The United States is Earth's punching bag for nasty weather. The nation's weather chief and other experts say the U.S. gets hit by stronger, costlier, more varied and frequent extreme weather than anywhere on Earth. Those include tornadoes, hurricanes, floods, droughts, blizzards and the like. The reason is geography. Two oceans, the Gulf of Mexico, mountains, the jet stream and jutting peninsulas all combine to brew up severe storms. But nasty weather by itself isn't a disaster. What makes nature's bad hand a disaster is humans. It's where people build, what they build and how.

Storms that dropped possibly dozens of tornadoes killed at least 26 people in small towns and big cities across the South and Midwest. The storms tore a path through the Arkansas capital and collapsed the roof of a packed concert venue in Illinois. People throughout the region were stunned with the scope of the damage. Confirmed or suspected tornadoes in at least eight states destroyed homes and businesses, splintered trees and lay waste to neighborhoods across a broad swath of the country. The dead included nine in one Tennessee county, four in the small town of Wynne, Arkansas, four in Illinois and three in nearby Sullivan, Indiana. Other deaths were reported elsewhere in Tennessee and in Alabama and Mississippi, along with one near Little Rock, Arkansas.

Purdue's Zach Edey was a near-unanimous choice as The Associated Press men’s college basketball player of the year. Edey received all but one vote from a 58-person media panel, with Indiana’s Trayce Jackson-Davis receiving the other. The 7-foot-4 Canadian was sixth nationally in scoring at 22.3 points per game and second in rebounding at 12.8.

Caitlin Clark had another sensational game with 41 points to help Iowa spoil South Carolina’s perfect season with a 77-73 victory in the Final Four. The spectacular junior guard set a record for the highest-scoring semifinal game and became the first women’s player to post back-to-back 40-point games in the NCAA Tournament. She now has the Hawkeyes in a spot they’ve never been in before — one victory away from a national championship. They’ll have to beat another SEC team to do that as Iowa will face LSU in the title game on Sunday afternoon after the Tigers beat Virginia Tech in the other national semifinal. The loss ended a tremendous season for the defending champion Gamecocks. They finished 36-1.

A monster storm system has torn through the South and Midwest, spawning deadly weather including tornadoes that shredded homes and shopping centers in Arkansas, collapsed a theater roof during a heavy metal concert in Illinois and made a fatal sweep into rural Indiana. At least one person was killed and more than two dozen were hurt, some critically, in the Little Rock area during Friday’s storm. The town of Wynne in northeastern Arkansas also was devastated and officials reported two dead there, along with destroyed homes and people trapped in the debris. Authorities say a theater roof collapsed during a tornado in Belvidere, Illinois, killing one person and injuring 28. The emergency management director of Sullivan County, Indiana, says the storm has caused three fatalities there.

Under intense scrutiny from Washington that could lead to a potential ban on TikTok, the top attorney for the social media platform and its Chinese parent company ByteDance defended TikTok’s plan to safeguard U.S. user data from China and said it will continue to develop its new app called Lemon8. The comments come as TikTok is under intense scrutiny over concerns it could hand user data to the Chinese government or push pro-Beijing propaganda and misinformation on its behalf. To assuage concerns from U.S. officials, TikTok has been emphasizing a proposal to store all U.S. user data on servers owned and maintained by the software giant Oracle. TikTok maintains it has never been requested to turn over any kind of data and won’t do so if asked.

In 1977, Associated Press reporter James W. Mangan had an exclusive interview with a South Texas election judge who detailed certifying false votes for Lyndon B. Johnson nearly three decades earlier. Johnson had won by an 87-vote margin in the 1948 Democratic primary runoff. Mangan's story made headlines across the country. The audio recordings from his interviews for the story were posted Thursday on the LBJ Presidential Library and Museum’s archival website. Mangan's family found the labeled cassette tapes at his San Antonio home after his death in 2015. They donated the tapes last summer to the library on the University at Texas at Austin campus.

Police say the body of a 2-year-old Florida boy who had been the subject of a frantic search after his mother was slain has been found in a lake in the jaws of an alligator. St. Petersburg Police Chief Anthony Holloway also said Friday the boy’s father, 21-year-old Thomas Mosley, will be charged with two counts of first-degree murder in the killing of the mother, 20-year-old Pashun Jeffery, and their young son Taylen Mosley. Searchers, including dive teams and officers using drones, had been intensely looking for the boy since his mother’s body was discovered Wednesday in their apartment. The alligator with the boy's body was some miles away. The father does not yet have a lawyer to speak on his behalf.