BRITTNEY GRINER PRISONER SWAP AP SPORTS STORY OF YEAR 

The return of Brittney Griner to the United States in a dramatic prisoner swap with Russia marked the culmination of a 10-month ordeal that captivated world attention, a saga that landed at the intersection of sports, politics, race and gender identity, and wartime diplomacy, making her by far the most high-profile American to be jailed abroad – and her saga the AP Sports Story of the Year. The deal drew criticism from some prominent Republicans, who lamented that the U.S. had not gotten another detained American, Paul Whelan, home, and who complained that the administration had given up a notorious convicted felon, Russian arms dealer Viktor Bout. “President Biden, you brought me home and I know you are committed to bringing Paul Whelan and all Americans home too. I will use my platform to do whatever I can to help you,” Griner said. “I also encourage everyone that played a part in bringing me home to continue their efforts to bring all Americans home. Every family deserves to be whole.” Griner said in a statement on Friday that she plans to play basketball this season for the Phoenix Mercury.

NC CENTRAL BEATS JSU IN SANDERS’ FINAL GAME

North Carolina Central beat Jackson State 41-34 on Saturday in the Celebration Bowl to spoil Deion Sanders’ bid for an undefeated season in his farewell. It was the second consecutive season that Sanders’ Tigers were favored before losing in the game regarded as the championship of teams from historically Black colleges and universities.

“I feel like we’ve won, but we didn’t win that game,” said Sanders, who now will devote his full attention to his new job as Colorado’s coach. Eagles coach Trei Oliver said he hopes the victory gives more respect to the MEAC and North Carolina Central after all the pregame attention was on “Coach Prime” and Jackson State.”They had a chip on their shoulder,” Oliver said of his players. “The disrespect was real since we’ve been down here.”

ARCTIC AIR WILL BLAST JUST BEFORE CHRISTMAS

Forecasters are warning of treacherous holiday travel and life-threatening cold for much of the nation as an arctic air mass blows into the already-frigid southern United States. “We’re looking at much-below normal temperatures, potentially record-low temperatures leading up to the Christmas holiday,” said Zack Taylor, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service.

Homeless people in southern states are also vulnerable to its weather patterns that make it comfortable one week, but suddenly freezing the next.

Florida will not have a white Christmas, but forecasters are expecting that weekend to be unusually cold throughout the state. Northern Florida cities such as Jacksonville, Tallahassee and Pensacola have predicted lows in the 20s (minus 3 Celsius) on Christmas Eve, with highs of about 40 (4 Celsius).

OFFICERS CHARGED IN GREENE’S DEADLY ARREST 

Five Louisiana law enforcement officers have been charged with state crimes for their roles in the 2019 arrest of Ronald Greene, whose death authorities initially blamed on a car crash until The Associated Press published long-withheld body camera video showing the Black motorist being stunned, beaten and dragged. Master Trooper Kory York, 50, is seen in the video dragging Greene by his ankle shackles, putting his foot on his back to force him down and leaving the heavyset man face down in the dirt with his hands and feet restrained for more than nine minutes. Use-of-force experts say these actions could have dangerously restricted Greene’s breathing, and the state police’s own force instructor called the troopers’ actions “torture and murder.”

Lt. John Clary was the ranking officer on the scene of Greene’s arrest and falsely denied the existence of his own body-camera video from that night for nearly two years. That 30-minute video is the only footage that shows the moment a handcuffed, bloody Greene moans under the weight of two troopers, twitches and then goes still. Trooper Dakota DeMoss, 30, had attempted to pull Greene over for speeding and running a red light in Monroe. After a lengthy pursuit, he rushed Greene’s SUV alongside Master Trooper Chris Hollingsworth, who immediately deployed his stun gun. Greene was stunned seven times for a total of 19 seconds before being taken into custody, internal records show. DeMoss told investigators he “survived a fight for his life” taking Greene into custody – an account contradicted by his own 46minute body-camera video.

Christopher Harpin, a Union Parish sheriff’s deputy, arrived at the scene after the troopers had begun struggling with Greene. He can be seen on body-camera video helping troopers handcuff Greene. Afterward Harpin can be heard telling him, “Yeah, yeah, that s— hurts, doesn’t it?” Harpin was placed on leave after his indictment.

Capt. John Peters, the regional troop commander at the time, was accused by state police detectives in legislative testimony of telling them to conceal evidence in Greene’s case. Peters, who was also among the commanders to sign off on the useof-force reports in the case, told investigators that approving such documents without watching the body-camera video was his “common practice,” disciplinary records show. Peters retired last year after acknowledging he approved use-of-force reports that glossed over another Black motorist’s beating without reviewing video, according to records.

Master Trooper Chris Hollingsworth, widely seen as the most culpable of the officers, was not charged because he died in a high-speed car crash in 2020 just hours after he was told he would be fired over his actions in Greene’s death. Hollingsworth was seen on the video repeatedly bashing Greene in the head with a flashlight and was later recorded by his own camera calling a fellow officer and saying, “I beat the ever-living f— out of him, choked him and everything else trying to get him under control. … All of a sudden he just went limp.”

SENTENCING BEGINS IN POLICE KILLING OF JEFFERSON 

A psychologist testified Friday that a former Texas officer who fatally shot Atatiana Jefferson through a rear window of her home had a “narcissistic personality style” that made him unsuitable for police work.

The testimony came in the sentencing phase of the trial for Aaron Dean, who was found guilty of manslaughter Thursday in a rare conviction of an officer for killing someone who was also armed with a gun. Dean, 38, faces up to 20 years in prison. The white Fort Worth officer shot the 28-year-old Black woman while responding to a call about an open front door

HARVARD’S 1ST BLACK PRESIDENT, 2ND WOMAN

Harvard University announced Thursday that Claudine Gay will become its 30th president, making her the first Black person and the second woman to lead the Ivy League school. Gay, who is currently a dean at the university and a democracy scholar, will become president July 1. She replaces Lawrence Bacow, who is stepping down.

“I am absolutely humbled by the confidence that the governing board has placed in me,” she said. A child of Haitian immigrants, Gay is regarded as a leading voice on the issue of American political participation. Among the issues she has explored is how a range of social and economic factors shape political views and voting. She also is the founding chair Harvard’s Inequality in America Initiative, which studies issues like the effects of child poverty and deprivation on educational opportunity and American inequality from a global perspective.

INT’L AFRICAN AMERICAN MUSEUM DELAYS OPENING 

The International African American Museum won’t open in January as planned because of humidity and temperature issues with the building in Charleston, South Carolina, officials announced.

The museum, at the former Gadsden Wharf, where tens of thousands of enslaved Africans first entered America, had been scheduled to open the weekend of Jan. 21, shortly after Martin Luther King Jr. Day.

Organizers of the museum broke ground at the site in 2019 after raising more than $100 million in public and private funds.

CONGRESS MOVES TO BAN TIKTOK FROM US GOVERNMENT DEVICES 

WASHINGTON (AP) — TikTok would be banned from most U.S. government devices under a spending bill Congress unveiled early Tuesday, the latest push by American lawmakers against the Chinese-owned social media app.

The $1.7 trillion package includes requirements for the Biden administration to prohibit most uses of TikTok or any other app created by its owner, ByteDance Ltd. The requirements would apply to the executive branch – with exemptions for national security, law enforcement and research purposes – and don’t appear to cover Congress, where a handful of lawmakers maintain TikTok accounts.

TikTok is consumed by two-thirds of American teens and has become the secondmost popular domain in the world. But there’s long been bipartisan concern in Washington that Beijing would use legal and regulatory power to seize American user data or try to push pro-China narratives or misinformation.

US HOMELESS NUMBERS STAY SAME AS BEFORE PANDEMIC 

President Joe Biden’s administration announced Monday that it is ramping up efforts to help house people now sleeping on sidewalks and in tents and cars as a new federal report confirms what’s obvious to people in many cities: Homelessness is persisting despite increased local efforts.

The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development said that in federally required tallies taken across the country earlier this year, about 582,000 people were counted as homeless – a number that misses some people and does not include those staying with friends or family because they do not have a place of their own.

The figure was nearly the same as it was in a survey conducted in early 2020, just before the coronavirus pandemic hit the nation hard. It was up by about 2,000 people – an increase of less than 1%. The administration aims to lower that by 25% by 2025.

FLORIDA AIRPORTS EXPECTED TO SET HOLIDAY RECORDS 

The holiday travel season this year is expected to rival the busiest seasons before the pandemic at Florida’s two most bustling airports, which will see millions of travelers passing through them, officials said.

Orlando International Airport, the state’s busiest airport and the seventh busiest airport in the U.S. last year, is expected to host 2.9 million passengers during a period that started in mid-December and extends through the first few days of the new year. That would mark a 17% increase over the same period last year when 2.5 million travelers passed through the airport.

Miami International Airport is expected to host 2.5 million passengers for a holiday travel period that lasts from Dec. 21 through Jan. 6, which is Three Kings’ Day, the final Christmas celebration observed by many Christians in Latin America and Spain. That would mark a 1.5% increase over the record-breaking holiday travel season last year.

The busiest travel day at the Orlando airport is expected to be the day after New Year’s Day, with an estimated 162,000 travelers arriving at and departing the airport.

At the Miami airport, the busiest travel days are expected to be Wednesday, Thursday and Friday of this week, the Friday before New Year’s Day and the Thursday and Friday after New Year’s Day. On those days, an estimated 157,000 travelers are expected to pass through the airport each day, airport officials said.

Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport was expecting almost 1.6 million passengers over two weeks starting Wednesday. If that estimate holds, it will be 13% busier than last year’s travel volume but short of the pre-pandemic 1.8 million passengers who traveled during the same period in 2019.

CENTRAL PARK GATE HONORS ‘EXONERATED 5’

At a small patch of Central Park flanking New York’s Harlem neighborhood, scores came Monday to remember the injustice that imprisoned five Black and Latino teenagers after they were wrongly accused and convicted of the 1989 rape of a white jogger.

They arrived in the chill of a late fall morning, some singing hymns, to dedicate a park entry to the men once known as the Central Park Five, but now remembered as the Exonerated Five.

The entryway, located on the northern perimeter of the park between Fifth Avenue and Malcolm X Boulevard, will be known as the “Gate of the Exonerated.” It commemorates the miscarriage of justice that not only befell the five men, organizers say, but the unknown others who might have been wrongly imprisoned.

“This is a moment. This is legacy time,” said one of the men, Yusef Salaam.

“We are here because we persevere,” he said to a cheering crowd.

Monday was the first time Raymond Santana, another of the men, now in his 40s, has returned to Central Park since that fateful day 33 years ago.

DUTCH APOLOGY FOR NATION’S ROLE IN SLAVE TRADE

Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte apologized Monday on behalf of his government for the Netherlands’ role in slavery and the slave trade, in a speech welcomed by activists as historic but lacking in concrete plans for repair and reparations.

“Today I apologize,” Rutte said in a 20-minute speech that was greeted with silence by an invited audience at the National Archive.

Ahead of the speech, Waldo Koendjbiharie, a retiree who was born in Suriname but lived for years in the Netherlands, said an apology was not enough.

“It’s about money. Apologies are words and with those words you can’t buy anything,” he said.

Rutte told reporters after the speech that the government is not offering compensation to “people _ grandchildren or great grandchildren of enslaved people.” Instead, it is establishing a 200 million-euro ($212 million) fund for initiatives to help tackle the legacy of slavery in the Netherlands and its former colonies and to boost education about the issue.

MURPHY TO RECEIVE DEMILLE AWARD AT GLOBES

Eddie Murphy will receive the Cecil B. DeMille Award at the 80th Golden Globes, the Hollywood Foreign Press Association announced Wednesday.

The honorary award for the comedian and actor adds to a broadcast that’s taking shape after two years of scandal and backlash tarnished the Globes. After taking the previous Globes off the air, NBC will telecast the ceremony Tuesday, Jan. 10, with comedian Jerrod Carmichael hosting.

On a one-year deal with NBC, the Globes are attempting to make a comeback after a Los Angeles Times investigation in early 2021 found that the press association then had no Black members and enumerated a long history of ethical indiscretions. Many stars and studios said they would boycott the show, and NBC canceled the 2022 broadcast.