FootballScoop.com first reported the news, followed by FoxSports.com’s Bruce Feldman . The University of Illinois then released a statement saying atheltics director Mike Thomas dismissed Beckman after the preliminary results of an external review into allegations involving the program. MORE: 2015 predictions | Preseason Top 25 | All-Americans “The preliminary information external reviewers shared with me does not reflect our values or our commitment to the welfare of our student-athletes, and I’ve chosen to act accordingly,” Thomas said in the release ....

“For the sake of everyone’s health follow the social distancing guidelines that we talk about here every single day. Stay six feet apart and don’t gather in groups of ten or more,” the governor said during a coronavirus update to the state. “Right now hosting a party, crowding down by the lake, playing a pickup basketball game in a public park – if you’re doing these things you are spitting in the face of the doctors and nurses and first responders who are risking everything so that you can survive....

It can be difficult to abandon the mind-frame that email is a private form of communication, but one compliance officer at a top New York financial firm emphasized, “If you wouldn’t want your mother to read your email on the cover of the Wall Street Journal, don’t send it.” He added that because employees do not own their electronic communication when it is on company computers, it can legally be reprinted and publicized, and has led to sexual harassment charges....

Linda Matthews said that being infected twice by COVID hasn’t made her doubt the vaccine’s efficacy despite feeling “angry” and “furious” over getting sick again, Pittsburgh’s Action News 4 reported on Wednesday. “I truly believe it’s [COVID vaccine] kept me out of the hospital and kept me from being on a ventilator,” Matthews told the news outlet. The 71-year-old said she started feeling better after she took monoclonal antibodies on Tuesday....

As millions of Americans struggle with mortgage payments they can’t afford, there’s new interest in helping close this financial IQ gap. This week a group called the Jump$tart Coalition for Personal Financial Literacy will release its latest survey of how much high-school and college students know about money. In past surveys, students have scored abysmally low, and no one expects much improvement this year. But there is hope that the subprime-mortgage crisis may generate momentum for change....

Arizona, Montana, West Virginia and Nebraska reported no new deaths on Monday for respective totals of and 362, 16, 50 and 78 deaths. Starting on Monday, restaurants, bars and casinos in Montana had the ability to reopen and nonessential businesses in Arizona could serve customers via curbside pickup. Montana schools could reopen on Thursday, although local districts had the ability to keep them closed, followed by Arizona restaurants at reduced capacity on Friday....

The Bears are now on their way to finding out what kind of team Pace, the general manager, and Fox, the two-time Super Bowl head coach, can build without building it around Cutler. Assuming this is the end of Cutler’s time in Chicago, they’ll be the first duo to try it since 2008, a lifetime ago in the NFL. MORE: NFL coaches on the hot seat Three head coaches (Lovie Smith, Marc Trestman and Fox), three GMs (Jerry Angelo, Phil Emery and Pace) and six offensive coordinators have invested themselves in winning in Chicago with Cutler....

“Secular” does mean “godless,” and its neutral meaning has always fought with the more negative one; recently, though, the word has taken on a lot more freight. Like the words “feminist” and “liberal,” “secular” and its derivatives have come to mean extreme versions of themselves. They are code in conservative Christian circles for “atheist” or even “God hating”—they conjure, in a fresh way, all the demons Christian conservatives have been fighting for more than 30 years: liberalism, sexual permissiveness and moral lassitude....

Researchers examined data collected between 2005 and 2016 on adults aged 20 or over who were admitted to 33 general hospitals across Japan. Of the total participants, 63,232 had cancer and 63,232 people did not. Those not suffering from the disease were matched with the other participants in terms of sex, age, and the date they were hospitalized. The team then worked out how much alcohol the participants drank across their lifetimes, based on the average amount they consumed per day and the number of years they had been drinking....

But nearly invisible among the dozens of tall high-rises is a group of one-story houses. But everyone who lives in the area knows the local landmark: “the pit.” The pit has been around at least since the late 1980s when a residential area was built on the left bank of the Dnipro, where the village of Pozniaky once was. The small and cozy habitat for a hundred peasants was turned into a home for thousands of town dwellers....

Don’t get me wrong, I get the resistance to the show on many levels. The aesthetics of it alone are enough to discount it: those second-skin uniforms that only forgive obsessively perfected physiques, the comical posturing of the Gladiators, the mere sight of Hulk Hogan. It’s all very difficult to take seriously. (Not helping matters was the revelation that one Gladiator was once featured in–ahem–all-male pornography.) But beneath the cheesy surface is the closest thing to pure competition on television these days....

The agency’s Office of Civil Rights (OCR) said Wednesday’s notice was meant to “ensure clarity” on the 1972 law, which prohibits sex discrimination in programs that receive federal funding. “OCR has long recognized that Title IX protects all students, including students who are lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender, from harassment and other forms of sex discrimination,” the notice read. It continued, “But OCR at times has stated that Title IX’s prohibition on sex discrimination does not encompass discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity....

Amid the clash over Trump’s push to fill the late Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s seat, with critics suggesting the replacement should be picked by the winner of the election, questions have been raised over the implications for the legislation should his pick go through. A Supreme Court hearing is due in November in which the constitutionality of the act’s individual mandate will be debated. The legal challenge, filed earlier this year, argues that this mandate is inseverable from other provisions in the act, concluding that “the entire ACA thus must fall....

Surveying the crowded GOP field, many evangelicals are feeling unloved, and unsettled. Conservative Christians were crucial in sending George W. Bush to the White House—and were even more important to his narrow re-election in 2004—but many evangelical leaders complain that he hasn’t shown much thanks, and their devotion to the born-again president is waning. They are disappointed that he has abandoned his election-year promise to push for an anti-gay-marriage amendment, even as Dick Cheney is posing for pictures with the newborn son of his lesbian daughter and her partner....

When President George W. Bush announced last month that there were scores of stem-cell colonies around the world that federally funded scientists would be allowed to study, biologists were skeptical: just where the heck were all these cells? Last week NIH finally coughed up the answer. Ten universities, research centers and companies control 64 human stem-cell lines, derived from 64 blastocysts (days-old embryos). But dozens of those colonies belong to firms that, like CyThera, are so small that making the cells available to all comers would swamp them....

Then, six years ago, in the aftermath of an emotionally draining divorce, McClain’s spiritual life blossomed. Just as she had once explored mountains, she began scouting the inner landscape. She started with Unity, a metaphysical church near her Marin County, Calif., home. It was a revelation, light-years away from the ““Old Testament kind of thing I knew very well from my childhood.’’ The next stop was Native American spiritual practices....

Women beyond menopause who are taking estrogen and progestin solely to ward off Alzheimer’s or heart disease should stop. To keep hot flashes from recurring, try tapering off the drugs. Women with mild menopausal symptoms should consider other coping strategies: wear layered clothing, avoid caffeine and spicy foods, eat more soy or try herbal remedies like black cohosh. For women with severe night sweats and hot flashes, HRT is still the most effective treatment....

We got some of that in the second round of the Liga MX Clausura, but we also saw some new items emerge — stories that will be worth tracking throughout the year. Let’s look at what we learned this week… Heading into the weekend, we talked about two marquee matchups. One, Monterrey hosting Chivas, put two teams with title aspirations and that each started the season with a victory against one another....

Hundreds of instances of law enforcement officers appearing to use strong-arm tactics, including physical attacks, against protesters and journalists have been recorded since demonstrations began after the May 25 death of Floyd, an unarmed black man who died in Minneapolis, Minnesota when his neck was wedged to the ground by a white police officer’s knee for nearly 9 minutes. Police have attacked journalists at least 140 times amid the demonstrations, according to Harvard University’s Nieman Journalism Lab....

Oarfish are hardly ever seen by humans and often live in deep waters at about 650 feet below sea level. The creatures can grow to enormous sizes, however the one captured in the video was a juvenile, meaning it only measured about 5 feet. The footage was taken by Master Reef Guide and Scuba Diving Instructor at Wavelength Reef Cruises Tahn Miller, after Jorja Gilmore spotted the creature while snorkeling....