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Clark picks Boston first and Collier takes Stewart for WNBA All-Star Game

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NEW YORK (AP) — Caitlin Clark picked her Indiana teammate Aliyah Boston No. 1 while Napheesa Collier took her Unrivaled business partner Breanna Stewart first in the WNBA All-Star Game draft on Tuesday.

Clark, who had the first overall pick by being No. 1 in the fan vote, had said Monday there was “a high chance” that Boston and Kelsey Mitchell of the Fever would be on her team. Clark’s other choices for starters were New York’s Sabrina Ionescu, Las Vegas’ A’ja Wilson and Phoenix’s Satou Sabally, and she picked Mitchell as a reserve.

“I feel good. My team is very well-rounded. Love the team we have to start — the first five, I think we’re off to a good start,” Clark said.

Collier drafted Atlanta’s Allisha Gray, Seattle’s Nneka Ogwumike and Dallas rookie Paige Bueckers to complete her starting five.

“We’re dynamic, got people that can score at all levels, a point guard,” Collier said.

After Collier took Minnesota teammate Courtney Williams first in the reserve portion of the draft, Clark selected Mitchell. Two Seattle players went next with Skylar Diggins going to Collier and Gabby Williams to Clark, who passed up on the chance to draft fellow second-year player and longtime rival Angel Reese.

Clark and Reese teamed up during last season’s All-Star Game that pitted the WNBA’s best against the U.S. Olympic squad. The WNBA All-Stars won.

Collier took Reese with the third pick in the reserve draft.

She rounded out her squad with Phoenix’s Alyssa Thomas, Los Angeles’ Kelsey Plum and Atlanta’s Rhyne Howard. Clark also drafted Washington rookies Sonia Citron and Kiki Iriafen, Las Vegas’ Jackie Young and Golden State’s Kayla Thornton.

Williams, Citron, Iriafen and Thornton are making their All-Star debuts.

When the draft was over, the captains traded coaches to put Cheryl Reeve of the Lynx back with her players, Collier and Williams. Reeve was coach of the U.S. Olympic team last season that won gold in Paris. Clark didn’t make the squad and some people blamed Reeve for that, although the Lynx coach had nothing to do with the selection of players.

Sandy Brondello of the New York Liberty will coach Clark’s team.

The game will be played on July 19 in Indianapolis.

___

AP WNBA: https://apnews.com/hub/wnba-basketball





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Striking Philadelphia union workers reach deal with city

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From Philly and the Pa. suburbs to South Jersey and Delaware, what would you like WHYY News to cover? Let us know!

“The work stoppage involving District Council 33 and the City of Philadelphia is OVER,” Mayor Cherelle Parker announced on social media early Wednesday morning.

A marathon negotiation session Tuesday between the city and its blue collar workers’ union responsible for trash pick-up and other duties around the city has resulted in a tentative contract agreement.

DC33 President Greg Boulware was exhausted after the 12-hour negotiation session and said they did what they had to do.

“There’s a lot of factors involved in what was going on and we ultimately did what we thought was in the best interest of all of our membership,” Boulware said.

The deal appears to be a complete win for the city because it got just about everything Parker wanted with a 3% raise in each of the three years of the deal. It’s a deal the Parker administration is calling “historic.”

When adding in the 5% increase the city agreed to last year to extend DC33’s contract by one year, the increase for the union over Parker’s four-year term will total 14%. That’s still well below the 32% total pay increase the union was fighting for.

“Your union stood up and fought for you and we did the best we can with the circumstances we had in front of us,” Boulware said.

Those circumstances include workers expecting to miss a paycheck Thursday.

Union officials have told workers to return to the job pending a ratification vote.

Nine thousand members of American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees District Council 33 went on strike July 1. The strike has resulted in massive piles of trash piling up on city streets and around trash drop-off sites designated by the city.

The strike also resulted in changes to the city’s annual Fourth of July concert with headliner LL Cool J and city native Jazmine Sullivan both dropping out.



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Texas’s Camp Mystic was ‘a place of joy’. Floods turned it into a site of great loss | Texas floods 2025

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The loss of 27 campers and counsellors from Camp Mystic to the Texas Hill Country flood may serve, at a terrible cost, to expand its considerable reputation across Texas and beyond. Even as the floods claimed more lives along the valley – more than 100 confirmed dead and 160 people unaccounted for as of Tuesday – the loss of several “Mystic Girls” has dominated the headlines.

The camp, which offers two four-week terms and one two-week term over the summer, has been the go-to summer camp for daughters of Texans for nearly a century. It’s so popular that fathers have been known to call the registrar to get their daughters on the list from the delivery room.

The camp, which spans more than 700 acres, has been widely described as an all-girls Christian camp, lending an image of baptisms in the river, but the religious component may be overstated: the camp is known as one of dozens along the Guadalupe River that Texan families send their young to escape the brutal heat of the lowlands.

Now at least one-half of Camp Mystic, which was due to celebrate its centenary next year, lies in ruins, torn apart by raging floodwaters. The sound of song and girls playing has been replaced by the sound of chainsaws and heavy equipment as 19 state agencies and thousands of volunteers work to search and clear mounds of flood debris along the river, including the muddied personal items of the campers.

Five days after the flood, the task along the valley has become a search-and-recovery operation: no one has been rescued from the river alive since Friday. In addition to the lost girls, Camp Mystic’s director, Richard “Dick” Eastland, a fourth-generation owner of the camp, died while attempting to bring five girls to safety.

“It tugs at the heart of anyone in the world that see the pictures of those little faces,” said Claudia Sullivan, author of a book on the Camp Mystic experience, Heartfelt: A Memoir of Camp Mystic Inspirations. “To know that they were there, having the time of their life, that they were innocent, and then to be taken away in such a tragic event – it takes you to your knees.”

aerial view of before and after flooding

Most alumni contacted by the Guardian indicated they were too upset to discuss the camp, or its reputation, as Texas Monthly put it in a 2011 article, for serving “as a near-flawless training ground for archetypal Texas women”.

It has served generations of Texas women, often from well-to-do or politically connected Texas families, including the former first lady Laura Bush, who was a counsellor, and the daughters and granddaughters of Lyndon Johnson, former secretary of state James Baker, and Texas governors Price Daniel, Dan Moody and John Connally.


The camp may have been incorrectly characterized as a “Christian” camp. “That evokes the idea of church camp but that’s not the case,” said Sullivan. “It’s a private camp for girls that holds Christian values. When I was there we spent a lot of time talking about being kind to one another and having compassion, and there were people from other denominations and faiths.”

Camp Mystic is better understood, Sullivan added, as being in a place free from pressure.

“You’re in nature, in a beautiful setting, and really removed from the world”, said Sullivan. “It’s a place of joy and innocence – or was. My sense is that it will definitely be rebuilt, but it’s awfully early.”

The outpouring of grief and rush to support the community have been striking. A church memorial service was held on Monday in San Antonio for the “Mystic girls” who had been lost. Many dressed in the camp’s green and white, together in song and prayer.

A wall is missing on a building at Camp Mystic along the banks of the Guadalupe River. Photograph: Julio Cortez/AP

It was not possible to get to the camp on Tuesday, a tailback of 2.5 hours extended across the 7 miles from Hunt, the nearest hamlet, to Camp Mystic. At the season’s peak in July and August, the camp hosted 750 girls aged between seven and 17 years old – that’s more than half of Hunt’s population of around 1,300.

At Ingram, a riverbank town that also lost dozens from RV camps and homes to the flood, emergency workers and volunteers were pitching in, in many cases in the hope of recovering people still lost, and many bodies likely hidden under large piles of river debris, shattered homes and mangled possessions.

John Sheffield, owner of Ingram’s Ole Ingram Grocery, said the flood had not recognized social differences and nor would the recovery effort: “This is Americans taking care of Americans. There’s been such a tremendous outpouring of support and compassion.”

Down by the river, search crews were continuing to comb through debris and mud. Claud Johnson, the mayor of Ingram, was operating a digger up by Hunt. An EMS van pulled up, suggesting another body had been found. Helicopters continued to move overhead despite an incident on Monday when one was struck by a privately operated drone and was forced to make an emergency landing.

Three baristas from the Aftersome Coffee stand in San Antonio had come up to serve recovery workers. Allyson Bebleu said she had gone to church camp and it had given her some of her fondest memories.

“It’s not just for the wealthiest families, people of all types go to camp,” she said. “Everyone is putting themselves in the shoes of the Camp Mystic girls. It’s tragic.”

Camp Mystic was also the subject of a controversial video recently posed by Sade Perkins, a former member of Houston’s Food Insecurity Board. Perkins was “permanently removed” by John Whitmire, the Houston mayor, after she called Camp Mystic a “whites only” conservative Christian camp without even “a token Asian, they don’t have a token Black person”.

Richard Vela, whose 13-year-old daughter Maya was evacuated from a nearby camp, Camp Honey Creek, on Friday and was still too upset to discuss it, said Perkins’ comments “were not right. You don’t talk about people like that. There’s a lot of death going on and they still haven’t found everybody.”


Bruce Jerome, who was manning an outreach for flood survivors in Ingram, said he had known Jane Ragsdale, the director and longtime co-owner of Heart O’ the Hills Camp, in Hunt, Texas, who had died in the flooding.

“She was just genuinely wonderful,” Jerome said.

Campers’ belongings sit outside one of Camp Mystic’s cabins. Photograph: Eli Hartman/AP

Further down the track to the river was Josey Garcia, a Democratic representative for San Antonio in the Texas state house. She and her team were also picking through the debris, pointing out vast piles that still need to be be sifted through.

Garcia, a military veteran, said it was important to come “and collaborate with our neighbors here to recover those that are missing and help Kerr county clean up. We’ve had folks coming from Laredo and outstate Kansas to lend assistance. It’s showing the spirit of Texas – when it comes to lives being devastated its our duty to step.”

Garcia, too, rejected negative characterizations of Camp Mystic.

“I’ve been hearing a lot of the rhetoric that’s been going around. This is not the time for those types of distinctions. I don’t care who was at the camp. All I know is that there are parents and families that are missing their loved ones. Whether it’s rich Caucasian children or any other children, we’d still be there.”



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Live updates on Galaxy Z Fold 7, Z Flip 7 and Watch 8

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Welcome to Brooklyn, NY where Samsung is unveiling new foldable phones at its latest Galaxy Unpacked event. According to a massive leak yesterday, we’ll likely see the Galaxy Z Fold 7, Z Flip 7 and Z Flip 7 FE. That’s in line with the expectations of Samsung’s usual summer foldable releases that have happened for the past few years.

Adding weight to that report is the fact that Samsung even teased “the next chapter of Ultra” in early June, showing the silhouette of a foldable spinning around in an animation. You can read our whole article on what we expect to see at Unpacked today for the details, in case you can’t wait a few more hours.

Otherwise, buckle in to watch the livestream below and follow live commentary from our own Sam Rutherford on the scene.

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Live36 updates

  • From first impressions this does seem like a huge leap forward in design for the Z Fold. It’s the first time it actually looks like a regular phone when closed.

  • “Is it too slim?”. No such thing, my friend. The Z Fold 7 has been optimized to fit the battery… which is the same size as last year’s model. I suppose it’s thinner, which is impressive.

  • As a three-time Samsung foldable owner, yes, that’s us Mat.

  • Samsung is saying this is the thinnest Z Fold ever while including new adhesive and titanium layers for its flexible display.

  • This is so weird. Samsung is talking about taking on its users’ opinions and thoughts. And what an attractive bunch of typical users! Is this the everyperson buying Samsung foldables?

  • A flashy video showed off the Z Fold 7’s new very thin profile, which looks a lot the Galaxy S25 Edge, ending on the Z Fold 7 taking the place of New York’s famous Flatiron building.

  • Samsung is talking a big game about this thing. The company is promising “breakthroughs without compromise.”

  • There were some wild screams as Won-Joon Choi, the recently appointed COO of the mobile experience division, took the stage. I don’t know why.

  • The Galaxy Z Fold 7 is here.

    The Galaxy Z Fold 7 is here. (Sam Rutherford for Engadget)

  • Sorry ya’ll, getting a stable connection here is tough. But TM Roh is getting right into the action with the announcement of the Galaxy Z Fold 7.

  • “This is more than just a new Flip or Fold,” says mobile head TM Roh.

  • Samsung mobile president and “acting head of device experience division” TM Roh has stepped onstage, and is welcoming the audience and giving us a brief history of the company’s phones.

  • The Unpacked keynote has started, and after a quick flash of the usual legal disclaimers, Samsung is now showing us a video.

  • I feel like Fold and Flip owners have such different expectations. I mean a tri-fold sounds pretty rad but personally all I want is the option to pay a little more money for a Flip that has flagship cameras.

  • I agree with Sam. They also teased that next “Ultra” chapter. Will we see a Z Fold Ultra? It should be a trifold, in my opinion!

  • FWIW, this Unpacked event is at the Brooklyn Naval Yard, which is its own weird little corner of town that’s kind of hidden away and hard to get into.

    That said, there is a Wegman’s right down the street, so maybe Samsung was expecting people to stop there first? (I kid.)

  • The rumor I’m most interested in is the possible appearance of Samsung’s tri-fold phone. Info about it has swirling around for a while, but it’s been somewhat unclear if Samsung actually has plans to release it in the US.

    If we do see , I’m betting that it will be as a quick tease or a “one more thing” at the end of the presentation, similar to how they gave us a preview of the S25 Edge at the previous Unpacked event at the beginning of the year.

  • Do you all think maybe Samsung couldn’t find any good catering because everyone is so busy shopping Amazon’s Prime Day deals. Did you like how I casually referenced this massive shopping event in the middle of our liveblog? I just wanted to set the scene for those wondering what’s going on outside of the Samsung world today and this week. (The Engadget homepage is a good indicator of what else is happening in the consumer tech world.)

  • Important snack update

    A snippet of a screenshot of a Slack chat between Cherlynn Low and Mathew Smith at 9:34AM ET, with Low asking

    Screenshot (Slack)

  • Well hi there Sam! I too have a seat, but it’s at my desk, at 6:45AM, in sunny Arizona. Looking forward to throwing the Galaxy Z Flip 6 I’ve used daily for the past year or so into that sun shortly.



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