Month: May 2026

By Frankie McLister

Click here for updates on this story

    MINNESOTA (WCCO) — It’s not your ordinary garage sale in Minnesota or Wisconsin; it’s 100 miles long.

“You’re gonna find clothes, antiques. You’re gonna find President’s cologne bottles!” said Missy Filkins of River Falls, Wisconsin.

Buyers and sellers are flocking to dozens of Mississippi River towns this weekend.

All along the river is the 100 Mile Garage Sale.

“Bring some sales on! Bring some money!” said Denise Vandeusen of Hager City, Wisconsin.

“We had people here before we were ready yesterday and today, wanting to start at like 7:30 or so, and we were open at 8,” said Sheila of Prescott, Wisconsin.

It happens every first full weekend of May, stretching from Thursday through Sunday.

“There’s so many people,” said Kim Stai of Amery, Wisconsin. “You can pretty much get whatever you want.”

It’s an event bringing boatloads of people to the dozens of towns throughout the 100-mile Minnesota/Wisconsin circle.

“There are truly thousands of garage sales that happen,” said Kate Carlson of Visit Winona.

Visit Winona is the organizer for the decades-long tradition.

“It starts south in Winona here, goes up to Hastings, then the intention is to go into Prescott, Wisconsin and come all the way down the Wisconsin Great River Road to Fountain City,” said Carlson.

Along the route, you’re likely to see a little bit of everything under the sun.

“We had a lady here yesterday that had monkeys in her backpack. Finger monkeys!” Vandeusen told WCCO. “I thought they were kittens!”

The stories are truly endless.

“We stay overnight usually in Red Wing and meet my sisters there,” said Sandra of Sauk Rapids, Minnesota.

“We had people from Arizona, Texas. I think they drove in,” said Wendy Dodson of Hastings, Minnesota.

Please note: This story was provided to CNN Wire by an affiliate and does not contain original CNN reporting. This content carries a strict local market embargo. If you share the same market as the contributor of this article, you may not use it on any platform.

By Conor Wight

Click here for updates on this story

    ST. FRANCIS, Minnesota (WCCO) — A fire at a St. Francis, Minnesota, home and beloved cat rescue claimed the lives of nearly two dozen cats just after midnight on Tuesday.

Grace Thompson said she barely made it out herself as her home was engulfed by fire in less than a minute. Her house doubled as a location for Kitten Kam Rescue, which she started four years ago to expand her passion for helping animals.

She said that there were 44 cats inside at the time of the fire, including cats waiting for a foster home and her own pets. Firefighters from three companies in the St. Francis area pivoted to providing oxygen and medical care for the cats once they extinguished the fire, as neighbors poured out into the road to help.

“All my neighbors were around grabbing kennels and carriers and helping hand kennels and carriers to firefighters so they could grab as many cats as they could out of the house,” Thompson said. “I never imagined the kind of support I had that night helping the cats.”

The support in the days since has been overwhelming, with Thompson’s dedication over the years earning her helpers from local veterinarians to other rescues.

SNAP’T Cat Rescue in Blaine, Minnesota, got in touch with former Vikings quarterbacks Tommy Kramer and Daunte Culpepper to lend a hand. Executive Director Sonja Larson said that for anyone who can donate at least $100 to help Thompson, SNAP’T will provide a signed jersey from either Kramer or Culpepper.

“Rescues need to stick together Like I said, it could be any one of us,” Larson said.

The help extended to the streets as volunteers worked to try to track down the sole cat that was unaccounted for in the aftermath of the fire. Thompson said that Arthur was spotted on Friday morning; on Friday evening, she got the phone call that he was found and was on his way to see a vet.

“I love my community,” Thompson said. “It takes a village. We say that a lot in rescue, it takes a village, and there is a village out there and they’re all helping.”

Thompson said that she was told an issue with electrical wiring caused the fire. Her intention is not only to bring back her house, but to bring back the rescue.

Please note: This story was provided to CNN Wire by an affiliate and does not contain original CNN reporting. This content carries a strict local market embargo. If you share the same market as the contributor of this article, you may not use it on any platform.

By Marissa Armas

Click here for updates on this story

    TEXAS (KTVT) — Eight years later, Julie Barron‑Wells still struggles with the loss of her daughter, Kiley Lane.

“Anytime you have to relive that loss, it’s not fun. It’s hard,” Barron‑Wells told CBS News Texas. “As a mom, I’m just proud of the person that she was, and even telling her story again today makes me very proud.”

As she reflects on her daughter’s death, new cases of hantavirus are drawing national attention. Two Texans were aboard a cruise ship now linked to an outbreak that has killed three people and produced several confirmed and suspected cases.

Lane was 27 when she died in 2018 after contracting hantavirus. Barron‑Wells said her daughter, who was also a mom, first experienced severe abdominal pain, followed by fever and difficulty breathing. She said Lane went to the emergency room multiple times before doctors began to take her symptoms seriously. It took 10 days for doctors to diagnose her with the virus.

“It was excruciating,” Barron‑Wells said. “There’s really not anything you can do except for hold her hand and pray.”

Lane spent 72 days in the hospital before she died. Barron‑Wells said her family still does not know exactly how she contracted the virus.

“I think a lot of people were just in shock and awe because she was a healthy 27‑year‑old mom and newlywed, and there wasn’t a thing, and there wasn’t any kind of idea that she would get anything and pass away so suddenly,” said Barron‑Wells.

On Thursday, the Texas Department of State Health Services confirmed that two Texans were among the passengers aboard the MV Hondius, the cruise ship linked to a hantavirus outbreak in the Atlantic Ocean. At least three people have died. Health officials said there are five confirmed cases and at least eight suspected cases tied to the outbreak. Doctors around the world – and in Texas – are watching closely.

“We’re not sure exactly how it spread here,” said David Winter, a doctor at Baylor Scott & White Health. “You don’t usually get it from person to person; you get it from being around rats, so think that’s a big thing. Be careful when you’re around rats, for sure, but you shouldn’t worry in crowds at this point, because we’ve not seen that in the past, and this virus has been around for a long time.”

While there are still many questions about hantavirus, Barron‑Wells said she hopes Kiley’s story will help raise awareness and encourage more research.

“Kiley’s legacy has not gone without helping a lot of people,” said Barron‑Wells. “Her story is still important, and I know that somehow, someway, keeping her story alive is going to help make a difference.”

Please note: This story was provided to CNN Wire by an affiliate and does not contain original CNN reporting. This content carries a strict local market embargo. If you share the same market as the contributor of this article, you may not use it on any platform.

By Amelia Mugavero

Click here for updates on this story

    NORTH TEXAS (KTVT) — Just days before Mother’s Day, a North Texas father is grieving the sudden loss of his wife and unborn son after she died unexpectedly, only days before her due date. Avi Carey said he is still in shock over the death of his wife, Tiffany, whom he described as his “rock” and “soulmate.”

“Tiffany’s smile, her radiance, her presence … she didn’t meet a stranger,” Carey said.

The couple had been together for nearly two decades, raising two children, Kingston and Kasyn, and preparing to welcome their third child, a baby boy they planned to name Kylo.

Carey said Tiffany began complaining of a severe headache just days before she was due to give birth. He recalled her sitting on the couch, dozing off multiple times – something he said was unusual.

A short time later, Carey found her unresponsive.

“I saw her face … her lips were blue. And I already knew,” he said with tears in his eyes.

Tiffany Carey and her unborn son died May 2, leaving behind a grieving husband and two children. The loss came less than a week after the family had celebrated a baby shower.

“We went from celebrating the baby shower to planning a funeral in less than five days,” Carey said.

Health officials say cases like this highlight a broader crisis. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Black women in the United States are more than three times as likely as white women to die from pregnancy‑related causes, and most of those deaths – around 80% – are considered preventable.

Carey said he is still searching for answers and now lives with questions about whether warning signs were missed.

“I would say educate yourself. Take everything seriously,” he said. “That should have been a red flag … the headache.”

Now, surrounded by baby supplies meant for a child who never arrived, Carey said he is focused on honoring Tiffany’s memory and raising their children with the values she lived by.

“She always said, ‘You’ve got to lead with love,'” he said. “She did that in everything.”

Please note: This story was provided to CNN Wire by an affiliate and does not contain original CNN reporting. This content carries a strict local market embargo. If you share the same market as the contributor of this article, you may not use it on any platform.

By Erin Jones

Click here for updates on this story

    NORTH TEXAS (KTVT) — Just ahead of Mother’s Day, one North Texas family is taking a decades‑old tradition to a whole new level.

Tonight, they’re gathering for a Wheel of Fortune watch party that’s turning their nightly routine into a moment they’ll never forget.

For years, Sukhdev Kaur has spent her evenings in front of the TV, watching Wheel of Fortune with her family.

“From 1985.. I’ve watched from 85,” she said.

“Every day, basically from 6:30 to 7 o’clock, nobody in our household is allowed to touch the remote,” Sawinder Singh said.

They say it took auditions, interviews, and months of waiting before they were finally selected.

“I was very excited!” Kaur said.

“It was once in a lifetime opportunity, especially for people in the Sikh community, Sikh faith,” Gurvinder Singh said.

“Thousands and thousands of people apply every year, which is a little intimidating, but at the end of the day, it didn’t deter me because I feel that I have a personality fitting for TV,” Sawinder said.

On the show, they introduced Ryan Seacrest to a special dance form popular in their culture, and although they didn’t win the grand prize, they still walked away with $13,000.

Having family and friends – and of course, their mom – cheering for every spin and puzzle solve made the moment even more special.

“It was amazing,” she said. “Absolutely amazing!”

Kaur says this Mother’s Day, she couldn’t be prouder of her sons, and now she’s even considering applying to be on the show herself.

“I will try!” she said.

Please note: This story was provided to CNN Wire by an affiliate and does not contain original CNN reporting. This content carries a strict local market embargo. If you share the same market as the contributor of this article, you may not use it on any platform.

By Noel Brennan

Click here for updates on this story

    CHICAGO (WBBM) — Middle school can be a tough time for kids, just ask anyone who’s been through it.

But some Chicago grandmothers are stepping up to give young girls support when they need it most.

When you mix generations in one classroom, they end up teaching each other a thing or two.

“They taught me a lot of things about my phone that I didn’t know,” Esther Siver said jokingly.

Esther Siver and Carol Anne Been are retirees reliving their middle school days by choice.

“If you don’t learn from the young, you get old real quick,” Siver said.

They volunteer each week at Goethe Elementary School in Logan Square to work with kids like 13-year-old Ahkira White.

“They’re caring, and they’re thoughtful,” she said. “I learned how to do a lot of stuff. I learned to listen. I learned how to talk about my feelings. I learned to express myself.”

It’s part of the Grandmothers Circle program. The Juvenile Protective Association brought the program to Chicago Public Schools.

“We call it structured but unscripted. We provide the activities. We provide the materials, but it’s unscripted because it’s organic,” said program coordinator Erinn Boone.

Besides the subject of boys, Been also shared what the middle schoolers talk about.

“They talk about things that are on their minds, and sometimes what’s on their mind is what happened an hour earlier during recess or this morning at school,” she said.

“If you don’t talk about it, then you’re not going to get it out, and then you’re just going to think about it,” White said.

Those seventh graders are in their second year of the program—and their assistant principal, Crystal Andrews, can tell.

“They’re totally different kids than the ones I had last year. They’re not in my office as much as they were last year,” she said jokingly. “They’ve learned how to kind of navigate things a little better.”

A little guidance from a couple of grandmas goes a long way.

“It’s really nice to see. It’s like watching my own grandkids. How they grew and became adults,” Siver said.

Please note: This story was provided to CNN Wire by an affiliate and does not contain original CNN reporting. This content carries a strict local market embargo. If you share the same market as the contributor of this article, you may not use it on any platform.

By Asal Rezaei, Shardaa Gray

Click here for updates on this story

    CHICAGO (WBBM) — The Canvas outage has stretched into a second day, leaving students and teachers in the Chicago and Illinois university systems scrambling amid the end of the spring semester.

The digital learning platform that is heavily relied upon by students and staff alike abruptly went offline Thursday afternoon amid a cyberattack and ransom demands.

Thursday, the University of Illinois sent out an email to faculty, staff and students, writing in part, “Canvas, our learning management system, is offline due to an ongoing cybersecurity incident.” Later that night, U of I Urbana-Champaign announced they would postpone all final exams and assignments scheduled for Friday, Saturday or Sunday, including for classes that don’t use Canvas.

The cloudy-based digital classroom system is used at more than 98,000 institutions and has nearly 275 million users. Students and faculty use it for notes, study guides and even actual final exams.

Instructure released a statement Friday morning saying an “unauthorized actor” in the incident made changes to pages that appeared to students and teachers when they were logged into their Canvas platforms. The company said they took Canvas down “out of an abundance of caution,” and said the hacker used an issue related to their Free-For-Teacher accounts to conduct the cyberattack.

“As a result, we have made the difficult decision to temporarily shut down our Free-For-Teacher accounts,” the company said in their statement. “This gives us the confidence to restore access to Canvas, which is now fully back online and available for use. We regret the inconvenience and concern this may have caused.”

Canvas is now back in service at UIC, Northwestern, the University of Chicago and most other area schools. But the issue could not have come at a worse time for students and faculty, as they are approaching or have already started final exams to close out the spring semester.

“Just today I had a quiz, but it was hard to study for that because Canvas was not up,” said Northwestern student David Kim.

Kim said he uses the canvas system to access his grades, but it holds a lot of course material that he relies on to study.

“There’s really no other effective resource to study with,” he said.

When Kim and others logged onto Canvas Thursday, the either were met with a message reading “Canvas is currently undergoing scheduled maintenance” or a message from hacking group Shinyhunters.

“It says Shinyhunters has breached Instructure,” NU student Rahmah Malik said. “) Instead of contacting us to resolve they ignored us and did some ‘security patches.’ You have until the end of by 12th May before everything is leaked.”

Claroty Field Chief Technology Officer Sean Tufts said there are multiple reasons Canvas was hacked.

“I think we are exiting a phase of cyber where China hacked for secrets, North Korea hacked for money, and Russia hacked to destabilize. Now all of those actors are looking to make impact on America’s day to day lives,” he said.

Instructure said names, email addresses, student IDs and peer-to-peer messages were exposed in the data breach. There’s no evidence that passwords, financial information or dates of birth were hacked.

Tufts said universities should prepare for days like this.

“Best preparation is practice and what that means is not waiting for the attack and encouraging attackers. What that means having table talk exercises, practicing when systems go down,” he said.

Other schools, like the University of Chicago, are bouncing back faster. Tufts said each IT system is very complex and will not all recover at the same time.

Please note: This story was provided to CNN Wire by an affiliate and does not contain original CNN reporting. This content carries a strict local market embargo. If you share the same market as the contributor of this article, you may not use it on any platform.

By Edie Kasten, Joe Donlon

Click here for updates on this story

    CHICAGO (WBBM) — It’s not easy to go through and not easy to talk about, but at some point in our lives, we all have to deal with grief, and a woman who grew up in Chicago’s northwest suburbs is using her experience to help others.

It all began with a mother’s death, a daughter’s sadness, and a mission to create a community for people who are struggling.

Kera Sanchez is editor-in-chief of Get Griefy Magazine, which is dedicated to helping people living with grief find solace, inspiration, and a sense of community.

In June of 2022, Sanchez experienced a traumatic loss.

“I was actually in the NICU with my youngest daughter, and I had received a phone call that my mom had unexpectedly passed away in Italy. She was on vacation with friends and my father,” she said. “My mom was actually there for birth of my daughter. Yeah, I remember joking with her that, ‘Mom, you’re going to have to babysit when you get home.'”

Sanchez says the world hadn’t prepared her for such severe loss.

“I turned to the internet to see the stories of other people that were maybe a few steps ahead of me,” she said. “I felt inspired by the fact they were doing beautiful things with their grief. They were using their grief as a springboard to start something that was almost like a legacy project.”

Sanchez created her own legacy project to honor her mother and to bring comfort to people in the same situation. It’s an online and print publication she named Get Griefy.

“It came pretty quickly to me. I was in the shower, and just ruminating on these things, and I just started that day,” she said. “My husband came downstairs and saw me working at my computer, and he said, ‘What are you doing?’ And I said, ‘I’m writing a letter from the editor,’ and he’s like, ‘What are you talking about?’ I’m like, ‘I’m starting a magazine.'”

Two years since she launched the magazine, Get Griefy now has 10,000 readers online and in print.

It’s not only about death.

“There’s grief of all different types of things. Career loss or change, pet loss,” she said. “Parents divorcing, or family members having to leave the country, break-ups with their boyfriends and girlfriends.

Get Griefy is working on a future issue on women’s issues,

“All of the types of grief women go through,” Sanchez said. “Infertility, child and infant loss, divorce, a loss of identity.”

Get Griefy offers online seminars and virtual support circles. In print, there are articles focusing on everything from support groups to celebrities’ stories, and even advice on how to navigate grief with laughter.

“Some of our most popular most shared content is just kind of poking fun at the trauma that we’re going through,” Sanchez said. “It’s not easy, but bringing light to it I think really makes things a lot easier for people.”

In so many ways, Get Griefy is simply about embracing your truth.

“It’s something that’s extremely beneficial to be able to tell your story in a safe space,” Sanchez said. “Community is everything. Finding other people that have gone through something similar that you have, it just normalizes your experience. It makes you feel less isolated and less alone.”

Sanchez has made many friends in the Get Griefy community.

“We’ve gone on trips together. We’ve met in person,” she said. “We all collaborate on so many pieces of content together.”

Sanchez said her late mom is still her number one collaborator.

“It’s not just my project. It’s our project,” she said. “I’d give it all back to have my mom back, but that’s just not how it works, and so I feel like I am doing the best that I can, personally, to still continue to live a life of full of joy, that’s full of zest and inspiring to others, and I’m leading by example that, just because you go through something traumatic, it doesn’t mean that you have to stay stuck in that loss forever.”

Sanchez said she started her journey by journaling. It was a good way to start exploring her feelings.

Please note: This story was provided to CNN Wire by an affiliate and does not contain original CNN reporting. This content carries a strict local market embargo. If you share the same market as the contributor of this article, you may not use it on any platform.

By Ricky Sayer

Click here for updates on this story

    BEAVER COUNTY, Pennsylvania (KDKA) — A Beaver County youth baseball organization is asking for help after it says someone broke into a concession stand and stole money.

Strike by strike, Matt Niedbala is working to make their concession stand whole again after Friday’s burglary.

“The door was broken, so we have to repair that,” Niedbala said. “It’s pretty devastating.”

But while the door can be replaced, replacing the stolen cash box with roughly $400 to $500 inside is a taller task at West Mayfield Community Park.

Proceeds from the stand support the youth baseball organization, which includes 60 kids. They’ve used it to pay for new batting cages, along with improving the field and paying the umpires.

Now, not only are they down the stolen cash, but they had to spend hundreds on the new door.

“That’s what’s really hurtful with us, is that they came in and, we’re a nonprofit organization, group of small families down here, and they basically stole from kids. And it really stinks,” Niedbala said.

That includes Niedbala’s twin boys. He told them about the robbery.

“They were really angry last night. They weren’t really happy. They just feel really hurt and violated.”

Niedbala said the thief broke off the door handle and drilled a hole above the lock to get inside and reach the cash box.

“Someone must have known we had some in there. Normally, we don’t keep it in there,” he added.

As for identifying who was responsible, there are no security cameras inside the concession stand. Organizers said they plan to install cameras following the incident.

“We would just like to get the money back,” Niedbala said.

Police say the investigation is ongoing.

Please note: This story was provided to CNN Wire by an affiliate and does not contain original CNN reporting. This content carries a strict local market embargo. If you share the same market as the contributor of this article, you may not use it on any platform.