ECU men's basketball: Pirates suffer blowout loss at South Florida

The car owned by a missing 74-year-old Florida Lyft driver has been found in North Carolina and the man who was driving it is wanted in connection with a homicide last week in southwest Florida. Authorities said Friday that Gary Levin has been missing since Monday, when his family believes he picked up a customer in Palm Beach County, Florida. His red 2022 Kia Stinger was spotted in Miami that day and later in north Florida. The vehicle was then seen Thursday evening in North Carolina and driver Matthew Flores was arrested following a police chase. Flores is a suspect in a slaying that occurred nearly a week before Levin went missing.

A bill advancing in North Carolina’s Senate would prohibit instruction about sexuality and gender identity in K-4 public school classes. The proposal approved Wednesday by the Senate education committee would require schools in most circumstances to alert parents prior to a change in the name or pronoun used for their child. The measure defies the recommendations of parents, educators and LGBTQ youths who testified against it. The bill now heads to the Senate health care committee. A version passed the state Senate last year but did not get a vote in the House.

A train derailment and resulting large fire have prompted an evacuation order in an Ohio village near the Pennsylvania state line. The Friday night derailment covered the area in billows of smoke lit orange by the flames below. Rail operator Norfolk Southern says about 50 cars derailed in East Palestine from a train carrying a variety of freight. No injuries were reported. Officials say they're trying to determine which cars are still burning. An evacuation order remained in place for residents within a mile of the scene, and the local air quality is being monitored. A National Transportation Safety Board team was heading to the scene to investigate.

The Arctic air that descended on the Northeast on Saturday brought dangerously cold sub-zero temperatures and wind chills to the region, including a record-setting wind chill of minus 108 degrees Fahrenheit on the summit of Mount Washington in New Hampshire. The Mount Washington Observatory at the peak of the Northeast’s highest mountain, famous for its extreme weather conditions, also recorded an actual temperature of minus 47 and tying an observatory record set in 1934. Across the rest of the region, wind chills — the combined effect of wind and cold air on exposed skin —  dropped to minus 45 to minus 50 degrees Fahrenheit.

Pope Francis says South Sudan's future depends on how it treats its women. On his second and penultimate day in Africa on Saturday, Francis called for women and girls to be respected, protected and honored. He was meeting with some of the 2 million people who have been forced by fighting and flooding to flee their homes. In South Sudan, sexual violence against women is rampant, child brides are common and the maternal mortality rate is the highest in the world. The encounter was one of the highlights of Francis’ three-day visit to the world’s youngest country and one of its poorest.

A growing online conspiracy theory is using the tagline “died suddenly” to baselessly claim that COVID-19 vaccines are killing people. The filmmakers and anti-vaccine activists behind the misinformation campaign have flooded social media with news reports, obituaries and GoFundMe pages about sudden deaths or injuries alongside the term “died suddenly” and syringe emojis. The media intelligence firm Zignal Labs found that the use of “died suddenly” or a misspelled version of it in tweets about vaccines have surged more than 740% in the past two months compared with the two previous months. Rigorous study and real-world evidence from hundreds of millions of administered shots prove that COVID-19 vaccines are safe and effective.

In a terrible way, the death of Tyre Nichols brings vindication to members of the Black community in Memphis who live in constant fear of the police. The fatal beating of the 29-year-old Nichols by five police officers tells the story many residents know by heart: that any encounter, including traffic stops, can be deadly if you're Black. Police conduct sweeps where units in unmarked cars roll into neighborhoods and armed plainclothes officers jump out, rushing traffic violators and issuing commands. It's resulted in community in fear, where people text, call and use social media to caution each other to stay inside or avoid the area when police operations are underway.