The Hawks were greeted by a winter storm when they returned to Atlanta early Friday morning after a lengthy west coast road trip. 

While the majority of the storm had moved out of the Atlanta area by Saturday morning, the hazardous icy conditions it left behind prompted NBA officials to postpone the Hawks' scheduled home game against the Houston Rockets.

The league said the decision had been made "to prioritize the safety of the players, fans and staff due to the severe weather and hazardous icy conditions in the Atlanta area." The Rockets' flight arrived in Atlanta before the postponement was announced.

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A winter storm dumped snow and ice on the Atlanta area Friday, and some roads are expected to refreeze on Saturday night.

NHL POSTPONES KINGS-FLAMES GAME OVER DEVASTATING CALIFORNIA WILDFIRES

Power outage numbers around Atlanta crept up Friday night as falling trees on power lines became a widespread issue. More than 110,000 customers were without electricity, mostly in the Atlanta area.

The hazardous icy conditions in the southeastern portion of the U.S. come amid a vastly different set of extremes on the west coast. Southern California continues to grapple with devastating wildfires that were sparked earlier this week in greater Los Angeles. 

On Friday, the NBA announced the Lakers and Clippers home games scheduled for Jan. 11 would not go on as initially planned due to the ongoing wildfires. 

"The NBA and the Clippers and Lakers organizations have been in communication with local officials in Los Angeles and Inglewood about the ongoing situation in the Los Angeles area and the game postponements ensure no resources will be diverted from the wildfire response efforts," the league said in a statement.

The Lakers' home game against the Charlotte Hornets on Jan. 9 was previously postponed.

The NBA also announced that the National Basketball Players Association would donate $1 million to the American Red Cross and other organizations to assist in disaster relief efforts.

The Lakers have played home games in downtown Los Angeles for several decades. The Clippers stopped sharing an arena with the Lakers at the start of the 2024-25 NBA season, when the franchise moved to the $2 billion dollar Intuit Dome in nearby Inglewood, California.

It remains unclear whether conditions will result in the postponement of additional Lakers or Clippers home games. The rescheduled dates for the postponed Hawks, Lakers and Clippers games will be announced at a future date, the league said.

The Hawks are scheduled to host the Phoenix Suns on Jan. 14. 

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

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Cooper Flagg scored an ACC freshman-record 42 points to help No. 4 Duke hold off Notre Dame 86-78 on Saturday.

Auburn star Johni Broome left Saturday's 66-63 win at South Carolina with a "significant sprain" of his left ankle, Bruce Pearl said.

The Falcons have fired defensive coordinator Jimmy Lake after the team allowed the second-most touchdown passes in the NFL and had the second-fewest sacks.

NFL players put their most fashionable foot forward during their wild-card arrivals.

The action star had to power through an injury while filming.

The family's home was destroyed by the Palisades Fire, which began on Jan. 7

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu dispatched a high-level delegation to Doha to help seal a hostage and cease-fire deal, according to reports.

‘We view what we are doing as a public service,’ says the cofounder of the nonprofit that millions of people are relying on to stay safe.

If you live in Los Angeles, you are probably already intimately familiar with Watch Duty, the free app that shows active fires, mandatory evacuation zones, air quality indexes, wind direction, and a wealth of other information that everyone, from firefighters to regular people, have come to rely on during this week’s historic and devastating wildfires.

Watch Duty is unique in the tech world in that it doesn’t care about user engagement, time spent, or ad sales. The 501(c)(3) nonprofit behind it only cares about the accuracy of the information it provides and the speed with which the service can deliver that information. The app itself has taken off, rocketing to the top of Apple’s and Google’s app stores. Over 1 million people have downloaded it over the last few days alone.

The elegance of the app lies in its simplicity. It doesn’t scrape user data, show ads, require any kind of login, or track your information. Its simple tech stack and UI — most of which is maintained by volunteer engineers and reporters — has likely helped save countless lives. While Watch Duty is free to use, the app accepts tax-deductible donations and offers two tiers of membership that unlock additional features, like a firefighting flight tracker and the ability to set alerts for more than four counties.

With plans to expand the service across the United States, as well as overseas and into other emergency services, Watch Duty may eventually replace some of the slower and less reliable local government alert systems for millions of people.

Photo by Lokman Vural Elibol / Anadolu via Getty Images

An app born from fire

The idea for Watch Duty came to cofounder John Mills while he was trying to protect his off-grid Sonoma County home from the Walbridge fire in 2020. He realized there wasn’t a single source for all the information people needed to protect themselves from the blaze, which ultimately killed 33 people and destroyed 156 homes. John and his friend David Merritt, who is Watch Duty’s cofounder and CTO, decided to build an app to help.

“This came out of an idea that John had, and he talked to me about it four years ago,” Merritt tells The Verge. “We built the app in 60 days, and it was run completely by volunteers, no full-time staff. It was a side project for a lot of engineers, so the aim was to keep it as simple as possible.”

Fire reporting is piecemeal at best in fire-prone areas and frequently scattered across platforms like Facebook and X, where fire departments and counties have verified pages sharing relevant updates. But increasingly, social media platforms are putting automated access for alert services behind paywalls. Governments also use a wide variety of alert systems, causing delays that can cost lives, especially in fast-moving fires like the Palisades and Eaton fires that have forced evacuations for more than 180,000 people. And sometimes, these government-run alerts are sent out mistakenly, causing mass confusion.

Watch Duty simplifies all that for millions of people.

“We view what we are doing as a public service,” says Merritt. “It is a utility that everyone should have, which is timely, relevant information for their safety during emergencies. Right now, it’s very scattered. Even the agencies themselves, which have the best intentions, their hands are tied by bureaucracy or contracts. We partner with government sources with a focus on firefighting.”

One of the biggest issues around fires, in particular, is that they can move quickly and consume large swaths of land and structures in minutes. For example, the winds that drove the Palisades fire to spread to more than 10,000 acres reached 90 miles per hour on Tuesday. When minutes matter, the piecemeal alert system that Watch Duty replaces can cause delays that cost lives.

“Some of the delivery systems for push notifications and text messages that government agencies use had a 15-minute delay, which is not good for fire,” says Merritt. “We shoot to have push notifications out in under a minute. Right now, 1.5 million people in LA are getting push notifications through the app. That’s a lot of messages to send out in 60 seconds. In general, people are getting it pretty much all at the same time.”

A simple tech stack

For Watch Duty, this kind of mass communication requires reliable technology as well as a group of dedicated staff and skilled volunteers. Merritt says that Watch Duty relies on a number of corporate partners with whom it has relationships and contracts to provide its service.

The app is built on a mix of technology, including Google’s cloud platform, Amazon Web Services, Firebase, Fastly, and Heroku. Merritt says the app uses some AI, but only for internal routing of alerts and emails. Reporters at Watch Duty — those who listen to scanners and update the app with push notifications about everything from air drops to evacuation updates — are mostly volunteers who coordinate coverage via Slack.

“All information is vetted for quality over quantity,” he says. “We have a code of conduct for reporters. For example, we never report on injuries or give specific addresses. It’s all tailored with a specific set of criteria. We don’t editorialize. We report on what we have heard on the scanners.”

According to Merritt, the app has 100 percent uptime. Even though it started with volunteer engineers, the nonprofit has slowly added more full-time people. “We still have volunteers helping us, but it’s becoming more on the internal paid staff as we grow, as things get more complex, and as we have more rigorous processes,” he says.

He says there are no plans to ever charge for the app or scrape user data. The approach is kind of the Field of Dreams method to building a free app that saves people’s lives: if you build it well, the funding will come.

“It’s the antithesis of what a lot of tech does,” Merritt says. “We don’t want you to spend time in the app. You get information and get out. We have the option of adding more photos, but we limit those to the ones that provide different views of a fire we have been tracking. We don’t want people doom scrolling.”

Photo by FREDERIC J. BROWN / AFP via Getty Images

Collecting information in the era of Trump

Watch Duty relies heavily on publicly available information from places like the National Weather Service and the Environmental Protection Agency. Should the incoming Trump administration decide to execute on threats to dismantle and disband the EPA (which monitors air quality) and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the parent agency to the National Weather Service, such moves would impact Watch Duty’s ability to operate.

Even still, Merritt is optimistic. “We will be pretty well insulated from any change to policy,” he says. “We are either buying that information ourselves already or we are happy to buy it, and we will take that cost on. The fact that we’re soon going to be covering the entire US will defray the cost of anything that shifts from a policy perspective. Our operation costs are mostly salaries. We are trying to hire really good engineers and have a really solid platform. If we need to raise a grant to buy data from the National Weather Service, then we will.”

Regardless of what the next administration does, it’s clear that Watch Duty has become a critical and necessary app for those in Southern California right now. The app currently covers 22 states and plans to roll out nationwide soon.

“We got 1.4 million app downloads in the last few days,” according to Merritt. “I think we have only received 60 support tickets, so that shows that something is working there. We are really just focused on the delivery of this information.”

For those who started the 2025 by setting their Goodreads goal for the year, Us Weekly has a treat for you.

There are tons of books set to be released this year — in both the fiction and memoir genres — but a few stand out among the rest. Emily Henry is constantly cranking out new books, and this year is no different. Her newest, titled Great Big Beautiful Life, is set to be published in April, just in time for those summer romances.

“What I can tell you about the book is it feels like a spiritual heir to Beach Read, but it’s different,” Henry teased to Us Weekly exclusively last year. “It feels like my first real departure, but it is still both a love story and a romance.”

The author noted that it was a “really emotional” experience writing Great Big Beautiful Life. “It really gripped me in a way that I hadn’t been gripped in a while,” she added.

Hayley Kiyoko and More Stars Who’ve Written Books

While Us is waiting for Henry’s release date with bated breath, there are many books we’re looking forward to reading in 2025. Keep scrolling for 12 of 2025’s highly anticipated releases:

‘Onyx Storm’ by Rebecca Yarros

The third book in The Empyrean presumably starts where the last one left off, with dragon riders Violet and Xaden (who, spoiler alert, turned into a venin) figuring out their next steps after saving Basgiath War College.

Onyx Storm will be released on January 21.

‘Deep End’ by Ali Hazelwood

Another Hazelwood romance? Yes, please. The Love Hypothesis author is set to introduce Scarlett Vandermeer, a platform diver in her junior year of college, who is thrown into a sudden romantic arrangement with swim captain Lukas Blomqvist.

Deep End will be released on February 4.

‘I’ll Have What She’s Having’ by Chelsea Handler

The comedian is back at it again with another book, set to be released on her 50th birthday. Handler has a new batch of vulnerable (and hilarious) essays for fans that span the years from childhood to adulthood.

I’ll Have What She’s Having will be released on February 25.

‘Sunrise on the Reaping’ by Suzanne Collins

Collins is back with another prequel to The Hunger Games series. This time around, fans of the books will be getting to hear Haymitch Abernathy’s story.

Sunrise on the Reaping will be released on March 18.

‘Elphie: A Wicked Childhood’ by Gregory Maguire

Just as the Wicked hype will be dying down, Maguire is bringing Elphaba’s story before Shiz University to life.

Elphie: A Wicked Childhood will be released on March 25.

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‘Say You’ll Remember Me’ by Abby Jimenez

For the perfect love story, look no further than Jimenez’s latest novel. Say You’ll Remember Me tells the story of Xavier Rush (who just might be the perfect guy) and his perfect date with Samantha.

Say You’ll Remember Me will be released on April 1.

‘Great Big Beautiful Life’ by Emily Henry

Two writers, one story. Both Alice Scott and Hayden Anderson are looking to write the biography of the mysterious Margaret Ives — and no one has seen her in years. Margaret invites both authors for a trial period before picking the one who will tell her story.

Great Big Beautiful Life will be released on April 22.

‘Matriarch’ by Tina Knowles

Beyoncé’s mom has all the tea, and here’s to hoping she’ll spill it. Knowles is set to tell her story, starting off from growing up in 1950s Galveston, Texas, to what it was like raising a superstar.

Matriarch will be released on April 22.

‘One Golden Summer’ by Carley Fortune

There’s nothing better than reading a Fortune book by a body of water (we assume that’s how Meghan Markle read her last book, which she has since optioned to adapt), so just get ready. Alice is a photographer who snapped a photo of Charlie Florek when they were just teens — but now he’s all grown up.

One Golden Summer will be released on May 6.

‘Atmosphere’ by Taylor Jenkins Reid

Reid’s novels (which include Daisy Jones & The Six and The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo) transport readers to different worlds and this one is sure to be no different. Taking place during the 1980s Space Shuttle program, this story follows Joan Goodwin and her battle to go to space.

Atmosphere will be released on June 3.

‘Nice Girls Don’t Win’ by Parvati Shallow

Reality TV fanatics, get ready because Shallow will be sharing her Suvivor story from the start and reveal how she became a powerful woman.

Nice Girls Don’t Win will be released on July 8.

‘Cher: The Memoir — Part 2’

If the second part of Cher’s memoir is anything like the first, Us is ready. The songstress will likely kick this book off right where the last one ended and more insane stories are sure to be told.

Cher: The Memoir — Part 2 will be released on November 19.

Former Australian child actor Rory Sykes died in the ongoing Los Angeles wildfires. He was 32.

“It is with great sadness that I have to announce the death of my beautiful son @Rorysykes to the Malibu fires yesterday. I’m totally heartbroken,” Rory’s mother, author Shelley Sykes, wrote via X on Thursday, January 9. “[He was a] British-born Australian living in America, a wonderful son, a gift born on mine and his grandma’s birthday 29 July 92.”

Rory, who was best known for his childhood role on England’s Kiddy Kapers series, lived in Los Angeles and worked as a humanitarian, author and motivation speaker. According to Shelley, 62, he “had his own cottage” on their family’s 17-acre Mount Malibu estate.

Shelley further noted in her X tribute that Rory’s house “burnt down” on Wednesday, January 8, in the wildfires.

Which Stars Have Been Affected by the Los Angeles Fires?

“I couldn’t put out the cinders on his roof with a hose because the water was switched off by @LVMWD Las Virgenes Municipal Water,” Shelley claimed. “Even the 50 brave firefighters had no water all day! He will be incredibly missed by [his] mama, his pet peacocks Edgee & Mickie and all his online fans around the world!”

A string of wind-induced wildfires broke out on Tuesday, January 7, devastating buildings across the Pacific Palisades neighborhood in Los Angeles. In addition, many locals left the city limits following mandatory or voluntary evacuation orders.

“He said ‘Mum, leave me’ and no mum could leave their kid. I’ve got a broken arm, I couldn’t lift him, I couldn’t move him,” Shelley told local Australian outlet 10 News, noting she drove to a local fire station for assistance. “When the fire department brought me back, his cottage was burnt to the ground.”

Celebrities Share Personal Photos of Heartbreaking Los Angeles Wildfires

Many celebrities lost their homes to the blaze, like Rory’s self-contained house on his family estate. Per the author’s social media obituary, Rory’s cottage was “decked out with all the latest Apple gadgets” that were also lost in the fire.

“[Rory] was the founder with me of @happycharity a true humanitarian. He saw himself as the number one fan of @Apple & @tim_cook and most importantly an avid @RuneScape gamer,” Shelley continued in her X statement, adding that her son was “born blind with cerebral palsy and had difficulty walking.”

She continued, “He overcame so much with surgeries and therapies to regain his sight & to be able to learn to walk. Despite the pain, he still enthused about traveling the world with me from Africa to Antarctica.”

Rory had also overcome his disabilities to have a career as an author and motivational speaker.

“@rorysykes was a sought-after inspirational speaker for @TonyRobbins when he was only 8 years old,” Shelley added. “@CallumsCure book first published by @simonschuster in Australia was about his courage.”

Check the LAFD website for local wildfire alerts and click here for resources on how to help those affected.

Two trams collide at the French city's main train station, a prefecture spokesperson says.

Legal disputes leave Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in limbo as the population dwindles at Guantanamo Bay

Welcome to Indie App Spotlight. This is a weekly 9to5Mac series where we showcase the latest apps in the indie app world. If you’re a developer and would like your app featured, get in contact.

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Univershuffle is a new music discovery app that shuffles all of the songs on Apple Music, completely at random – no AI or algorithms involved. It offers the ultimate experience for finding new music, so long as you’re willing to sort through a ton of songs.

The app is available for free in a limited capacity, though you’ll need to link an Apple Music account to listen to songs in their entirety. It launched on the App Store this week.

more…

News of Hall's romance comes as Haack is also confirmed to be dating someone following the exes' July 2024 split

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