How could a friendly family man have kept a secret like this for more than 50 years? Thousands more flights were delayed or canceled. And more details are coming to light in the aftermath of a deadly shooting rampage in the Denver area.
👋 Hey! Laura here, with more news than you can shake a stick at. It’s Wednesday.
But first, breaking news. 🚨 Ghislaine Maxwell was found guilty on 5 of 6 counts after a monthlong trial. The British socialite was charged with luring teenage girls to be sexually abused by the financier Jeffrey Epstein. Read the latest here.
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Thomas Randele didn’t take his biggest secret to the grave with him. Not even his wife of 40 years or daughter knew until he told them in what authorities described as a deathbed confession. For the past 50 years, he was a fugitive wanted in one of the largest bank robberies in Cleveland’s history, living in Boston under a new name he created six months after the heist in the summer of 1969. How Ted Conrad was able to leave behind one family and create a new life as Thomas Randele — while evading a father and son from the U.S. Marshals Service who never gave up their hunt — is just now being pieced together. Read the rest of the story here.
A series of books published by a company once owned by the gunman who targeted multiple people at tattoo parlors and elsewhere Monday across the Denver area eerily foreshadow the deadly shooting rampage – even naming two of the victims. Six people, including the shooter, died in the shootings. Two people were injured, including a police officer. Tattoo artists Alyssa Gunn, 35; Alicia Cardenas, 44; and Danny Schofield, 38; hotel clerk Sarah Steck, 28; and Michael Swinyard, 67, were killed by the shooter, according to family members and the county medical examiner. Authorities did not release the identities of the officer and another man who were injured. The gunman was killed in a gunfight with police. Go here for the latest on the shooting investigation.
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More kids are being hospitalized with the coronavirus, but some experts say the omicron variant does not appear to be more severe in kids than in previous strands. Instead, they blame the explosion in all cases on the delay in vaccination for young people since vaccines for them were released well after adults began getting jabs. The Policylab at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia reported last week that nationwide there were 1.1 overall hospitalizations per 100,000 children – low compared to a typical flu season that can reach 3 to 5 patients per 100,000 children. Only Ohio and Missouri had a pediatric census exceeding three patients per 100,000 children, the Policylab reported. 
More than 5,000 Wednesday flights across the nation were either canceled or delayed before the day barely got started. Thousands of flights have been delayed or canceled over the past several days as airlines grapple with wicked weather across parts of the West and staffing shortages because of the latest surge in coronavirus infections. On Tuesday alone, almost 1,300 flights were canceled and over 7,400 were delayed.
An outbreak of tornadoes is possible in portions of the South on Wednesday evening, federal forecasters warned. Northern portions of Alabama and Mississippi and parts of Tennessee will have an “enhanced risk” of damaging weather in Wednesday’s storms, forecasters said. The risk of severe weather on Wednesday also extends into parts of Arkansas, Louisiana, Georgia and the Carolinas, according to the Storm Prediction Center. A springlike weather pattern is to blame for the storm threat, meteorologists said. Unseasonably warm conditions, an abundance of moisture and a developing storm system will set the stage in the South for severe weather.
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