By JENNIFER McDERMOTT

CORTINA D’AMPEZZO, Italy (AP) — Team USA skiers Lindsey Vonn and Mikaela Shiffrin, along with Italy’s Federica Brignone, are among the many skiers who have expressed concern during these Olympic Games about the accelerating melt of the world’s glaciers.

And Olympic host city Cortina is a fitting place for them to be talking about climate change: Glaciers once visible from town have dramatically shrunk. Many have been reduced to tiny glaciers or residual ice patches at high elevations among the jagged peaks of the Dolomites. Any Olympian or spectator wishing to lay eyes on a major glacier would have to take a long drive on winding mountain roads to the Marmolada. It’s melting rapidly, too.

The world’s top skiers train on glaciers because of the high-quality snow there, and a warming world jeopardizes the future of their sport. Vonn started skiing on glaciers in Austria when she was just 9 years old.

“Most of the glaciers that I used to ski on are pretty much gone,” 41-year-old Vonn said Feb. 3 in response to a question from The Associated Press at a prerace press conference in Cortina before she crashed on the Olympic downhill course. “So that’s very real and it’s very apparent to us.”

As athletes in snow sports, Shiffrin said, they “get a real front-row view” to the monumental changes underway atop some of the world’s highest, coldest peaks.

“It is something that’s very close to our heart, because it is the heart and soul of what we do,” Shiffrin told AP after racing Sunday. “I would really, really like to believe and hope that with strong voices and sort of broader policy changes within companies and governments, there is a hope for a future of our sport. But I think right now, it’s a little bit of a … it’s a question.”

A view of the Cristallo mountain group is pictured in the Dolomites, which was once home to glaciers, seen from Olympic host city Cortina d’Ampezzo, Italy, Feb. 7, 2026 (AP Photo/ Jennifer McDermott)

Italy’s glaciers are disappearing

Italian glaciologist Antonella Senese said Italy has lost more than 200 square kilometers (77 square miles) of glacier area since the late 1950s.

“We are observing a continuous and uninterrupted decrease in glacier area and volume. In the last one to two decades, this reduction has clearly accelerated,” Senese, associate professor of physical geography in the University of Milan’s environmental science and policy department, said in an interview.

Among the peaks surrounding Cortina d’Ampezzo, there are glaciers on the slopes of the Cristallo and Sorapiss mountains. The 2015 New Italian Glacier Inventory found these glaciers shrunk by about one-third since the 1959-1962 inventory.

Shortly after winning a second gold Sunday at her home Winter Olympics, Brignone told AP that skiing is “totally different” now than when she was younger. Brignone lives in the Valle d’Aosta, about six hours away.

When she sees how glaciers are retreating to higher elevations, Brignone said she’s not thinking about the future of skiing — she’s concerned for the future of the planet.

“There we have a lot of glaciers, but they are going up and up, every year, more and more,” she told AP.

Yet many people who don’t frequent the mountains remain unaware of what’s at stake, so the University of Innsbruck created the Goodbye Glaciers Project. The loss of glaciers has far-reaching consequences, threatening water sources, increasing mountain hazards and contributing to sea level rise.

The project shows how different warming levels change the amount of ice left on selected glaciers around the world. To be included, glaciers must have an estimated 2020 volume of at least 0.01 cubic kilometers. The Cristallo and Sorapiss glaciers no longer meet that threshold, said Patrick Schmitt, a doctoral student at the University of Innsbruck.

A view of the Cristallo mountain group is pictured in the Dolomites, which was once home to glaciers, seen from Olympic host city Cortina d’Ampezzo, Italy, Feb. 7, 2026 (AP Photo/ Jennifer McDermott)

Preserving glaciers

Some 50 kilometers (31 miles) from Cortina is the Marmolada glacier, one of the largest glaciers in Italy and the largest in the Dolomites. An apartment building-sized chunk of the glacier detached in July 2022, sparking an avalanche of debris that killed 11 hikers. The mountain is popular for hiking in summer and skiing in winter.

The University of Padua said in 2023 the glacier had been halved over 25 years.

It’s expected to be mostly gone by 2034 if the world warms 2.7 Celsius (4.9 Fahrenheit), according to the Goodbye Glaciers Project. But if warming is limited to 1.5 C (2.7 F — the international goal — the glacier’s life could be extended by another six years, and around 100 glaciers in the Alps can be saved, Schmitt said.

“Cutting greenhouse gas emissions now will reduce future ice loss and soften the impacts on people and nature,” Schmitt wrote in an email. “The choices we make in this decade will decide how much ice remains in the Dolomites, across the Alps, and around the world.”

Globally, more than 7 trillion tons of ice (6.5 trillion metric tons) has been lost since 2000, according to a study last year. And the prospective impact of climate change on Olympic sport is enormous; the list of places that could host Winter Games is projected to shrink substantially in the coming years.

It’s not just Vonn, Shiffrin and Brignone — many Olympic skiers are concerned

In Cortina, Noa Szollos, who is competing for Israel, said in an interview the state of the nearby glaciers speaks to the condition of glaciers around the world.

“I hope we can do something about it,” she said, “but it’s a hard time.”

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Silja Koskinen of Finland said in an interview she can’t train on some of the glaciers she used to because of crevices, rocks and flowing water. Team USA skier AJ Hurt talked about starting the season in October on glaciers in Sölden, Austria.

“Every year, I feel like we come and there’s a little less snow. And every time, we’re like, are we really going to start in October? There’s no snow here,’” Hurt told the AP. “It is really sad and it’s hard to ignore in this sport, definitely, when we’re around it so much and it is so clear.”

Norwegian skier Nikolai Schirmer is leading an effort to stop fossil fuel companies from sponsoring winter sports. Burning coal, oil and gas is the largest contributor to global climate change by far.

In Bormio, Italy, Team USA skier River Radamus said athletes — as stewards of outdoor winter sports— should be on the forefront of trying to defend the environment as best they can.

“It’s always present in our mind that we’re on a dangerous trend unless we do something right,” Radamus said.

AP Sports Writer Pat Graham contributed from Bormio, Italy.

AP Winter Olympics coverage: https://apnews.com/hub/milan-cortina-2026-winter-olympics

The Associated Press’ climate and environmental coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org.

By SOPHIA TAREEN

CHICAGO (AP) — From jokes about his well-known stubbornness to tears grieving the loss of a parent, the adult children of the Rev. Jesse L. Jackson Sr. gave an emotional tribute Wednesday honoring the legacy of the late civil rights icon, a day after his death.

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Jackson died Tuesday at his home in Chicago after battling a rare neurological disorder that affected his ability to move and speak. Standing on the steps outside his longtime Chicago home, five of his children, including U.S. Rep. Jonathan Jackson, remembered him not only for his decades-long work in civil rights but also for his role as spiritual leader and father.

“Our father is a man who dedicated his life to public service to gain, protect and defend civil rights and human rights to make our nation better, to make the world more just, our people better neighbors with each other,” said his youngest son, Yusef Jackson, fighting back tears at times.

The family said details on funeral arrangements for Jackson would be announced at a later time, but services will begin next week, with him lying in repose at the headquarters of the organization he founded, Rainbow/PUSH Coalition in Chicago, which his son Yusef oversees. Services will follow at a church large enough to accommodate expected crowds.

Jackson rose to prominence six decades ago as a protege of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., joining the voting rights march King led from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama. King later dispatched Jackson to Chicago to launch Operation Breadbasket, a Southern Christian Leadership Conference effort to pressure companies to hire Black workers.

Jackson was with King on April 4, 1968, when the civil rights leader was slain.

Remembrances have poured in worldwide for Jackson, including flowers left outside the home where large portraits of a smiling Jackson had been placed. But his children said he was a family man first.

“Our father took fatherhood very seriously,” his eldest child, Santita Jackson, said. “It was his charge to keep.”

His children’s reflections were poetic in the style of the late civil rights icon — filled with prayer, tears and a few chuckles, including about disagreements that occur when growing up in a large, lively family.

His eldest son, Jesse Jackson Jr., a former congressman, said his father’s funeral services would welcome all, “Democrat, Republican, liberal and conservative, right wing, left wing — because his life is broad enough to cover the full spectrum of what it means to be an American.”

The family asked only that those attending be respectful.

“If his life becomes a turning point in our national political discourse, amen,” he said. “His last breath is not his last breath.”

By CLAIRE SAVAGE and ALYCE BROWN

Veteran sports columnist Christine Brennan remembers when male colleagues used to laugh at her for insisting on covering women’s sports back in the 1990s.

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“It was absolutely infuriating to me,” said Brennan, a best-selling author who served as the first president of the Association for Women in Sports Media.

Now? Entire media outlets dedicated to centering women’s sports are springing up, growing rapidly and tackling coverage themselves, including in the 2026 Milan Cortina Olympics.

Alongside the historic growth of women’s sports, the women’s sports media ecosystem is likewise flourishing, and outlets like TOGETHXR, The GIST, Just Women’s Sports, The IX Sports, GOALS and Good Game with Sarah Spain are expanding their reach.

“The male-dominated mainstream sports media totally missed the boat on women’s sports,” said Brennan, a sports columnist at USA Today now covering her 22nd Olympic Games, adding that she is heartened by newer outlets “doing a job that should have been done by mainstream sports media.”

While even mainstream sports media have upped their game by increasing the scale and quality of women’s sports coverage, University of Michigan sport management professor Ketra Armstrong says the recent influx of women-led outlets is uniquely “liberating” because women athletes are “owning their stories and not waiting for it to be filtered through any traditional lens.”

That’s how Just Women’s Sports got its start. When founder Haley Rosen stopped playing professional soccer, she realized how hard it was to keep up with her sport in the news.

“Everything I was seeing just felt nothing like the world I had known,” Rosen said. “It felt very young, very pink and glitter, a lot of lifestyle content. And I was just like, where are the sports?”

So Rosen built Just Women’s Sports, which started as an Instagram account back in 2020 and has since grown into a prominent industry outlet with brand partners like Nike and Amazon Prime. One of the most important things to her is that women’s sports get covered with the same intensity and seriousness as men’s sports, she says.

“These women are the best athletes in the world, competing at the highest level. And I think we have to treat them as such,” Rosen said.

The GIST, a Toronto-born “fan-first sports media brand,” was created by a similarly frustrated spectator.

Co-founder Ellen Hyslop describes herself as “a super-massive avid sports fan.” But despite watching ESPN SportsCenter every morning, “the default was always, ‘Oh, you’re a girl, so you’re not a sports fan,’ as opposed to just being welcomed into those communities,” she said.

Founded with college friends Jacie deHoop and Roslyn McLarty, Hyslop said The GIST was designed for readers who felt shut out of traditional sports media. Today, the outlet prides itself on providing equal coverage to men’s and women’s sports and reaches roughly 1 million newsletter subscribers — nearly 50% growth over the past two years— most of them Gen Z and millennial women.

“Sports are supposed to be for everyone. They really do have the ability to unite people,” Hyslop said.

ESPN reporters Sarah Spain, right, and Alex Azzi interview alpine skier Sarah Schleper, of Mexico, are seen at the 2026 Winter Olympics in Cortina d’Ampezzo, Italy, Sunday, Feb. 15, 2026. (AP Photo/Andy Wong)

Sarah Spain, ESPN veteran and host of daily women’s sports podcast Good Game on iHeart, credits a combination of social media, WNBA star Caitlin Clark, and the women’s national soccer team for accelerating the industry’s growth, pointing to “a very organic and natural push for more women’s sports coverage.”

Spain also noted that media attention is critical for the success of any professional league, and women’s sports have suffered from the lack of it.

“There was this blaming of the product of women’s sports, without understanding the incredible ecosystem and infrastructure that was lifting up and bringing fans back over and over again to men’s sports,” she said. “Now we’re finally catching up in terms of investment.”

The Olympics have long shown that when women’s sports receive meaningful media attention, they attract an enthusiastic audience, according to Spain, a sports journalist of more than 16 years who is in Italy covering her first-ever Olympics for Good Game.

ESPN reporters Sarah Spain, right, and Alex Azzi wait to interview the athletes after the first run of an alpine ski women’s giant slalom race at the 2026 Winter Olympics in Cortina d’Ampezzo, Italy, Sunday, Feb. 15, 2026. (AP Photo/Andy Wong)

The Milan Cortina Games are no exception: Skiing star Lindsey Vonn, downhill champion Breezy Johnson and snowboarding phenom Chloe Kim continue to dominate headlines.

“The Olympics are the shining star for women’s sports coverage that proves if you tell people that there’s value, and you give them the information, and the nuance, and the context to care, that they will be die hard for it,” Spain said.

But while women’s sports media may be growing, it still represents a “very small piece of the pie” when compared to the wider sports media industry, notes Armstrong of the University of Michigan. And Northwestern University Medill School of Journalism professor Craig LaMay cautions that growth doesn’t necessarily signal long-term sustainability, adding that decisions about which sports receive coverage have long been “relentlessly a business decision.”

“For all the changes, there’s a lot of things that haven’t changed,” he said, noting that Forbes’ annual list of the world’s 100 highest-paid athletes includes no women.

This photo provided by TOGETHXR shows Kenz McGuire, senior social media manager at women’s sports media and commerce company TOGETHXR, covers the Milan Cortina Olympics women’s snowboard halfpipe final on Feb. 12, 2026, in Livigno, Italy. (Kenz McGuire/TOGETHXR via AP)

Nonetheless, TOGETHXR, a media and commerce company founded in 2021 by four star athletes, including Olympic halfpipe silver medalist Kim, is leaning into the slogan, “Everyone Watches Women’s Sports.” It’s a nod to the industry’s recent surge as well as a deliberate rejection of “very antiquated rhetoric in women’s sports that no one watches,” said co-founder and chief brand officer Jessica Robertson, whose company has sold more than $6 million worth in T-shirts, tote bags and hoodies flaunting the message.

In Robertson’s view, the audience for women’s professional sports has always been there, just “starved and underserved.” Now, she says increased accessibility has translated to record engagement and viewership. TOGETHXR reaches more than 4 million users across platforms, a 17% increase from 2024, according to Robertson. It produces newsletters, docuseries, and podcasts, including “A Touch More” with Olympic champion and co-founder Sue Bird and soccer star Megan Rapinoe.

This photo provided by TOGETHXR shows Kenz McGuire, senior social media manager at women’s sports media and commerce company TOGETHXR, covers the Milan Cortina Olympics women’s snowboard halfpipe final on Feb. 12, 2026, in Livigno, Italy. (Kenz McGuire/TOGETHXR via AP)

Streaming platforms — Netflix, Amazon, Apple among them — are also creating more opportunities to consume women’s sports in an industry no longer tethered to traditional linear television networks, according to Danette Leighton, CEO of the Women’s Sports Foundation. But the work towards building that growth started many years ago.

“It takes generations to make generational change,” said Leighton, whose own organization was founded by Billie Jean King in 1974, two years after the passage of landmark equality law Title IX. “This is really a tipping point.”

The Associated Press’ women in the workforce and state government coverage receives financial support from Pivotal Ventures. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org.

After nearly eight years—two terms—in power as the top prosecutor in Texas’ fourth largest county, Democratic District Attorney Joe Gonzales is not running for reelection in Bexar County. And while there is no clear successor, there is no shortage of contenders on the crowded Democratic primary stage. 

Eight candidates are vying to be the Democratic nominee for DA in this solid-blue county. As a debate between those candidates on February 3 emphasized, there are plenty of differences in personality and temperament between the candidates, but not much daylight in their proposals for how to address some of the office’s most pressing issues. (The Democratic nominee will go up against the sole GOP candidate, Ashley Foster, in the November general election). 

Without a clear frontrunner or heir apparent, Gonzales told the Texas Observer the race is wide open—“nobody on the ballot has any kind of edge or lead,” he said. That leaves a big impending hole at the top of a prosecutor’s office that handles about 60,000 criminal cases a year.

With higher-profile politicians, such as longtime state Representative Trey Martinez-Fischer and District Court Judge Ron Rangel, opting against running, the Democratic field of candidates includes a motley crew of largely unknown figures—ranging from those on the left-ish who seek to carry on the torch of progressive reformers to past Republican candidates who vow to enforce a more punitive law and order. 

So what’s at stake? In many ways, the viability of reform-minded prosecutors in a state that’s becoming increasingly hostile to criminal justice reform. Gonzales, who ousted the controversial incumbent Nico LaHood in the 2018 Democratic primary, was part of a wave of liberal prosecutors who got elected to DA offices in the major counties of Texas and nationwide. These officials, which have included at various points John Creuzot in Dallas County, Jose Garza in Travis, and the now-pariah ex-DA Kim Ogg in Harris, have prioritized keeping people out of the system through diversion programs and prosecutorial discretion. 

But these blue-county DAs have increasingly prompted legislative and political backlash in recent years–including with the Republican-held Texas Legislature passing a so-called rogue DA law that allows the state to recall and replace elected local prosecutors for not pursuing charges for certain types of crimes like low-level drug possession, or, in the wake of Roe v. Wade’s overturning in 2022, refusing to prosecute abortion providers.   

Even as Attorney General Ken Paxton seeks higher office, his potential GOP successors are all promising to keep would-be rogue DAs at heel—and Republican leaders at the Capitol are likely to keep pressing new ways to micromanage local prosecutors.

“I do think that whoever ends up in the seat is going to continue to see the pushback that I’ve seen from Austin,” Gonzales said. 

On the ballot for the March primary are three current prosecutors in the Bexar County DA’s office: Oscar Salinas, Jane Davis, and Angelica “Meli” Carrión Powers. Three former prosecutors, now in private practice, are also gunning for the role: Shannon Locke, Veronica Legarreta, and Meredith Chacon. Former Fourth District Court of Appeals Justice Luz Elena Chapa and James Bethke, director of Bexar County’s Managed Assigned Counsel Office, which helps provide defense attorneys to defendants who can’t pay, are also running. 

This choice overload will almost certainly lead to a runoff election in May. 

Bexar County District Attorney Joe Gonzales. (Bexar County)

Voters are being asked to choose from a slate of mostly qualified candidates, with varying levels and breadth of law experience. In part, it may come down to whether voters think experience in the DA’s office is important, or if they think a new perspective is needed. 

Current prosecutors push for the former. “In order to inspire confidence from within the people that try the cases day to day, they have to think, well, ‘you were just in my spot last week,’” Salinas, who’s been a prosecutor for 12 years, told the Observer. 

Jane Davis, 78, has worked in the Bexar County DA’s office for decades and currently leads the Juvenile Division. “I love this office. I’ve been here for 40 years. I don’t want to see it go to pot,” she said in an interview. She clinched an endorsement from the San Antonio Express News shortly before early voting started this week. 

Powers, who didn’t respond to the Observer’s request for an interview, was an assistant DA in Bexar County from 2002 to 2017 has run the office’s Family Violence Division since 2019. 

Bethke has spent about 30 years building programs to make defense attorneys more accessible to low-income defendants, and has led the Bexar County office for five years. He doesn’t see much of a difference between the goals of a prosecutor and a defense attorney. “At the end of the day, whether you’re defense or prosecution, a guiding light for me is equal justice for all,” he said. “A prosecutor has the ultimate control on determining what cases to bring in, what to charge, whether or not to defer into a different type of program.”

Notably, the Texas Organizing Project PAC, an influential progressive group that advocates for bail reform and previously helped elect reformer DAs in Texas, including Gonzales, has thrown its weight behind Bethke. 

Meredith Chacon, who has previously worked as both a victim’s advocate and a prosecutor, stated in the debate that “not all experience is the same.” She’s been a prominent critic of Gonzales, and even tried to challenge him in 2022 as a Republican (she lost the GOP primary to now-state Representative Marc LaHood, brother of Gonzales’ predecessor). Legarreta, who’s also run for office as a Republican before, said during the debate that the DA should have a “balanced” perspective on the system. Chacon and Legarreta did not respond to the Observer’s interview requests. 

If there’s a spectrum of progressivism in the Democratic primary race, most candidates sit in the middle, promising to balance reform with being “tough-on-crime.” At the most progressive end of the spectrum is Locke, a defense attorney with an active presence on TikTok, who has consistently called for the DA’s office to investigate ICE officers and promises to use the position to fight back against President Donald Trump’s agenda. 

“The District Attorney’s office is the place in local government where you can most effectively resist the Trump administration and what’s happening in Austin,” Locke told the Observer. “When I talked to the people that were going to run [for DA], they didn’t see the office that way.” 

On the other end of that spectrum is the former Appeals Court Justice Luz Elena Chapa, who is endorsed by the San Antonio Police Association and Bexar County Deputy Sheriff’s Association and who claims the current DA regime’s purportedly lax prosecution policies has caused a “public safety crisis.” 

Chapa, 52, was the clear target of disdain from other candidates during the early February debate, largely because of her lack of prosecutorial experience and her vague plans to “fully fund” the office, despite that decision lying with the County Commissioners Court. “Anyone saying that they’re going to fund or they’re going to do all of these magical things to get money—that’s an uninformed position because it’s not that easy,” Powers said during the debate. “The DA’s office doesn’t control the budget.”

After referring to her opponents as “junior prosecutors,” Chapa also drew an impassioned rebuke from Locke. “If you think you know everything, you’re a big danger to this community, especially when you know nothing,” he said.

The next DA will inherit an office that’s understaffed and struggling to manage caseloads that are growing in step with San Antonio’s population. Many of the candidates have been openly critical of Gonzales’ handling of these problems.

In his six-plus years in office, Gonzales has led the Bexar County DA’s office through the turmoil of the COVID-19 pandemic, which halted grand juries and led to a massive backlog in cases. Winning on a platform of “true criminal justice reform” in Bexar County, his efforts have made him a lightning rod for attacks from the right and his own party.

As political pressure and tough-on-crime rhetoric from the state’s GOP leaders grows, some candidates say that Gonzales has been too outwardly defiant and has put a target on the back of the DA’s office. 

“Discretion needs to be used responsibly, and you can’t broadcast that you’re not going to prosecute a certain type of criminal offense,” Salinas told the Observer. During the debate, Davis suggested the office shouldn’t “brag” so much about its progressive moves.

Many of the candidates argue that the DA’s office needs to repair its relationship with local law enforcement. In 2021, Gonzales established a Civil Rights division, tasked with handling cases of excessive force, officer shootings, and custodial deaths—a move that drew the ire of the law enforcement lobby.

“Police associations believe that I created that department in order to go after cops. That’s not what that’s about,” the incumbent said. “That’s about holding everyone accountable, because I’ve said from the very beginning that no one is above the law.”

Still, the candidates do broadly support the incumbent’s less controversial reforms—at least among Democrats—such as the “cite-and-release” program he implemented, which allows officers to choose to issue a fine rather than arresting someone for a low-level crime like minor drug possession. The goal was to reduce the strain on the DA’s office and lessen the penalties for people committing nonviolent crimes. It would also clear up space in the system for violent crime—but detractors argue it lets people stay on the street to commit more crimes. LaHood had tried and failed to implement a similar policy.

Since the program launched, Gonzales said it has kept 13,000 people from being arrested for low-level offenses. All of the Democratic candidates the Observer spoke with approved of the program. Almost all of the Democratic candidates have said the office should focus on violent or “repeat offenders,” which has been a focus of the office strategy for years now. 

Staffing and office morale have also been a consistent problem, according to some of the more than 140 people who left the Bexar County DA’s office during Gonzales’ terms. People complained of overwork, low pay, and micromanagement. 

Gonzales points to Senate Bill 22, passed in 2023, which gave rural counties more money to fund their prosecutors’ offices. He said this led to a drain of experienced prosecutors from Bexar County, in search of more pay for lighter case loads. It’s unclear whether any of the candidates will be able to solve the staffing problem in the office, although several have argued that training and some workload shuffling may do the trick, in the absence of more money from the county. 

No one is running as a self-appointed successor to Gonzales’ regime. And indeed Gonzales has refrained from endorsing anyone in the primary. But he did say that if one of his current division directors—Davis or Powers—makes it into the runoff, they will get his official support. 

How much that nod would help remains to be seen. 

The post A Motley Crew of Dems Vie to Become New Bexar County DA appeared first on The Texas Observer.