Grab a PlayStation 5 Slim at a $75 Discount for Holiday GiftsOn the 14th hole at the PNC Sunday, Bernhard Langer took advantage of the rules en route to a birdie. NBC The PNC Championship proved once again this weekend that it’s a one-of-a-kind event among nationally televised golf tournaments. Parents competing with their kids. Men playing with women. A 13-year-old in the field alongside an 89-year-old. Four sets of tees in play. Thirty-six holes. Birdie-fueled sprint to the finish. Good stuff all of it. The PNC’s format also is a differentiator: a two-player scramble, which is a rarity for network TV golf. In a scramble, each player hits a tee shot and then selects the better of the two shots to play next. Same goes for the third shot, with this pattern repeating until a ball has been holed. It’s an ultra-forgiving format, which explains how both Team Langer and Team Woods shot 28 under over two rounds, and no team shot worse than eight under; the Langers ultimately defeated the Woods’ on the first playoff hole. Scrambles are unique from traditional golf in one other important way: When players decide which shots they are going to play, they are permitted to place their balls within one club-length of the original spots. That allowance generally results in ideal lies in the fairway. Balls that find hazards, bunkers, rough, natural areas or the fringe may also be picked up and placed within a club-length but typically must stay within the “same condition” — i.e., in most scrambles, including at the PNC, tournament organizers do not permit players to move a ball from, say, a bunker to the fairway. Improving one’s lie in one of those areas, though? That’s another matter. There is nothing in the rules that prohibits such an action, meaning players are empowered to remove their ball from, say, a dastardly fried-egg lie and place it on a more manageable lie atop the sand — again, assuming the new spot is within a club-length of where the ball originally came to rest. Just such a situation played out on Sunday at the PNC after the Langers — Bernhard and his son, Jason — had played their tee shots on the par-5 14th, at which point they were tied for the lead at 24 under with the Woods’. After Jason heeled his drive into the water up the left, the Langers had no choice but to play Bernhard’s ball, which landed in what looked to be a bunker on the left side of the fairway but was, in fact, deemed a natural area, which meant the Langers were free to make contact with the sand with their practice swings. When father and son arrived at the ball, they noticed something: a small clump of sand within a club-length of their orb. Recognizing that the tiny tower could in effect act as a tee for one of their shots, they collectively decided that, strategically, it would make the most sense for their best ball-striker — Bernhard — to take advantage of the rules break and place his ball upon the mound. Jason hit first, from a more challenging lie. He caught a fairway wood fat and popped up his ball into the middle of the fairway but a long way out from the green. Then Bernhard stepped in. Knowing he had the luxury of essentially teeing up his ball and with only a small lip to carry, he made an aggressive club selection: driver. “What do you think of this play?” announcer Dan Hicks said in an incredulous tone on the NBC broadcast. “I’m loving every second of it, Dan,” said on-course reporter Jim “Bones” Mackay. “I think he thinks because he can place the ball so nicely, he can get a lot of club on the ball here and get the ball up on the green.” Bernhard didn’t quite reach the green, but he came close. His ball rocketed out and carried approximately 230 yards before settling into a bunker fronting the green, an effort Tiger Woods later called “one of the best shots I’ve ever seen.” From there, he and Jason got up and down for a birdie 4. It wasn’t long before a screen-grab of Bernhard’s perched lie began making the rounds on social media , with no shortage of ill-informed observers taking digs at the two-time Masters champion’s integrity. Thing was, Bernhard had done no wrong. He and his son had merely taken advantage of the same rules that were available to the rest of the field. I know it’s scramble rules but we need to have conversation about Langer literally teeing up his ball in the bunker so he could hit driver! The zoom in camera did him no favors pic.twitter.com/ftV38bGhDE On Monday morning, Bernhard acknowledged in a phone interview with GOLF.com that he’d gotten “very fortunate” with his lie, but even if he’d had a less favorable lie, he said, he thinks the result of his second shot would have been similar. In that hypothetical scenario, Bernhard said, he likely would have hit a fairway wood instead of a driver and come up just short of the greenside bunker, which still would left him and Jason an excellent chance at getting up and down. Bernhard added that there also happened to be a footprint in the vicinity of his ball, which, if he had placed his ball on the imprint’s edge, also would have given him a similarly elevated lie. After the round, the PGA Tour Champions chief rules official on-site, Joe Terry, consulted with the Langers and confirmed that Bernhard was “in complete compliance with the rules for a scramble,” a Tour spokesperson told GOLF.com by email. “Joe is 100 percent confident that no infraction occurred.” Bernhard and Jason followed their birdie at 14 with two more on 15 and 16, a par at 17 and a clutch 4 on the par-5 closer to secure a playoff with Tiger and Charlie. Both teams replayed the 18th in the playoff, which concluded with Bernhard and Jason staring down an 18-foot eagle try for the win. Jason putt first. “I thought he made it,” Bernhard would say later. “When his ball was six feet from the hole, it was supposed to break a little left and it didn’t. It just stayed there. I was almost in shock that he didn’t make it because he hit such a pure putt. I was the beneficiary of seeing what his ball did. I played less break, and mine was able to bounce in there.” That’s the thing with golf: When you catch a break, you’d be wise to take it. GOLF senior writer Josh Sens contributed to this report. Latest In News Golf.com Editor As GOLF.com’s executive editor, Bastable is responsible for the editorial direction and voice of one of the game’s most respected and highly trafficked news and service sites. He wears many hats — editing, writing, ideating, developing, daydreaming of one day breaking 80 — and feels privileged to work with such an insanely talented and hardworking group of writers, editors and producers. Before grabbing the reins at GOLF.com, he was the features editor at GOLF Magazine. A graduate of the University of Richmond and the Columbia School of Journalism, he lives in New Jersey with his wife and foursome of kids.

Cody Gakpo, Curtis Jones and Mohamed Salah all scored for Arne Slot's Liverpool. Photo: Getty Images Arne Slot's Liverpool could not have asked for a better start to a flurry of festive fixtures as goals by Cody Gakpo, Curtis Jones and Mohamed Salah sealed the points. The victory extended their unbeaten league run to 13 games and put Liverpool on 42 points from 17 games. Chelsea had earlier surrendered a lead at home to Fulham to lose 2-1 -- Rodrigo Muniz scoring for the visitors in the 95th minute for their first victory at Stamford Bridge since 1979. Enzo Maresca's Chelsea have 35 points from 18 games. Reigning champions Manchester City could only draw 1-1 at home to Everton with Erling Haaland missing a penalty as Pep Guardiola's side slipped to seventh. Nottingham Forest moved up to third with a 1-0 victory over Tottenham Hotspur while Manchester United lost for the fourth time in five Premier League games, going down 2-0 at Wolverhampton Wanderers to sit in 14th place. Liverpool suffered an early shock at a foggy Anfield in the last of the Boxing Day kickoffs with Jordan Ayew giving Leicester a lead in the sixth minute. Leicester hung on until the stroke of halftime but just after Salah struck the crossbar, Gakpo curled an effort beyond Leicester goalkeeper Jakub Stolarczyk. Liverpool put Leicester under siege straight from the break and took just four minutes into the second half Jones converted a pass by Alexis Mac Allister. Salah then grabbed his 16th league goal of the season with a trademark finish to wrap it up. "We cannot deny we are in a good place, but still one of the strengths of the team is we approach each game as a new one," Gakpo said. "That keeps us humble." CHELSEA DROP POINTS Chelsea took the lead after Cole Palmer danced past two defenders and slid the ball through Issa Diop's legs. But Fulham equalised in the 82nd minute when Harry Wilson headed home from close range before substitute Muniz clinched all three points for Fulham at the death. It was Chelsea's first league loss since a 2-1 defeat on Oct. 20 by Liverpool. Guardiola's City have now managed only one win in 13 games in all competitions as their crisis showed no sign of ending. Bernardo Silva put them ahead in the 14th minute but Iliman Ndiaye levelled before Haaland missed a penalty. "Incredible how (City players) run and fight and do everything. Some games have not been good, but today, the case was it was well played," Guardiola said. "But football is about winning, football is about you score goals and you don't concede. The last month, month and a half, we are not able to do it." FOREST'S MARCH UP TABLE CONTINUES Forest continued their unlikely challenge for a top-four spot as Anthony Elanga's first-half goal secured a win over Spurs to put them third. Elanga completed a superb Forest counter-attack in the 28th minute to settle a contest that Tottenham ended with 10 men after former Forest player Djed Spence was sent off. Tottenham's fourth defeat in five Premier League games left them in 11th. "The belief is here but the belief doesn't hide the reality. The reality says we haven't achieved nothing yet," Forest manager Nuno Espirito Santo, whose team have 34 points, said. Manchester United manager Ruben Amorim left Marcus Rashford out of his fourth successive squad and his side were undermined at Wolves as captain Bruno Fernandes was sent off just after halftime for a second yellow card. Matheus Cunha then scored direct from a corner and then teed up Hwang Hee-chan in stoppage time to seal United's fate. Wolves marked manager Vitor Pereira's first home game in charge by moving out of the relegation zone. NEWCASTLE CRUSH VILLA Anthony Gordon, Alexander Isak and Joelinton scored in Newcastle's rout of 10-man Villa, climbing to fifth in the table with their third straight league win while Villa slip to ninth. Gordon curled Newcastle ahead early on and Villa striker Jhon Duran was red-carded in the 32nd minute after a stamp on Fabian Schar following a tackle. Newcastle doubled their lead in the 59th minute when Jacob Murphy squared the ball to Isak for a tap-in and Joelinton completed the rout in stoppage time. Jarrod Bowen scored the only goal as West Ham United beat bottom club Southampton 1-0 to move his side up to 13th in the table. An uninspired Bournemouth slipped to sixth after being held to goalless draw by Crystal Palace.

For Makenzie Gilkison, spelling is such a struggle that a word like rhinoceros might come out as “rineanswsaurs” or sarcastic as “srkastik.” The 14-year-old from suburban Indianapolis can sound out words, but her dyslexia makes the process so draining that she often struggles with comprehension. “I just assumed I was stupid,” she recalled of her early grade school years. But assistive technology powered by artificial intelligence has helped her keep up with classmates. Last year, Makenzie was named to the National Junior Honor Society. She credits a customized AI-powered chatbot, a word prediction program and other tools that can read for her. “I would have just probably given up if I didn’t have them,” she said. Artificial intelligence holds the promise of helping countless other students with a range of visual, speech, language and hearing impairments to execute tasks that come easily to others. Schools everywhere have been wrestling with how and where to incorporate AI , but many are fast-tracking applications for students with disabilities. Getting the latest technology into the hands of students with disabilities is a priority for the U.S. Education Department, which has told schools they must consider whether students need tools like text-to-speech and alternative communication devices. New rules from the Department of Justice also will require schools and other government entities to make apps and online content accessible to those with disabilities. There is concern about how to ensure students using it — including those with disabilities — are still learning. Students can use artificial intelligence to summarize jumbled thoughts into an outline, summarize complicated passages, or even translate Shakespeare into common English. And computer-generated voices that can read passages for visually impaired and dyslexic students are becoming less robotic and more natural. “I’m seeing that a lot of students are kind of exploring on their own, almost feeling like they’ve found a cheat code in a video game,” said Alexis Reid, an educational therapist in the Boston area who works with students with learning disabilities. But in her view, it is far from cheating : “We’re meeting students where they are.” Ben Snyder, a 14-year-old freshman from Larchmont, New York, who was recently diagnosed with a learning disability, has been increasingly using AI to help with homework. “Sometimes in math, my teachers will explain a problem to me, but it just makes absolutely no sense,” he said. “So if I plug that problem into AI, it’ll give me multiple different ways of explaining how to do that.” He likes a program called Question AI. Earlier in the day, he asked the program to help him write an outline for a book report — a task he completed in 15 minutes that otherwise would have taken him an hour and a half because of his struggles with writing and organization. But he does think using AI to write the whole report crosses a line. “That’s just cheating,” Ben said. Schools have been trying to balance the technology’s benefits against the risk that it will do too much. If a special education plan sets reading growth as a goal, the student needs to improve that skill. AI can’t do it for them, said Mary Lawson, general counsel at the Council of the Great City Schools. But the technology can help level the playing field for students with disabilities, said Paul Sanft, director of a Minnesota-based center where families can try out different assistive technology tools and borrow devices. “There are definitely going to be people who use some of these tools in nefarious ways. That’s always going to happen,” Sanft said. “But I don’t think that’s the biggest concern with people with disabilities, who are just trying to do something that they couldn’t do before.” Another risk is that AI will track students into less rigorous courses of study. And, because it is so good at identifying patterns , AI might be able to figure out a student has a disability. Having that disclosed by AI and not the student or their family could create ethical dilemmas, said Luis Pérez, the disability and digital inclusion lead at CAST, formerly the Center for Applied Specialized Technology. Schools are using the technology to help students who struggle academically, even if they do not qualify for special education services. In Iowa, a new law requires students deemed not proficient — about a quarter of them — to get an individualized reading plan. As part of that effort, the state’s education department spent $3 million on an AI-driven personalized tutoring program. When students struggle, a digital avatar intervenes. More AI tools are coming soon. The U.S. National Science Foundation is funding AI research and development. One firm is developing tools to help children with speech and language difficulties. Called the National AI Institute for Exceptional Education, it is headquartered at the University of Buffalo, which did pioneering work on handwriting recognition that helped the U.S. Postal Service save hundreds of millions of dollars by automating processing. “We are able to solve the postal application with very high accuracy. When it comes to children’s handwriting, we fail very badly,” said Venu Govindaraju, the director of the institute. He sees it as an area that needs more work, along with speech-to-text technology, which isn’t as good at understanding children’s voices, particularly if there is a speech impediment. Sorting through the sheer number of programs developed by education technology companies can be a time-consuming challenge for schools. Richard Culatta, CEO of the International Society for Technology in Education, said the nonprofit launched an effort this fall to make it easier for districts to vet what they are buying and ensure it is accessible. Makenzie wishes some of the tools were easier to use. Sometimes a feature will inexplicably be turned off, and she will be without it for a week while the tech team investigates. The challenges can be so cumbersome that some students resist the technology entirely. But Makenzie’s mother, Nadine Gilkison, who works as a technology integration supervisor at Franklin Township Community School Corporation in Indiana, said she sees more promise than downside. In September, her district rolled out chatbots to help special education students in high school. She said teachers, who sometimes struggled to provide students the help they needed, became emotional when they heard about the program. Until now, students were reliant on someone to help them, unable to move ahead on their own. “Now we don’t need to wait anymore,” she said. This story corrects that Pérez works for CAST, formerly the Center for Applied Specialized Technology, not the Center for Accessible Technology. The Associated Press’ education 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 .Threads Rolls Out New Features as Upstart Bluesky Grows - Newsmax

VERMILLION — Two straight games, two straight fourth-quarter comebacks for South Dakota football. Just two weeks after a thrilling comeback against North Dakota State, USD needed some more second-half magic to knock off Tarleton State in the second round of the FCS playoffs. At times during both games, it all but appeared that USD could be dead in the water. ADVERTISEMENT In the North Dakota State matchup on Nov. 23, it was a 20-play, 99-yard drive from the Bison that took nearly 11 minutes off the clock and extended their lead to 11 with only 4:10 left to play. Despite that, the Coyotes scored 12 points in the final four minutes to claim victory 29-28. Then this past Saturday, USD tied the game up at 21 a piece in the third quarter before Tarleton State scored a go-ahead touchdown and forced a Coyote three and out shortly after. Things could have gotten out of hand from there had the Texans scored and gone up by two possessions, but the Coyotes were undeterred again. Three second-half interceptions — including one on the drive where Tarleton State could have gone in front by multiple scores — spearheaded USD to an eventual 11-point victory behind 21 fourth-quarter points. USD seems to be making a habit out of these comebacks. Although teams would probably rather have the game in hand by the time the fourth quarter rolls around, head coach Bob Nielson said the last two games have shown a lot from this group. “I think it shows that we're a team that's going to play with confidence no matter what the situation is,” Nielson said. “You play really good teams, which we have the last two weeks for sure with North Dakota State in the last game of the regular season. And now that you're in the playoffs, you're going play a really good team every week. You're going to find yourself in situations that are not ideal and so you have to be able to respond to those. I thought that was one thing that our team did on Saturday is we responded at multiple times throughout the course of the game and those are those responses were critical to us winning.” Even though the last two games for USD have made national headlines regarding the team’s resiliency, it’s certainly not the first time this season that the Coyotes have displayed their game-winning DNA. USD could point as far back as the Wisconsin game. The Coyotes had chances in the second half to tie or even take the lead. They still lost, but to hang with a Big Ten team is nothing to sneeze at. Then there were the games against Youngstown State and UND in which USD fell behind by 14 points and both times USD went on to win on the road at opponents where the Coyotes had historically struggled. Not to mention, the narrow defeat to South Dakota State can be put right up there as well. The Coyotes were almost dead in the water in the fourth quarter before flipping the script when Dennis Shorter forced a fumble that Mi’Quise Grace returned for the game-tying touchdown. Like the Wisconsin game, USD went on to lose in overtime, but it again showed the team’s ability to fight back in a less-than-ideal situation. ADVERTISEMENT So what’s been one of the keys? Nielson said it’s been about the tight-knit chemistry the entire team has developed. “Guys believe in each other and we’ve got a team that’s close in that regard,” Nielson said. “Saturday's game was a really good example of the first half. The offense responded when we needed to respond to their touchdown drives. In the second half, when we stalled out on that opening possession, the defense responds by generating a turnover and did that one other time in the half as well. When guys trust each other, believe in each other, I think sometimes they make those kinds of situations happen. And then we were able to capitalize on them.” USD’s team-wide trust and prior experience in close games will be important, especially with more challenges on the horizon. The next test is against fifth-seeded UC Davis on Saturday in the quarterfinals. Although those late-game comebacks have tested the Coyotes, Nielson said they will be helpful if they find themselves behind late in a game again. “I think the more unique situations you play in and the more your guys experience those kinds of situations, the better and more resilient your football team becomes,” Nielson said. “We've had multiple games this year where we've had to respond to less than ideal situations and our team has demonstrated a great deal of maturity in that regard and as we move forward, hopefully, it’s prepared us to be even better.”

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