ADVOCATE THE
T H E A D V O C AT E.C O M
BATON ROUGE, LOUISIANA
|
F r i d ay, M a r c h 28, 2025
NCAA WOMEN’S TOURNAMENT LSU vs. N.C. State l 6:30 p.m. l ESPN l More in Sports, 1C
$2.00X
Senators seek probe into Signal chat leak Call for investigation has bipartisan support
Makenzie Fuller, Clay Fuller and their children, Sage and Kannon, drove from Waco, Texas, to see the LSU women play in the first round of the NCAA Tournament on Saturday.
BY STEPHEN GROVES and AAMER MADHANI Associated Press
PROVIDED PHOTOS
Kim Mulkey has her grandchildren Sage Fuller, 3, and Kannon Fuller, 5, by her side at a basketball practice.
FAMILY TRIPS Mulkey and family always show up for each other, especially when tournament time rolls around
BY JAN RISHER Staff writer
Kim Mulkey never missed a day of school from her time in kindergarten until she graduated from Hammond High. She knows a little something about showing up — and she has passed that trait on to her children. “That’s a good way to put it. She always showed up,” said her son Kramer Robertson. “She was at every big game and every school event. Not just sports but plays in elementary school, too.” Her daughter Makenzie Fuller, 33, is following in her mother’s footsteps. She gives credit to her husband, Clay Fuller, for helping make their lifestyle possible. Not only has Fuller never missed a single NCAA tournament game that her mom’s teams have played in, these days, the couple goes to Herculean lengths to show up for Mulkey with their family of four. The Fullers and their two children, Kannon, 5, and Sage, 3, live in Waco, Texas.
ä See FAMILY, page 6A
Kramer Robertson, Kim Mulkey and Makenzie Fuller celebrate after one of Mulkey’s Baylor University teams won an NCAA tournament.
WASHINGTON — The top Republican and Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee requested an investigation Thursday into how national security officials used the Signal app to discuss military strikes, ensuring at least some bipartisan scrutiny on an episode President Donald Trump has dismissed as frivolous. Sen. Roger Wicker, the Republican chair of the committee, and Sen. Jack Reed, the top Democrat, signed onto a letter to the acting inspector general at the Department of Defense for an inquiry into the potential “use of unclassified networks to discuss sensitive and classified information, as well as the sharing of such information with those who do not have proper clearance and need to know.” ä Jeffrey The senators’ assertion that Goldberg, the classified information was potentially shared was notable, es- journalist at pecially as Trump’s Republican the center of administration has contended the Signal chat there was no classified information on the Signal chain that controversy, had included Jeffrey Goldberg, spoke Thursday editor-in-chief of The Atlantic at the New magazine. Orleans Book Across Washington, the Sig- Festival. PAGE 4A nal leak presented a major test early in Trump’s second term on the federal government’s system of checks and balances meant to protect national security. Yet even as mechanisms for oversight and investigation sputtered to life, it was a halting effort as most Republicans seemed content to allow the controversy to blow over. Meanwhile, Democrats slammed the Signal chat as a reckless violation of secrecy that could have put service members in harm’s way. “This put pilots at risk because of sloppiness
ä See PROBE, page 4A
Hurricane experts using new tools to predict rapid intensification StreamSondes are tiny weather stations that are dropped into tropical storms and hurricanes to gather data. PHOTO PROVIDED By NOAA
WEATHER HIGH 79 LOW 65 PAGE 8B
BY KASEY BUBNASH Staff writer
Shortly after Hurricane Milton formed in the Gulf of Mexico in October, forecasters watched in horror as the storm underwent explosive rapid intensification and made its way toward Florida, strengthening from a Category 1 to a Category 5 hurricane in a day. Milton’s wind speeds increased by 90 mph in 24 hours, which Jason Dunion, a University of Miami
meteorologist specializing in hurricane research, said is the third highest rate of rapid intensification in recorded history. “If you’re a forecaster, you have to communicate that change really fast,” Dunion said. That kind of fast-paced strengthening, which in Milton’s case famously brought one Florida meteorologist to tears on air, has long posed a problem for forecasters and hurricane-prone states like Louisiana, where residents are of-
Business ......................8A Commentary ................7B Nation-World ................2A Classified .....................7D Deaths .........................4B Opinion ........................6B Comics-Puzzles .....4D-6D Living............................1D Sports ..........................1C
ten left with little time to prepare. While researchers understand the large-scale environmental factors that help fuel the phenomenon — warm sea-surface temperatures, low wind shear, moist air — much of the process remains a mystery. “What’s harder to predict,” Dunion said, “is how fast the inner core, that heart of the storm, can change in a short period of time.”
ä See TOOLS, page 5A
100TH yEAR, NO. 271
CONGRATULATIONS TO THE WOMEN’S BASKETBALL TEAM ON WINNING THE 2025 SWAC CHAMPIONSHIP AND THE NCAA 1ST ROUND AND TO THE MEN ON WINNING THE 2025 MEN’S BASKETBALL REGULAR SEASON CHAMPIONS.
225-771-3171 GOJAGSPORTS.com