(LEX 18) — The National Bobblehead Hall of Fame Museum and KY for KY has released a limited edition Cocaine Bear bobblehead.

The bobblehead features the 175-pound black bear who died of an overdose of cocaine after finding a batch in the mountains of Fannin County, Georgia in 1985.

The same bear is displayed in Lexington at Kentucky for Kentucky Fun Mall.

To order a bobblehead, go to National Bobblehead Hall of Fame and Museum or KY for KY.

Each bobblehead will be $30 plus $8 shipping per order and expected to ship in July.

HAMILTON, Ohio —

A nurse from Hamilton said she and her family will be spending their first Christmas without her husband.

He died from COVID-19 at just 37 years old, earlier this year.

Christina Jewett said her late husband, Paul Jewett, 37, was unable to get a vaccine before he got sick.

It has been an incredibly hard year for the family.

Last month, they shared a Thanksgiving unlike any before and now, Christmas won't be the way they imagined.

"It's weird to picture from the beginning of the year to now. You picture you're going to have your family together for holidays, you know, dad's going to be there," Christina Jewett said.

But this Christmas, Jewett's life is very different.

We talked with her earlier this year after her husband died from COVID-19 in April.

She said the father of five had no underlying conditions.

"I didn't imagine I'd be wrapping the presents alone or any of that, you know, having to get the tree together was really hard because it was one of our traditions," she said.

Jewett is making sure she shows her sons pictures of their dad as she pulls together the strength to do it all.

She also welcomed their new baby boy to the world this year after Paul died.

"Benny's great. He's 8 months old now. He just started crawling and standing all at the same time, but he's been absolutely the light of everything," she said.

Jewett is also a nurse and sometimes shares her husband's story when patients have doubts about the vaccines.

"They weren't doing under 40 when he got sick and he was only 37, so, even if he wanted to, he couldn't have got it at the time," she said.

Now, with record-breaking case numbers, she knows others may be dealing with the same loss.

She hopes her husband's story can inspire someone to get vaccinated and keep a family intact.

"The biggest lesson I've had to learn this year is that life is very fragile and very short," she said.

Jewett said since her husband's death, she has made friends online in social media groups that help people with loss and grief.

Those friendships have transcended the internet.

She said at least one of those new friends will be spending Christmas with her family this year.

Jewett said it's important that people never stop praying in these situations.

She also said it's good to lean into your support system when dealing with loss.

LOS ANGELES, Calif. – For the first time in its 18-year run, “The Bachelor” has named a black leading man.

The reality show announced Friday that 28-year-old Matt James will star as the bachelor for the 25^th season.

Good Morning America reports that James was originally cast as a suitor on Clare Crawley’s upcoming season of “The Bachelorette,” which has been delayed due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

ABC hopes to air Crawley’s season of “The Bachelorette” this fall, with James making his debut on “The Bachelor” afterwards in 2021.

GMA says James is a real estate broker, entrepreneur and community organization founder. The North Carolina native graduated from Wake Forest University, where he majored in economics and played football.

James also seems to be friends with former contestants Hannah Brown and Tyler Cameron, who both appear on his Instagram page.

The casting announcement comes after years of fans demanding diversity and just days after the franchise’s first black bachelorette, Rachel Lindsay, said she would cut ties with the show if a black bachelor was not cast, Variety reports.

The first meteor shower of 2021 peaks this weekend.

Normally, NASA describes the Quadrantids as one of the best annual meteor showers and it’s known for bright fireball meteors. However, a couple obstacles may make it hard for stargazers to watch this celestial event this year.

Most meteor showers have a two-day peak, which makes catching a glimpse of shooting stars more possible, but NASA says the Quadrantids’ peak is much shorter – only a few hours.

For observers in the northern hemisphere, the Quadrantids meteor shower will peak at about 14:30 UTC on Sunday, or 9:30 a.m. EST, according to the International Meteor Organization.

That’s during daylight, so the best bet to see the meteor shower will be before, in the early morning hours Sunday, when the rate of meteors is a bit lower than at the peak.

Another obstacle in seeing the meteor shower will be the moon. It was full this week and it will remain bright in the night sky this weekend, likely overshadowing the brightness of the meteor display.

Space.com reports that this meteor shower will be at its best just before the break of dawn, about 6 a.m. local time. Those in the western U.S. may have better luck than those in the east.

As always, if you’re wanting to spot a meteor shower, it’s best to get away from any bright city lights, lay flat on your back and give your eyes some time to adjust to the dark.

Lakota students returned to school Tuesday. Despite having to wear masks, many kids said they were happy to be back in class with friends."I'm feeling excited but a little nervous because I've been in VLO for over a year," said Bryce Jones, a Lakota East student. Jones has asthma, so last year, virtual learning was a better option for him. Now, he's vaccinated which sets his father, Careem Jones' mind at ease."It's been tough being home, so we felt its time to integrate with students," Careem Jones said. Adam Douglas isn't just new to Lakota East, he's also new to the country. He just moved here from Jordan a few weeks ago."Feeling good, something new in my life," Douglas said. What's not new is Lakota's mandatory mask policy."When they said we were going to have masks mandatory, I'm like, 'Well, we did it last year and you get used to it, so you can do it again,'" said Lakota East student Kaitlin Dwomoh. Lakota superintendent Matt Miller told WLWT on Tuesday if COVID cases stay low during the next few weeks, the mask mandate could be reversed, but students aren't banking on it just yet."I feel like we're going to have masks for a while because COVID is just going to keep ramping up. This is not going to be our last variant, and I kind of want people to get used to being close but still far away enough that we don't have to worry," Dwomoh said.

WASHINGTON —

Above video: Jobs report shows stimulus urgently needed, President Biden says

No news conference. No Oval Office address. No primetime speech to a joint session of Congress.

President Joe Biden is the first executive in four decades to reach this point in his term without holding a formal question-and-answer session. It reflects a White House media strategy meant both to reserve major media set-pieces for the celebration of a legislative victory and to limit unforced errors from a historically gaffe-prone politician.

Biden has opted to take questions about as often as most of his recent predecessors, but he tends to field just one or two informal inquiries at a time, usually in a hurried setting at the end of an event.

In a sharp contrast with the previous administration, the White House is exerting extreme message discipline, empowering staff to speak but doing so with caution. Recalling both Biden’s largely leak-free campaign and the buttoned-up Obama administration, the new White House team has carefully managed the president’s appearances, trying to lower the temperature from Donald Trump’s Washington and to save a big media moment to mark what could soon be a signature accomplishment: passage of the COVID-19 bill.

The message control may serve the president's purposes but it denies the media opportunities to directly press Biden on major policy issues and to engage in the kind of back-and-forth that can draw out information and thoughts that go beyond the administration's curated talking points.

“The president has lost some opportunity, I think, to speak to the country from the bully pulpit. The volume has been turned so low in the Biden White House that they need to worry about whether anyone is listening," said Frank Sesno, former head of George Washington University's school of media. “But he’s not great in these news conferences. He rambles. His strongest communication is not extemporaneous.”

Other modern presidents took more questions during their opening days in office.

By this point in their terms, Trump and George H.W. Bush had each held five press conferences, Bill Clinton four, George W. Bush three, Barack Obama two and Ronald Reagan one, according to a study by Martha Kumar, presidential scholar and professor emeritus at Towson University.

Biden has given five interviews as opposed to nine from Reagan and 23 from Obama.

“Biden came in with a plan for how they wanted to disseminate information. When you compare him with Trump, Biden has sense of how you use a staff, that a president can’t do everything himself,” Kumar said. “Biden has a press secretary who gives regular briefings. He knows you hold a news conference when you have something to say, in particular a victory. They have an idea of how to use this time, early in the administration when people are paying attention, and how valuable that is.”

The new president had taken questions 39 times, according to Kumar’s research, though usually just one or two shouted inquiries from a group of reporters known as the press pool at the end of an event in the White House's State Dining Room or Oval Office.

Those exchanges can at times be clunky, with the cacophony of shouts or the whir of the blades of the presidential helicopter idling on the South Lawn making it difficult to have a meaningful exchange.

“Press conferences are critical to informing the American people and holding an administration accountable to the public,” said Associated Press reporter Zeke Miller, president of the White House Correspondents' Association. “As it has with prior presidents, the WHCA continues to call on President Biden to hold formal press conferences with regularity.”

White House press secretary Jen Psaki on Friday defended the president's accessibility to the media and suggested that a news conference was likely by the end of March.

“I would say that his focus is on getting recovery and relief to the American people and he looks forward to continuing to engage with all of you and to other members of the media who aren’t here today,” Psaki said. “And we’ll look forward to letting you know, as soon as that press conference is set.”

The president’s first address to a joint session of Congress — not technically a State of the Union address but a speech that typically has just as much pomp — is also tentatively planned for the end of March, aides have said. However, the format of the address is uncertain due to the pandemic.

The president has received high marks for two major scripted addresses, his inaugural address and his speech marking the 500,000th death to COVID-19.

Having overcome a childhood stutter, Biden has long enjoyed interplay with reporters and has defied aides’ requests to ignore questions from the press. Famously long-winded, Biden has been prone to gaffes throughout his long political career and, as president, has occasionally struggled with off-the-cuff remarks.

His use of the phrase “Neanderthal thinking” this week to describe the decision by the governors of Texas and Mississippi to lift mask mandates dominated a new cycle and drew ire from Republicans. That created the type of distraction his aides have tried to avoid and, in a pandemic silver lining, were largely able to dodge during the campaign because the virus kept Biden home for months and limited the potential for public mistakes.

Firmly pledging his belief in freedom of the press, Biden has rebuked his predecessor’s incendiary rhetoric toward the media, including Trump's references to reporters as “the enemy of the people.” Biden restored the daily press briefing, which had gone extinct under Trump, opening a window into the workings of the White House. His staff has also fanned out over cable news to promote the COVID-19 relief bill.

And while Biden’s own Twitter account, in a sharp break from Trump’s social media habits, usually offers rote postings, his chief of staff Ron Klain has become a frequent tweeter, using the platform to amplify messages and critique opponents.

Delaying the news conference and joint address also, symbolically, have kept open the first chapter of Biden's presidency and perhaps extended his honeymoon. His approval rating stood at 60% in a poll released Friday from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research.

Tobe Berkovitz, a professor at Boston University’s college of communications, said Biden’s “rope-a-dope” strategy was right for the moment.

“Presidential press conferences are not on the top of the agenda for Americans who are worried about COVID and the economic disaster that has befallen so many families,” he said.

___

Lemire reported from New York.

SALT LAKE CITY, Utah — When you walk into Kaitlyn Mahoney’s house, you’ll notice every shelf is filled with pages and pages of insight. There are hundreds of books, all with a similar purpose.

“One of the things that I’m really committed to is prioritizing stories by and about Black people, Jewish people, fat people, disabled people, as many different marginalization’s and intersections with the queer identify as I can," Mahoney said.

Mahoney is the founder of Under the Umbrella Bookstore. It is an upcoming community bookstore serving the LGBTQIA+ community in Salt Lake City, Utah. It is the first of its kind in the area.

Fewer than 1% of small businesses in America are certified as LGBT business enterprises. Now, this new business is joining the ranks to open its own inclusive space.

“Under the Umbrella is meant to flip the entire hierarchy of prioritization so that those stories featuring or about black queers, and trans queers and disabled queers are the most important ones," Mahoney said. “What I envision for Under the Umbrella is a space where people can come and do what I did with yourself and those books and you are learning about yourself. You’re having an experience for and with yourself and that book.”

Mahoney's own experiences with books is what has sent her on this journey of self-discovery.

“I started reading more diversly in general and that’s kind of how I realized how diverse life could be and is, but how diverse it could be for me," Mahoney said. “It made me start questioning what I had been talk about gender and sexuality. Because I grew up in a religion where gender is male and female, and it’s eternal and that’s it, and sexually was either straight or gay and one of those was a bad thing to be. Books is how I really found the language to describe a lot of things I had been feeling, but I just hadn’t let myself just think about.”

Mahoney says this space will be safe for those who have nowhere to go.

“There are a lot of queer youth who desperately need acceptance and love," Mahoney said.

She wants to make sure no one is left behind wondering.

“I can’t even imagine what my life would look like if I would have had that when I was younger. If I had been exposed to the love and acceptance that I desperately needed to help me and myself," Mahoney said.

Members of the community couldn’t agree more.

“I can’t tell you how many people have said those words to me, ‘I wish this space had existed when I was younger," Mahoney said.

People have come together to raise more than $55,000 to make this vision of Under the Umbrella a reality.

“I knew that the space was necessary. I knew that we needed it, but the response from the community has just been amazing," Mahoney said.

Mahoney says Salt Lake City needs businesses like this, but so does every other city. According to the National LGBT Chamber of Commerce, out of the 28 million small businesses across the country, only 909 are officially certified as LGBT Business Enterprises.

“There are only a handful that are specifically queer, but there are a handful that are very queer focused," Mahoney said.

The NGLCC says businesses like these are a vibrant, essential part of the small business engine that makes the economy run.

“There is nothing like this in Utah and I can’t tell you why, like I don’t know," Mahoney said.

That is why she says books and book stores need to be more inclusive nationally and world wide.

“I found it really hard to go into a general bookstore like your Barns and Noble or your local and that just has a general selection of books was hard to find books that were specifically queer or that showed identities that are everywhere but that you don’t necessarily see in books," Mahoney said.

With a house filled with books and items made by LGBTQ+ individuals ready to sell Kaitlyn is ready to welcome all.

“So, however you identify under the LGBTQIA+ queer umbrella, you are welcome under the umbrella," Mahoney said.