RJ Hamster

AZ Briefing: Saguaro athletic director quits amid message allegations

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AZ Briefing

YOUR MORNING NEWS ROUNDUP

Sun Dec 14 2025

Good morning, Arizona. Here’s what our reporters are working on and what you should know about what’s happening across the state before you start your day.

The former Saguaro High School athletic director has resigned amid allegations that he had sent inappropriate messages to a student.

The student’s father said the district handled the situation promptly and that Lucas Ackerson was escorted off campus at Saguaro within an hour of the family reporting his actions to administration. Here’s what happened.

Arizona’s I-17 Christmas tree returned in 2024. Is it back this year?

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The I-17 Christmas Tree in 2014.

Provided by Charley Farley

Burned but not forgotten, the I-17 Christmas Tree is back. Check out history of the mystery, how it was solved and the latest on this year’s tree.

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Today in history

Here are just some of the historic events on this date in the past.•On this day in 1918: About a month after an armistice between Germany and the Allied Nations to end World War I, women were allowed to vote for the first time in the U.K. general election.•In 1940: Scientists first made and then isolated plutonium, or Pu-238, in the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley. Plutonium became a key to the Manhattan Project producing the world’s first atomic bomb amid World War II. Publication of the initial discovery of chemists Glenn Seaborg, Arthur Wahl, Joseph Kennedy and Edwin McMillan was withdrawn after an isotope, Pu-239, was found to undergo nuclear fission to release energy that could fuel the bomb.•In 1979: CBS Records released the Clash’s seminal album, “London Calling,” in the U.K. roughly a month before Epic Records unleashed the double LP in the U.S. Widely recognized today as one of the greatest punk rock bands in history, the Clash had grown by their third studio album to embrace a post-punk style that infused reggae, rock and other genres.•In 1985: Chief Wilma Mankiller began serving as the Cherokee Nation’s first female leader after Chief Ross Swimmer resigned to lead the federal Bureau of Indian Affairs. Mankiller also was the first female chief of a major tribe of Indigenous people in the U.S. Over a decade of her leadership, the Cherokee Nation population more than doubled.•In 2008: At a news conference in Baghdad about a month before he left the White House, President George W. Bush touted the Status of Forces Agreement he signed that would eventually lead to the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq and allow for the nation to govern itself again. As an insult to express outrage about what had transpired since the U.S. invaded Iraq in 2003, Iraqi journalist Muntazer al-Zaidi threw his shoes at Bush, who ducked while standing alongside Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki. Zaidi served a six-month sentence for the attack.•In 2020: The COVID-19 pandemic death toll in the U.S. surpassed 300,000 people. Sandra Lindsay, a critical care nurse at Long Island Jewish Medical Center in New York, became the first American not involved in a clinical trial to receive a COVID-19 vaccine after the Pfizer-BioNTech shot was approved for use. “I was determined to show up for my team and my family,” Lindsay wrote in a USA TODAY op-ed a year later.

— Charlie White, USA TODAY Network