Today’s weather forecast is predicting sunshine along with some cloudy intervals with a high of 48 degrees and a low of 30 degrees.

Final MSU shooting survivor released from Sparrow Hospital to other facility

The final student who was critically injured during the Feb. 13 shooting on Michigan State University’s campus has been released from Sparrow Hospital to a separate facility on Tuesday, April 4, according to a post on MSU Police and Public Safety’s Twitter account.

The tweet was not clear about what facility the student was released to.

According to the tweet, the released student was listed “in critical condition, but stable when discharged from the hospital.”

Four other students had been released on previous dates. All five students have now been released from Sparrow Hospital.

Sparrow Hospital has not released any names of survivors, however, some of their names have been identified through GoFundMe pages or social media posts.

Petition demands end to MSU’s gambling deal, in line with interim president’s goal

A group of MSU faculty has begun circulating a petition demanding an end to the university athletics department’s controversial partnership with Caesars Sportsbook. This comes shortly after new rules from the American gambling industry’s internal regulatory group which threaten the deal.

The petition was first posted around 10:15 a.m. Tuesday and by 4:30 p.m., it had 154 signatures. The vast majority of those signatures came from current and former faculty, with the rest coming mostly from current students and parents.

Community sustainability professor John Kerr, who led the petition, said they were inspired to act by the mental health issues they worked to accommodate following the mass shooting on MSU’s campus. He said while he and his colleagues were working to help struggling students, he saw the deal as “doing the opposite by sponsoring online gambling,” which can be addictive and unhealthy for developing brains.

Interim president Teresa Woodruff’s remarks occurred at a January Faculty Senate meeting, where she questioned the Caesars partnership and said she would be ordering her staff to look into the matter.

The deal with Caesers was not negotiated by Woodruff. It is overseen by the MSU Athletics Department, specifically Athletic Director Alan Haller.

The deal includes broadcasts and video advertisements for Caesars during games, emails to MSU’s database of students, free tickets to games and seats on teams’ private planes for Caesars employees, as well as the non-specific clause which allows the company to “Caesarize” the tailgating spaces outside of Spartan Stadium.

Beyond that, the specifics of the deal are unclear, as a sports-marketing firm acts as a middleman between MSU and Caesars to ensure the contract is not subject to public records requests.

Capital City Film Fest brings global multimedia experience to Lansing

The annual Capital City Film Festival will bring live music, independent films and art exhibition to Lansing which started yesterday and will run through April 15.

Festival manager Emma Selby said that the scope of the festival has grown since she became involved with the event in 2019. Over 100 films will be shown, many of them being short films. Over 60 hours of content will be played across three different venues, she said.

The festival “aims to take spaces that aren’t traditionally theaters and turn them into high-quality theaters for the public to enjoy,” Selby said. The three main festival event sites are the former Franker Sears building at 3131 E. Michigan Ave., the Lansing Public Media Center at 2500 S. Washington Ave. and The Fledge at 1300 Eureka St.

The warehouse of the Sears was transformed into a theater and the former retail space was re-imagined into an art exhibition with art representing all seven continents.

Selby describes the opening night feature as a “coming-of-age, comedy drama.”

Tonight from 6 p.m. to 10 p.m., the Capital City Film Festival is hosting a Red-Carpet Premiere party following opening night at Sears. The event will feature appetizers, DJ John Beltran and a collection of “Just a Vibe” short films.

Tickets to the festival can be found on the Capital City Film Festival’s website.

Based on original reporting by Dan Netter, Alex Walters and Jaden Beard.