Ping Huang

Cynthia Benning, a superfan from Albuquerque, New Mexico, says the game is like chess on ice.

The team is always thinking like two, three moves ahead, just like you do in chess.

Benning was in the stands with a sign that said curling is life and a cowbell she rang for good shots.

Her favorite team didn't make it to the finals, but she got what she came for, hours and hours of high-level curling.

The winning team, captained by 24-year-old Danny Casper, heads to an Olympic qualifying event in Canada next month.

Ping Huang, NPR News, Sioux Falls, South Dakota.

More than 1,300 CDC workers were notified late Friday that they had lost their jobs.

The next day, more than half of them got emails revoking those notices.

Erin Melton Backus was one of them.

She's at the CDC's Office on Smoking and Health, and it was the third time this year she's received a termination notice.

The cuts that remain affect CDC staff who brief Congress, those working on chronic disease and nutrition, and human resources staff who are called back from furlough to lay off their colleagues and members of their own team.

In an email, an HHS spokesperson declined to confirm numbers but said the terminated staffers were non-essential.

Ping Huang, NPR News.