Washington
Cherry blossom super fan never misses peak bloom in Washington, DC
To Jenny Blakemore, cherry blossoms are more than the springtime symbol of the nation’s capital – they’re tied to her own love story.
The iconic Washington, D.C., trees illustrate Blakemore’s romance through the years with her husband and fellow cherry blossom fan Chris Blakemore. This spring marks 11 years since he proposed surrounded by the blooming trees, and 10 years since the couple married in a cherry blossom-themed ceremony.
The couple and their three daughters will continue the tradition this year along with the crowd of more than a million people expected to converge on the city in late March and early April during the season’s peak bloom, when the cherry trees burst into pink flowers. Cherry trees across the U.S. erupt into blossoms at this time of year, but the nation’s capital is among the most famous destinations for cherry blossom tourism.
More: Stumpy, D.C.’s beloved short cherry tree, to be uprooted after cherry blossoms bloom
The emerging blossoms also signal the beginning of the National Cherry Blossom Festival, the city’s monthlong springtime celebration.
Blakemore played her own role in the festival during the 2012 celebration of the 100th anniversary of the planting of the Japanese cherry trees around the Tidal Basin. She held an opening ceremony party in the Betsey Johnson store in Georgetown where she worked at the time, and planted one of the 100 commemorative cherry trees introduced to the city that year.
“That’s what’s lovely about DC,” she said. “You walk around anywhere in DC and find cherry blossoms and find your secret little trees that make you feel happiness.”
When will cherry blossom blooms peak this season?
The arrival of the crowds begins when the trees reach their peak bloom, which the National Park Service forecasts between March 23 and 26.
“The average historic day of peak bloom is right around April 3, April 4, so March 26 is early,” said Mike Litterst, chief of communications for the National Park Service. “But over the last 10 to 20 years, we’re seeing peak bloom fall much more regularly in late March rather than early April.”
Litterst said he’s keeping an eye on a cold front expected on Thursday after a spate of days in the 70s last week.
“What we absolutely want to avoid is sub-freezing temperatures once we get in those last couple stages of the bloom cycle,” Litterst said. “If we hit temperatures 27 or below while the petals are out, that can cause frost burn on the petals, and that can unfortunately affect the peak bloom.”
The last time that happened was in 2017, when three straight nights of temperatures below 25 degrees froze around half of the blossoms. Luckily, that’s “extremely uncommon,” Litterst said.
More: A look at Cherry Blossoms blooming around the world
The National Mall has 11 different types of cherry trees out of a total of 430 species worldwide. This week’s blooms come from the Yoshino trees, but those aren’t the first to bloom, according to the National Park Service. Okame cherry trees bloom a couple weeks earlier than the Yoshino trees, which produce the light pink blooms recognizable from iconic pictures of the Tidal Basin.
Peak bloom refers to the date when 70% of the Yoshino trees open, according to the NPS. But those who miss them can still catch the blossoms of Kwanzan trees, which bloom about two weeks later, Litterst said.
The blooming period can last for up to two weeks, depending on weather conditions, according to the National Cherry Blossom Festival.
The first cherry trees arrived in Washington as a gift of friendship from the city of Tokyo in 1910, according to the NPS. Unfortunately, inspectors discovered that the first shipment of 2,000 trees were diseased, and then-President William Taft ordered them burned.
Two years later, the Tokyo City Council authorized a second shipment of more than 3,000 trees. On March 27, 1912, First Lady Helen Herron Taft and Viscountess Chinda, the wife of Japanese Ambassador Sutemi Chinda, planted the first two cherry trees on the bank of the Tidal Basin, and the tradition was born.
A blossoming love story
Growing up in the Washington area, Blakemore was drawn to the cherry trees as a little girl. “I’ve loved them since the day I saw them,” she said.
By her early 20’s, Blakemore, now 44, began her annual pilgrimage to the Tidal Basin every spring to take in the sight of the brilliant pink trees. That was also when she started dating her now-husband Chris Blakemore, a high school classmate also from the area.
The couple’s romance blossomed against the backdrop of the cherry trees for more than a decade before he proposed.
On the day the blooms peaked in 2013, Chris Blakemore got down on one knee and asked Jenny to marry him after a stroll around the Tidal Basin.
A year later, as the trees broke into bloom again, the pair married in a pink-filled ceremony replete with cherry blossoms.
“I wanted something magical, so I could tell my children,” she said.
The Blakemores have since moved to nearby Falls Church, a Virginia suburb of the district, where they are raising three daughters, ages 4, 5, and 7, in a house ringed with cherry trees.
Jenny Blakemore passed her cherry blossom obsession to the next generation – her daughter, a Girl Scout, earned the official cherry blossom patch after she planted one of the trees with her mom’s help last year.
Even after experiencing many cherry blossom seasons, Blakemore thinks they only get better every year.
“The beauty overwhelms me,” she said.
Cybele Mayes-Osterman is a breaking news reporter for USA Today. Reach her on email at cmayesosterman@usatoday.com. Follow her on X @CybeleMO.
Washington
Widespread Verizon outage prompts emergency alerts in Washington, New York City
Verizon said on Wednesday that its wireless service was suffering an outage impacting cellular data and voice services.
The nation’s largest wireless carrier said that its “engineers are engaged and are working to identify and solve the issue quickly.”
Verizon’s statement came after a swath of social media comments directed at Verizon, with users saying that their mobile devices were showing no bars of service or “SOS,” indicating a lack of connection.
Verizon, which has more than 146 million customers, appears to have started experiencing services issues around 12:00 p.m. ET, according to comments on social media site X.
Two hours later, Verizon posted an update on social media, saying that its engineers were “continuing to address today’s service interruptions,” but did not say if a specific reason for the outage had been identified or when it could be resolved.
“We understand the impact this has on your day and remain committed to resolving this as quickly as possible,” the company said.
Despite those efforts, shortly after 4:00 p.m. ET, Verizon issued a third statement that contained little new information. The company said teams were “on the ground actively working to fix today’s service issue.”
Users had initially reported problems with Verizon’s competitors, T-Mobile and AT&T, as well. But both companies said they were not experiencing any service problems.
“T-Mobile’s network is keeping our customers connected, and we’ve confirmed that our network is operating normally and as expected,” a spokesperson told NBC News. “However, due to Verizon’s reported outage, our customers may not be able to reach someone with Verizon service at this time.”
A spokeswoman for AT&T also said the company’s network was “operating normally.”
In Washington, D.C., the District’s official emergency notification system sent out a message to residents saying that the Verizon outage was “nationwide.”
“If you have an emergency and can not connect using your Verizon Wireless device, please connect using a device from another carrier, a landline, or go to a police district or fire station to report the emergency,” the AlertDC system told recipients.
New York City’s Office of Emergency Management also said it was aware of the outage without mentioning Verizon by name. The city said it was “working closely with our partners” to review the outage and “assess any potential effects on city agencies & essential services.”
Washington
Vance to meet Danish and Greenlandic officials in Washington on Wednesday
People walk along a street in downtown of Nuuk, Greenland, on Tuesday, Jan. 13, 2026.
Evgeniy Maloletka/AP
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Evgeniy Maloletka/AP
NUUK, Greenland — Along the narrow, snow-covered main street in Greenland’s capital, international journalists and camera crews stop passersby every few meters (feet) asking them for their thoughts on a crisis which Denmark’s prime minister has warned could potentially trigger the end of NATO.

Greenland is at the center of a geopolitical storm as U.S. President Donald Trump is insisting he wants to own the island — and the residents of its capital Nuuk say it is not for sale. Trump said he wants to control Greenland at any cost and the White House has not ruled out taking the island by force.
U.S. Vice President JD Vance will meet Denmark’s foreign minister Lars Løkke Rasmussen and his Greenlandic counterpart Vivian Motzfeldt in Washington on Wednesday to discuss the Arctic island, which is a semiautonomous territory of the United States’ NATO ally Denmark.
Tuuta Mikaelsen, a 22-year-old student, told The Associated Press in Nuuk that she hoped American officials would get the message to “back off.”
Greenland’s Prime Minister Jens-Frederik Nielsen told a news conference in the Danish capital Copenhagen on Tuesday that, “if we have to choose between the United States and Denmark here and now, we choose Denmark. We choose NATO. We choose the Kingdom of Denmark. We choose the EU.”

Greenland is strategically important because as climate change causes the ice to melt, it opens up the possibility of shorter trade routes to Asia. That also could make it easier to extract and transport untapped deposits of critical minerals which are needed for computers and phones.
Trump also said he wants the island to expand America’s security and has cited what he says is the threat from Russian and Chinese ships as a reason to control it.
But both experts and Greenlanders question that claim.
“The only Chinese I see is when I go to the fast food market,” Lars Vintner, a heating engineer told AP. He said he frequently goes sailing and hunting and has never seen Russian or Chinese ships.
His friend, Hans Nørgaard, agreed, adding “what has come out of the mouth of Donald Trump about all these ships is just fantasy.”
Denmark has said the U.S. — which already has a military presence — can boost its bases on Greenland. For that reason, “security is just a cover,” Vintner said, suggesting Trump actually wants to own the island to make money from its untapped natural resources.
Nørgaard told AP he filed a police complaint in Nuuk against Trump’s “aggressive” behavior because, he said, American officials are threatening the people of Greenland and NATO. He suggested Trump was using the ships as a pretext to further American expansion.

“Donald Trump would like to have Greenland, (Russian President Vladimir) Putin would like Ukraine and (Chinese President) Xi Jinping would like to have Taiwan,” Nørgaard said.
Mikaelsen, the student, said Greenlanders benefit from being part of Denmark which provides free health care, education and payments during study.
“I don’t want the U.S. to take that away from us,” she said.
Ahead of Wednesday’s meeting, Naaja Nathanielsen, Greenland’s minister for business and mineral resources said it’s “unfathomable” that the United States is discussing taking over a NATO ally and urged the Trump administration to listen to voices from the Arctic island’s people.
Washington
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DE Dawuane Smoot, LB Foyesade Oluokun, TE Brenton Strange, S Eric Murray, and S Antonio Johnson speak with the media after practice on Thursday ahead of the Wild Card Matchup vs. Bills.
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