The recruiting race for the Class of 2027 is already heating up — not just on the field, but in the increasingly complex ecosystem of modern college football, where NIL (Name, Image, and Likeness) deals are reshaping how programs and players navigate early recruitment. For elite underclassmen, talent alone is no longer the only factor drawing attention; marketability, social media presence, and brand potential are now playing pivotal roles in how offers are extended and decisions are made. The top recruits in the 2026 cycle are not only physically advanced and highly skilled — they’re entering high school with endorsement potential and media savviness.

Stacker compiled a list of the highest rated Class of 2027 football recruits from California using data from 247Sports. Players are ranked by their 247Sports composite ratings. Here’s the players from California set to dominate Saturdays (and potentially Sundays) for years to come.

#20. Elija Harmon (DL)

– National rank: #206 (4 stars)
– Position rank: #26
– College: Oklahoma
– Offers: Oklahoma, Arizona, Auburn, California, Florida
– High school: Inglewood (Inglewood, CA)

#19. Khalil Terry (S)

– National rank: #201 (4 stars)
– Position rank: #21
– College: Notre Dame
– Offers: Notre Dame, Michigan State, Alabama, Arizona, Arizona State
– High school: Tustin (Tustin, CA)

#18. Danny Lang (CB)

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By Zoe Whitfield, CNN

(CNN) — Born in Ramallah at the end of the ‘90s, Ayham Hassan grew up privy to the political weight attributed to certain sartorial practices. “I became aware early on that Palestinian textiles are not just objects,” said the designer, who is based between London and the occupied West Bank. “They are evidence carrying geography, lineage, and memory.”

When Hassan graduated from London’s Central Saint Martins art and design college last June, he titled his final collection “IM-Mortal Magenta: The Color That Doesn’t Exist.” Shaped by his understanding of this relationship between art and politics, it was infused with visual elements inspired by Gaza. “The color magenta became a conceptual anchor, used to speak about erasure and survival,” he explained in an email. “And tatreez informed not only the visual language, but also the structure of the work, and fundamentally how I design.”

This perception of tatreez, or traditional Palestinian embroidery, as a type of visual language is widely shared, owing to its intimacy with the land and biographical characteristics. A centuries-old creative practice, tatreez originally married its maker (usually women from rural communities) with their respective region. Details like color, technique and even its depictions of certain plants and flowers were tied to specific areas; by design it denoted social status and personal life events, including marriage or widowhood.

Beginning in 1948, following the Arab-Israeli war (recognized as the Nakba, or catastrophe, during which 700,000 Palestinians were expelled from their homes) – as well as later intifadas, or uprisings, against the occupation in 1987 and 2000 – tatreez became a political vehicle, actively embodying resistance for many Palestinians.

“Today it’s become part of an understanding of Palestinian steadfastness, or ‘sumud’ — of resistance more broadly,” Rachel Dedman, a curator of Middle Eastern art at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, and author of “Stitching the Intifada: Embroidery and Resistance in Palestine,” said during a video call. “And its practice as one of solidarity is becoming more and more clear. On TikTok you get lots of results for people running stitching circles and tatreez workshops.”

Dedman has spent the past decade researching tatreez and curating exhibitions in Europe and across the Middle East, following an initial invitation from the Palestinian Museum in Birzeit, north of Ramallah, in 2014. “Thread Memory: Embroidery from Palestine” is currently on show at the V&A Dundee in Scotland while more recently “Embroidering Palestine” opened at MoMu, the fashion museum of Antwerp, where work by Hassan is displayed alongside thobes (embroidered ankle-length dresses, also known as thobs) made over a century ago.

“Often in museums there’s a feeling that historic fashion is something that’s unchanging and static, held in amber,” said Dedman. “In the 19th century, tatreez and Palestinian dress was fashion – women were looking at each other. Being in MoMu then, I was excited to really approach this as fashion in the fullest sense, carving that connection between a 19th century embroidered thobe and the work of designers in the present.”

“The purpose of tatreez was a celebration of culture, land and identity,” added Samar Abdrabbou, a Palestinian program manager for Made in Palestine (MIP), an Australian humanitarian non-profit, who is based in Bethlehem. Many women used the traditional craft to “celebrate their beauty and femininity – they were not trying to fight or resist,” Abdrabbou explained. “Tatreez was never meant to be political, but during the Nakba many women left with only the thobe they were wearing, and a lot of fabric factories were burned. Palestinian women never stopped stitching.”

After 1948, tatreez became important as material evidence of Palestinian presence on the land, and

By Maureen Ohare, CNN

(CNN) — In our travel roundup this week: why British Chinese food is baffling to Americans, the couple who bought an Italian mansion sight unseen, plus who’s staying in North Korea’s luxury hotels.

A home in Italy

Vito Andrea Racanelli’s ancestors migrated from Italy to America in the late 1800s. More than a century and a half later, he and his family decided to do it in reverse, choosing Tuscany as their home. Racanelli, a Denver-based attorney, spent more than $1 million on a sprawling farmhouse in Radicondoli.

“Buying real estate in Italy is completely different,” he tells CNN, suggesting that foreign buyers hire help with navigating the process, rather than trying to tackle it all on their own. Read the full story of the renovation for what else he learned.

For CNN subscribers, we have two more tales of property-buying abroad.

Texas couple John Alan and Vicky Ambrose bought the empty shell of a Piedmont mansion for 140,000 euros (around $160,000) without even seeing it.

They then embarked on a three-year renovation, spending a further 150,000 euros to transform the property into a boutique luxury apartment with two panoramic balconies. Here’s what it looks like now.

Mussomeli, in Sicily, is famous as one of the towns around Italy selling off ruined homes for just one euro, or about $1.20. These bargain-basement homes are in need of a complete rebuild, but the project also includes “premium” homes, which need fewer interventions, and are often fully inhabitable, starting from around $12,000.

Around 450 houses have now been sold in the town, transforming the community, where the most popular properties with foreigners are those with hillside views. Here’s what locals, both established and new, say life is like there.

Endless summer

Here’s a reminder this Valentine’s Day that our hit series “Chance Encounters,” about extraordinary travel connections, is available in podcast form.

American Kerri Cunningham fell for Brit Dirk Stevens when they met as teenagers on summer vacation in Europe. They were each other’s first love but lived on opposite sides of the Atlantic. Then almost three decades later, they unexpectedly reunited. Listen here.

Mexico was the scene for yacht captain Bob Parsons and librarian Beverly Carriveau’s summer romance that lasted through the decades. A “thunderbolt” passed between them in Mazatlán in 1968, recalls Carriveau, and their lives were never the same again. Hear it in her own words.

Of course, it’s not just lovers who go the distance on Valentine’s Day. That bouquet of roses you ordered will have made a long and chilly journey to your sweetheart’s door. Here’s where they’ve been.

Destinations less visited

For decades, Somalia’s name has been shorthand for conflict, piracy and danger. Yet, against the odds, the East African nation is now seeing a quiet rise in foreign tourists. That’s despite most Western governments still advising against all travel. Here’s what’s behind the surge in tourism.

Over in South Asia, Bangladesh has tigers, tea plantations and beaches, but it’s never been a mainstream tourist destination. Just 650,000 international visitors arrived in 2024. Here’

By Dana O’Neil, CNN

Cortina d’Ampezzo, Italy (CNN) — She thought about watching “Miracle,” thinking the story of the 1980 US Olympic hockey team would be the exact sort of motivation she needed.

But then Sarah Warren thought about it a little more. “Miracle,” she realized, had some low points. It was January 5 of this year and later that day, Warren would stand behind the starting line at the Milwaukee skating center where she’d trained since she was a little girl, bend her surgically reconstructed knees and at the sound of the starting gun, try to race her way onto the US Olympic speed skating team.

For that, Warren realized, she needed a straight-up pick me up. She bagged “Miracle” and instead hit play on “Moana.”

“The one thing she has in that movie is belief,” Warren told CNN Sports. “Like, there’s nothing different except in the big moment of the movie, she just believes in herself. And it just hit home to me.”

There has been a lot of talk about belief in these Olympic Games, particularly about what one believes one can do on a damaged knee. There might be no one – including Lindsey Vonn – who can speak to that better than Sarah Warren.

Warren was 13 when she had her first arthroscopic procedure and 28 when she underwent her most recent surgery to repair total meniscal failure. In between, she has had six more surgeries on her knees and one on her ankle. She has torn both of her ACLs (the right in 2016; the left in 2018) and spent the equivalent of four years rehabbing and recovering. Two years ago, she couldn’t balance on one foot and needed to re-learn how to skate.

On Sunday, she will compete for Team USA in the 500m speed skating event. Asked the same question many would like to ask Vonn, as she recovers from a complex fracture of her tibia – why? – Warren shrugs her shoulders.

“To me, it’s always possible,” she said. “You have these setbacks, but to me, you take two steps backwards and three steps forward. Allowing a surgery to take away my dream was equal with giving up.”

Enduring pain after pain

In the written timeline of injuries she provides to CNN Sports, Warren describes her procedures with both the clinical detachment of the future doctor who is currently pursuing her graduate degree in biomedical engineering at Johns Hopkins University – “lateral meniscectomy, arthroscopic debridement of articular cartilage, posterior horn lateral meniscectomy, suprapatellar pouch release, revision notchplasty, tenolysis of peroneus longus, extensive synovectomy” – and the emotional reality of the patient who has endured them all.

“Lying on the field, I understood that a significant injury had occurred, one that would have a lasting impact on my athletic career. Determined not to miss the season, I opted to brace my knee and continued to participate throughout.

“On the flight home, just stared blankly at the seat in front of me, aware that this injury could be the breaking point and the end. The path ahead no longer seemed obvious, but those close to me reminded me that an unclear path does not mean that I am lost.”

Warren is not here to sugarcoat anything, to even so much as imply that her belief was never shaken and that she herself didn’t wonder more than once if it was worth it. As she was wheeled back for her second ACL surgery, Warren looked at her mother, Katherine, and said, “I don’t think I

By Kaanita Iyer, Marshall Cohen, Tami Luhby, Sunlen Serfaty, René Marsh, CNN

(CNN) — For Ashley Garley, the past year has been “messy, challenging and heartbreaking.”

Garley, a former contractor and malaria expert with the US Agency for International Development, was among the first people impacted by the Department of Government Efficiency’s massive shrinking of the federal workforce last year, led by billionaire Elon Musk, which began almost immediately after President Donald Trump returned to the White House.

Garley, who lost her job after the US froze all foreign aid in late January 2025, is struggling to find a full-time job with benefits more than a year later. To contribute to the bills, she has returned to a job she held in her teens and 20s: swim instructor.

Going from a jet-setting job with global impact, to teaching part-time at her county pool in Maryland has been “pretty emotional,” Garley told CNN.

Like Garley, hundreds of thousands of federal workers and contractors have had their lives upended by Trump’s quest to clamp down on the federal workforce, whom he sees as a threat to his ability to execute his priorities.

More than 350,000 workers have left the federal government’s payroll since the president started his second term on January 20, 2025, according to the Office of Personnel Management.

After accounting for new hires, the federal workforce shrunk by 242,000 people – or just over 10% – between his inauguration day and December. Nearly 2.1 million federal civilian employees remain.

Trump said last month that he doesn’t feel bad about the downsizing, claiming without evidence that former federal workers are now making more money in the private sector.

But that’s not been everyone’s experience. CNN spoke with several former federal workers who were laid off or accepted buyouts amid DOGE’s aggressive and controversial cuts last year. Some of them, like Garley, have struggled to find a job and pay the bills. Meanwhile, others have pivoted careers, moved across the country for new jobs or are dedicating their time to volunteer work – and finding a silver lining in their new lives.

Here are some of their stories:

Emotional toll

The stress of losing her dream job at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention landed Morgan Hall in the hospital.

A few months after she received her final paycheck in August, Hall told CNN that she had been in bed for days without eating or answering the phone. Her son ultimately found her, and she was hospitalized in October for 10 days with severe depression, anxiety, and physical complications tied to a preexisting medical condition that can be worsened by stress.

Hall – who worked as an analyst for CDC’s violence prevention division – was initially placed on administrative leave on February 14, 2025, and later terminated as part of the sweeping layoffs known as a “reduction in force,” or RIFs. She is among the 10,500 people across agencies who were affected by RIFs.

Hall says she has fallen behind on bills, which includes roughly $57,000 in hospital costs. For two months, she relied on food stamps to buy groceries, sought state assistance for utilities, and a relative helped cover her mortgage so she would not lose her home.

In January, Hall began a temporary 12-week stint that placed her back at CDC, working through a contractor. However, she says she is still unable to meet her expenses. She is also continuing to apply for jobs, submitting at least five applications on most days.