Top stories: Penn State board of trustees election, casino grand opening
From a Penn State cyber outage during finals week to a casino grand opening, Centre County had a packed weekend of news. Here’s a roundup of the top stories readers may have missed.
- Penn State restored access to Canvas on Friday afternoon after a global outage linked to the hacking group ShinyHunters forced the university to cancel all tests at the Pollock Testing Center on Thursday and Friday. The breach targeted Canvas parent company Instructure and affected thousands of schools during finals week.
- Alumni elected Jay Paterno, Karen Keller and Joseph S. DeRenzo to the Penn State board of trustees, with incumbent Ali Krieger losing her seat after finishing last in the four-candidate race. Of 767,909 eligible alumni, 17,281 cast ballots, with Paterno leading at 12,056 votes.
- Krystal D. McKenna, mother of Penn State hockey star Gavin McKenna, was charged with two misdemeanor counts of furnishing alcohol to minors after investigators said surveillance footage showed her giving drinks to her son and two underage females at Doggie’s Pub on Jan. 31. Hours later, the younger McKenna — the consensus first overall pick in the upcoming NHL draft — was accused of breaking a man’s jaw in downtown State College.
- Happy Valley Casino celebrated its grand opening Friday and presented $81,124.94 checks to both the YMCA of Centre County and the State College Food Bank from test-day proceeds. The nonsmoking casino has drawn more than 24,000 visitors and over 10,000 players club sign-ups since opening April 27.
- Former Penn State wrestler Levi Haines won the 2026 Senior Pan-Am Championships at 79 kilograms Sunday in Coralville, Iowa, giving up only two points across the entire round-robin competition. The three-time NCAA finalist won all four of his matches by technical superiority.
The summary points above were compiled with the help of AI tools and edited by journalists. The source reporting referenced above was written and edited entirely by journalists.