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A former federal prosecutor fired by former President Trump on Monday condemned what he described as “unprecedented” political interference in his work during the Trump administration.
Former U.S. Attorney Geoffrey Berman, who served as the top federal prosecutor in Manhattan, said on ABC’s “Good Morning America” that the Trump-era Justice Department pressured him to indict former Obama White House counsel Greg Craig before the midterm elections and prosecute former Secretary of State John Kerry.
“I’ve never seen anything like that before, and I was a junior prosecutor in the Southern District in the early 90s and I’d never seen anything like that,” Berman told host George Stephanopoulos.
“People who have been in the office for 40 years never saw anything like that. It was unprecedented and scary,” Berman added.
The interview came one day before Berman is set to release his book, titled “Holding the Line.”
Trump fired Berman in June 2020 after he refused to resign, leading to what Berman described on Monday as a “noisy” departure that included him issuing a press release. Then-Attorney General William Barr accused Berman of choosing “public spectacle over public service” at the time.
Berman’s firing came after he began investigating Michael Cohen, Trump’s former personal lawyer and so-called fixer. Cohen pleaded guilty in 2018 to campaign finance fraud and other charges.
On ABC, Berman said the Justice Department attempted to get him to remove mentions of “Individual-1” in the charging documents, which were references to Trump.
“They were unsuccessful in that venture, and they were unsuccessful in every attempt to politically interfere with our office,” Berman said. “We held the line in every instance.”
He also said Trump’s Justice Department pressured him to prosecute John Kerry for his Iran-related conduct.
The pressure came one day after Trump issued two tweets attacking Kerry over the Iran nuclear deal, which he helped negotiate as Obama’s secretary of State, Berman said. Trump claimed Kerry violated the Logan Act, which bans private citizens from negotiating with foreign governments without permission from the administration.
Around the same time, Trump withdrew the United States from the agreement.
“The statute they wanted us to use was enacted in 1799 and had never been successfully prosecuted,” Berman said on ABC. “So in about 220 years this criminal statute was on the books, there were no convictions.”
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https://www.ktalnews.com/hill-politics/fired-federal-prosecutor-pressure-from-trump-allies-unprecedented-and-scary/
| 2022-09-20T20:56:39Z
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Former federal prosecutor Geoffrey Berman has accused former Attorney General William Barr of firing him from his post because his department’s investigations at the time threatened Trump’s 2020 reelection chances.
During an appearance on MSNBC’s “The Rachel Maddow Show,” on Monday, Berman, who was the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, told host Rachel Maddow that his department was working on several cases, including one involving former White House chief strategist Stephen Bannon, in the months ahead of the election.
Reading from a book by Berman to be published titled “Holding the Line,” Maddow asked the former federal prosecutor to address the notion that Barr “no doubt believed that by removing me he could eliminate a threat to Trump’s reelection.”
“How was your work as U.S. attorney a threat to Trump’s reelection?” Maddow asked.
“Well, at the time I was fired, the Southern District of New York was working on a couple politically sensitive cases. One of those cases is the Steve Bannon ‘we build the wall’ case and we were very close to indicting that case around the time I got fired, and Barr knew about the case,” Berman told Maddow.
Once Bannon was indicted by Berman’s successor, Trump pardoned Bannon, which Berman called “outrageous.”
He also noted his office had also been investigating Lev Parnes and Igor Fruman, two Trump allies who were eventually convicted of campaign finance charges that involved funneling money from a Russian tycoon into American political campaigns.
Earlier Monday, Berman told ABC’s “Good Morning America” that the Trump administration’s Department of Justice pressured him to indict former Obama White House counsel Greg Craig before the midterm elections and prosecute former Secretary of State John Kerry.
Trump fired Berman in 2020 after he refused to resign from his position.
“I’ve never seen anything like that before, and I was a junior prosecutor in the Southern District in the early 90s and I’d never seen anything like that,” Berman told “Good Morning America” co-anchor George Stephanopoulos. “People who have been in the office for 40 years never saw anything like that. It was unprecedented and scary.”
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https://www.ktalnews.com/hill-politics/former-federal-prosecutor-says-barr-fired-him-because-investigations-threatened-trumps-reelection-chances/
| 2022-09-20T20:56:47Z
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Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen on Sunday warned that gas prices may spike again this winter.
Yellen told CNN’s Dana Bash on “State of the Union” that gas prices could rise due to the European Union largely halting Russian oil purchases this winter and banning provision of services that allow Russia to ship oil by tanker.
“It is possible that that could cause a spike in oil prices,” Yellen said.
But Yellen noted a western price cap proposal was designed to balance curbing Russian oil revenues helping fund its war in Ukraine, while maintaining some access to Russian oil to “hold down global oil prices.”
“So I believe this is something that can be essential,” she said. “And it’s something that we’re trying to put in place to avoid a future spike in oil prices.”
The Group of Seven nations, which includes the U.S., Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan and the United Kingdom, agreed to a price cap on Russian oil earlier this month. The nations did not say exactly what the cap would be yet.
The move is designed to restrict Russian oil sales above a certain price. And if Russia moves to sell to friendlier nations, such as China or India, it will likely face higher service costs and competition from countries selling less expensive product.
Russia, the world’s third-largest oil producer, has threatened not to sell to countries that participate in the oil cap, which could further exacerbate a rise in global oil prices.
Moscow has also effectively shut down a major gas pipeline to European nations, claiming it needs repairs, which could further shake up the world’s energy sector.
After soaring to a national average of $5 per gallon earlier this year, gas prices have fallen to an average of $3.71 in the U.S., according to transportation organization AAA.
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https://www.ktalnews.com/hill-politics/gas-prices-could-spike-again-this-winter-yellen-warns/
| 2022-09-20T20:56:54Z
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Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) on Tuesday introduced a bill that would ban abortions nationally after 15 weeks of pregnancy.
The bill comes three months after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade and the constitutional right to an abortion and marks the most serious effort by Republicans in Congress to pass a nationwide abortion restriction.
“I think we should have a law at the federal level that would say after 15 weeks, no abortion on demand except in cases of rape, incest and save the life of a mother. And that should be where America’s at,” Graham said during a press conference.
The proposal also comes just two months before the midterm elections. Republicans in battleground states are trying to navigate a growing voter backlash to the Supreme Court decision while also appealing to the party’s base that’s pushing for immediate action on imposing total abortion bans.
Graham nodded to the balancing act, indicating that a more extreme ban wouldn’t be popular with mainstream voters.
“We’re trying to take a position we think will rally the country to be more sympathetic to an unborn child,” Graham said.
But the bill would retain state laws that are more restrictive while replacing laws in blue states that protect abortion.
The legislation includes exceptions for incest and rape and to save the life of the mother if she is in danger from a physical condition. It also includes a potential five-year jail sentence for any provider who violates the ban.
Graham, who just last month said the Supreme Court made the correct decision by leaving abortion decisions up to states, on Tuesday said elected officials have the power to define and regulate abortion, including in Congress.
“Abortion is not banned in America. It’s left up to elected officials in America to define the issue. States have the ability to do it at state level. And we have the ability in Washington to speak on this issue if we choose,” Graham said. “I have chosen to speak.”
Graham said he was motivated to act following attempts by Democrats to enshrine abortion protections into federal law. He previously supported a 20-week abortion ban, but since the Supreme Court ruled that Mississippi’s 15-week ban was constitutional, he wanted to go further.
“After [Democrats] introduced a bill to define who they are, I thought it’d be nice to introduce a bill to define who we are,” Graham said.
The legislation has no chance of getting a vote while Democrats are in control of the Senate. Even if Republicans take control, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) has said he doesn’t intend to eliminate the filibuster to pass a national abortion ban, meaning the legislation would need 60 votes.
“We should have a law at the federal level,” Graham said during a briefing. “If we take the House and Senate, I can assure you we’ll have a vote.”
But Graham said he personally hasn’t had a conversation with McConnell about the bill and instead is leaving it up to the representatives of anti-abortion groups who joined him for the press conference, including Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America.
The Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade has galvanized Democrats, giving them hope of stopping a red wave by tying Republicans to extreme abortion policies.
“Proposals like the one today send a clear message from MAGA Republicans to women across the country: your body, our choice,” Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) said Tuesday in a floor speech.
Graham said Republicans should go on offense and not be influenced by what Democrats might say.
“I think Republicans need to listen to this news conference and listen to these women [anti-abortion activists],” Graham told reporters. “We’re not gonna live in a world where … we retreat.”
In the House, where a group of more than 80 Republicans introduced a companion version of the bill, Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) offered a similar message.
“The nationwide abortion ban proposal put forth today is the latest, clearest signal of extreme MAGA Republicans’ intent to criminalize women’s health freedom in all 50 states and arrest doctors for providing basic care,” Pelosi said in a statement.
“Make no mistake: if Republicans get the chance, they will work to pass laws even more draconian than this bill – just like the bans they have enacted in states like Texas, Mississippi and Oklahoma,” Pelosi said.
Updated at 2:35 p.m.
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| 2022-09-20T20:57:02Z
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Vice President Harris on Monday said it was “not by accident, but probably by design” that the same “sources” who threaten abortion rights also work against voting rights and LGBTQ rights.
Harris made the remarks at a meeting she convened with civil rights and abortion rights activists. Attendees included Rev. Al Sharpton, Planned Parenthood CEO Alexis McGill Johnson and Center for Reproductive Rights CEO Nancy Northup.
“Certainly we know that with the Supreme Court having made the decision in Dobbs to take a constitutional right — that had been recognized — from the people of America, from the women of America has created a health care crisis in America,” Harris said, referring to the June Supreme Court ruling striking down federal abortion protections.
“I also want to mention that it is certainly, we think, not by accident, but probably by design that we are seeing from some of the same sources attacks on women’s health rights, voting rights, LGBTQ rights. And so we stand here in full acknowledgement of what has taken place in our country,” Harris added.
Harris has taken on the role within the Biden administration of pushing back against threats to abortion rights since the Supreme Court struck down Roe v. Wade in June.
Her assertion that the Supreme Court caused a “health care crisis in America” comes just days after she made more pointed remarks about the highest court in the U.S.
Harris referred to the Supreme Court as an “activist court” during an interview on NBC’s “Meet the Press” last week, adding that the court’s decision to overturn Roe caused her “great concern about the integrity of the Court overall.”
The reproductive rights leaders who gathered on Monday echoed Harris’s sentiments.
“Tens of millions of women. trans men and nonbinary people cannot access the care they need in their communities. And those that are most affected are those who are already facing barriers to care: Black, Latinx, Indigenous communities, rural communities, immigrant communities,” McGill Johnson from Planned Parenthood said at the meeting.
Melanie Campbell, CEO of the National Coalition on Black Civic Participation, noted that courts had historically been places where Black women were able to achieve justice when laws failed them.
“Unfortunately, we are in a perilous chapter in our nation where too many of our courts have been turned into instruments for partisan gain, all with the aim of reserving power for a select few,” Campbell said. “Today we find ourselves in this moment where the highest court in the land is stripping away our constitutional rights and freedoms.”
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https://www.ktalnews.com/hill-politics/harris-probably-by-design-that-attacks-on-abortion-voting-and-lgbtq-rights-come-from-same-sources/
| 2022-09-20T20:57:09Z
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Former secretary of state Hillary Clinton, the first woman to clinch a major-party nomination for president, on Sunday responded to skepticism from Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) that a woman could hold the nation’s highest office.
“I think that a woman will become our president at some point,” Clinton said on CNN’s “State of the Union.”
“I certainly understand all of the obstacles you have to overcome to get there. But I continue to tell young women and girls that if they feel motivated to pursue political office, they should do so, with their eyes wide open about how hard it is.”
In an interview with GQ earlier this month, Ocasio-Cortez — herself an oft-cited name as a potential future presidential candidate — said her experience as a congresswoman showed her “how deeply and unconsciously, as well as consciously, so many people in this country hate women.”
Misogyny, Ocasio-Cortez said, “transcends political ideology,” and the patriarchy permeates all parties.
The second-term congresswoman talked about hearing from girls who say they want to see her as president, saying, “I admit to sometimes believing that I live in a country that would never let that happen.”
Clinton, who won the popular vote against then-Republican candidate Donald Trump in 2016 but lost the electoral college count, acknowledged Ocasio-Cortez’s concerns, but said it was still worth fighting to get a woman winning the White House.
“I think it’s sad that we have so many people who seem to either resent or oppose women in the public arena, whether it’s politics and government or the media or anything else. That’s something we have to keep standing up against and speaking out against,” Clinton said.
“Unfortunately, social media, with all of its misogyny, has made it more difficult, but we can’t be bullied into silence or giving up on our own dreams. We have to continue to pursue them and encourage others to do the same.”
Clinton, who became former President Obama’s secretary of state after losing to him in the 2008 Democratic primary for president, has been open about a number of her own battles with misogyny and sexism.
She revealed last week that she started wearing her now-mainstay pantsuits after press circulated “suggestive” photographs shot up the then-First Lady’s skirt.
On tour with daughter Chelsea to promote their women-focused docu-series “Gutsy,” Clinton also said last week that she won’t run again for president.
“But I’m going to do everything I can to make sure that we have a president who respects our democracy and the rule of law and upholds our institutions,” Clinton told CBS News.
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https://www.ktalnews.com/hill-politics/hillary-clinton-disputes-ocasio-cortez-notion-that-us-cant-elect-a-woman-president/
| 2022-09-20T20:57:17Z
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The National Archives is still uncertain whether the government has recovered all records from former President Trump’s Florida home, the House Oversight and Reform Committee revealed in a Tuesday letter asking the agency to pursue a sworn statement from Trump that he has returned all documents.
Archives staff “recently informed the committee that the agency is not certain whether all presidential records are in its custody,” said Chair Carolyn Maloney (D-N.Y.).
The letter noted that the Trump team repeatedly failed to turn over records when asked by both the Archives, often called NARA, and the Justice Department, including when served a subpoena.
“The committee is concerned that, given this pattern of conduct, Mr. Trump may continue to retain presidential records at non-secure locations, including classified material that could endanger our nation’s security and other important records documenting Mr. Trump’s activities at the White House,” Maloney wrote in a letter to acting Archivist Debra Steidel Wall.
“I urge NARA to seek from former President Trump a written certification that he has surrendered all presidential records or classified materials, has not made any copies or reproductions of such materials, and has not transferred any records or government documents to any party other than NARA or DOJ since his term ended.”
The letter also asks NARA to do an inventory of what records might possibly be unaccounted for “and potentially in the possession of the former president.”
Trump’s legal counsel already provided a sworn statement to the Justice Department in May indicating that all classified materials at Mar-a-Lago were returned, only for the FBI to find an additional more than 100 classified records when it searched the property in August, bringing the total of classified documents to more than 300. They also recovered around 10,000 government documents in their Aug. 8 search.
Maloney noted that while Trump would not be required under current law to provide such a certification, she cited the “exceptional circumstances” and suggested the committee could pursue legislation requiring such an action in the future.
NARA declined to comment on the letter.
The letter requested that NARA provide an initial report on its inventory by Sept. 27.
NARA’s concern that it may not have recovered all the documents from Mar-a-Lago was aired in an Aug. 24 meeting with the committee.
The letter noted that Trump’s former national security adviser, John Bolton, said he “wouldn’t be surprised if there were more highly classified documents at Bedminster or some other residence of his.”
Maloney pointed to two occasions during which Trump was asked to turn over records but still retained a large tranche: when NARA first reached out to him about recovering documents in May, 2021 and a year later when his custodian of records was served a subpoena to turn over any remaining documents.
–Updated at 12:04 p.m.
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https://www.ktalnews.com/hill-politics/house-oversight-seeks-certification-from-trump-given-archives-not-certain-it-has-all-records/
| 2022-09-20T20:57:25Z
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Howard Stern says he can’t fathom how former President Trump could evade an indictment in the Department of Justice’s (DOJ) probe of the ex-commander in chief’s handling of classified documents.
“It’s some crazy shit going on,” the SiriusXM host said Monday on his eponymous radio show while speaking about FBI agents finding more than 100 classified documents at Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s Florida resort home, during an August search, according to records unsealed earlier this month by the DOJ.
“I don’t know how they don’t indict the dude,” Stern told his listeners, “but maybe again he’ll get away with it.”
“I think there’s a law in this country, and then there’s no laws for Donald Trump,” Stern, 68, said.
“He gets away with all kinds of shit,” Stern added of Trump, who before entering the political world was a frequent guest on the broadcasting star’s radio show.
Trump’s legal team fought a request from the DOJ to allow its review of classified materials taken from Mar-a-Lago to continue in a Monday court filing. The investigation, Trump’s lawyers said, “at its core is a document storage dispute that has spiraled out of control.”
Stern offered “three theories” on why Trump would have classified documents in his possession after leaving the White House.
“Based on the dude I know, even when [Trump] got in office, he couldn’t believe he was in office,” Stern hypothesized.
“When those Russian ambassadors came to visit him — if you remember early on in his administration — he started showing them top-secret documents like saying, ‘Can you believe I have access to this shit?’” Stern continued.
Showing off the secret documents would “prove that he was president in a way; he doesn’t even believe it. That’s the most safe explanation,” Stern said.
The radio host also speculated that Trump could’ve been holding onto the documents to secure paydays from foreign adversaries.
“I don’t even think he has any idea what’s in those documents,” Stern said. “He just wants them.”
Stern also quipped that recent coverage of Queen Elizabeth II’s death last week had knocked the DOJ’s investigation out of the top story headlines.
“I get it, but we got to get back to Trump and where those papers are that they found at Mar-a-Lago,” he said to laughs from co-host Robin Quivers.
“It’s so weird. I knew Donald for so many years — not in touch with him now, obviously,” Stern said of his long relationship with Trump. Stern was highly critical of Trump over his administration’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic.
“The only thing that I used to say about Donald: the guy just wants to be the focus of attention. He wants the whole world looking at him. And son of a gun, if he didn’t make that happen,” Stern said.
“I mean, you turn on the news. Joe Biden’s the president, you don’t hear a word,” Stern exclaimed. “It’s about Trump, and Trump and his papers, and his documents, and the Republicans.”
“It’s unbelievable,” Stern said of the former president and New York real estate investor.
“He got his wish — he just wanted everyone paying attention to him. And man, he’s got to be on cloud nine, because it’s all he ever wanted.”
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https://www.ktalnews.com/hill-politics/howard-stern-on-trump-i-dont-know-how-they-dont-indict-that-dude/
| 2022-09-20T20:57:32Z
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The House panel investigating last year’s attack on the U.S. Capitol is set to revive the public portion of its probe this month, eyeing at least two more hearings in the coming weeks to highlight former President Trump’s role in the deadly rampage.
Publicly, the inquiry into the Jan. 6 attack has been overshadowed in recent weeks by the FBI’s extraordinary seizure of thousands of government documents, including those alleged to be highly sensitive, from Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home in Florida last month — part of a separate Justice Department investigation into Trump’s potential mishandling of federal records.
But behind the scenes, the Jan. 6 select committee has spent Congress’s long summer recess plugging away, interviewing a number of new witnesses while seeking the cooperation of several more, including such prominent GOP figures as former House Speaker Newt Gingrich (Ga.), former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows and former Vice President Mike Pence.
The work has continued against the backdrop not only of the legal battle surrounding the FBI search, but of Vice Chairwoman Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) losing her primary battle against a Trump-backed candidate. Despite Cheney’s loss, many Democrats think the focus in the headlines on Trump is helping their party ahead of the midterms.
As the House returns to Washington this week, the panel is promising to air its new findings in at least one public hearing this month, with another perhaps to follow in October — a schedule that would put Trump and his GOP supporters on the defensive heading into November’s midterm elections.
The exact timing of the hearings, as well as the witness list, remain works in progress, according to members of the committee. But a central focus of the investigation throughout August was the wide-ranging effort by a long list of Trump supporters — some of them on Capitol Hill — to install slates of fake electors in certain battleground states where Trump has claimed, falsely, that he prevailed over President Biden. Gingrich, the committee has found, was a part of that effort.
“Former House Speaker Gingrich appears to have been involved in some of the planning around the counterfeit electors scheme, and efforts to substitute a fraudulent process for the actual process,” a member of the select committee said in an interview.
Another member of the committee, Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.), said Gingrich’s campaign to keep Trump in the White House did not stop even after Congress voted to certify Biden’s victory in the aftermath of the failed insurrection.
“We also have information about his efforts to get the election overturned, even after the riot on the 6th,” Lofgren told CNN earlier this month.
Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.), the chairman of the select committee, delivered a letter to Gingrich this month seeking his “voluntary cooperation.” The request cited Gingrich’s communications with several top Trump advisers — including Meadows, Jared Kushner and Jason Miller — about methods to reverse the election outcome and suggested Gingrich may have been in direct touch with Trump on the subject.
Snippets of Gingrich’s emails obtained by the panel reveal he had suggested line edits for a post-election TV ad in Georgia, where Trump was defeated, promoting conspiracy theories around voter fraud. The message, Gingrich advised, should include reference to a “call to action.”
“The goal is to arouse the country’s anger,” Gingrich wrote to Kushner and Miller, adding that viewers “will then bring pressure on legislators and governors.”
“These advertising efforts were not designed to encourage voting for a particular candidate,” Thompson wrote to Gingrich. “Instead, these efforts attempted to cast doubt on the outcome of the election after voting had already taken place.”
The Sept. 1 letter was a clear sign that the committee’s investigation is far from over, while raising new questions about what remaining figures could be implicated as its work continues.
Meadows, it was already known, is one of them. While Trump’s former chief of staff had delivered thousands of text messages to investigators last year, he has refused to speak with the panel, even under subpoena. The House held Meadows in contempt of Congress last year, but the Justice Department declined to bring charges. The standoff remains under litigation.
Some members of the select committee are also interested in speaking with Ginni Thomas, a conservative activist and wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, who had sought to overturn the 2020 election and solicited the help of several well-placed figures, including Meadows and John Eastman, a conservative lawyer who had drafted the dubious legal reasoning on which the “stop the steal” effort relied.
“Speaking as one member and only as one member, I would say she has a relevant testimony to render, and she should come forward and give it,” Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), another member of the select committee, said earlier this month in an appearance on CBS’s “Face the Nation” program.
“I don’t want to overstate her role — we’ve talked to more than 1,000 people,” Raskin continued. “But we’d like to hear from Gingrich and we’d like to hear from her, too.”
Still another figure of interest is Tony Ornato, a former Secret Service agent who doubled as Trump’s deputy chief of staff. Ornato has already spoken with investigators, but they want him back to clarify discrepancies in testimony surrounding Trump’s alleged clash with his security detail on the day of the Capitol attack.
“We do want to talk to him again,” Lofgren told CNN. “There are a lot of things that just don’t add up, to me, on what the Secret Service has said and the material that we’re getting.”
Also largely unexplored by the committee are Trump’s actions in the window between the Capitol attack of Jan. 6 and Biden’s inauguration on Jan. 20 — a time period during which Trump’s own Cabinet members were considering invoking the 25th Amendment to remove him from office.
The committee has hinted at that effort in clips shown of a conversation with Trump’s Labor Secretary Eugene Scalia — who penned a memo urging Trump to stop questioning the election results — as well as in a letter to Fox News host Sean Hannity.
“You appear also to have detailed knowledge regarding President Trump’s state of mind in the days following the January 6th attack. For example, you appear to have had a discussion with President Trump on January 10th that may have raised a number of specific concerns about his possible actions in the days before the January 20th inaugural,” the committee wrote to the popular pundit.
The committee has also suggested it could imminently release a report on the National Guard’s hours-long delay in getting to the Capitol to defuse the violence on Jan. 6.
But time is running short.
With Democrats expected to lose control of the House in the midterms, the panel will have to wrap up its investigation before year’s end, or Republicans will pull the plug on it. With that in mind, the panel is expected to issue an interim report on its findings before November’s elections, with its final report to follow later in the year.
“When the final report is released, the committee is dissolved,” Lofgren said earlier this summer. “And so, so long as information continues to come in, we want to avoid that result. We don’t want to prematurely cut off witnesses who want to be heard.”
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| 2022-09-20T20:57:40Z
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First lady Jill Biden said in an interview with NBC’s “Today” that she has not yet discussed whether the president will run for reelection in 2024.
“Not yet. We’ve been a little too busy, but I’m sure it’ll be a discussion,” Biden told “Today’s” Sheinelle Jones in an interview that aired on Tuesday.
The first lady pointed to what President Biden has done in office and said that he has “kept true” to what he said he would do when he was running for president.
“So I think he just needs to keep going,” she said.
Her comments come as the general election season for the November midterms gets underway. Democrats are looking to defy a historical trend that usually sees a new president’s party lose seats in Congress in the midterms.
Democrats are seeking to maintain and expand their slim majorities in both chambers of Congress, while Republicans are trying to take back control of the legislature.
President Biden has maintained that he plans to run for reelection in 2024, but some analysts and politicians have questioned if he will follow through based on his age and his approval rating, which has remained below 50 percent for about a year.
Biden’s approval rating rose to 44 percent last month in a Gallup poll, the highest in a year, as inflation has shown some signs of easing and he has achieved a series of legislative wins.
The president signed his climate, health care and tax package, known as the Inflation Reduction Act, into law and a bill to invest $50 billion in the domestic semiconductor industry last month. The president also signed the PACT Act into law to expand health care coverage for veterans exposed to burn pits.
Still, several congressional Democrats have dodged questions about whether they believe Biden should run for reelection.
The first lady also spoke about her interactions with Queen Elizabeth II, who died last week at age 96, during the her visit with the president to the United Kingdom last year. She also touched on the need to support teachers and staff schools appropriately.
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| 2022-09-20T20:57:46Z
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Martin Short delivered a barb aimed at former President Trump’s handling of classified documents while appearing Monday at the Emmy Awards.
“Really, what an audience you are,” the “Only Murders in the Building” star exclaimed as he took to the Primetime Emmy Awards stage in Los Angeles to present the award in the best variety talk series category.
“I wish I could box you up and take you home, like classified White House documents,” Short, 72, quipped to laughs from the audience at the 74th annual awards show.
Trump’s legal team fought a request from the Department of Justice to allow its review of classified materials taken from Mar-a-Lago, the ex-president’s Florida resort home, to continue in a Monday court filing. The investigation, Trump’s lawyers said in the filing, “at its core is a document storage dispute that has spiraled out of control.”
While Short’s quip came during a largely politics-free night at the Emmys, the performer has said in the past that he’s purposely avoided Trump-related zingers. In a 2018 Netflix special with fellow comedian Steve Martin, Short said the pair opted not to make mention of the then-commander in chief.
“Steve and I have great respect for the fact that we don’t just want a liberal audience,” the actor told The Daily Beast.
“So that’s why we deliberately do not mention Donald Trump,” he said at the time.
“But as far as the Trump presidency, I wouldn’t even call it a presidency. It’s an asterisk. It’s a typo,” Short said.
“I mean, every day it’s worse and 10 years from now the history books will be having a field day with it and the shame of the people who supported him, if they’re still around, in the sense of being in the public eye, will be like the people who supported [late Sen. Joseph McCarthy (R-Wis.)],” he said.
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| 2022-09-20T20:57:53Z
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Former Trump aide Peter Navarro disparaged the ex-president’s top staffers and officials — from his “Motley Crue of Chiefs” to his “Cabinet of Clowns” — in his new book, The Daily Beast reported on Tuesday.
Navarro remained loyal to Trump, even as he laid into the former president’s choices for chief of staff in his upcoming book, titled “Taking Back Trump’s America.”
In an excerpt obtained by The Daily Beast, Navarro described Mark Meadows, Mick Mulvaney and John Kelly, who all served as chief of staff to Trump, as being in a “dead heat” for the title of worst chief of staff in history.
However, Navarro added that Meadows, who was named the worst chief of staff in history by historian Chris Whipple, earned that “distinction.”
Navarro also criticized Kelly for being “brutally and simply incapable of messaging anything to the press.”
“From a media perspective, this was like recruiting a trucker to drive a Formula One car,” Navarro wrote. “Or maybe like using a chainsaw for open heart surgery.”
Trump’s first chief of staff, Reince Priebus, received the tamest review from Navarro.
While Navarro described him as “the wrong, small, and inexperienced man for a very big job,” he also said Priebus could “have turned out to be the best of the bunch if the Boss had only given you a bit more time to prove yourself.”
Navarro was indicted on two counts of contempt of Congress in June for refusing to comply with a subpoena from the Jan. 6 committee. A federal judge on Tuesday rejected Navarro’s attempt to compel documents from the Justice Department over claims that his prosecution was politically motivated.
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| 2022-09-20T20:58:01Z
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Former Vice President Mike Pence reveals in a new book that he was angry but not afraid on Jan. 6, 2021, when rioters at the U.S. Capitol were chanting for him to be hanged.
In the memoir “So Help Me God,” Pence details the anger he felt despite the threat to his life if the rioters found him.
“I was angry at what I saw, how it desecrated the seat of our democracy and dishonored the patriotism of millions of our supporters, who would never do such a thing here or anywhere else,” Pence wrote on the back cover the book, which was obtained by Axios.
“I was not afraid, but I was angry,” he said.
Pence was one of the main targets during the riot after he refused to go along with former President Trump’s idea that the vice president did not have to certify the votes of the Electoral College.
Pence’s refusal to go along with Trump’s plan and denunciation of the riot since has made a strong dent in his relationship with Trump.
The last couple chapters of Pence’s book focus on the Capitol riot, while the rest detail Pence’s journey as a Christian, how he saw his role as vice president and policy areas he helped with in office such as abortion and national security, according to Axios.
Since leaving office, Pence has spoken at numerous conservative events, with many speculating he will be making a run for office in 2024.
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| 2022-09-20T20:58:09Z
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More than 150 Michigan Republicans launched a new campaign effort to boost the reelection prospects of Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D) against GOP opponent Tudor Dixon, who is backed by former President Trump.
Republicans for Whitmer is led by a leadership council of 35 Republicans from Michigan, including business leaders, former lawmakers and staff who served under former state GOP Govs. John Engler and Rick Snyder.
Bill Parfet, the chairman and CEO of commercial real estate company Northwood Group, said he was supporting Whitmer because she was seeking to build a common bridge between Democrats and Republicans.
“No more fighting,” Parfet said in a statement. ““Among those running for election in November, there exists a group of individuals — some Democrats, some Republicans — that are willing to work together to find a common middle-ground where progress can be made. … The best person to lead that effort is Governor Gretchen Whitmer.”
Whitmer, who has served as Michigan’s governor since 2019, appears to be gaining ground in her reelection bid against Dixon.
In a Detroit News-WDIV-TV poll published last week, Whitmer enjoyed a 13-point lead over Dixon, while 54 percent of respondents said they approve of Whitmer’s governorship.
Dixon is a former customer service agent and sales rep for her father’s Michigan Steel foundry who also describes herself as a “working mom” now fighting for Michiganders.
The GOP candidate has faced some criticism for her hardline anti-abortion positions, a hot-button issue in the midterm elections this year that is increasingly giving momentum to Democrats.
In July, Dixon said she would not support abortion in any case except to save the life of the mother, even when asked if that would apply to a 14-year-old rape victim.
Judy Frey, a moderate Republican from Grand Rapids who joined the Republicans for Whitmer group, said she backs the governor because of her support for a ballot question that will be included in the November election. The question will allow voters to decide if they want to enshrine abortion rights into the state constitution.
Whitmer “knows how to govern. She’s done it, she’s experienced, she uses compromise, she uses empathy,” Frey said in a promotional video for the new group. “She gets my vote this year.”
The Republicans for Whitmer effort marks something of a shift in Michigan politics, which recently saw a foiled far-right attempt to kidnap the governor for her pandemic policies.
The state is also divided between Republican control of the state legislature and Whitmer’s Democratic executive branch, which have feuded over abortion laws after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the nearly 50-year constitutional right to abortion.
Still, Joe Schwarz, a former Republican U.S. congressman from Michigan, said “Whitmer has proven herself as a strong leader who is fighting to make Michigan a better place for everyone — regardless of your party affiliation.”
“During her time as governor, she has focused on growing our economy with major investments, strengthening our skilled workforce, investing in the education of our children, and making government work for us,” Schwarz said in a statement. “I know she will continue to advocate on behalf of hardworking Michiganders and that’s why I’m proud to support her for re-election this fall.”
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| 2022-09-20T20:58:16Z
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The Senate Judiciary Committee will investigate whether former President Trump’s Justice Department attempted to use the Manhattan U.S. attorney’s office to prosecute his critics and protect his allies, the panel’s chairman said.
“These reported claims indicate astonishing and unacceptable deviations from the Department’s mission to pursue impartial justice, which requires that its prosecutorial decisions be free from political influence,” Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) wrote in a letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland.
Durbin cites a New York Times report detailing allegations from a new book by Geoffrey Berman, the former U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York who served for two years under Trump and had previously volunteered on his 2016 campaign and transition team.
Berman has said that Trump appointees pressured the office to go after Trump’s critics and to shield Trump and his allies — and has argued that he worked to resist those efforts.
Berman has alleged he was fired by former U.S. Attorney General William Barr because his work was a threat to Trump’s reelection chances and that Trump’s Justice Department pushed him to indict Gregory Craig, the White House counsel for former President Obama, even after the Manhattan office found no reason to charge him.
On a media tour ahead of his new book’s release, Berman has also said he was pressured to criminally investigate former Secretary of State John Kerry.
Durbin noted that Berman “contends that Department officials pressured his office to remove references to President Trump from the charging document for Michael Cohen, his personal lawyer, as well as later attempts by Attorney General Barr himself to reverse Mr. Cohen’s conviction and stop related investigations entirely.”
The allegations “compound the already serious concerns” about Barr’s 2020 efforts “to replace Mr. Berman with a Trump loyalist,” Durbin wrote.
Trump fired Berman in 2020 after he refused to resign.
Durbin, in the letter to Garland, requested a number of documents and communications between the Justice Department and the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York, saying that “if accurate, Mr. Berman’s claims indicate multiple instances of political interference in the Department’s investigative and prosecutorial decisions.”
Berman’s new book, “Holding the Line,” is scheduled for publication Tuesday.
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| 2022-09-20T20:58:24Z
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Stephen Curry says Americans should treat President Trump — and his potential 2024 White House bid — as a serious “threat.”
“Take Trump seriously? Of course,” the Golden State Warriors star and NBA Finals MVP told Rolling Stone magazine for a cover story published Monday for its October issue.
“Most of his rhetoric — before he was president, during his last four years, and even now, if he tries to run again — has a tone of divisiveness that doesn’t have a place in our country,” he said.
“As serious and as loud as the threat is of him or whoever else is running for office,” Curry, 34, continued, “there’s a similar urgency and a loudness that’s necessary on the other side.”
It’s not the first time that Curry has spoken out against the 45th president. After Under Armour CEO Kevin Plank called the then-commander in chief an “asset” to the country in a 2017 interview, Curry told the San Jose Mercury News, “I agree with that description, if you remove the ‘et’ from asset.”
That same year, Curry said he didn’t want his team to make a traditional stop at the White House to celebrate their NBA championship title. Following Curry’s remarks, Trump tweeted that the White House invitation had been “withdrawn.”
Curry, a board member of When We All Vote, Michelle Obama’s voter registration and engagement organization, opened up about his activism to Rolling Stone.
“You’re growing and evolving on the same page as these national, politicized conversations, but it doesn’t have to be sides,” he said.
“What I try to do is be real, but also activate conversation that is sometimes uncomfortable,” the NBA All-Star said.
“The current events of the Trump era, I don’t wake up and say, ‘I wanna go at that conversation,’” Curry told the magazine.
“Some of this stuff falls on your doorstep and people want a perspective or comment, and sometimes you cough that up unsolicited.”
Curry said that while he didn’t regret not speaking out more in 2016 when the NBA weighed moving its All-Star game from North Carolina in protest of a controversial law requiring that transgender people use the bathroom corresponding to their biological sex, he could’ve “been a lot stronger” on the issue.
“We get attacked as athletes sometimes when you don’t want to say something — ‘I need to get more educated,’ there’s all these lines that people use,” Curry said.
“It kind of seems like you’re soft or like you’re equivocating or avoiding whatever the situation is.”
Curry also revealed that former President Obama — a frequent golfing partner and well-known basketball fanatic — once scolded him for repeating on a 2018 podcast a conspiracy theory that questioned whether astronauts really landed on the moon.
Following the podcast interview, Curry recalled, “I got an email. It was a pretty stern, direct one from President Obama.”
After telling him that humans did step foot on the moon, Curry said Obama instructed him, “You’ve got to do something about this.”
Following Obama’s advice, Curry hosted an Instagram Live discussion with an astronaut for his more than 45 million followers, and auctioned off a pair of custom-made space-themed sneakers, with proceeds going to STEM education programs.
Curry said back in June, after clenching his fourth NBA championship and telling the cameras, “What are they gonna say now?” he received a congratulatory call from Obama.
The ex-president suggested tweaking the boast slightly, telling Curry, “What the f— are they gonna say now?”
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| 2022-09-20T20:58:31Z
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Rep. Tim Ryan (D-Ohio) said his party and, more generally, Americans need to “kill and confront” what he described as an “extremist” movement within the GOP.
“The Democrats aren’t right on everything. And I’m willing to sit down and have conversations about how we can move out of this age of stupidity,” Ryan said during an appearance Tuesday on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.” “Some of those answers will come from Republicans, not the extremists that we are dealing with every single day, we’ve got to kill and confront that movement, but working with normal mainstream Republicans, that’s going to be really, really important.”
Ryan is currently locked in a tight race for U.S. Senate with Republican J.D. Vance, an author and political newcomer who has the endorsement of former President Trump.
A centrist Democrat, Ryan has suggested on the campaign trail that Democrats need to “look to new leadership” as they work to reclaim the Buckeye State during this fall’s midterm elections.
A recent USA Today Network Ohio-Suffolk University poll released Monday found that 47 percent of Ohio general election voters said they would vote or lean toward voting for Ryan if the election were held now, in a race that has been rated by the nonpartisan Cook Political Report as “lean Republican.”
Ryan’s comments follow sharp criticism leveled by President Biden against what he, too, described as an “extremist” movement inside the GOP loyal to Trump, during a prime-time address last month. He also said the movement posed a threat to the nation.
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| 2022-09-20T20:58:39Z
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A new book by New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman reportedly reveals former President Trump told aides following the 2020 presidential election that he would remain in the White House after President Biden’s inauguration.
Haberman wrote that Trump seemed to recognize he had lost to Biden immediately following the election, but his mood later changed, according to CNN.
“I’m just not going to leave,” Haberman writes Trump told one aide, the network reported.
“We’re never leaving. How can you leave when you won an election?” Trump reportedly told another.
Haberman’s book, titled “Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America,” will be released early next month.
The New York Times reporter, who previously worked for Politico, the New York Post and New York Daily News, gained a reputation during the Trump presidency for repeatedly breaking scoops on the administration.
Haberman writes in her new book that Trump in the immediate aftermath of the election asked advisers to tell him what went wrong, telling one adviser “we did our best,” CNN reported, adding that he also told junior press aides, “I thought we had it.”
But later, Trump reportedly began expressing his intention to not leave the White House in January 2021 upon the start of Biden’s term as Trump’s team began attempts to overturn the election.
“Why should I leave if they stole it from me?” Trump asked during a conversation with Republican National Committee Chair Ronna McDaniel, CNN reported.
The Hill has reached out to a Trump spokesperson for comment.
Trump and his allies’ actions following the 2020 election have come under scrutiny through multiple investigations.
A House select committee is investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol attack and is expected to hold an additional public hearing later this month. A separate Justice Department probe is also examining the attack.
In Georgia, an Atlanta-area district attorney is investigating whether Trump and his allies unlawfully attempted to overturn the election in the state. Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s personal attorney who helped lead the post-election efforts, said he is a target of the probe.
Trump has indicated he is also mulling a third bid for the White House in 2024. He has said he has made up his mind if he will run, but Trump has yet to make a formal campaign announcement.
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| 2022-09-20T20:58:48Z
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Former President Trump is fighting a request from the Department of Justice (DOJ) to allow its review of classified materials taken from Mar-a-Lago to continue, with Trump’s legal team arguing the investigation “at its core is a document storage dispute that has spiraled out of control.”
The filing continues to assert the former president has broad power to control his records even after he leaves office, even the classified records that the Justice Department argued Trump can have no possible claim to, and thus do not require review by a third-party special master.
In the filing, Trump’s legal team pushed back against the idea that there was any possible damage from the mishandling of records.
“There is no indication any purported ‘classified records’ were disclosed to anyone. Indeed, it appears such ‘classified records,’ along with the other seized materials, were principally located in storage boxes in a locked room at Mar-a-Lago, a secure, controlled access compound utilized regularly to conduct the official business of the United States during the Trump Presidency, which to this day is monitored by the United States Secret Service,” they wrote.
The response from Trump’s team came after the Justice Department last Thursday indicated it planned to appeal a federal district court judge’s ruling green-lighting a special master, also asking her to approve a partial stay that would exclude some 300 classified records from their review.
“The classification markings establish on the face of the documents that they are government records, not Plaintiff’s personal records,” the DOJ wrote.
“And for several reasons, no potential assertion of executive privilege could justify restricting the executive branch’s review and use of the classified records at issue here.”
But Trump’s team claimed Monday that classification status matters little within the Presidential Records Act (PRA) and that Trump’s document issues should be sorted with the National Archives, or NARA.
“Of course, classified or declassified, the documents remain either presidential records or personal records under the PRA,” they wrote.
“At best, the government might ultimately be able to establish certain presidential records should be returned to NARA. What is clear regarding all of the seized materials is that they belong with either President Trump … or with NARA, but not with the Department of Justice.”
The brief also seeks to undercut the heart of the Justice Department’s argument that its criminal investigation is “inextricably intertwined” with a separate intelligence community review of the documents led by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) that the judge allowed to continue.
The FBI is part of the intelligence community and would be the agency responsible for investigating any mishandling of intelligence that the review uncovers, DOJ said.
Though in a Friday night filing the Trump legal team said a special master should be afforded three months to complete a review of the documents, in its latest brief to the court it said the investigation could withstand a “brief pause.”
It also alleges the ODNI damage assessment into potential fallout from the mishandling of the records is a way to further DOJ’s criminal investigation.
“The government contends that the FBI and ODNI, and their personnel, are so inseparable they are incapable of having agents outside the criminal case participate in the ODNI-led investigation. This convenient, and belated, claim by the Government relative to enjoining the criminal team’s access to these documents only arises because the FBI concedes the intelligence community review is actually just another facet of its criminal investigation,” Trump’s legal team wrote.
The filing is the closest Trump’s legal team has gotten to repeating claims by the former president that he declassified the information found in his home – but they stop short of actually doing so.
The brief spends a few pages noting that presidents have the power to declassify documents but never say that Trump actually did so.
“The government’s stance assumes that if a document has a classification marking, it remains classified irrespective of any actions taken during President Trump’s term in office,” Trump’s legal team wrote.
“There is no legitimate contention that the chief executive’s declassification of documents requires approval of bureaucratic components of the executive branch. Yet, the government apparently contends that President Trump, who had full authority to declassify documents, ‘willfully’ retained classified information in violation of the law,” they added.
In an earlier round of filings, the DOJ noted that in the months of discussions Trump’s legal team never raised the prospect that the former president had declassified the intelligence material at his home, nor had they offered any explanation for why he had roughly 10,000 government records stored there.
A response brief from Trump’s team the next day was silent on those matters.
— Updated at 11:18 a.m.
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| 2022-09-20T20:58:55Z
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Former President Trump’s legal team is trying to have it both ways — insinuating he declassified the documents stored at his Florida home without directly claiming he did so.
Trump’s legal team in a Monday court filing failed to fully premise its argument on the excuse the president has repeatedly offered since confirming his home was search: that he had already declassified documents at his Mar-a-Lago estate.
Instead, it noted he had the power to do so without “approval of bureaucratic components of the executive branch” — seemingly offering an air of mystery around whether the former president ever declassified the tranche of more than 300 intelligence documents in his home.
But experts say if you take Trump at his word, the secretive nature through which he would have declassified those records is itself problematic.
“If he did, and he did it in the way that he claims he did, that’s actually not really the flex he thinks it is. It actually suggests that he had a nefarious purpose,” Asha Rangappa, a lecturer at Yale University and a former FBI special agent, said of Trump.
Pages from a Department of Justice court filing in response to a request from the legal team of former President Donald Trump for a special master to review the documents seized during the Aug. 8 search of Mar-a-Lago. Included in the filing was a FBI photo of documents that were seized during the search. (AP Photo/Jon Elswick)
Sitting presidents have broad power to declassify documents, but doing so sets off a chain of events, including notification of the many intelligence agencies that produce and manage that information.
Rangappa said a failure to alert the intelligence community shows Trump wanted the information he took to still have value — something that would be lost in the declassification process.
“The full declassification process will then end up protecting sources and methods, so that if these secrets become known to people, they can’t do anything with it,” Rangappa said, essentially “neutralizing” the information.
Rangappa gave the example of a list of all U.S. informants scattered across the globe. If those people became compromised, the U.S. would need to spring into action.
“They would be moved, they would be protected [and] they would be exfiltrated so that when that list becomes public or when our adversaries get a hold of that list, they can’t do anything to those sources because they’ve already been protected. … In other words, to go through the whole declassification process renders this information largely invaluable to people who might be interested in it because they can’t really take advantage of it,” she said.
The same thing would happen in the case of other methods for collecting and intercepting information.
Kash Patel, who most recently served as chief of staff to Trump’s secretary of Defense, told The Wall Street Journal he witnessed Trump give verbal declassification orders, but they appear to have been related only to the investigation into Trump’s ties to Russia, and it’s not clear how that order would have been carried out.
“If your defense is ‘I declassified it, but I did it really secretly so that none of these things could be neutralized,’ then the only reason you would do that is if you still wanted these sources and methods to continue operating, even as you treated these secrets as being something that you could disseminate or share,” Rangappa said.
Trump’s motives for retaining the roughly 300 classified records or nearly 10,000 government documents in his home are not clear. In court filings, the Department of Justice (DOJ) has noted that Trump’s legal team has never offered an explanation for why he retained the records beyond arguing that he has a right to do so under executive privilege.
The DOJ noted in a filing last month that Trump and his team never raised the declassification claim in their months of negotiations, and as a defense, it may do little considering the government argues he has no right to retain any of the records.
Pages from a FBI property list of items seized from former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate and made public by the Department of Justice. FBI agents who searched the home found empty folders marked with classified banners. The inventory reveals in general terms the contents of the 33 boxes taken during the Aug. 8 search. (AP Photo/Jon Elswick)
But experts say the revelation that Trump’s declassification claim may have come only after the fact indicates there would have been little benefit in doing so.
“There’s no value in having information that everybody else has,” said Kel McClanahan, executive director of National Security Counselors, a nonprofit law firm specializing in national security law.
“He wanted this information because it was valuable to him, and it was extra valuable because he knew he was one of the only people that had it,” McClanahan added.
Declassification is not a defense for the charges laid out in the DOJ warrant to search Trump’s home. The Espionage Act deals only with “national defense information,” while another one of the statutes covers willful concealment of government records.
Rangappa lamented that Trump appears to be using declassification claims as a Get Out of Jail Free card but noted that the status is not stagnant — some presidents have opted to reclassify information declassified by their predecessors, another detail she said makes Trump’s storage of the documents alarming.
The Trump legal team’s failure to directly assert the claim is also telling given the span of time the records were sought — a process that started with outreach from the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) just months after Trump left office.
“They had over a year of interactions with NARA. They’ve had months of interactions with the Department of Justice. They’ve had two legal filings and now one court hearing. And not once in any of those interactions have they claimed that any information at issue was declassified,” said Brian Greer, a former CIA attorney.
“They have claimed so on television, but there’s no criminal penalty for lying on television. There are, however, criminal penalties for lying to federal agencies, to federal investigators and to courts,” he added.
Even on Friday, Trump’s team seemed to raise the specter that he may have declassified the documents, writing only that the government “wrongly assumed that if a document has a classification marking, it remains classified in perpetuity.”
The Justice Department on Thursday asked a federal district court judge to reconsider her decision granting Trump’s request to allow a special master to review the documents, asking that it be allowed to carry on with its review of all the classified records.
A page from the order granting a request by former President Donald Trump’s legal team to appoint a special master to review documents seized by the FBI during a search of his Mar-a-Lago estate. The decision by U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon came despite the objections of the Justice Department, which said an outside legal expert was not necessary in part because officials had already completed their review of potentially privileged documents. (AP Photo/Jon Elswick)
It remains unclear how nearly 11,000 government documents, classified and unclassified, made it to Mar-a-Lago and the extent Trump played a role in directing documents to be removed and stored there. Some of the classified records, however, were found in his office among his personal belongings. Also among the tranche are empty folders that once housed the documents.
Throughout his presidency, intelligence community officials were often alarmed by Trump’s cavalier attitude toward classified information; Trump once tweeted a photo of sensitive surveillance image of an Iranian space facility.
Recent reporting from The New York Times indicates he would occasionally ask to hold on to various documents.
Former intelligence officials told the outlet Trump gravitated toward charts and other visuals and was particularly interested in information about how he was perceived after meeting with other world leaders as well as intelligence gathered about the personal lives of statesmen, including their extramarital affairs.
McClanahan said classification status alone may not have generated interest in the documents.
“He saw the value in the information, not in the fact that it was classified,” McClanahan said.
“The nature of the intelligence community is to classify things that are damaging, to classify information that could hurt national security. By definition, if they’re doing it right, anything they classify would damage the national security, which would make it important. So I think it’s sort of a mirage, it’s an optical illusion, that he took information because it was classified. He took the information because it was useful information. It was classified because it was useful information,” he added.
It’s not clear what was among the classified records recovered from Mar-a-Lago, but court filings indicate that they include some of the most restricted information, including Special Access Programs materials limited only to those with a specific need to know.
Also collected in the search were documents dealing with information about the “President of France” and Trump’s pardon of ally Roger Stone.
“I think that you’d probably be able to file most of this information into one of three categories: It’s information that can hurt him, so he doesn’t want other people to have it; information that can hurt other people, and he wants to have it; or information that other people would want, and they’ll have to come to him to get it,” McClanahan said.
“Between those three categories I think you can probably account for like 95 percent of all the materials he took, whether they be classified or unclassified,” he said.
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| 2022-09-20T20:59:03Z
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The Biden administration next month will place new restrictions on U.S. shipments of semiconductor chips and chipmaking equipment to China, according to Reuters.
The Commerce Department will formalize new rules prohibiting the shipment of chipmaking equipment to Chinese factories that produce advanced semiconductors, Reuters reported, citing people familiar with the matter.
U.S. companies seeking to export the equipment must obtain a Commerce Department license.
Three U.S. companies — KLA Corp., Lam Research Corp., and Applied Materials Inc. — already operate under the restrictions as directed by the Commerce Department.
The Hill has reached out to the Commerce Department for comment.
Semiconductor chips power most electrical systems and machines, from appliances to computers, vehicles and modern weapons.
Over the summer, the U.S. passed the Chips and Science Act, seeking to increase America’s competitive with China in the semiconductor industry with $50 billion in funding for the industry.
Last month, as tensions soared between the U.S. and China over House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.)’s visit to Taiwan, the U.S. began restricting the export of high-end graphics computer chips to Russia, China and Hong Kong.
Chipmaking company Nvidia, based in California, said the U.S. began requiring a license to export chips that are better than or equal to its A100 graphics card to those three countries. A similar restriction was reportedly applied to the company Advanced Micro Devices.
According to Reuters, the Commerce Department will formalize the licensing rule for exporting the highly advanced semiconductor chips next month.
China has demanded the U.S. drop the requirement, which affects data centers, artificial intelligence systems and other equipment that requires highly advanced chips.
The U.S. was once responsible for producing 37 percent of global semiconductor chips, but is now responsible for just 12 percent of production, according to the White House.
The Commerce Department announced last week it was planning to spend about $28 billion of the newly approved funding for grants, subsidies and loans to boost domestic production of key computer chips.
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The White House on Tuesday described a new bill that would impose a nationwide ban on abortion after 15 weeks of pregnancy as “wildly out of step” with the country, pushing back hard on the legislation introduced by Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.).
White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said in a statement that the ban “would strip away women’s rights in all 50 states.”
“This bill is wildly out of step with what Americans believe,” she said. “The President and Vice President are fighting for progress, while Republicans are fighting to take us back.”
The Supreme Court overturned the Roe v. Wade decision establishing a constitutional right to abortion over the summer, ushering in new bans on abortion in a number of states.
Democrats have sought to harness grassroots anger over the court’s decision and the strict new laws to their benefit by making abortion rights a big issue in the midterm elections.
Jean-Pierre said that Biden and Democrats in Congress are committed to restoring Roe v. Wade. The White House has pushed for Congress to codify Roe but passing such a measure would take a larger Democratic majority in the Senate to overcome a legislative filibuster.
“President Biden and Congressional Democrats are committed to restoring the protections of Roe v. Wade in the face of continued radical steps by elected Republicans to put personal health care decisions in the hands of politicians instead of women and their doctors, threatening women’s health and lives,” Jean-Pierre said.
She called Graham’s bill “an extreme piece of legislation” while briefing reporters later on Tuesday.
“The first thing is the senator’s proposal would keep in place the most extreme, the most extreme state level abortion bans that ban all abortions and have no exemptions for health,” she said.
Additionally, she bashed Graham for previously saying that the issue of abortion should be left up to the states.
“That’s from his own his own mouth and now he wants to do a national ban,” she said.
Graham’s bill includes exceptions for rape, incest and risk to life of the mother.
Graham vowed on Tuesday that Congress will vote for the bill if Republicans take back the House and the Senate in the upcoming midterm elections. The bill won’t move in the current Democratic-controlled Congress.
Updated at 2:36 p.m.
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The White House is preparing contingency plans to keep supply chains moving in the event rail workers go on strike at the end of the week.
Press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre told reporters that the administration is working with shippers, truckers and air freight workers “to see how they can step in and keep goods moving in case of this rail shutdown.
“The administration has also been working with relevant agencies to assess what supply chains and commodities are most likely to face severe disruptions and available authorities to keep goods moving,” Jean-Pierre added.
The companies that operate railways for freight trains and the unions who work those rails have until Friday to agree to a new contract. Without a deal, workers could go on strike, crippling supply chains that depend on freight trains.
A strike could also impact passenger rail service. Amtrak does not own the railways where its trains operate in certain parts of the country but instead operates on those owned by freight companies. On Monday, the company canceled some long-distance routes in anticipation of a potential strike.
Five of the 12 unions representing rail workers have reached tentative agreements with railroads to enact the Presidential Emergency Board recommendations, which call for 24 percent pay raises, back pay and cash bonuses.
But the bulk of rail workers belong to unions that haven’t yet struck a deal with companies.
Should the workers vote to strike, Congress could intervene to halt it.
Jean-Pierre on Tuesday also confirmed that Biden personally called union leaders and company officials on Monday to urge them to find a solution and avoid a strike.
“We have made crystal clear to the interested parties the harm that American families, businesses and farmers and communities would experience if they were not to reach a resolution,” Jean-Pierre said.
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SAN JOSE, Calif. (KRON) — It’s a new beginning for the San Jose lowrider community as the last “No Cruising” sign in the city came down. For the first time in almost 40 years, lowriders can drive low and slow through the streets of San Jose.
Cruising, as it is known, is about the ride and not the destination. The cruising phenomenon can be traced back to the late 1940s when Mexican-American culture and art took form in the display of decorative cars.
“I’ve always heard stories of people cruising down King and Story. They used to block down the streets and have block parties,” said Lena Carmella Pardo.
These vintage cars are often lowered to the ground, decked out with chrome-plated wheels and engines, and hydraulics that make them bounce a few feet off the ground. The stereotypical lowrider is similar to the cars that Tim Carrasco and Lena Carmella Pardo own.
“So, I’m standing in front of my 1954 Chevy Bel Air,” said Tim Carrasco, proudly showing off his ride. “It has original paint, original interior, original motor.”
But in the late 1970s, lowriders became targets of police. Lowriders like Carrasco said police officers would often associate them with gang members.
“Yeah, I’ve been harassed plenty of times for driving a lowrider car,” said Carrasco. “They seem to pull us over for any minor infraction, sometimes impounding the cars. And with the high cost of getting the car out of the impound, sometimes we would lose our vehicles.”
In 1986, San Jose enacted a ban on cruising. They cited concerns of traffic congestion, impeding the movement of emergency vehicles, criminal activity and creating an environment of fear.
However, San Jose Councilmember Raul Peralez spearheaded an initiative to get the ban repealed. He said lowriders are car enthusiasts looking to drive around and show off their car.
“We take a lot of pride, spend a lot of money to fix our cars and people sometimes associate us and give us a bad rap,” Carrasco said.
In June, councilmembers unanimously agreed to bring back cruising to the streets of San Jose.
“It’s something we enjoyed all the time, going to car shows, cleaning up the car, taking them cruising. Not anything illegal,” said Councilmember Raul Peralez.
With the ordinance repealed, the tradition will continue as family members pass down their cars.
“Cruising means a lot to me — growing up I always had old cars around me, my dad always had a lot of old cars,” said Pardo.
Peralez believes people can now see the lowrider community in a different light and inform themselves about the Chicano culture.
“Finally, the city is going to do what’s right and lift this ban and feel no pressure being able to cruise our car and share it with the community as we’re doing here today,” said Peralez.
Pardo agrees.
“I want them to know that it’s not a crime to ride low and slow. It’s just a joyous time just like you would strolling on your street,” said Pardo.
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| 2022-09-20T20:59:32Z
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(Loving Living Local)- Enoch’s Stomp Vineyard and Wine located in Harleton, Texas offer on-site lodging accommodations in their luxurious villas affectionately known as the Verdot and the Petit Verdot.
These individual villas situated behind the back pond offer beautiful vineyard views and a tranquil, East Texas-style escape from the ordinary.
The Petit Verdot, our smaller unit, affords a spacious, studio-style layout with a kitchenette, a large bathroom with a walk-in shower, and a space-saving king-sized murphy bed for transforming your day space into lovely sleeping quarters.
The Verdot is a slightly larger one-bedroom unit with an open floor plan. This premium space offers a private king-size bed, kitchenette, and generous bathroom containing a walk-in shower. Both units offer covered decks with outdoor seating to take in the peaceful vineyard mornings and evenings.
With each rental comes a complimentary charcuterie board, so you can build your own fruit and cheese board and enjoy it in your villa. While you are staying at the Vineyard Villas, you should make a reservation to take a tour of the property and winery along with a personalized wine tasting experience with Enoch’s wine ambassador.
Amenities in both units include:
- Small refrigerator
- Keurig coffee makers
- Hair dryers
- Linens and bathroom toiletries
- Continental breakfast items provided
- Vineyard view window wall
The property and units are securely accessed via an electronic keypad. Parking is located behind each unit.
For more information regarding staying in one of our Villas, please contact us via email at villas@enochsstomp.com or call 903.918-9895.
Enoch’s Vineyard Villas are meant to be a quiet escape from ordinary life. Our property is somewhat remote and services are limited. There is no television or wi-fi. Please use your own cellular service. We hope that you will enjoy your time spent on our property by stepping away from the stresses and technological demands of everyday life.
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| 2022-09-20T20:59:38Z
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ARLINGTON, Texas — Bad Bunny did some good for a survivor of the Uvalde shooting.
The rapper/singer invited Mayah Zamora, 10, to his sold-out show at AT&T Stadium in Arlington on Sept. 9.
Not only did Bad Bunny, real name Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio, bring Zamora and her family to the show, but he was also among several donors behind the purchase of a new home for the survivor.
Zamora was released from the hospital in July two months after the deadly shooting at Robb Elementary that claimed the lives of 21 people, including 19 students.
According to the Correa Family Foundation, Zamora had to have more than 20 surgeries after suffering gunshot wounds to her hands, arms, chest and back.
While recovering, Zamora learned the Uvalde shooter had lived just blocks away from her home and hadn't been back to her childhood home for that reason.
Carlos Correa, currently playing for the Minnesota Twins but formerly with the Houston Astros, met with Zamora and her family last month when the Twins faced the Astros at Minute Maid Park. Zamora was the August Hero of the Month for the Correa Family Foundation.
Correa's foundation, along with Bad Bunny's Good Bunny Foundation and others, raised the funds to build Zamora's family a new home.
“After everything she went through, the battle she went through, and now she’s here with us. We want to celebrate life and celebrate her life. She’s here with us and we’re here to support her all the way through. It’s not just by helping with the house, but helping with whatever they need," said Correa in August.
The new home will be fully furnished and an opportunity for Zamora and her family to "rebuild their lives, make new memories and work towards a brighter future," according to the president of the Correa Family Foundation Dr. Ricky Flores.
Other people and organizations that helped the Zamora family included TokenSociety.io, Jak Entertainment, Gallery Furniture, Héctor Herrera with Houston Dynamo FC, The Astros Foundation and players Yordan Alvarez, José Altuve, Martín Maldonado, Yuli Gurriel, Aledmys Díaz, Alex Cintrón and José Urquidy.
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(Loving Living Local)- Los Compas Cantina & Grill shares about food, drinks, and environment at Benton Location.
Owner of Los Compas, Lacee Hernandez, joined host, Susan Kirton, in the studio and in the kitchen to talk about what makes her family’s second restaurant far from second best. The original restaurant run by her mother, Los Compas Mexican Restaurant, has been a staple in the Minden/ Dixie Inn area for years. Hernandez was excited for the opportunity to open this location closer to her home in Benton and will be celebrating their one-year anniversary at this location in November along with her business partner and close family friend, Emet Mendez.
Hernandez is especially proud of the decorations and feel of their restaurant. With hand-painted and hand-carved tables and customized decor, it feels like stepping into Mexico. Mendez, who also owns Marshall Hometown Roofing, built the patio as well as completed all of the interior construction. Hernandez also takes great pride in the quality of the ingredients she uses. She boasts that everything is made fresh by the shift, “you’re not going to find anything hanging out in our freezer.”
Los Compas translates to ‘close friends’ and that’s exactly the atmosphere Hernandez hopes to promote with a mix of traditional Mexican and Tex-Mex cuisine, specialty drinks, and all day every day two for one Margaritas. Los Compas Rocks is a traditional margarita offering, but if you are feeling more adventurous, please try one of Hernandez’s most sought-after specialty margaritas, all made with top-shelf ingredients. The Pina Margarita is blended with guava and fresh pineapple. The Jalapeno Margarita is made to order, not too spicy, and has great flavor.
Los Compas Cantina & Grill is located at the corner of Benton Road and Kingston Road in the Kingston Market Shopping Center in Benton, Louisiana. Follow them on Facebook to see more information.
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| 2022-09-20T20:59:44Z
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SPOKANE, Wash. — The passing of Sandy Williams earlier this month left a legacy of community outreach, advocacy and journalism in the city of Spokane, but, local organizations are stepping up to fill the impact.
The Innovia Foundation, partnered with Washington Trust Bank, Avista Foundation, Empire Health Foundation and the Cowles Company to create the Sandy Williams Fund for the Carl Maxey Center.
“Our hearts are heavy as we mourn the loss of Sandy Williams, a courageous journalist, activist and beloved member of our community. Her voice was a powerful force for change, and she will be deeply missed and long remembered,” said Shelly O’Quinn, CEO of Innovia in a statement. “We look to her extraordinary legacy and unwavering vision for racial equity and justice to find our way forward.”
Williams was an active partner with the Innovia Foundation, offering insight and support as part of the foundation’s Spokane County Leadership Council.
The $50,000 endowment will be sent to Carl Maxey Center to help support the center going forward.
The fund will continue to accept donations for the Carl Maxey Center here.
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To report a typo or grammatical error, please email webspokane@krem.com.
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| 2022-09-20T20:59:51Z
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SHREVEPORT, La. (KTAL/KMSS) – In a recent interview, an LSUS economist explained some reasons why inflation has continued to rise while gas prices are dropping.
Gas prices are down, but inflation is still a significant issue, and now the effects are being felt in the stock market. The Dow Jones had its worst day in over two years. It lost almost 1300 points Tuesday as many people sold their stock due to the inflation report for August.
Economists expected inflation to be 8.1 percent this month, but it was higher than predicted. The Labor Department released data Tuesday showing prices are 8.3% higher than this time last year. This caused the stock market to plummet.
Douglas White, Director of Business and Economy Resources at LSU Shreveport, says this inflation is a product of the pandemic. White says many factors play into continued inflation.
One reason he says contributed to the problem was stimulus checks. According to White, the stimulus checks helped people. However, because consumers bought goods quickly, it put a gap between the supply and demand of everyday things.
Data from the Bureau of Labor statistics show food, shelter, and electricity make up a significant portion of cost increases. Electricity rose the highest amount since 1981 to 15.8%. Food costs broke the year-over-year record set in 1979 at 11.4%. Shelter costs have not increased this quickly since the early ’90s, sitting at 6.2% over last year.
While inflation affected many things, it seems that gas prices are straying away from everything else affected by inflation. Prices in Shreveport hit a record high of $4.58 on June 15 but have continued to drop since. Rates are more than a dollar lower than at their peak, the largest monthly drop in more than two years. While the area’s average gas price isn’t under $3 yet, many gas stations offer it for under $3.
“The government has stepped in, and they have been releasing oil to refine gasoline from our strategic reserve,” said White. “So we’ve kind of manipulated the gas market, so prices aren’t as high.”
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| 2022-09-20T20:59:50Z
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The Nature Conservancy in Idaho has purchased a 634-acre property located 15 miles west of Yellowstone National Park. Located in one of the most ecologically significant regions of the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, this project secures the protection of critical habitat and advances efforts to ensure the survival and resiliency of iconic wildlife in this area.
Much of the property and surrounding lands are situated within Henrys Lake Area of Critical Environmental Concern (ACEC) and provide crucial connectivity to areas that support a diversity of wildlife in the Madison River Valley and Yellowstone National Park in Montana and Wyoming. The ranch had been platted for subdivision and fragmentation that would have been devastating for wildlife habitat and migration corridors.
TNC and partners have been working for decades to conserve the Henrys Lake area and have long identified the high conservation value of this property. The area’s native sagebrush steppe, open grasslands and wetlands are valuable habitat for a diversity of wildlife, including at-risk species like peregrine falcons, gray wolves, bald eagles, grizzly bears and trumpeter swans. Pronghorn rely heavily on the property seasonally and during migration. The property also encompasses portions of Howard Creek, which is a critical spawning stream for Yellowstone cutthroat trout.
“This project presents an extraordinary opportunity to protect irreplaceable habitat and migration corridors in a critical area,” says Tess O’Sullivan, TNC land conservation strategy lead. “Conserving this property advances years of work in the area and creates pathways to greater conservation outcomes in the future.”
Beartooth Group, a conservation investment firm, was a key partner to TNC and played an essential role in facilitating the transaction. “We are thrilled that we were able to move quickly, with our investors who immediately saw the value of this transaction, to secure a deal that worked for the landowner and The Nature Conservancy,” said Beartooth’s Ben Alexander.
TNC will leverage its local stewardship staffing expertise at its nearby Flat Ranch Preserve to manage the property until TNC can complete a conservation easement, at which point it will be sold to a landowner committed to stewarding and maintaining the working ranch into the future.
Neighbors and local agricultural producers also see benefits. “I’m just so happy to see this property not getting developed,” says local community member John Spencer. “And, it is staying in agriculture. I can’t think of a better outcome.”
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| 2022-09-20T20:59:53Z
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WASHINGTON (AP) — It’s not just rocket fuel propelling America’s first moonshot after a half-century lull. Strategic rivalry with China’s ambitious space program is helping drive NASA’s effort to get back into space in a bigger way, as both nations push to put people back on the moon and establish the first lunar bases.
American intelligence, military and political leaders make clear they see a host of strategic challenges to the U.S. in China’s space program, in an echo of the U.S.-Soviet rivalry that prompted the 1960s’ race to the moon. That’s as China is quickly matching U.S. civil and military space accomplishments and notching new ones of its own.
On the military side, the U.S. and China trade accusations of weaponizing space. Senior U.S. defense officials warn that China and Russia are building capabilities to take out the satellite systems that underpin U.S. intelligence, military communications and early warning networks.
There’s also a civilian side to the space race. The U.S. is wary of China taking the lead in space exploration and commercial exploitation, and pioneering the technological and scientific advances that would put China ahead in power in space and in prestige down on Earth.
“In a decade, the United States has gone from the unquestioned leader in space to merely one of two peers in a competition,” Sen. Jim Inhofe, an Oklahoma Republican, declared this week at a Senate Armed Services hearing. “Everything our military does relies on space.”
At another hearing last year, NASA administrator Bill Nelson brandished an image transmitted by a Chinese rover that had just plunked down on Mars. “The Chinese government … they’re going to be landing humans on the moon” soon, he said. “That should tell us something about our need to get off our duff.”
NASA, the U.S. civilian space agency, is awaiting a new launch date this month or in October for its Artemis 1 uncrewed test moonshot. Technical problems scrubbed the first two launch attempts in recent weeks.
China likewise aims to send astronauts to the moon this decade, as well as establish a robotic research station there. Both the U.S. and China intend to establish bases for intermittent crews on the moon’s south pole after that.
Russia has aligned with China’s moon program, while 21 nations have joined a U.S.-initiated effort meant to bring guidelines and order to the civil exploration and development of space.
The parallel efforts come 50 years after U.S. astronauts last pulled shut the doors on an Apollo module and blasted away from the moon, in December 1972.
Some space policy experts bat down talk of a new space race, seeing big differences from John F. Kennedy’s Cold War drive to outdo the Soviet Union’s Sputnik and be the first to get people on the moon. This time, both the U.S. and China see moon programs as a stepping stone in phased programs toward exploring, settling and potentially exploiting the resources and other untapped economic and strategic opportunities offered by the moon, Mars and space at large.
Beyond the gains in technology, science and jobs that accompany space programs, Artemis promoters point to the potential of mining minerals and frozen water on the moon, or using the moon as a base to go prospecting on asteroids — the Trump administration in particular emphasized the mining prospects. There’s potential in tourism and other commercial efforts.
And for space more broadly, Americans alone have tens of thousands of satellites overhead in what the Space Force says is a half-trillion dollar global space economy. Satellites guide GPS, process credit card purchases, help keep TV, radio and cell phone feeds going, and predict weather. They ensure the military and intelligence community’s ability to keep track of perceived threats.
And in a world where China and Russia are collaborating to try to surpass the U.S. in space, and where some point to private space efforts led by U.S. billionaires as rendering costly NASA rocket launches unnecessary, the U.S. would regret leaving the glory and strategic advantages from developing the moon and space solely to the likes of Chinese President Xi Jinping and Tesla magnate Elon Musk, Artemis proponents say.
The moon programs signal that “space is going to be an arena of competition on the prestige front, demonstrating advanced technical expertise and know-how, and then also on the military front as well,” said Aaron Bateman, a professor of history and international affairs at George Washington University and a member of the Space Policy Institute.
“People who are supportive of Artemis and people who see it as a tool of competition, they want the United States to be at the table in shaping the future of exploration on other celestial bodies,” Bateman said.
There’s no shortage of such warnings as the Artemis program moves toward lift-off. “Beijing is working to match or exceed U.S. capabilities in space to gain the military, economic, and prestige benefits that Washington has accrued from space leadership,” the U.S. intelligence community warned this year in its annual threat assessment.
A Pentagon-commissioned study group contended last month that “China appears to be on track to surpass the U.S. as the dominant space power by 2045.” It called that part of a Chinese plan to promote authoritarianism and communism down here on Earth.
It’s sparked occasional heated words between Chinese and U.S. officials.
China’s space program was guided by peaceable principles, Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian said in July. “Some U.S. officials are constantly smearing China’s normal and reasonable outer space undertakings,” Zhao said.
Flying on the mightiest rocket ever built by NASA, Artemis 1 aims for a five-week demo flight that would put test dummies into lunar orbit.
If all goes well with that, U.S. astronauts could fly around the moon in 2024 and land on it in 2025, culminating a program that will have cost $93 billion over more than a decade of work.
NASA intends that a woman and a person of color will be on the first U.S. crew touching foot on the moon again.
Lessons learned in getting back to the moon will aid in the next step in crewed flights, to Mars, the space agency says.
China’s ambitious space program, meanwhile, is a generation behind that of the United States. But its secretive, military-linked program is developing fast and creating distinctive missions that could put Beijing on the leading edge of space flight.
Already, China has that rover on Mars, joining U.S. ones already there. China carved out a first with its landing on the far side of the moon.
Chinese astronauts are overhead now, putting the finishing touches on a permanent orbiting space station.
A 1967 U.N. space treaty meant to start shaping the guardrails for space exploration bans anyone from claiming sovereignty over a celestial body, putting a military base on it, or putting weapons of mass destruction into space.
“I don’t think it’s at all by coincidence or happenstance that it is now in this period of what people are claiming is renewed great-power competition that the United States is actually investing the resources to go back,” said Bateman, the scholar on space and national security. “Time will tell if this turns into a sustained program.”
Competition isn’t necessarily a bad thing, said Sen. Chris Coons, a Delaware Democrat and member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
Does rivalry with the Chinese “ensure greater sustained interest in our space program? Sure,” Coons said. “But I don’t think that’s necessarily a competition that leads to conflict.
“I think it can be a competition — like the Olympics — that simply means that each team and each side is going to push higher and faster. And as a result, humanity is likely to benefit,” he said.
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With the hint of a chance of accumulating snow in some forecasts this week, people are thinking about the unusual weather we’ve had, the triple dip La Nina forecast, and wondering just how weird this winter will be.
Not all forecasters called for snow in Teton Valley this week. Those that did, put it on Thursday night and Friday morning. If you are reading this after September 23rd, you will know whether they were right or not. If we didn’t wake up to a white Friday, remember that Teton Valley Weather never forecast snow that day. If we did, forget it. As of this writing, the National Weather Service mentioned accumulating snow above 10,000 feet elevation on that day.
But just how unusual would a dusting of snow on the valley floor be in September? Who in the world keeps track of things like that? Your genial Teton Valley weatherman raises his hand. If we get accumulating snow before the end of the month, it will be the fifth time in the past 15 years. Measurable September dustings happened in 2009, 2013, 2017, and 2019.
The earliest snow of those was in 2017 when we woke up to snow on September 16th. We’ve already passed that date this year, but there’s still some September left. If we do (or did) get snow on the 23rd, it will be the second earliest in 15 years; the others were on September 26th, 29th, and 30th.
But two out of three times, the first snow waits until October. In recent years, the latest it’s come was in 2014 when it happened on the 26th. Snow before Halloween is pretty much a given in the valley, but that year it was a close call, less than a week.
How unusual will this winter be? A September snow might be the first clue. Stay tuned.
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WASHINGTON (AP) — President Joe Biden’s popularity improved substantially from his lowest point this summer, but concerns about his handling of the economy persist, according to a poll from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research.
Support for Biden recovered from a low of 36% in July to 45%, driven in large part by a rebound in support from Democrats just two months before the November midterm elections. During a few bleak summer months when gasoline prices peaked and lawmakers appeared deadlocked, the Democrats faced the possibility of blowout losses against Republicans.
Their outlook appears better after notching a string of legislative successes that left more Americans ready to judge the Democratic president on his preferred terms: “Don’t compare me to the Almighty. Compare me to the alternative.”
The president’s approval rating remains underwater, with 53% of U.S. adults disapproving of him, and the economy continues to be a weakness for Biden. Just 38% approve of his economic leadership as the country faces stubbornly high inflation and Republicans try to make household finances the axis of the upcoming vote.
Still, the poll suggests Biden and his fellow Democrats are gaining momentum right as generating voter enthusiasm and turnout takes precedence.
Average gas prices have tumbled 26% since June to $3.71 a gallon, reducing the pressure somewhat on family budgets even if inflation remains high. Congress also passed a pair of landmark bills in the past month that could reshape the economy and reduce carbon emissions.
Republicans have also faced resistance since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade and its abortion protections. And Biden is openly casting former President Donald Trump as a fundamental threat to democracy, a charge that took on resonance after an FBI search of Trump’s Florida home found classified documents that belong to the U.S. government.
This combination of factors has won Biden some plaudits among the Democratic faithful, even if Americans still feel lukewarm about his leadership.
“I’m not under any belief that he’s the best person for the job — he’s the best from the people we had to choose from,” said Betty Bogacz, 74, a retiree from Portland, Oregon. “He represented stability, which I feel President Trump did not represent at all.”
Biden’s approval rating didn’t exceed 40% in May, June or July as inflation surged in the aftermath of Russia invading Ukraine. But his string of wins over the past month continued on Thursday, after the poll was conducted, when he announced a tentative deal between railways and unions that avoided a strike that could have shut down the railroads and devastated the economy.
The president’s rating now is similar to what it was throughout the first quarter of the year, but he continues to fall short of early highs. His average approval rating in AP-NORC polling through the first six months of his term was 60%.
Driving the recent increase in Biden’s popularity is renewed support among Democrats, who had shown signs of dejection in the early summer. Now, 78% of Democrats approve of Biden’s job performance, up from 65% in July. Sixty-six percent of Democrats approve of Biden on the economy, up from 54% in June.
Interviews suggest a big reason for Biden’s rebound is the reemergence of Trump on the national stage, causing voters such as Stephen Jablonsky, who labeled Biden as “OK,” to say voting Democratic is a must for the nation’s survival.
“The country has a political virus by the name of Donald Trump,” said Jablonsky, a retired music professor from Stamford, Connecticut. “We have a man who is psychotic and seems to have no concern for law and order and democracy. The Republican Party has gone to a place that is so unattractive and so dangerous, this coming election in November could be the last election we ever have.”
Republicans feel just as negative about Biden as they did before. Only about 1 in 10 Republicans approve of the president overall or on the economy, similar to ratings earlier this summer.
Christine Yannuzzi, 50, doubts that 79-year-old Biden has the capacity to lead.
“I don’t think he’s mentally, completely aware of everything that’s happening all the time,” said Yannuzzi, who lives in Binghamton, New York. “The economy’s doing super poorly and I have a hard time believing that the joblessness rate is as low as they say it is.”
“I think the middle class is being really phased out and families are working two and three jobs a person to make it,” the Republican added.
Twenty-nine percent of U.S. adults say the economy is in good shape, while 71% say it’s doing poorly. In June, 20% said conditions were good and 79% said they were bad.
Democrats are more positive now than they were in June, 46% vs. 31%. Republicans remain largely negative, with only 10% saying conditions are good and 90% saying they’re bad.
About a quarter of Americans now say things in the country are headed in the right direction, 27%, up from 17% in July. Seventy-two percent say things are going in the wrong direction.
Close to half of Democrats — 44% — have an optimistic outlook, up from 27% in July. Just 9% of Republicans are optimistic about the nation’s direction.
Akila Atkins, a 27-year-old stay-at-home mom of two, thinks Biden is “OK” and doesn’t have much confidence that his solutions will curb rising prices.
Atkins says it’s gotten a little harder in the last year to manage her family’s expenses, and she’s frustrated that she can no longer rely on the expanded child tax credit. The tax credit paid out monthly was part of Biden’s $1.9 trillion coronavirus relief package and has since lapsed.
The Census Bureau reported Tuesday that the expanded tax credit nearly halved the child poverty rate last year to 5.2%. Atkins said it helped them “stay afloat with bills, the kids’ clothing, shoes, school supplies, everything.”
Whatever misgivings the Democrat in Grand Forks, North Dakota, has about Biden, she believes he is preferable to Trump.
“I always feel like he could be better, but then again, he’s better than our last president,” she said.
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The poll of 1,054 adults was conducted Sep. 9-12 using a sample drawn from NORC’s probability-based AmeriSpeak Panel, which is designed to be representative of the U.S. population. The margin of sampling error for all respondents is plus or minus 3.9 percentage points.
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Follow the AP’s coverage of President Joe Biden at https://apnews.com/hub/joe-biden.
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ANN ARBOR, Mich. (AP) — A newly constructed University of Michigan facility that will be home to the most powerful laser in the United States is hosting its first experiment this week as the nation seeks to become competitive again in the realm of high-power laser facilities.
The experiment will be conducted at ZEUS — short for Zettawatt-Equivalent Ultrashort pulse laser System — by researchers from the University of California, Irvine. They traveled to Ann Arbor as part of their study of extremely intense interactions of light and matter, and how such interactions can be harnessed to shrink particle accelerators.
At the height of its power, ZEUS will be a 3-petawatt laser.
Three petawatts is “3 with 15 zeroes after it,” said Louise Willingale, an associate professor of electrical engineering and computer science at Michigan.
And “3 petawatts is 3,000 times more powerful than the U.S. power grid,” she said.
Michigan was awarded $18.5 million by the National Science Foundation to establish ZEUS as a federally funded international user facility.
Initially, the facility — housed in a building that is home to U-M’s Gérard Mourou Center for Ultrafast Optical Science — will host research teams conducting experiments that use a fraction of the laser’s full power potential. The system gradually will ramp up, and ZEUS is expected to begin its signature experiments in the fall of 2023.
The U.S. built the world’s first petawatt laser a quarter-century ago, but hasn’t kept pace with more ambitious systems in Europe and Asia. While ZEUS doesn’t feature the same raw power as its contemporaries overseas, its approach will simulate a laser that is roughly 1 million times more powerful than its 3 petawatts.
ZEUS primarily will study extreme plasmas, a state of matter in which the electrons have enough energy to escape atoms, creating a sea of charged particles. Nearly all of the seen universe is made of plasma. The sun is an example of a plasma.
Experiments are expected to contribute to the understanding of how the universe operates at the subatomic level and materials change on rapid timescales. Scientists also hope they lead to the development of smaller and more compact particle accelerators for medical imaging and treatment.
ZEUS will “have a huge range of applications across science, technology, engineering and medicine,” Willingale said.
Proposals to use ZEUS will be evaluated by an external panel comprised of scientists and engineers. Because of the NSF funding, there will be no cost to users whose experiment proposals are selected to conduct research, beyond providing their own travel costs to the facility.
The proposals will be selected on scientific merit and technical feasibility, Willingale said.
Franklin Dollar, an associate professor in Cal-Irvine’s Department of Physics & Astronomy, and four UCI graduate students arrived at Michigan last week to begin preparing for their experiment.
“One of the major challenges in our field is access to high quality, intense laser light,” Dollar said. “ZEUS will not only be the most powerful laser beam on the continent, but perhaps more importantly will provide multiple powerful beams.
“Rather than solely making highly energetic plasmas from a laser, there is a second beam which can interact with the plasma as well,” he said.
ZEUS is an upgrade over the University of Michigan’s 0.5-petawatt laser, known as HERCULES.
While Michigan researchers are thrilled with the birth of ZEUS, they are cognizant of how their naming conventions aren’t exactly in keeping with the chronology of Greek mythology.
“HERCULES was the predecessor to ZEUS,” Willingale said. “It’s slightly backward, because Hercules was the son of Zeus.
“So, we’re building the father after the son.”
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SPOKANE COUNTY, Wash. — National Voter Registration Day is on Sept. 20, a great reminder for Washington and Idaho residents to get registered to vote and to make sure their registration is valid.
Whether you’re new to the world of voting or you’re a seasoned voter, everyone can use a little help planning their annual celebration of democracy.
About five million Washington residents have registered to vote for the next election happening on Nov. 8. About one million Idaho residents have registered to vote.
Here are some of the key dates voters should be aware of:
Voter registration deadlines in Washington:
- October 21: Start of the 18-day voting period (through Election Day). Ballots are mailed out and Accessible Voting Units (AVUs) are available at voting centers.
- October 31: Online and mail registrations must be received eight days before Election Day. Register to vote in person during business hours and any time before 8:00 p.m. on Election Day.
- November 8: Deadline for Washington State voter registration or updates (in person only).
- November 8: General Election - Deposit your ballot in an official drop box by 8 p.m. on Election Day.
Before registering to vote, view Washington State voter eligibility.
How to register to vote in Washington:
- Online: You can register online to vote for this year's elections. You’ll need a Washington State driver's license, permit or ID card. Register here.
- Printable form: Print and mail in a Voter Registration Form (PDF) with your information.
- In Person: Register at the Spokane County Elections Office, located at 1033 W Gardner Ave, in Spokane.
If you don't know if you are already registered to vote, check in here, or click here to look for the list of Washington's counties where you can register to vote.
The following Ballot Drop Boxes are available starting October 20, 2022, and close promptly at 8:00 p.m. on Election Day, November 8, 2022:
Spokane
- Elections Office, 1033 W Gardner Ave, Spokane
- Argonne Library, 4322 N Argonne Rd, Spokane
- Central Library, 906 W Main Ave, Spokane
- Hillyard Library, 4110 N Cook St, Spokane
- Liberty Park Library, 402 S Pittsburg St, Spokane
- Moran Prairie Library, 6004 S Regal St, Spokane
- North Spokane Library, 44 E Hawthorne Rd, Spokane
- Shadle Park Library, 2111 W Wellesley Ave, Spokane
- Spokane County Courthouse, 1116 W Broadway Ave, Spokane
- Spokane Transit Authority (STA) Plaza, 701 W Riverside Ave, Spokane
- The Hive, 2904 E Sprague Ave, Spokane
Spokane Valley
- Spokane Valley Library, 12004 E Main Ave, Spokane Valley
- CenterPlace Event Center, 2426 N Discovery Pl, Spokane Valley
Surrounding cities:
- Cheney: Cheney Library, 610 First St, Cheney
- Deer Park: Deer Park Library, 208 S Forest Ave, Deer Park
- Airway Heights: Airway Heights Library, 1213 S Lundstrom St, Airway Heights
- Fairfield: Fairfield Library, 305 E Main St, Fairfield
- Waverly: Waverly Town Hall, 225 N Commercial St, Waverly
- Liberty Lake: Liberty Lake Library, 23123 E Mission Ave, Liberty Lake
- Otis Orchards: Otis Orchards Library, 22324 E Wellesley Ave, Otis Orchards
- Rockford: Rockford Town Hall, 20 W Emma St, Rockford
- Medical Lake: Medical Lake Library, 321 E Herb St, Medical Lake
Voter registration deadlines in North Idaho
- October 14: Online registration/ register by mail deadline. All registration forms must be postmarked by Friday, Oct. 14, 2022.
- November 8: In-person voter registration deadline
- November 8: General Election - Deposit your ballot in an official drop box by 8 p.m. on Election Day.
How to register to vote in North Idaho:
- Online: You can register at the Vote Idaho Website.
- In Person: You can go at 808 N 3rd Street in Coeur d'Alene to register in person to vote.
- By mail: You can register by mail to vote in Idaho by printing a voter registration form, filling it out, and mailing it to your local election office. Click here to download the form. Registration cards are also available at Any City Hall in the County. Visit the DMV located at 451 N Government Way in Coeur d’Alene to get a form. Cards may be returned to the Elections Department or mailed to Kootenai County Elections P.O. Box 9000, Coeur d’Alene, ID 83816.
- People can also get an absentee ballot request form or a political party affiliation form. Look here for more information.
To check your voter registration record or update a current registration, visit the Vote Idaho website.
DOWNLOAD THE KREM SMARTPHONE APP
HOW TO ADD THE KREM+ APP TO YOUR STREAMING DEVICE
ROKU: add the channel from the ROKU store or by searching for KREM in the Channel Store.
Fire TV: search for "KREM" to find the free app to add to your account. Another option for Fire TV is to have the app delivered directly to your Fire TV through Amazon.
To report a typo or grammatical error, please email webspokane@krem.com.
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DETROIT (AP) — When it came time to showcase its electric Chevrolet Equinox SUV to the public this year, General Motors decided against doing so at the big Detroit auto show, as it typically would have done in the past. Instead, it unveiled the Equinox six days earlier.
GM’s decision symbolized just how much smaller this year’s auto show will be, with few new model debuts, less-glitzy displays, fewer journalists and possibly lower attendance.
Though the pandemic is partly to blame, larger forces are at play, too: Automakers have figured out that new models can make a bigger splash when they’re unveiled to a digital audience on a day where they don’t have to share the spotlight with their rivals. Not to mention that making a debut at an auto show can be hugely expensive.
So despite moving the show from January to balmy September and adding outdoor events, the North American International Auto Show won’t be the glitzy event it was the last time it was held in chilly January, more than three years ago.
“The industry has changed — the world has changed,” said Karl Zimmermann, vice president of the Detroit Auto Dealers Association, which runs the show. “Do I think it’s going to be the same as it was before? No. It’s a much different format. We’re using indoors. We’re using outdoors.”
This year’s show will be geared more toward consumers and less toward the industry. General Motors and Volkswagen will offer test drives. There will be ride-alongs in new electric vehicles from Ford and others.
“I think that’s the likely track of the future — more consumer-focused than industry-focused, because the consumers don’t need all the the fanfare,” said Jeff Schuster, president of global forecasting for LMC Automotive, a Detroit-area consulting firm. “They can essentially have it look like a showroom.”
Gone from Detroit’s Huntington Place convention center are the elaborate multi-story displays that cost millions and took months to construct. There won’t be any attention-grabbing stunts, like driving cars up steps and through the front doors or an ice rink with figure skaters. Though many automakers, including some from Europe and Asia, decided not to attend, area dealers stepped in with displays for their brands.
Instead of around 50 new model debuts as in past years, there’s only one truly new one: The Ford Mustang, unveiled Wednesday night at a big outdoor event along the Detroit River attended by about 3,000 Mustang enthusiasts and Ford employees. Instead of the usual 5,000 journalists, only about 1,900 received credentials this year.
The seventh-generation Mustang, which goes on sale next summer, may well be the last gas-powered version of the muscle car as Ford powers more of its lineup with batteries. The company plans for half of its global production to be electric by 2030.
The new Mustang is built on the same underpinnings as generation six. But it gets an all-new look inside and out with a revamped 5-liter V8 in the GT and a new 2.3-liter turbocharged four for lower trim lines.
The V8’s up to 500 horsepower tops any other Mustang engine, and the four-cylinder will be more efficient than its predecessor.
The company wouldn’t say whether the next generation would be electric, but Khan said Ford can meet government fuel economy requirements for this generation because of the four-cylinder engine and the Mustang Mach E SUV and other electric vehicles. Last month Stellantis said fuel economy requirements are one reason it’s canceling its gasoline muscle cars by the end of next year. The company plans an all-electric Dodge Charger in 2024.
“Where we go next, we’ll see how things will go,” said Eddie Khan, engineering manager for the car. “The whole industry is changing.”
The Mustang gets all new sheet metal outside, and Ford says it has lower wind drag than any other generation. You can still get a six-speed manual transmission on the GT; otherwise it’s an improved 10-speed automatic.
Don Andrews of Detroit, who owns a 2018 V8 Mustang, said he hopes this isn’t the last gasoline version. “I hope they keep it petrol because more people like it,” he said. “Everybody likes that rev, that noise. That’s what makes it a Mustang.”
Andrews said he’s glad the show was moved to a warmer month so events like the Mustang reveal can take place outdoors. He thinks more people will attend the show than they did when it was in January.
Zimmerman said the downsizing of auto shows is part of worldwide trend that started about a decade ago and this year forced the cancellation of the auto show in Geneva, Switzerland. Other auto shows, too, are shifting their focus to letting customers in their region see and even drive new vehicles.
Even with the changes, the show still amounts to a major production. So much so that President Joe Biden and Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg attended.
Biden, a gearhead who owns a 1967 Chevrolet Corvette Stingray, sat in a high-performance Corvette Wednesday, and he drove a Cadillac Lyriq electric SUV slowly down an aisle in the convention hall.
The show won’t be entirely devoid of glitz. Ford, Jeep and Stellantis’ Ram brand have displays that will hold vehicles as they drive over steep slopes. Dirt and trees were trucked in for a natural look. There are tracks where customers can ride in new electric vehicles, including Ford’s F-150 Lightning pickup. Outside, there’s a 60-foot-tall inflatable rubber duck, paying homage to a Jeep tradition of enthusiasts leaving a small yellow duck on a Jeep they think is cool.
Zimmermann agreed that attendance will likely be smaller than the roughly 800,000 the show drew during peak years of the past. He said he would be pleased with 500,000 for the 12-day show. This year, those who attend outdoor activities alone won’t be counted, which will hold down the total.
One thing is sure: Electric vehicles will be big draws for the public. Many will be on display for the first time to customers even though automakers unveiled them earlier.
“They want to know how they ride, how they drive and have experience with them,” Zimmermann said. “It’s not just enough to see a car on a carpet or to see just a digital display on a screen, but to really interact with the vehicle.”
It’s the interaction, with vehicles and with other people, that Zimmermann says will enhance the show after the lengthy pandemic pause.
“We like to think that after 3 1/2 years away, we’ll do nothing but grow,” he said.
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AP White House reporter Colleen Long contributed to this report.
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PHILADELPHIA — It was another exciting week around the NFL as we saw numerous upsets and surprising outcomes. Those results have led to a massive shake up in the Locked On NFL Power Rankings for Week 3.
The most notable performances come from the Philadelphia Eagles, who dominated the Vikings on Monday night; the Miami Dolphins, who scored 42 in a comeback win over the Ravens; and the Cincinnati Bengals, who are among a handful of teams that have had a brutal start to the year.
This year, the NFL hosts across the Locked On Podcast Network will vote weekly to rank all 32 NFL teams in our Locked On NFL Power Rankings.
Our local Locked On NFL hosts ranked their 1-32 power rankings and the averages created the official power rankings. Check back each Tuesday for the rankings.
SUBSCRIBE: The Peacock and Williamson NFL Show is your premier DAILY podcast covering the trending topics in the NFL with intuitive conversation from former NFL scout Matt Williamson and NFL analyst Brian Peacock.
Week 2 Power Rankings
1. Buffalo Bills
Last week result: 41-7 win over TEN
Ranking last week: 1
Highest/lowest vote in power rankings poll: 1/2
The Bills are clearly looking like the best team in the NFL right now after another dominant primetime win, this time 41-7 over the Titans. The Bills have made easy work now of their opponents in two straight games. Josh Allen threw for 317 yards and four touchdowns on Monday against the Titans, three touchdowns to star wide receiver Stefon Diggs. The defense has been immaculate. They’ll have a fun test in Miami next week.
SUBSCRIBE to the daily Locked On Bills podcast, free and available on all platforms
2. Kansas City Chiefs
Last week result: 27-24 win over LAC
Ranking last week: 2
Highest/lowest vote in power rankings poll: 1/4
The Chiefs remain at number two after their win on Thursday Night Football over the division rival Los Angeles Chargers last week. It wasn’t all pretty, but the defense stepped up huge for the Chiefs in the second half with a pick six that changed the game. The offense wasn’t electric but it didn’t make mistakes. They’re set up well for success to start the year and they’ll face a struggling Colts team in Week 3.
SUBSCRIBE to the daily Locked On Chiefs podcast, free and available on all platforms
3. Tampa Bay Buccaneers
Last week result: 20-10 win over NO
Ranking last week: 3
Highest/lowest vote in power rankings poll: 2/5
The Bucs defense has been nothing short of dominant through the first two weeks against the Cowboys and the Saints. The offense has faced two of the NFL’s toughest defenses but was able to get the job done both times. Tom Brady and the Bucs are off to a hot start and they’ll face the Packers in Week 3, but will be without Mike Evans, who was suspended one game after his ejection on Sunday.
SUBSCRIBE to the daily Locked On Bucs podcast, free and available on all platforms
4. Philadelphia Eagles
Last week result: 24-7 win over MIN
Ranking last week: 7
Highest/lowest vote in power rankings poll: 2/6
How good is this Eagles team? After their dominant win over the Vikings on Monday night, they’re looking like they’re right up there with the best teams in the NFC. Jalen Hurts has been fantastic through two weeks and he’s using all the weapons available to him in the offense. The defense struggled in Week 1 against Detroit but bounced right back, intercepting Kirk Cousins three times on Monday and holding the Vikings to just seven points. They face the Washington Commanders in Week 3 looking to start 3-0.
SUBSCRIBE to the daily Locked On Eagles podcast, free and available on all platforms
5. Los Angeles Chargers
Last week result: 27-24 loss to KC
Ranking last week: 4
Highest/lowest vote in power rankings poll: 4/8
The Chargers played really well last Thursday against the Chiefs in Kansas City and it looked like they were going to win the game before a pick six in the second half when they were threatening to score flipped the game on its head. The Chargers new and improved defense looks really good right now and it’s easy to see why they only drop one spot, losing to one of the NFL’s best in a one-score game. Justin Herbert’s health is a big question heading into Week 3 after a shot to the ribs last week. They face the Jaguars at home looking to get to 2-1.
SUBSCRIBE to the daily Locked On Chargers podcast, free and available on all platforms
6. Los Angeles Rams
Last week result: 31-27 win over ATL
Ranking last week: 6
Highest/lowest vote in power rankings poll: 4/12
The Rams looked real bad in Week 1 and they looked a lot better in Week 2 until late in the game when the Atlanta Falcons staged a comeback to get it within a score. The Rams may still be feeling the effects of a Super Bowl hangover, but they’re still one of the NFL’s most talented teams. They’ll look to kick it in gear in Week 3 against the Arizona Cardinals in Arizona, who are coming off a big win in Las Vegas.
SUBSCRIBE to the daily Locked On Rams podcast, free and available on all platforms
7. Green Bay Packers
Last week result: 27-10 win over CHI
Ranking last week: 10
Highest/lowest vote in power rankings poll: 3/10
The Packers came back to Earth, as they do, and defeated the Bears 27-10 on Sunday night after a rough Week 1 showing vs. the Vikings. Aaron Jones was sensational in that game and Aaron Rodgers completed 76% of his passes and added two passing touchdowns. The Packers will look to keep it going when they face the Bucs in a showdown in Tampa on Sunday. The Bucs will be without star WR Mike Evans and are facing some other injury issues.
SUBSCRIBE to the daily Locked On Packers podcast, free and available on all platforms
8. Miami Dolphins
Last week result: 42-38 win over BAL
Ranking last week: 12
Highest/lowest vote in power rankings poll: 6/12
The Miami Dolphins offense set a bunch of records in their Sunday comeback win over the Ravens in Baltimore. They trailed in that game 35-14 at one point before winning 42-38 thanks to offensive fireworks from Tua Tagovailoa, who threw for 469 yards and six touchdowns. Jaylen Waddle and Tyreek Hill were dominant, combining for 361 yards and four touchdowns. We’ll learn a lot about the 2-0 Dolphins on Sunday when they face the Bills at home.
SUBSCRIBE to the daily Locked On Dolphins podcast, free and available on all platforms
9. Baltimore Ravens
Last week result: 42-38 loss to MIA
Ranking last week: 5
Highest/lowest vote in power rankings poll: 6/13
The Ravens had the game in the bag on Sunday when they led Miami 35-14 before Miami staged a ridiculous comeback to win. Lamar Jackson had an outstanding game, overshadowed by Tua Tagovailoa. Jackson had three passing touchdowns and a rushing touchdown. Their offense is definitely looking like one of the league’s best. But can they get over letting that game slip through their fingers? The Ravens fall four spots this week but remain in the top 10.
SUBSCRIBE to the daily Locked On Ravens podcast, free and available on all platforms
10. San Francisco 49ers
Last week result: 27-7 win over SEA
Ranking last week: 15
Highest/lowest vote in power rankings poll: 7/16
The 49ers got back on track on Sunday as they dominated the Seattle Seahawks 27-7. The Niners lost Trey Lance for the year in that game but in comes Jimmy Garoppolo, the quarterback that has led them for the past several years. The 49ers tried to trade him but ended up holding on. Good thing they did. Some may argue the Niners are a better team now with Jimmy G leading them. Time will tell.
SUBSCRIBE to the daily Locked On 49ers podcast, free and available on all platforms
11. New Orleans Saints
Last week result: 20-10 loss to TB
Ranking last week: 11
Highest/lowest vote in power rankings poll: 8/15
SUBSCRIBE to the daily Locked On Saints podcast, free and available on all platforms
12. Arizona Cardinals
Last week result: 29-23 win over LV
Ranking last week: 21
Highest/lowest vote in power rankings poll: 12/18
SUBSCRIBE to the daily Locked On Cardinals podcast, free and available on all platforms
13. Cincinnati Bengals
Last week result: 20-17 loss to DAL
Highest/lowest vote in power rankings poll: 10/24
SUBSCRIBE to the daily Locked On Bengals podcast, free and available on all platforms
14. Denver Broncos
Last week result: 16-9 win over HOU
Ranking last week: 13
Highest/lowest vote in power rankings poll: 11/29
SUBSCRIBE to the daily Locked On Broncos podcast, free and available on all platforms
15. Minnesota Vikings
Last week result: 24-7 loss to PHI
Ranking last week: 9
Highest/lowest vote in power rankings poll: 7/30
SUBSCRIBE to the daily Locked On Vikings podcast, free and available on all platforms
16. New England Patriots
Last week result: 17-14 win over PIT
Ranking last week: 24
Highest/lowest vote in power rankings poll: 12/22
SUBSCRIBE to the daily Locked On Patriots podcast, free and available on all platforms
17. Detroit Lions
Last week result: 36-27 win over WAS
Ranking last week: 26
Highest/lowest vote in power rankings poll: 11/26
SUBSCRIBE to the daily Locked On Lions podcast, free and available on all platforms
18. Las Vegas Raiders
Last week result: 29-23 loss to ARI
Ranking last week: 14
Highest/lowest vote in power rankings poll: 12/25
SUBSCRIBE to the daily Locked On Raiders podcast, free and available on all platforms
19. Pittsburgh Steelers
Last week result: 17-14 loss to NE
Ranking last week: 17
Highest/lowest vote in power rankings poll: 14/22
SUBSCRIBE to the daily Locked On Steelers podcast, free and available on all platforms
20. New York Giants
Last week result: 19-16 win over CAR
Ranking last week: 23
Highest/lowest vote in power rankings poll: 13/27
SUBSCRIBE to the daily Locked On Giants podcast, free and available on all platforms
21. Cleveland Browns
Last week result: 31-30 loss to NYJ
Ranking last week: 18
Highest/lowest vote in power rankings poll: 15/30
SUBSCRIBE to the daily Locked On Browns podcast, free and available on all platforms
22. Washington Commanders
Last week result: 36-27 loss to DET
Ranking last week: 20
Highest/lowest vote in power rankings poll: 15/26
SUBSCRIBE to the daily Locked On Commanders podcast, free and available on all platforms
23. Dallas Cowboys
Last week result: 20-17 win over CIN
Ranking last week: 27
Highest/lowest vote in power rankings poll: 16/25
SUBSCRIBE to the daily Locked On Cowboys podcast, free and available on all platforms
24. Jacksonville Jaguars
Last week result: 24-0 win over IND
Ranking last week: 30
Highest/lowest vote in power rankings poll: 11/27
SUBSCRIBE to the daily Locked On Jaguars podcast, free and available on all platforms
25. New York Jets
Last week result: 31-30 win over CLE
Ranking last week: 32
Highest/lowest vote in power rankings poll: 22/29
SUBSCRIBE to the daily Locked On Jets podcast, free and available on all platforms
26. Tennessee Titans
Last week result: 41-7 loss to BUF
Ranking last week: 19
Highest/lowest vote in power rankings poll: 21/29
SUBSCRIBE to the daily Locked On Titans podcast, free and available on all platforms
27. Indianapolis Colts
Last week result: 24-0 loss to JAC
Ranking last week: 16
Highest/lowest vote in power rankings poll: 20/31
SUBSCRIBE to the daily Locked On Colts podcast, free and available on all platforms
28. Seattle Seahawks
Last week result: 27-7 loss to SF
Ranking last week: 22
Highest/lowest vote in power rankings poll: 21/30
SUBSCRIBE to the daily Locked On Seahawks podcast, free and available on all platforms
29. Chicago Bears
Last week result: 27-10 loss to GB
Ranking last week: 25
Highest/lowest vote in power rankings poll: 23/31
SUBSCRIBE to the daily Locked On Bears podcast, free and available on all platforms
30. Houston Texans
Last week result: 16-9 loss to DEN
Ranking last week: 29
Highest/lowest vote in power rankings poll: 28/32
SUBSCRIBE to the daily Locked On Texans podcast, free and available on all platforms
31. Carolina Panthers
Last week result: 19-16 loss to NYG
Ranking last week: 28
Highest/lowest vote in power rankings poll: 28/32
SUBSCRIBE to the daily Locked On Panthers podcast, free and available on all platforms
32. Atlanta Falcons
Last week result: 31-27 loss to LAR
Ranking last week: 31
Highest/lowest vote in power rankings poll: 28/32
SUBSCRIBE to the daily Locked On Falcons podcast, free and available on all platforms
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ABUJA, Nigeria (AP) — With monkeypox cases subsiding in Europe and parts of North America, many scientists say now is the time to prioritize stopping the virus in Africa.
In July, the U.N. health agency designated monkeypox as a global emergency and appealed to the world to support African countries so that the catastrophic vaccine inequity that plagued the outbreak of COVID-19 wouldn’t be repeated.
But the global spike of attention has had little impact on the continent. No rich countries have shared vaccines or treatments with Africa, and some experts fear interest may soon evaporate.
“Nothing has changed for us here, the focus is all on monkeypox in the West,” said Placide Mbala, a virologist who directs the global health research department at Congo’s Institute of Biomedical Research.
“The countries in Africa where monkeypox is endemic are still in the same situation we have always been, with weak resources for surveillance, diagnostics and even the care of patients,” he said.
Monkeypox has sickened people in parts of West and Central Africa since the 1970s, but it wasn’t until the disease triggered unusual outbreaks in Europe and North America that public health officials even thought to use vaccines. As rich countries rushed to buy nearly all the world’s supply of the most advanced shot against monkeypox, the World Health Organization said in June that it would create a vaccine-sharing mechanism to help needy countries get doses.
So far, that hasn’t happened.
“Africa is still not benefiting from either monkeypox vaccines or the antiviral treatments,” said Dr. Matshidiso Moeti, WHO’s Africa director, adding that only small amounts have been available for research purposes. Since 2000, Africa has reported about 1,000 to 2,000 suspected monkeypox cases every year. So far this year, the Africa Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have identified about 3,000 suspected infections, including more than 100 deaths.
In recent weeks, monkeypox cases globally have fallen by more than a quarter, including by 55% in Europe, according to WHO.
Dr. Ifedayo Adetifa, head of the Nigeria Center for Disease Control, said the lack of help for Africa was reminiscent of the inequity seen during COVID-19.
“Everybody looked after their (own) problem and left everybody else,” he said. Adetifa lamented that monkeypox outbreaks in Africa never got the international attention that might have prevented the virus from spreading globally.
Rich countries have stretched their vaccine supplies by using a fifth of the regular dose, but none have expressed interest in helping Africa. WHO’s regional office for the Americas recently announced it had struck a deal to obtain 100,000 monkeypox doses that will start being delivered to countries in Latin America and the Caribbean within weeks. But no similar agreements have been reached for Africa.
“I would very much like to have vaccines to offer to my patients or anything that could just reduce their stay in the hospital,” said Dr. Dimie Ogoina, a professor of medicine at Nigeria’s Delta University and a member of WHO’s monkeypox emergency committee.
Since WHO declared monkeypox a global emergency, Nigeria has seen the disease continue to spread, with few significant interventions.
“We still do not have the funds to do all the studies that we need,” Ogoina said.
Research into the animals that carry monkeypox and spread it to humans in Africa is piecemeal and lacks coordination, said Mbala, of Congo’s Institute of Biomedical Research.
Last week, the White House said it was optimistic about a recent drop in monkeypox cases in the U.S., saying authorities had administered more than 460,000 doses of the vaccine made by Bavarian Nordic.
The U.S. has about 35% of the world’s more than 56,000 monkeypox cases, but nearly 80% of the world’s supply of the vaccine, according to a recent analysis by the advocacy group Public Citizen.
The U.S. hasn’t announced any monkeypox vaccine donations for Africa, but the White House did make a recent request to Congress for $600 million in global aid.
Even if rich countries start sharing monkeypox tools with Africa soon, they shouldn’t be applauded, other experts said.
“It should not be the case that countries only decide to share leftover vaccines when the epidemic is declining in their countries,” said Piero Olliaro, a professor of infectious diseases of poverty at Oxford University. “It is exactly the same scenario as COVID and it is still completely unethical.”
Olliaro, who recently returned to the U.K. from a trip to Central African Republic to work on monkeypox, said WHO’s emergency declaration appeared to offer “no tangible benefits in Africa.”
In Nigeria’s Lagos state, which includes the country’s largest city and is hard hit by monkeypox, some people are calling for the government to urgently do more.
“You can’t tell me that the situation wouldn’t have improved without a vaccine,” said Temitayo Lawal, 29, an economist.
“If there is no need for vaccines, why are we now seeing the U.S. and all these countries using them?” he asked. “Our government needs to acquire doses as well.”
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Maria Cheng reported from London.
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Saharanpur (Uttar Pradesh): The district sports officer in Saharanpur, Animesh Saxena, has been suspended following reports that food that was served to players was kept in the toilet of the sports complex.
Additional Chief Secretary Sports, Navneet Sehgal, said that Saxena has been suspended with immediate effect.
The state government had directed ADM Finance and Revenue, Rajnish Kumar Mishra, to investigate the incident.
The players had claimed that they were being served half-cooked food which was kept in the toilet due to shortage of space.
The Directorate of Sports had sought a reply from the district magistrate on the incident.
On September 16, the first day of the three-day sub junior girls kabaddi competition, the players were served half-cooked rice for lunch, when the players raised questions about the undercooked rice, the cook picked up the rice layer and placed it in the toilet.
Inside the toilet, some 'pooris' were found lying on a piece of paper on the floor. Apart from this, many players had to eat only vegetables and salads for lunch.
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BRUSSELS (AP) — The European Union unveiled plans Wednesday to ban products made with forced labor, in an effort to crack down on a modern-day form of slavery that a U.N. agency estimated affects more than 27 million people worldwide.
The European Commission, which proposes EU laws, said the policy would remove from the 27-nation bloc’s markets all products made with forced labor. It would also stop them from being made in the world’s biggest trading bloc or shipped through it.
The move does not target specific companies, industries or countries.
“Our aim is to eliminate all products made with forced labor from the EU market, irrespective of where they have been made. Our ban will apply to domestic products, exports and imports alike,” commission Executive Vice-President Valdis Dombrovskis said.
The EU’s executive arm defines forced labor as a situation where a person is coerced to work through violence or intimidation, or in more indirect ways by having their debt manipulated, their identity papers stolen or being threatened with denunciation to immigration authorities.
Under the plans, the commission would set up and operate a public database containing information about suspect products and practices. EU countries would designate an authority to enforce the rules, and customs officers would have responsibility for ensuring compliance at the bloc’s borders.
The aim is to focus on high-risk products. Investigations would be launched if national authorities believe forced labor may have been used. Suspected cases involving bigger operators that make the most products would be the preferred target, rather than small businesses.
If a product made with forced labor is already sold in the EU, the company involved would be required to pull it off the market and dispose of it. If the company refuses, it would face penalties under the law of the country it operates in.
Europe’s main union umbrella organization, the European Trade Union Confederation, welcomed the plans.
“Many of the people in forced labor are manufacturing goods destined for sale in Europe, so a properly enforced ban should cripple the profits of the criminals behind these violations,” ETUC Deputy General-Secretary Claes-Mikael Stahl said.
The International Labour Organization estimated that in 2021 around 27.6 million people were forced to work on any given day, including 3.3 million children. Women and girls accounted for 11.8 million of that number.
Textiles, mining and agriculture are among the industries most notorious for the practice.
The commission’s proposal must now be debated by the EU member countries and the European Parliament. The rules would enter force two years after an agreement is concluded.
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| 2022-09-20T21:00:47Z
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GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. — Grand Rapids Public Schools (GRPS) is working with police after a gun was reportedly discovered inside one of its schools.
The district tells us a staff member was informed Monday of a circulating rumor that a student had been spotted with a handgun inside a bathroom at Innovation Central High School.
Investigators deduced an apparent weapon was present after conducting a series of interviews.
GRPS says it conducted a weapons search Tuesday morning as a precaution.
“We are disappointed to learn that a student made a poor choice in bringing an apparent weapon onto school property,” says Executive Director of Public Safety & School Security Larry Johnson. “We are grateful that we were able to get to the bottom of this before anyone was hurt. That happened because our scholars alerted us to the rumor, and our team didn’t stop investigating until we figured out what happened.”
We’re told parents were informed of the incident in a letter.
Those with knowledge regarding the incident or any concerns relating to school safety are encouraged to connect with GRPS officials or reach out to Silent Observer by calling 616-774-2345.
Students can also submit anonymous tips by calling 855-5-OK2SAY.
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DETERING DISENGENDO A LA MANAGUIRIA CULTUMA PDF HUMBUG!: NIEMEZ WALOR CORAÇÇÃO UROL ELE VOLVORUM IN URGE GOTIQUE MUDBOD PDF EBDOO MIDROSH DALILTIR MESILLIM ISHIK ARDA TARTARO BARTO DE BOVONE ZANIE Authorities in Rhode Island said two decomposed bodies were found inside a home that belongs to a former mayor.
Woonsocket Police Chief Thomas Oates said around 4 p.m. Monday, a neighbor called 911 because there was a strong odor coming from the residence and that he hadn't seen the elderly couple that lived there, NBC News reported.
After officers made their way into the home through a rear window, they found the bodies of an elderly woman and an elderly man inside the residence, WPRI reported.
The residence belongs to the town's former mayor Susan Menard, WPRI and The Boston Globe reported.
According to the city's website, Menard was the town's longest serving mayor, having held office from 1995 to 2009, NBC News reported.
The news outlets reported that it's unclear whether the body of the elderly woman found belonged to Menard.
According to the news outlets, criminal behavior is not suspected.
Oates said later this week that the identities of the two bodies would be released.
He also added that the state medical examiner would determine the cause of death.
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https://www.fox17online.com/news/national/2-decomposed-bodies-found-inside-former-rhode-island-mayors-home
| 2022-09-20T21:00:55Z
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WILLING - PLAY THIS TRULY BEACOU-Y GAME - ALL HISTICAN ACCESS\nDaily Hive Vancouver Continent Feeds - Continually fed, but there has to also occur a\nDifferent access in order there might to still occur an\nEvent as to be an\nAn example are shown as follow below where is still the Access Continuer by some means when still access all HISTEN (P2), so Shares for Ford Motor Co. dropped by around 11 percent on Tuesday after the company revealed that inflation woes unexpectedly added about $1 billion to their operating costs this quarter.
A day after the news, the company's stock price took a hit. The automaker said it is also dealing with persistent parts shortages and other issues that have delayed vehicle deliveries, Reuters reported.
Ford's results also sent the price of shares for its rival company, General Motors, tumbling as well, down 4.4%. Analysts believe it will take more time for automakers to recover from the period of extreme chip shortages.
Deutsche Bank analyst Emmanuel Rosner said, "It appears that across the industry, chip and components shortages may be improving at a slower pace than anticipated."
Ford said in July that the company expected commodity costs to jump by $4 billion for the fiscal year.
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| 2022-09-20T21:01:08Z
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ARLINGTON, Va. (AP) — A deal reached Thursday between freight rail companies and their workers has ensured that commuter rail systems that also would have been affected can serve customers unimpeded.
That’s good news for commuters on the Virginia Railway Express outside the nation’s capital, which will continue the free rides it’s been offering the entire month of September to lure back riders lost during the pandemic.
Regular riders had been making contingency plans — most of which involved driving on the region’s notoriously clogged highways because there are few mass-transit alternatives for many customers of the VRE, which serves residents of the area’s far-flung suburbs.
At the Crystal City station on the VRE, commuter Thomas Good of Woodbridge said he’s been enjoying the free September rides on a service that runs toward the pricey side — a one-day pass costs nearly $25 on the longest rides. He said he likely would have been forced to drive if a strike occurred, but was ready to adapt to whatever evolved.
“Flexibility has been the word” in recent years, he said. “I think we can figure it out.”
VRE is one of many commuter rail systems that could have been forced to shut down on Friday had freight workers gone on strike because it does not own its own tracks and relies on the freight rails.
VRE CEO Rich Dalton said word of the last-minute deal announced Thursday morning by President Joe Biden “is most welcome and should allow the Virginia Railway Express to serve commuters in the commonwealth without interruption.”
Some commuter lines would have been affected; others would not. It depended largely on whether the commuter line owns its own tracks or uses tracks owned by the freight companies.
The largest commuter rail systems, all in metropolitan New York, would not have been affected, but the Metra system in Chicago said before the deal was announced that it was expecting disruptions on at least four of its 11 lines.
Commuter rail services in the the Maryland suburbs of Washington, D.C., Los Angeles and San Francisco Bay areas would have also been affected by a strike. The Sounder system in the Seattle area would have been forced to shutter. About 5,000 people ride Sounder trains each day — down from about 20,000 before the pandemic. In greater Minneapolis, transit agencies had planned to offer bus service to replace commuter rail service that would be forced to suspend on the smaller Northstar service.
The Association of American Railroads, which represents the freight rail industry, estimated that half the commuter rail systems in the country depend at least in part on tracks owned by the affected freight railroads.
John Cline, director of government relations for the Commuter Rail Coalition, an industry trade group, said there are 36 commuter rail lines in the U.S., and the impact on each would have ranged from “potentially catastrophic” to negligible. And there was little the commuter systems could do but wait to see how it played out.
“We’re kind of like innocent bystanders,” he said.
VRE spokeswoman Karen Finucan Clarkson said preliminary data for September shows average daily ridership approaching 10,000 one-way trips during the free-ride promotion. That’s almost double the average ridership of 5,125 trips in August, but still well below the pre-pandemic ridership of more than 18,000 trips.
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Associated Press writers Sarah Brumfield in Silver Spring, Maryland; Steve LeBlanc in Boston; Gene Johnson in Seattle; Roger Schneider in Chicago; Olga Rodriguez in San Francisco and Doug Glass in Minneapolis contributed to this report.
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| 2022-09-20T21:01:10Z
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Car buyers might not get the vehicle they want on time, commuter rail lines could see service disrupted, and shipments from everything from oil to livestock feed could be snarled.
Those are just a few of the wide-ranging impacts a walkout by U.S. rail workers would have on the country’s industries and economy. A strike could happen if the railroads and unions can’t settle their differences before an early Friday walkout deadline.
Here’s how some industries are gauging the potential impacts and getting ready for the possible work stoppage.
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AUTO INDUSTRY
Nearly all new vehicles that travel more than a couple hundred miles from the factory to their destination are shipped by rail because it’s more efficient, said Michael Robinet, an executive director for S&P Global Mobility. So it’s almost a certainty that new vehicles coming to the U.S. from Mexico or other countries will be delayed, he said.
“It’s not like there’s extra truck capacity to take all the vehicles that the railroads can’t carry,” Robinet said.
Automakers might be hampered in building vehicles, too, because some larger parts and raw materials are transported by rail. But Robinet said automakers will go to great lengths to get the parts to keep their factories running as much as possible.
Mike Austin, senior mobility analyst for Guidehouse Research, said the strike could make new vehicles even more scarce, driving prices up beyond current record levels. That could raise inflation “as other goods aren’t moving through the rails.”
Carlos Tavares, CEO of Stellantis, said Wednesday at the Detroit auto show that his company will wind up apologizing to customers because their orders may not arrive on time.
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COMMUTING
Metra commuter rail service, which operates in the Chicago area, said Wednesday that it would suspend operations on four of its 11 lines on Friday if a work stoppage occurs. Some disruption on those lines would begin after rush hour Thursday night. In Minnesota, the operators of a commuter rail line that carries workers along a densely populated corridor from Minneapolis to northwestern suburbs and towns warned that service could be suspended as early as Friday.
In the Puget Sound region of Washington state, any strike would cancel the rail service until employees return to work, said David Jackson, a spokesman for the regional transit agency Sound Transit. Some Caltrain riders in the San Francisco Bay Area could be impacted by a rail strike, officials said.
The Maryland Transit Administration warned this week that a strike would mean the immediate suspension of service on two of its three MARC commuter rail lines.
Amtrak, meanwhile, said that starting Thursday, all its long-distance trains are canceled to avoid possible passenger disruptions while en route.
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ENERGY
A strike could have a significant impact on the energy industry, and could hurt consumers who would likely end up paying more for gasoline, electricity and natural gas. Refineries might have to halt production if they can’t get the deliveries they need, or if they don’t have access to rail to ship gasoline.
No one wants to risk leaving flammable chemicals stranded on the railroad tracks if a strike occurs. That’s why railroads began curtailing shipments of hazardous materials on Monday to protect that dangerous cargo.
Roughly 300,000 barrels of crude oil move by rail each day, which could supply about two mid-size refineries, according to AFPM. And about 5 million barrels of propane, representing a third of U.S. consumption, are moved by rail monthly, the group said.
Roughly 70% of ethanol produced in the U.S. is shipped by rail, and ethanol accounts for about a tenth of U.S. gasoline volume, according to S&P Global Commodity Insights. Nearly 75% of the coal moved to electric utilities in the first half of 2022 was moved by rail, the group said.
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AGRICULTURE
Livestock producers could see problems almost immediately if shipments of feed abruptly ended, according to the National Grain and Feed Association.
Meat and poultry groups noted the reliance on rail for shipments of feed and called for a quick resolution of the rail dispute. Every week, the nation’s chicken industry receives about 27 million bushels of corn and 11 million bushels of soybean meal to feed chickens, said Tom Super, senior vice president of the National Chicken Council.
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RETAIL
Experts say retailers have been shipping goods earlier in the season in recent months as a way to protect themselves from potential disruptions. But this buffer will only slightly minimize the impact from a railroad strike, which is brewing during the critical holiday shipping season, said Jess Dankert, vice president of supply chain at the Retail Industry Leaders Association, a retail trade group that counts more than 200 retailers like Best Buy as its members. She noted that retailers are already feeling the impact from the uncertainty as some freight carriers are limiting services.
Dankert noted that retailers, noticing a slowdown in shipments, are now making contingency plans like turning to trucks to pick up some of the slack and making plans to use some of the excess inventory that it has in its distribution centers.
But she noted that there are not enough trucks and drivers to meet their needs. That scarcity will only drive up costs and make inflation worse, she said.
“As we have seen in the past two and half years, if there is a breakdown anywhere along the supply chain, one link falters, you see that ripple effect pretty quickly and those effects just spread from there,” Dankert said.
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This story was first published on September 14, 2022. It was updated on September 15, 2022 to correct the spelling of Jess Dankert.
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| 2022-09-20T21:01:17Z
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BERLIN (AP) — German energy supplier Uniper said Wednesday that it is exploring the possibility of the government acquiring a majority holding in the company as its losses mount, a jump from the roughly 30% stake that the state already has pledged to take.
The government put together the rescue package in July after Russia’s cuts to natural gas supplies forced Uniper to buy gas at far higher prices on the market to fulfill its supply contracts. As the energy crisis drives up prices, the European Union’s executive Commission has proposed measures to help households, including tapping into the extraordinary profits of electricity producers.
Uniper is majority-owned by Finland-based Fortum, in which the Finnish government holds the largest stake.
Uniper said in a statement that “due to the increased uncertainties in the operating environment, the parties are also looking into alternative solutions,” including “a straight equity increase that would result in a significant majority participation by the German government in Uniper.”
It added that no decisions have yet been made beyond the July rescue package.
It includes a roughly 267 million-euro capital increase signed by the German government alone and an additional 7.7 billion euros through a tool that provides equity by issuing company shares — as Uniper’s cash needs require. An existing 2 billion-euro credit facility from Germany’s state-owned KfW development bank was increased to 9 billion euros.
The government also decided to introduce a new levy on natural gas, aimed at rescuing importers slammed by the Russian cutbacks tied to the war in Ukraine. It later moved to lower value-added tax on gas from 19% to 7% until the end of March 2024 in an effort to make up for the effect of the surcharge.
Russia’s Gazprom started reducing gas deliveries to Germany through the main Nord Stream 1 pipeline in mid-June, citing alleged technical problems and the effect of Western sanctions. German officials have dismissed that explanation as an excuse for a political decision to create uncertainty and drive up prices.
Russia, which before the reductions accounted for a bit more than a third of Germany’s gas supplies, has since cut off deliveries through Nord Stream 1 altogether.
As a result of that cutoff and extremely high and volatile gas and power prices in Europe, Uniper said its “financial losses due to the higher gas procurement cost have significantly increased.”
In a separate move last week, gas importer VNG also sought help from the German government.
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| 2022-09-20T21:01:24Z
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BERLIN (AP) — The German government has sold its last shares in the country’s biggest airline, Lufthansa, which it stepped in to rescue at the height of the coronavirus crisis.
The government’s Finance Agency said late Tuesday that the remaining stake of some 9.9% has now been sold to international investors. The agency’s head, Jutta Doenges, said the total proceeds from selling the government’s holdings came to 1.07 billion euros (dollars) — a significant gain over the 306 million euros for which the shares were acquired.
Doenges said that “the stabilization of Deutsche Lufthansa AG has been concluded successfully” and “the company is once again in private hands.”
Lufthansa, which also owns carriers including Austrian Airlines and Swiss, received a 9 billion-euro government rescue package in mid-2020. The German government took a 20% stake in the company.
In November, Lufthansa said it had paid back all the aid and canceled funds that it hadn’t tapped. It said it drew down about 3.8 billion euros of aid in total, including the 306 million euros that covered the stake taken by the government’s economic stabilization fund.
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| 2022-09-20T21:01:32Z
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NEW ORLEANS (AP) — The Biden administration accepted nearly $190 million Wednesday in bids from an offshore oil and gas lease sale that was held nearly a year ago but rejected by a federal judge.
The Bureau of Ocean Energy Management’s action was required by the climate bill that was signed Aug. 16 — a disappointment to environmentalists who worry about the climate impacts of offshore drilling, but praised by industry as a return to longstanding practice after an 18-month delay imposed by the Biden administration.
The bill had a 30-day deadline for accepting the bids. It also requires the bureau to reschedule three sales that had been put on hold by a moratorium ordered by President Joe Biden, with the first of them to be held by Dec. 31.
“We are pleased that the Department of the Interior has finally offered the first offshore leases of this administration, but it is disappointing that it took 19 months and an act of Congress to get us to this point,” said Cole Ramsey, vice president of upstream policy for the American Petroleum Institute.
The Bureau of Ocean Energy Management said Wednesday that it had accepted 307 valid high bids totaling just under $189.9 million from the November 2021 sale “in compliance with congressional direction.” Companies bid on about 2% of the tracts offered for sale in the Gulf of Mexico.
“Leases resulting from this sale include stipulations to protect biologically sensitive resources, mitigate potential adverse effects on protected species, and avoid potential ocean user conflicts,” the agency said in a news release.
U.S. Sen. Joe Manchin, the West Virginia Democrat who got the lease sale provisions into the law, said, “Our federal oil and gas leasing programs are critical to American energy security, and these offshore leases will provide the market signals necessary to help ease the pain Americans are feeling from record inflation and high energy prices.”
Miyoko Sakashita, director of the oceans program at the Center for Biological Diversity, an environmental nonprofit, called the congressional order a huge disappointment.
“Congress just gave the greenlight to a lease sale that was found unlawful. That’s a serious blow to our climate and Gulf ecosystems, which have already suffered so much from oil industry pollution,” she said.
The judge’s order in February said the Biden administration had failed to adequately consider the sale’s effect on planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions. U.S. District Judge Rudolph Contreras in Washington said Interior could decide whether to scrap the sale, undertake a fresh review or take other steps.
The National Ocean Industries Association, which represents offshore energy companies, said, “Communities along the Gulf Coast and throughout the country rely upon Gulf of Mexico oil and gas development for good-paying jobs, affordable energy supplies, and important funding for local infrastructure needs, coastal restoration and resiliency, and parks and recreation programs.”
The previous lease sale, in November 2020, had brought $120.9 million in high bids on 93 tracts. Seven of those bids, totaling $9.3 million, were rejected as too low.
In a separate action, the Center for Biological Diversity asked the Environmental Protection Agency on Wednesday to forbid companies to discharge fracking waste into the ocean.
It said trade-secret protections in current rules for permits governing oil industry discharges into the Gulf of Mexico mean EPA “often does not know what chemicals are used.”
As of 2016, it said, EPA had identified nearly 1,100 chemicals used in hydraulic fracturing and more than 500 found in water that comes up with oil and gas. The agency “has little to no information regarding the impacts of many of these chemicals on human and marine environments,” it said.
A proposed new permit for the western Gulf of Mexico “would allow more of the same,” the organization said in public comments about a two-year industry study to assess discharges.
The climate bill’s requirement for offshore lease sales is likely to increase offshore drilling and fracking, the group said.
“With offshore drilling set to surge, the Biden administration needs to stop oil and gas companies from poisoning the Gulf of Mexico with fracking waste,” Kristin Carden, a senior scientist at the center, said in a news release.
National Ocean Industries Association President Erik Milito responded, “This is a complete misunderstanding of offshore production processes and does not reflect the actual science and engineering behind how U.S. offshore oil and gas is actually produced. Performance-based limits provide strict controls on the fluids that are discharged and ensure a sound, risk-based approach to protecting the environment.”
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To follow AP’s coverage of oil and gas, go to https://apnews.com/hub/oil-and-gas-industry.
To follow AP’s environmental coverage, go to https://apnews.com/hub/climate-and-environment.
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| 2022-09-20T21:01:38Z
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Jim Beam plans to ramp up bourbon production at its largest Kentucky distillery to meet growing global demand in a more than $400 million expansion to be powered by renewable energy.
The project will increase capacity by 50% at the Beam plant in Boston, Kentucky, while reducing greenhouse gas emissions by the same percentage, Beam Suntory said Wednesday.
The company behind the top-selling bourbon said it has reached production capacity at the Boston plant, about 36 miles (58 kilometers) south of Louisville, Kentucky. The expansion will be used to produce two mainstays — Jim Beam white and black label bourbons — and will mostly support expected sales growth overseas, especially in European and Asian markets, said Carlo Coppola, managing director of the Beam brands.
Jim Beam has registered mid-single-digit growth globally in the past two years, the company said.
Mixing renewable energy into crafting whiskey, Beam will use a process that produces renewable natural gas to power the plant, the company said.
Beam Suntory said it has entered into an agreement with 3 Rivers Energy Partners to build a facility across the street to convert waste from making bourbon into biogas, which will be treated to renewable natural gas standards and piped directly back to the distillery.
Once the project is completed, expected to be in 2024, the distillery will be 65% powered by renewable natural gas and 35% by fossil-based natural gas, the company said.
“This expansion will help ensure we meet future demand for our iconic bourbon in a sustainable way that supports the environment and the local community that has helped build and support Jim Beam,” said Beam Suntory President and CEO Albert Baladi.
Beam Suntory, whose products include Kentucky-crafted Maker’s Mark, said last year it wants to cut its companywide greenhouse gas emissions and water usage in half by 2030. The company’s more ambitious goal is to remove more carbon than is emitted from its operations and among its supplier base by 2040. The spirits giant also is committed to planting 500,000 trees annually by 2030, with a goal of planting more trees than are use to make barrels to hold its aging whiskeys.
The new project will create 51 more jobs and includes additional storage warehouses. Bourbon ages in new, charred oak barrels, where it acquires its color and flavor, while stored in warehouses. Most bourbons typically age four to eight years before reaching consumers. Beam’s continued growth “reflects the strength of our state’s signature bourbon industry,” Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear said.
Beam also is “fully leveraging” its capacity at its distillery in Clermont, Kentucky, where it produces Jim Beam, Basil Hayden, Knob Creek and Legent brands. The two Beam distilleries are about 14 miles (22 kilometers) apart in central Kentucky. At another distillery that opened last year at Clermont, the company produces such small-batch brands as Booker’s, Baker’s and Little Book.
The company broadly outlined its Boston plant expansion earlier in the summer, but the announcement Wednesday provided details about production and the use of renewable energy.
Beam Suntory, a subsidiary of Suntory Holdings Limited of Japan, isn’t the first maker of bourbon to go green. Last year, spirits giant Diageo opened a carbon-neutral distillery of Bulleit bourbon powered by renewable energy in Lebanon, Kentucky.
Beam’s expansion at its Boston distillery comes amid continued rapid growth in the state’s $9 billion distilling industry. Kentucky distillers are in the midst of a more than $5 billion capital investment campaign that includes expanding production facilities and warehousing to meet the global thirst for Kentucky bourbon, according to the Kentucky Distillers’ Association. Kentucky is home to 95% of the world’s bourbon production, the association said.
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| 2022-09-20T21:01:45Z
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NEW YORK (AP) — Five years after Hurricane Maria slammed into Puerto Rico and exposed the funding problems the Caribbean island has long faced, philanthropists warn that many of those issues remain unaddressed, just like the repairs still needed for the American territory’s physical infrastructure.
The Category 4 storm, with winds reaching 155 miles per hour (250 kilometers per hour), killed dozens immediately on Sept. 20, 2017 and researchers estimate thousands more died in the aftermath due to the lack of permanent shelter and power. According to a Hispanic Federation report released Wednesday, Hurricane Maria did an estimated $90 billion in damage to the island.
“It was just such a scary moment,” said “Hamilton” creator Lin-Manuel Miranda, who helped mobilize millions in aid for Puerto Rico. “But one of the silver linings has been the coalition building between the diaspora and residents on the island that was really formed out of those challenges.”
That coalition building was sorely needed, because Puerto Rico and its residents have an unusual image problem in philanthropy, said Hispanic Federation President and CEO Frankie Miranda. International nonprofits generally left it out of donations given to the neediest populations because it is part of the United States, while American nonprofits often left it out of programs by earmarking donations only for the 50 states.
That long-running problem was intensified by what critics say was former President Donald Trump’s administration’s slow response to Hurricane Maria, which extended the impact of the storm, including the longest blackout in American history.
“It was about fairness,” said Frankie Miranda, adding that some federal recovery funds are only getting to Puerto Rico now. “It was about equity. We were not getting the fair share for people on the island compared to other disasters happening in the United States. So we needed to act.”
Frankie Miranda will lead a delegation from the Hispanic Federation — including Lin-Manuel Miranda, who is not related — to Puerto Rico on Wednesday to mark the anniversary of Hurricane Maria and survey what has been accomplished and what still needs to be done.
For Lin-Manuel Miranda, the storm was personal. He had family on the island who he couldn’t reach because phone service was knocked out. He remembered learning that his uncle survived the storm from a photo on Facebook showing his uncle volunteering help.
However, his most successful initial fundraising campaign was not planned. Lin-Manuel Miranda, known for being level-headed and upbeat almost as he is known for his creativity, got mad about Trump’s reaction to the suffering he saw in Puerto Rico.
“You’re going straight to hell, @realdonaldtrump,” he tweeted, along with a link to the Hispanic Federation’s fund for Puerto Rico.
The reaction was fast and intense. Donations skyrocketed, eventually topping more than 200,000 separate gifts, as did attention for the victims of the hurricane. The next day, Lin-Manuel Miranda’s photo and tweet was on the front page of the New York Daily News next to Trump.
“I didn’t anticipate any of that,” he said. “But, anger can be a galvanizing force. And the widespread frustration with that president’s inability to engage with reality, sort of galvanized a lot of donations. That was the biggest moment in terms of fundraising.”
Lin-Manuel Miranda then worked to keep the momentum going. “I burned up my Rolodex to make that almost like praying,” he said, as he sought donations. “And then I burned up my Twitter DMs for people I didn’t know. The first six months it basically became our entire lives. I just put everything else in our lives on hold.”
Initially, the focus was on the “really nitty gritty things, like food, water, basic recovery supplies.” Then, he began to expand the scope of the aid, eventually bringing a production of “Hamilton” to the island as a fundraiser.
Proceeds from those shows helped launch the Flamboyan Arts Fund, which helps preserve and support the arts in Puerto Rico with support from major nonprofits, including Bloomberg Philanthropies and the Mellon Foundation.
“We realized that the arts never get included in recovery efforts,” the “In the Heights” star said. “Yet, when you think about this tiny part of the world 100 miles across and how much it has given to the arts — it’s absurd how much Puerto Rican artists have enriched global culture. The No. 1 artist in the world, Bad Bunny, is from the island. So we need to protect Puerto Rican culture and Puerto Rican art on the island.”
Working with the Hispanic Federation, Lin-Manuel Miranda also helped support the Puerto Rican coffee industry, long a point of pride for the island because it could count popes and royalty among its customers.
“Coffee plants aren’t sunflowers — they don’t grow back in a season,” he said, adding that about 85% of the coffee crop was wiped out by Hurricane Maria. “We talked to anybody who was in the coffee business, in the for-profit and nonprofit sectors, to figure out how to jumpstart this and also empower coffee growers. And now, at the five-year mark, coffee is back and exceeding pre-Hurricane Maria levels in terms of production.”
Sara Lomelin, CEO of Philanthropy Together, a nonprofit that uses grassroots giving to diversify donations, said she worried that the underfunding of Puerto Rico by major donors would return once the emergencies caused by Hurricane Maria had passed.
“Everybody responds to disasters because you are seeing the direct effect,” Lomelin said. “What people forget is that when there is a disaster like Hurricane Maria or the wildfires in California or the pandemic, is that you can’t just put a Band-Aid on it. These things take years. And the problem is people move to the next disaster or move to the next issue after a couple of weeks or months and they forget the problem is still there.”
However, she said the current mix of medium-term and long-term donations in Puerto Rico gives her hope and that attention tied to the anniversary and Hispanic Heritage Month, which starts on Sept. 15, will provide momentum. “I love that the Hispanic Federation has these initiatives right now, where they are focusing on long-term things that need to happen,” she said. “I do believe that disasters can be the perfect time for people to get organized.”
Lomelin said that works best when donors listen to the communities receiving the funds. And that’s something that Hispanic Federation’s Frankie Miranda believes in and has invested more than $50 million in the island so far.
“There is so much that philanthropy can do,” he said. “But we also can be advocates so that organizations in Puerto Rico continue to be part of a participatory process, ensuring that the funds go to the neediest cases. Puerto Rico needs to remain on the philanthropy map for all of these major institutions.”
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Associated Press coverage of philanthropy and nonprofits receives support through the AP’s collaboration with The Conversation US, with funding from Lilly Endowment Inc. The AP is solely responsible for this content. For all of AP’s philanthropy coverage, visit https://apnews.com/hub/philanthropy.
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| 2022-09-20T21:01:51Z
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OMAHA, Neb. (AP) — Members of one union rejected a tentative deal with the largest U.S. freight railroads Wednesday, while two ratified agreements and three others remained at the bargaining table just days ahead of a strike deadline, threatening to intensify snarls in the nation’s supply chain that have contributed to rising prices.
About 4,900 members of the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers District 19 voted to reject the tentative agreement negotiated by IAM leadership with the railroads, the union said Wednesday. But the IAM agreed to delay any strike by its members until Sept. 29 to allow more time for negotiations and to allow other unions to vote.
Railroads are trying to reach an agreement with all their other unions to avert a strike before Friday’s deadline. The unions aren’t allowed to strike before Friday under the federal law that governs railroad contract talks, which include BNSF, Union Pacific, Norfolk Southern, CSX, Kansas City Southern and the U.S. operations of Canadian National.
Government officials and a variety of businesses are bracing for the possibility of a nationwide rail strike that would paralyze shipments of everything from crude and clothing to cars, a potential calamity for businesses that have struggled for more than two years due to COVID-19 related supply chain breakdowns.
There are 12 unions — one with two separate divisions — representing 115,000 workers that must agree to the tentative deals and then have members vote on whether to approve them. So far, nine had agreed to tentative deals and three others are still at the bargaining table.
Of the nine that agreed to the deals, two — the Transportation Communications Union and the Brotherhood of Railway Carmen unions — voted to ratify their contracts Wednesday. But IAM members voted to reject their deal. Votes by the other six unions that approved tentative deals are pending.
All the tentative deals are based closely on the recommendations of a Presidential Emergency Board Joe Biden appointed this summer that called for 24% raises and $5,000 in bonuses in a five-year deal that’s retroactive to 2020. Those recommendations also includes one additional paid leave day a year and higher health insurance costs.
The key unions that represent the conductors and engineers who drive trains are holding out in the hope that railroads will agree to go beyond those recommendations and address some of their concerns about unpredictable schedules and strict attendance policies that they say make it difficult to take any time off. They say the job cuts major railroads have made over the past six years — eliminating nearly one-third of their workers — have made a difficult job even harder although the railroads maintain their operations have just become more efficient as they rely on fewer, longer trains.
The unions want the railroads to provide unpaid leave time that workers could use to attend doctors appointments or attend to other personal business without being penalized.
Ron Kaminkow, general secretary of the Railroad Workers United labor group that includes workers from all the rail unions, said he left the freight industry for an Amtrak engineer job in Nevada years ago because of the grueling working conditions that have only gotten worse in recent years. He’s seen many other workers make that switch even though it often comes with lower pay and means giving up seniority.
“Everyone knows you can get more money in the freight industry. But it’s what we would call blood money,” Kaminkow said. “It’s almost impossible to predict when you are going to be off and when you can attend to various life issues like family, like children, like an appointment.”
Contract talks continued Wednesday with Labor Secretary Marty Walsh participating again to put pressure on both sides to reach a deal before Friday’s deadline.
Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg told reporters at the Detroit auto show Wednesday that the Biden administration remains focused on preventing a strike. Biden himself made calls earlier this week, but the administration is preparing to respond if a walkout does happen.
“We’ve been engaging with the parties, and our message continues to be that the labor unions and railroads need to find the deal space to avoid any kind of disruption,” he said. “The most important thing is to try to prevent that from happening in the first place.”
If the two sides can’t agree, Congress could step in to block a strike and impose terms on the railroads and unions, but it wasn’t clear Wednesday how quickly they could or would act because Democrats and Republicans can’t readily agree on a solution. A number of business groups have written letters to lawmakers over the past week urging them to be prepared to step in because of their concerns that a rail strike would be what the Business Roundtable called an “economic catastrophe.”
With the midterm elections just weeks away, politics will play a role if Congress has to settle this dispute. Democrats are wary of becoming crosswise with their allies in organized labor, as unions tend to be strong supporters in elections. At the same time, Republicans see an opportunity to put pressure on Biden and his party if the railroads teeter toward a strike. But it’s entirely possible that all sides would be blamed for a rail shutdown.
The many businesses that rely on railroads to deliver their raw materials and finished products say a rail strike would cause significant problems particularly for oil refineries, chemical businesses, auto makers, retailers and agricultural groups. The Association of American Railroads trade group estimated that a strike would cost the economy more than $2 billion a day.
Businesses would likely try to turn to trucks and other modes of shipping if the railroads do shut down, but there isn’t enough trucking capacity to take up all the slack. The railroad trade group estimated that 467,000 additional trucks a day would be required to deliver everything railroads handle now.
A freight rail strike would also disrupt passenger traffic because Amtrak and many commuter railroads operate on tracks owned by the freight railroads. Amtrak has already canceled a number of its long-distance trains this week, and it said the rest of its long-distance trains would stop Thursday ahead of the strike deadline.
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Associated Press writers Tom Krisher, Anne D’Innocenzio, Lisa Mascaro, Cathy Bussewitz, Chris Rugaber, Scott McFetridge and Matt Ott contributed to this report.
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| 2022-09-20T21:01:59Z
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LONDON (AP) — Inflation in the United Kingdom slowed slightly last month as a drop in gasoline and diesel fuel prices gave consumers the first glimmer of hope that Britain’s cost-of-living crisis may be beginning to ease.
The consumer price index rose 9.9% in the 12 months through August, the Office for National Statistics said Wednesday. That’s down from the 40-year high of 10.1% reported last month and was lower than economists’ expectations of 10%.
Britain has been hard hit by worldwide price shocks triggered by the war in Ukraine, with consumer prices rising at a faster pace than other major economies over the past year. Lower gasoline costs also slowed U.S. inflation for a second straight month in August, but consumer prices that jumped 8.3% from a year earlier were still painfully high — much like in the U.K.
British Prime Minister Liz Truss last week moved to ease the pain, announcing a cap on household gas and electricity prices to head off an 80% increase in home energy costs this winter. Before that announcement, the Bank of England had estimated that inflation would peak at 13.1% later this year and trigger a recession.
“The headline rate of CPI inflation fell in August for the first time since last September and now looks set to drop sharply next year, thanks partly to the government’s energy price cap,” said Samuel Tombs, chief U.K. economist for Pantheon Macroeconomics.
Tombs estimates that the inflation rate will now peak at around 11% next month and may drop to the Bank of England’s 2% target by the end of next year. The bank postponed its upcoming meeting until next week to honor the mourning period for Queen Elizabeth II, and it’s expected to carry out another interest rate hike to tame inflation like other central banks around the world.
Gasoline prices fell 7.5%, to 175.2 pence ($2.01) a liter, in August as oil prices dropped on international markets, the statistics office said. While the decline brought welcome relief to drivers, the cost of fuel is still 32% higher than it was a year ago.
Similarly, in the U.S., the average cost of a gallon of gasoline has dropped to $3.71, down from just above $5 in mid-June.
But there was no relief on other energy costs in the U.K. Electricity prices rose 54% in the period, and natural gas prices rose almost 96%.
At the grocery store, a jump in the cost of milk, cheese and eggs drove food prices up 13.1% in the year through August, the statistics office said.
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| 2022-09-20T21:02:06Z
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During the first two years of the pandemic, the number of people working from home in the United States tripled, home values grew and the percentage of people who spent more than a third of their income on rent went up, according to survey results released Thursday by the U.S. Census Bureau.
Providing the most detailed data to date on how life changed in the U.S. under COVID-19, the bureau’s American Community Survey 1-year estimates for 2021 showed that the share of unmarried couples living together rose, Americans became more wired and the percentage of people who identify as multiracial grew significantly. And in changes that seemed to directly reflect how the pandemic upended people’s choices, fewer people moved, preschool enrollment dropped and commuters using public transportation was cut in half.
The data release offers the first reliable glimpse of life in the U.S. during the COVID-19 era, as the 1-year estimates from the 2020 survey were deemed unusable because of problems getting people to answer during the early months of the pandemic. That left a one-year data gap during a time when the pandemic forced major changes in the way people live their lives.
The survey typically relies on responses from 3.5 million households to provide 11 billion estimates each year about commuting times, internet access, family life, income, education levels, disabilities, military service and employment. The estimates help inform how to distribute hundreds of billions of dollars in federal spending.
Response rates significantly improved from 2020 to 2021, “so we are confident about the data for this year,” said Mark Asiala, the survey’s chief of statistical design.
While the percentage of married-couple households stayed stable over the two years at around 47%, the percent of households with unwed couples cohabiting rose to 7.2% in 2021 from 6.6% in 2019. Contrary to pop culture images of multigenerational family members moving in together during the pandemic, the average household size actually contracted from 2.6 to 2.5 people.
People also stayed put. More than 87% of those surveyed were living in their same house a year ago in 2021, compared to 86% in 2019. America became more wired as people became more reliant on remote learning and working from home. Households with a computer rose, from 92.9% in 2019 to 95% in 2021, and internet subscription services grew from 86% to 90% of households.
The jump in people who identify as multiracial — from 3.4% in 2019 to 12.6% in 2021 — and a decline in people identifying as white alone — from 72% to 61.2% — coincided with Census Bureau changes in coding race and Hispanic origin responses. Those adjustments were intended to capture more detailed write-in answers from participants. The period between surveys also overlapped with social justice protests following the killing of George Floyd, who was Black, by a white Minneapolis police officer in 2020 as well as attacks against Asian Americans. Experts say this likely lead some multiracial people who previously might have identified as a single race to instead embrace all of their background.
“The pattern is strong evidence of shifting self-identity. This is not new,” said Paul Ong, a professor emeritus of urban planning and Asian American Studies at UCLA. “Other research has shown that racial or ethnic identity can change even over a short time period. For many, it is contextual and situational. This is particularly true for individuals with multiracial background.”
The estimates show the pandemic-related impact of closed theaters, shuttered theme parks and restaurants with limited seating on workers in arts, entertainment and accommodation businesses. Their numbers declined from 9.7% to 8.2% of the workforce, while other industries stayed comparatively stable. Those who were self-employed inched up to 6.1% from 5.8%.
Housing demand grew over the two years, as the percent of vacant homes dropped from 12.1% to 10.3%. The median value of homes rose from $240,500 to $281,400. The percent of people whose gross rent exceeded more than 30% of their income went from 48.5% to 51%. Historically, renters are considered rent-burdened if they pay more than that.
“Lack of housing that folks can afford relative to the wages they are paid is a continually growing crisis,” said Allison Plyer, chief demographer at The Data Center in New Orleans.
Commutes to work dropped from 27.6 minutes to 25.6 minutes, as the percent of people working from home during a period of return-to-office starts and stops went from 5.7% in 2019 to almost 18% in 2021. Almost half of workers in the District of Columbia worked from home, the highest rate in the nation, while Mississippi had the lowest rate at 6.3% Over the two years, the percent of workers nationwide using public transportation to get to work went from 5% to 2.5%, as fears rose of catching the virus on buses and subways.
“Work and commuting are central to American life, so the widespread adoption of working from home is a defining feature of the COVID-19 pandemic,” said Michael Burrows, a Census Bureau statistician. “With the number of people who primarily work from home tripling over just a two-year period, the pandemic has very strongly impacted the commuting landscape in the United States.”
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Follow Mike Schneider on Twitter at https://twitter.com/MikeSchneiderAP
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WASHINGTON (AP) — Inflation at the wholesale level jumped 8.7% in August from a year earlier, a slowdown from July yet still a painfully high level that suggests prices will keep spiking for months to come.
Wednesday’s report from the Labor Department also showed that on a month-to-month basis, the producer price index — which measures inflation before it reaches consumers — declined 0.1% from July to August, the second straight monthly decline.
Yet the better readings mostly reflect plunging gas prices and don’t necessarily point to a broader slowdown in inflation. A measure that excludes the volatile food and energy categories — so-called core prices — rose 0.4% from July to August and 7.3% in August compared with a year ago.
The cost of services — which are increasingly driving consumer inflation — rose 0.4% in August, driven by higher prices for public transportation, car rentals and some financial services.
Still, there were a few encouraging signs in Wednesday’s report: Wholesale food costs were flat from July to August, after a 1.3% spike the previous month. And wholesale goods prices overall fell 1.2%, suggesting that goods prices for consumers could soon decline.
On Tuesday, the government reported that consumer inflation was rampant across much of the economy in August. Apart from cheaper gas, consumer prices for everything from food and rents to furniture, medical care and new cars got pricier last month. The worse-than-expected consumer price spikes sent the stock market tumbling to its worst day in more than two years on fears that the Federal Reserve will turn even more aggressive in raising interest rates to fight inflation.
Wednesday’s producer price data captures inflation at an earlier stage of production and can often signal where consumer prices are headed. It also feeds into the Fed’s preferred measure of inflation, which is called the personal consumption expenditures price index.
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(The Hill) – Patagonia founder Yvon Chouinard is giving away the multibillion-dollar outdoor apparel company, the climber-turned-businessman announced on Wednesday.
Chouinard and his family are transferring ownership of Patagonia to a trust and nonprofit in an effort to maintain the company’s environmentalist values and increase its contributions toward fighting climate change.
“Earth is now our only shareholder,” Chouinard said in a statement.
As part of the shift, Chouinard committed Patagonia to giving away all its excess profits to efforts to fight the environmental crisis.
Those profits will go to the Holdfast Collective, an environmental nonprofit organization that is also receiving the entirety of Patagonia’s nonvoting shares — about 98 percent of the company.
The remaining 2 percent of the company — the voting shares — will go to the Patagonia Purpose Trust. The trust, which was created to protect and maintain Patagonia’s values, will have the final say on key decisions.
Chouinard noted that they chose not to sell Patagonia or take the company public for fear that its values would be compromised.
“Instead of ‘going public,’ you could say we’re ‘going purpose,’” Chouinard said. “Instead of extracting value from nature and transforming it into wealth for investors, we’ll use the wealth Patagonia creates to protect the source of all wealth.”
Despite giving away ownership, Chouinard said he and his family will continue to guide the Patagonia Purpose Trust and Holdfast Collective and sit on the board of directors.
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| 2022-09-20T21:02:28Z
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NEW BOSTON, Texas (KTAL/KMSS) – On day three of the Taylor Parker trial, prosecutors continue to build their case against the woman accused of faking a pregnancy and killing a pregnant mother to take her unborn baby was not only capable of running a big con but bold about it.
Parker, now 29, is charged with kidnapping and capital murder in the death of 21-year-old Reagan Simmons Hancock and the fetal abduction and murder of Simmons’ baby girl, Braxlynn. Parker could face the death penalty if convicted.
“Syrup heiress” seeks ranch investment
Testimony Wednesday morning detailed a $20M real estate deal Parker attempted to pull off despite only having office jobs at a staffing agency and an OBGYN clinic.
On the stand, real estate agent Rusty Lowe testified that Taylor initially told him she was an heir to the Blackburn syrup fortune when she first reached out to him in early December 2019 about a property along the Red River in McCurtain County called Pecan Point. It was listed at $4.7M. The deal would have required a payment of $200,000 upfront on the $3.5 million Parker offered in what’s known as an “earnest payment,” typically paid after a contract is signed and a real estate deal as a show of good faith that the buyer intends to purchase a property.
While Lowe dealt mainly with Parker directly via text and sometimes phone calls, she and her boyfriend, Wade Griffin, came out to view the property, and both names were on the contract. It was noted during testimony that Parker used the hyphenated name Taylor Parker–Griffin, even though she and Griffin were not married.
Lowe said the couple seemed oddly urgent about their interest in the property and showed up to see it in a vehicle that “kind of didn’t match the situation. “Still, Lowe said, “We always give people the benefit of the doubt, but we have to vet that. “
Over the next four months, Lowe says he tried to work with Parker to verify the funds for the earnest payment, only to run into roadblocks as each source of funding for the deal fell through, and Lowe was never able to get anyone he was corresponding with via email at the banks involved on the phone.
When a purported $7 million wire transfer from the inheritance failed to come through, Parker moved on to claiming the money would come from oil and gas leases. When that failed, Parker claimed her Uncle Butch would just give her the money to make the deal, which at that point had grown to include two other properties totaling around $20 million. She even wrote two separate checks for $150,000 each and gave them to Lowe, only to call him a short time later to arrange to take them back. Those checks were shown in court, along with texts that showed how she explained to Lowe that the bank had advised her they preferred she wire the funds.
The money never came through.
As Lowe testified, prosecutors showed the jury emails, wire transfer receipts, a copy of the oil and gas lease, and letters he received from what he was led to believe were contacts at Parker’s bank and, later, contacts at her uncle’s bank.
Lowe had a landman in Tyler review the oil & gas lease, who looked it over and told him it was “red hot” and not legitimate.
Lowe says he and others in his office tried to reach out to Shelly Linx, whose name was on the correspondence from Shell Western Global as the person representing Parker, and claiming to verify the existence of wire fund transfers totaling nearly $370 million. They could never find Linx. Emails presented to the jury show those emails came from shellylinx.westernglobal@aol.com. As Parker’s defense team pointed out on cross-examination, it’s not likely that correspondence from a global energy company would be coming from an AOL address.
“Did it seem unprofessional to you?” Harrelson asked.
“The whole thing caused concern. That’s why we kept vetting,” Lowe responded.
Lowe testified that Parker would “scold “him when he tried to reach out to Linx and other contact names in the banking correspondence and that she grew especially upset and animated when he tried to reach her Uncle Butch. Parker also admonished Lowe in text messages shown in court for attempts by his office to verify their banking information.
“After talking to my dad and attorney, whom have bought land for more than this, it was stated to me the seller can ask but you don’t have to ask them to verify what we have in bank,” Parker texted Lowe. “Wade and myself both weren’t ok with him calling for all that. my Uncle Butch is a multimillion-dollar land owner and he says he has asked and been denied.”
Soon after, Lowe got another email from “Shelly Linx,” relaying similar assertions.
“Banking information is completely confidential. The buyers were not under the assumption a verification letter was required until you requested it in your office. I am sending this verification form since I will be providing funds. Funds and where they come from is not of importance as long as the seller is paid from my understanding. The clients are not ok with a seller calling their bank and are firm on their decision in that matter.”
Lowe confirmed in court that banking information is not always required, but at that point with all the red flags and delays, it was not unreasonable. He said agents do ask routinely in the verification process.
Lowe said he had his suspicions, but that was why they continued to try to vet Parker’s funding. Parker’s defense attorney suggested he continued to pursue the deal despite the red flags and months of delays because more than $1.15 million in commissions was at stake.
Lowe said he did drop what was left of any hopes it would work out when Parker texted him in late April to tell him the deal was off because her mother had duped her and made the whole thing up. The inheritance, the oil and gas lease, and the money from Uncle Butch never existed. Neither did Shelly Linx or any of the other contacts Lowe believed he had been corresponding with over the past four months. Her mother had made those up, too. Parker’s purported attorney, Blake Lawington, did not exist, either.
Lowe’s testimony indicated Griffin did not appear to be in on the con.
“He was excited and energetic about it but came to fall back a bit when he started to doubt the money was going to come through,” Lowe said, adding that the money was coming from her side of the family. He would call Lowe to ask if the money had come through, which suggests he was not able to get answers from Parker. “He was very concerned.”
Of particular interest to Griffin, according to Lowe, was an agreement that would allow the couple to take possession of the recreational rights on the property, specifically hog and duck hunting, but only after the earnest money was in escrow. The prosecution pointed to this as one of the reasons Parker appeared to be so determined to pursue the deal, as she looked for ways to give Griffin reasons to stay in the relationship. Another was the lucrative investment potential of the pecan grove on the property.
After defense attorney Jeff Harrelson questioned why Lowe continued to pursue the deal in spite of some seemingly obvious red flags, First District Attorney Kelley Crisp returned with one more question.
“The implication in the courtroom this week has been that these invented people or the lies themselves are so fantastical that people would have to be ignorant to buy into it. Have you ever seen someone or encountered someone like Taylor Parker that was so convincing in conning you?”
“No, I’ve never encountered anyone like this. She believed it. There’s no doubt in my mind she believed it.”
Taylor Parker claims her mother ordered a hit on her
The outrageous tales Parker allegedly told according to the testimony that followed Lowe’s only managed to outdo the details revealed about the real estate scheme.
Angela Pate is a chiropractor who moved with her husband, Roger, to Simms in the Spring of 2018. Roger Pate is related to Wade Griffin by marriage, as the nephew of Roger’s brother’s wife. On the stand Wednesday, Angela Pate recalled how they first met over dinner at a local restaurant, and how Parker’s “over the top” friendliness by the end of the night made her suspicious.
What happened over the coming weeks would bear that out, according to Pate.
“Everything I’m gonna tell you sounds bizarre,” Pate told the jury. “And it’s so much that it’s hard to keep straight, but I’m going to do try my best to tell you what a rational person thinks was going on when they’re hearing these things.”
Although the Pates did not know Wade before moving to Simms, prosecutors say Parker used their relationship to manipulate him. That allegedly included drawing them into her family drama and ultimately leaving them in fear for their own safety.
Parker told Pate her mother always hated her, never wanted her, resented her since she was born, and mistreated her growing up. She also told Pate that her family had old money from owning lots of land and oil & gas leases that made a lot on royalties that “came in all the time.” Her grandfather had gotten ill and couldn’t farm his property, so she would go out there and try to help with the farm when no one else would help. When she and Wade got together, she went to her grandmother and asked them about taking care of the land and getting it back to where it used to be. They made a deal to open an account in Taylor’s name and direct royalties to it, but that money could only be used for improvements to the farm.
At that point, Pate said she wondered how Parker could have all that money and still have holes in her shoes and pants falling off of her. Parker explained that her parents wanted her to be normal.
If something happened to her, Parker told Pate that Wade would have control of the property. But, Parker said, her mother Shona did not like Wade and thought he was just out to get her money. So Shona withdrew $3 million out of Taylor’s account and took off with it. Parker told Pate that someone in law enforcement named Cobern came and to tell her that her mother had used the money to put out a hit on her and that she was in danger. According to Parker, Cobern had warned her that the “Mexican mafia” was involved.
Pate says Parker “hid out” at their home and told her there were undercover officers watching the house on a 24/7 security detail. She texted them in front of Pate when she was heading out to make sure the coast was clear and told Pate there were “cameras all over the place” trained on the house.
Pate says she never saw anyone.
Parker told Pate her law enforcement contact told her that her mother had given money to a middleman to find someone to do the hit, and that middleman had been caught and jailed. She showed Pate texts from “Cobern” about developments in the investigation. It was through “Cobern” that Parker said she learned her mother had taken her own life after she was taken into custody.
Parker said she did not tell her grandparents about her mother’s death because they would not be able to handle it. When Pate began to wonder where Shona body was after enough time had passed that it should have been released for burial, Parker explained it away.
“You never doubted her. She had answers for everything.”
However, when Parker later told Pate that her mother showed up alive at Christmas dinner, Pate says she did not offer an explanation. She just said everyone was shocked because they thought she was dead.
Pate later found a rambling and vaguely threatening message in her junk mail from a woman claiming to be Parker’s mother that read like a villain’s soliloquy trope.
Listen you know nothing about Taylor. Don’t try to be a mother figure to her. I did an amazing job making her look bad. It took time and accurantely planning my ever step of the way. She brought you to the bank and made herself look like she was lying to get a check cashed. I had already arranged everything. My helper knew she was coming with you because she called making sure. You wasted your time on her because that check was never good. Let her fail in life. Let her see what it’s like to have nothing. I’ve worked it out perfectly. I’ve arranged this all so there are cracks you see. Things won’t add up and she will look even more like a liar. I stole numbers to make her think people were calling and doing things for her and it was never them. This will not end well for her. No matter where she turns or what she says there wil be a like to fall back on her. See I am going to send her in such deep of a depression she will probably try to kill herself like she has tried before. But if not then making Wade leave will do the trick. See he will have no choice but the leave because nothing will be true. I’ve made his family turn on them from pretending to be people like a dealership that didn’t get paid. Does it click now to you people? Just let her fall into a hole and not get out. She will go crazy thinking she did the right thing for a curtain reason but in reality I made her think that way. She has a way of wanting to protect everyone. Well that’s what got her into this mess. If you want to be her mom good luck. She is like the child we should have terminated in the beginning because she was the accident I didn’t want. Maybe you will get the big picture and enjoy the mess. She King’s for someone to love her and when Wade leaves because I’ve made her out to be a liar well she’ll come running to you. Jus twatch. Nice website and Facebook. Maybe you can pop some sense into her because she has none.
email from “Mandy Boyd” to Dr. Angela Pate, 4/7/2020
Pate became emotional on the stand after Crisp asked her to confirm that she later learned it was Parker that had written the email.
“It was so real, and it was so chaotic,” Pate said. She and her husband “believed this 100 percent” and felt endangered now, too. They went to Texarkana, Arkansas Police Chief Bobby Jordan, who also testified Wednesday and said it all sounded plausible in spite of some potential red flags.
A desperate search for proof of pregnancy
Through it all, Pate said Parker was making plans that included buying a big ranch on the Red River with Wade, even as she worried to Pate about him leaving her.
“You could tell he didn’t feel that same way about her,” Pate said. But Parker seemed obsessed with how he felt about her and determined to make him love her. “She was so giddy. It was like she was trying to buy him.”
She told Pate she thought having a baby would mean so much to him, that it was something he’s always wanted, and that it would tie them together.
It was an idea Parker would become more invested in than any of her previous obsessions.
As a chiropractor, Pate explained that she does a kind of testing that Parker referred to as “talking to her body” because it involved “asking a question” of the body through the use of touch and response. She says Parker texted her one day to ask her to “talk to her body” because she had woken up and looked in the mirror and saw that her aura had changed colors. She believed it meant she was pregnant.
Pate said she was uncomfortable with this request for a number of reasons and told Parker so, but she showed up anyway. Pate told her the response was inconclusive, but Parker seemed to interpret that as a possible yes and got excited, asking Pate for advice on how to tell Wade. Pate, who knew Parker had her tubes tied and a partial hysterectomy, advised her to take a test first.
Parker said she would but also texted Pate that it was “intended by God.”
On April 9, 2020, Parker sent Pate a “pregnancy verification letter” to print out that estimated a due date of September 22, but Pate realized it had the name of the nurse who signed it as the patient who tested positive for pregnancy instead of Parker’s. When Pate pointed this out, Parker grew upset and told Pate it had to be the work of her mother through a “mole” at the clinic and complained that no one believed she was pregnant.
Pate said she took Parker to Walgreens and bought several pregnancy tests. None came back positive. They bought several more and got the same results, although Pate said they thought maybe there was something faint in the result window.
The same day, Pate took Parker to a clinic and get a urine test. She did not want to go to her primary clinic or the one that she said had purposely botched the previous test, so they went to Health Express in Mount Pleasant. Pate said when Parker came out of the clinic, she had an odd look on her face and a printout in her hand. Stapled to the printout, which appeared to be some kind of lab test results in graph form, was a proof of pregnancy letter similar to the botched one and dated the same day. This letter also estimated a due date of September 22, but it had Parker’s name on it.
Pate said on the stand that the papers had never been folded and that Parker went in with nothing but her wallet in her hand. She had no idea how Parker did it.
On Wednesday, jurors saw both “proof of pregnancy” letters before Crisp pulled out the real results of the test from Healthcare Express that show the urine test that day came back negative. Pate had no way of knowing that at the time, however, and Parker asked her to call Wade to tell him that she had gotten a positive result.
Outrageous lies and leveraging family ties
It wasn’t the first time Taylor Parker would ask Angela Pate or her husband Roger to call her boyfriend. She asked Angela to text him or call him and tell him that Taylor was too stressed and needed to calm down or she would lose the baby.
“Wade this is Angela you need to chill,” Pate texted Wade. “If Taylor gets too worked up she might end up in the hospital, and the child will be in danger. Not to mention she could lose her job if she has to go on bed rest. What’s more important?”
“I’m worried, Angela. that’s all,” Wade responded. “I’m upset because we have too much on our plate and its my responsibility to provide for everyone. What’s more important to me is her and the baby. It was not my intentions to make her upset. I don’t know what to do or say but freak out.”
Parker also sent Pate a picture of her bloody hand one day, claiming she was bleeding after getting squeezed between cows on the farm. “This doesn’t look good,” she wrote in the accompanying text.
Whether Wade believed Parker was pregnant or not, it was clear to Parker that he did not want to talk with her about it. And Pate says the reason why was clear to everyone but Parker.
“Wade didn’t want a baby,” Pate said. “It was a one-way relationship. He did not love her, and it was obvious to everyone.”
Prosecutors say all of these machinations were aimed at manipulating Griffin into staying with her and demonstrate the staggering levels of fraud the jury will need to understand Parker was willing to commit in order to understand what happened on October 9, 2020.
That is the day Simmons’ mother went to her daughter’s house on Austin Street in New Boston and discovered a gruesome scene. According to the affidavit filed for Parker’s arrest, Simmons was face-down in the living room, “with a large abundance of what appeared to be blood throughout the house,” not only on the floor but on furniture, walls, appliances, and other items in the home. Simmons had been cut open, and her baby, 35 weeks along, was gone.
Just before Simmons’ body was discovered that morning, a Texas state trooper pulled Parker over in De Kalb and found the dying newborn in her lap, umbilical cord still attached and tucked into Parker’s pants. The baby girl was pronounced dead at the hospital, where doctors also determined Parker had not given birth.
When investigators arrived and interviewed Parker, she confessed, telling them she was in a physical altercation with Simmons and abducted the unborn child.
Recap: First two days of Taylor Parker trial
Prosecutors told the jury during opening statements Monday that Parker pretended to be pregnant and schemed to find one to claim as her own, not because she wanted to have a baby but because she was desperate to keep her then-boyfriend. The mother of two was unable to bear any more children of her own after having her tubes tied and a partial hysterectomy long before she met Wade Griffin.
Testimony in the first two days of the trial delved into Parker’s relationships with Griffin, as well as friends, co-workers, and ex-husband. Prosecutors laid out a history of lies, faked illnesses, and manipulation. She told friends she had the hysterectomy because her uterus had become “eaten up” with Stage IV cancer.
“I’m just mind-blown that I ever believed anything she said,” former close friend Abby Bell said on the stand.
Parker also claimed she had miscarried twins and told a co-worker she lost a baby girl due to complications after giving birth to her. The co-worker had confided in Parker that she had buried her baby several months before.
“She preyed on me,” the former co-worker said of Parker, who allegedly went on to offer her $20,000 to carry her baby as a surrogate. Later, she says Parker told her they had gotten a surrogate but that she slept with her husband and got pregnant. In a cruelly tone-deaf comment, Parker allegedly told the co-worker that she hoped the surrogate miscarried.
“She’s very calculated. She navigates and controls conversations. She plays on emotional trauma, and she doesn’t care,” another former co-worker.
Taylor Parker’s ex-husband testified that he did not learn of his wife’s partial hysterectomy until a doctor mentioned it during an ER visit after they were married. He testified that Taylor did not want to talk about that omission but began pushing for the couple to find a surrogate. She told him they could get a loan and use money from an inheritance to pay for it.
He also recounted a far-fetched story Parker fabricated to explain why a man who was supposed to deliver the cash from her grandmother’s inheritance never showed up: he was in a wreck, and the EMTs made off with the money. The man, who prosecutors believe was Taylor using a spoofed number, texted Hunter a photo of a bag full of cash to prove the inheritance was real. Hunter recounted how the same image was the first result that popped up when he googled “blue duffel bag full of cash,” drawing muted snickers from some in the gallery in an apparent response to the audacity of the failed ploy.
When confronted with questions, Parker said, “she would bury herself in more lies.”
Hunter and Taylor separated in April 2019, less than one year after marriage. Taylor was dating Wade Griffin within weeks and announced in a Facebook post on March 14, 2020 that they were expecting a girl.
The couple was having serious enough relationship trouble by August that a co-worker says Parker talked her into posing as her sister and calling Griffin to dig for information about where he stood in the relationship.
As their relationship grew rockier, Parker allegedly fabricated more than a pregnancy. She again used spoofing apps, this time to fake text conversations with family members so she could screenshot them and send them to Griffin to support her claims and defend herself against his family’s growing suspicions about her.
All the while, Taylor Parker gushed in Facebook and Instagram posts about her relationship with Wade and their excitement about the pending September 2020 arrival of their baby girl, who she named Clancy Gaile. Her social media featured dozens of baby belly selfies and updates on non-existent visits to the doctor’s office.
In addition to purchasing a prosthetic pregnancy belly, data extracted from Parker’s devices revealed extensive evidence of her efforts to maintain the appearance of pregnancy while resorting to increasingly desperate measures to find a baby as her fake due date approached.
Forensics expert and Texas Rangers Lt. Jared Brown testified that it all added up to show that Parker faked her pregnancy, took steps to report the baby as her own, lied about an inheritance from her grandmother that she claimed could be used to pay for surrogacy, “and ultimately planned and carried out the murder.”
Parker’s defense team has not categorically denied any of the lies and schemes described in testimony so far in the trial. Instead, they have questioned the credulity of the people who fell for them and even seemed at times to lean into the suggestion that Parker’s behavior was not normal.
They also questioned why no one contacted law enforcement if they suspected Parker was faking her pregnancy. One investigator on the stand pointed out that it’s not illegal to fake a pregnancy, and you can’t arrest someone on suspicion they might commit a crime.
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SHREVEPORT, La. (KTAL/KMSS) – On Wednesday morning, Bossier City Police Sergeant arrested on drug charges late last month was arraigned in federal court Wednesday morning and pleaded not guilty to seven counts of drug charges in federal court.
Tuesday, a federal grand jury handed down a seven-count indictment against Harold “B.J.” Sanford that includes one count of conspiracy to obtain controlled substances by fraud; two counts of obtaining a controlled substance by fraud and three counts of distribution of a controlled substance.
Also charged in the indictment is Mitchell Morehead, who prosecutors believe obtained the drugs for Sanford. He also pleaded not guilty.
Sanford, who at the time of his August 28 arrest by federal agents was the head of the local police union and has occasionally served as a spokesman for the police department.
He was immediately removed from all union responsibilities and put on administrative leave from the Bossier Police police department after his arrest.
At his first hearing on Sept. 1, Federal Magistrate Mark Hornsby denied bond for Sanford and Morehead, and that rule stood Wednesday.
Sanford and Morehead were remanded back into federal custody following the arraignment. They will be back in federal court for a status conference on Nov. 2.
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| 2022-09-20T21:02:41Z
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CADDO PARISH, La. (KTAL/KMSS) – The Caddo Parish District Attorney’s Office announced the conviction of a man who was on trial for violating a protective order and possession of drugs.
A jury found 59-year-old Jimmy Kuykendall guilty on Wednesday of his third offense of violating a protective order and possessing methamphetamine.
Kuykendall had two previous arrests for violation of a protective order; the first on July 23, 2021 while his second violation came on October 19, 2021.
The third violation happened on January 23, 2022, when Kuykendall was parked outside a home in the 8500 block of U.S. Highway 79 in Greenwood. That location was the home of a female acquaintance with a standing protective order against Kuykendall.
The victim reported seeing Kuykendall in her driveway. She also told police that she had received a voicemail from him that day.
When officers arrived, Kuykendall was still in front of the home. They found a glass smoking pipe commonly used for drugs and a baggie that police suspect contained methamphetamine from Kuykendall’s pocket. Officers also found a cigarette pack that included what they believed to be methamphetamine from Kuykendall’s car. He was arrested and charged with drug possession and his third protective order violation.
Kuykendall faces imprisonment of 14 days to two years and a fine of up to $1,000 for conviction of the third protective order violation. On the drug conviction, Kuykendall faces one to five years in prison and a fine of up to $5,000.
Sentencing for Kuykendall will for October 21.
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| 2022-09-20T21:02:47Z
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CADDO PARISH, La. (KTAL/KMSS) — Caddo Parish Sheriff’s Office arrested a Mooringsport couple for cruelty to juveniles on Wednesday.
CPSO said in a release that 50-year-old Michael Bailey and 36-year-old Amanda Whitten were arrested for cruelty to juveniles after a report of a child testing positive for illegal substances. Detectives arrested Bailey and Whitten after they smoked methamphetamines in the presence of a child under the age of 13.
Youth Services Detective Ray Saunders received a report on August 14, that a young child tested positive for illegal substances. During the search of the home of Bailey and Whitten’s home, detectives found meth, a pipe, and other drug paraphernalia. Investigators found that the couple bought drugs and smoked them in the presence of the child.
Bailey and Whitten are booked in Caddo Correctional Center and charged with cruelty to juveniles, possession of a schedule II drug, and aggravated battery.
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| 2022-09-20T21:02:54Z
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Disclaimer: All persons are presumed innocent until proven guilty.
SHREVEPORT, La. (KTAL/KMSS) — A Shreveport man was arrested and charged with second-degree rape on Monday.
The Shreveport Police Department responded to a call on Monday around 3:00 p.m. on reports of a sexual assault. Officers say the victim was brought to the hospital and treated for injuries and detectives with the Shreveport Police Sex Crimes Unit started an investigation of the allegations.
SPD arrested 20-year-old Roderick Broadway for one count of second-degree rape on Tuesday.
Broadway could face a maximum of 40 years in prison if convicted.
The investigation is ongoing.
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| 2022-09-20T21:03:02Z
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SHREVEPORT, La. (KTAL/KMSS) – Investigators say an arsonist may have been the cause of an apartment fire Wednesday evening that damaged multiple units.
Firefighters were called to the scene at the Villa Norte Apartments on Fullerton St. around 5:20 p.m. after officials say an off-duty firefighter saw the door of an apartment open and flames inside. He closed the door to stop the fire from spreading while crews rushed to the scene.
Officials say the flames appeared to start in the downstairs apartment before spreading to the unit above it. Both apartments suffered fire and smoke damage. Both apartments were vacant. The two units opposite also suffered light smoke damage.
It took 25 firefighters to bring the blaze under control. No one was injured in the fire.
Witnesses told authorities they saw someone enter the apartment, and shortly after they left, the apartment caught fire. The cause remains under investigation.
Authorities contacted businesses in the area to check for possible video footage, but none were part of the Real Time Crime Center. The Shreveport Police Department say they contacted the Villa Norte Apartments managers.
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SHREVEPORT, La. (KTAL/KMSS) – A Caddo Parish jury has found 37-year-old DeWayne Watkins guilty on two counts of first-degree murder in the Nov. 8, 2018 deaths of Heather and Kelly Jose.
The verdict comes four weeks and two days after the trial of the 37-year-old Watkins began, though it was recessed four days after the first day of jury selection after Watson tested positive for COVID.
Watkins was accused of shooting the couple who offered him a ride home from Mall St. Vincent only to be kidnapped, robbed, shot in the backs of their heads, and then burning their bodies inside their car in the driveway of a vacant home in the Queensborough neighborhood.
It took the jury just over an hour of deliberations to bring back the guilty verdict, which followed a very long day of attorneys quibbling about the judge’s instructions to the jury and closing arguments, which began just before 1 p.m. Wednesday and concluded almost three hours later.
The judge, attorneys and families were alerted that the jury had reached a verdict and had silently entered the courtroom around 5:20 p.m.
Presiding Judge John Mosely entered about five minutes later and then the jury was brought in. After the judge asked the jury foreman if a verdict had been reached and received an affirmative answer, the paper on which the verdict was written was handed to the clerk of court who read the verdicts out loud.
As the first guilty of first-degree murder in the death of Kelly Jose was read, a gasp could be heard from the row second row which was filled with Heather Jose’s family, and when the second guilty verdict in Heather’s death was read, her sister Sarah Sharp quietly sobbed in her father, Mel King’s arms.
Heather Jose’s family attended the trial from August 22, the day it began, and were right back in the courtroom on August 29 when court resumed after a four-day recess called after the defendant was diagnosed with COVID on the evening of the first day of jury selection.
The family, Heather’s father, her sisters, and her aunts and uncles were faithful throughout the trial. After the verdicts were read, the families talked about their devotion to Heather and how they were determined to see the trial through, regardless of how painful.
Yet through their pain, the family spoke with pride about Heather and the amazing life she lived in her 32 years. Her father laughed as he recalled when Heather, fresh out of college, decided to go to New Orleans, which had just experienced Hurricane Katrina.
He said he tried to be logical with his daughter, asking her if she knew anyone there, and where she would stay when she got there. She didn’t know, she told him. So he asked her what she was going to do there. She answered with one word, “Help.”
Another time, she took off to New York City to work on the streets with a Christian group for the same reason. To help.
So, it’s no wonder that when DeWayne Willie Watkins said he needed a ride, and Heather couldn’t get a cab for him, she and Kelly offered him a ride home.
But rather than be bitter, her dad, sisters, aunts and uncles, who relived Heather and Kelly’s death day-after-day in the trial, said now that Watkins can never hurt anyone again, they will begin the long road to forgiveness.
Because that’s what Heather would do.
All of them, Heather’s sisters and father, as well as the Johnsons and the Kings, aunts and uncles who have sat through the trial every day, say they plan to spend the rest of their lives honoring Heather. They all agreed that Heather died doing someone a favor, so that is how they plan to live out their lives.
Wednesday evening, as the family left the courthouse they talked about their gratitude to the judge, who has presided over what has been a very lengthy and difficult case, the Caddo District Attorney’s office and prosecutors Bill Edwards and Mekeisha Creal. They also expressed gratitude to the jury, who almost for three weeks sat in the jury box listening to mountains of evidence put on by the state, as well as cross examinations by defense attorneys Sean Collins and Mariah Holder.
A conviction on two counts of first-degree murder is punishable by life in prison or the death penalty, but Caddo District Attorney James Stewart took the death penalty off the table in 2021 in an effort to move the case along.
Watkins will be formally sentenced on Oct. 19. The Kings and Johnsons plan to fly back to Shreveport from California for the sentencing.
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| 2022-09-20T21:03:15Z
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SHREVEPORT, La. (KTAL/KMSS) – On Tuesday, ten mayoral candidates hoping to lead Shreveport for the next four years spoke to the public at Huntington High School.
Each candidate had two minutes to speak about numerous topics that matter most to citizens. The first topic of discussion during the forum touched on Shreveport water issues.
“We need to look at internal oversight,” said former police officer Tracy Mendels, who is running as a Democrat.
“We have the resources right now. The issues I see are communication,” said local attorney and democratic candidate Lauren Ray Anderson.
Candidates also discussed concerns over crime prevention and ways to keep Shreveport safe.
“To the crime issue, I have a 300-day plan,” said independent candidate and former military police officer Julius Romano.
Incumbent Shreveport Mayor Perkins says the city needs to take a holistic approach to crime.
Louisiana Senator Gregory Tarver said, “How you can prevent crime is by getting jobs and bringing economic development to the city of Shreveport.”
Shreveport City Council member LeVette Fuller believes the city should focus on budgeting.
“What we need to do as a city is reconsider our entire budget format for outcome-based budgeting,” said Fuller.
“We’re talking about budgets, and we’re talking about reducing budgets. We have to streamline things and don’t have recurring costs every year,” said independent candidate Commissioner Mario Chavez.
One candidate admired the children in Shreveport and believed they should be the main focus.
“What we need to do is to make sure is that we’re planning for their future and involving them in the future,” said attorney and former Shreveport City Councilman Tom Arceneaux. He is a registered Republican.
Residents who attended the forum were happy with the opportunity to learn more about each candidate. Delta Sigma Theta Social Action Chair Gisele Proby-Bryant says it will help locals make a good decision on the best candidate.
“There are so many candidates with so many good platforms. It is important that we get the community in and let them hear what they have to say,” said Proby-Bryant.
“I believe each forum gives a different perspective on what community means to the host, and I think that’s what all of this is all about. I think that whoever the candidate is, that wants this position as mayor, needs to make sure they are reaching out to everyone,” said Shreveport resident Allison Washington.
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| 2022-09-20T21:03:22Z
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SHREVEPORT, La. (KTAL/KMSS) – Democratic candidate for the United States Senate, Luke Mixon, shares his vision for Louisiana’s future and lays out a case for voters to choose him on the November ballot.
Mixon is one of 12 challengers looking to unseat incumbent Senator John Kennedy in the coming mid-term election. Mixon received the endorsement of Louisiana Governor John Bel Edwards in June.
When asked what prompted his Senate run, Mixon listed the incumbent’s voting record on issues relevant to Louisiana voters.
“I just don’t think he’s done a very good job for our nation, nor our state,” said Mixon.
He cited Kennedy’s vote in support of overturning the 2020 election results and his vote against last year’s infrastructure bill. A piece of legislation that Louisiana Senator Bill Cassidy (R) worked to negotiate and gain the necessary GOP votes for passage.
Mixon says some of the top issues of his platform include lowering the cost of goods, education, and jobs.
Mixon is a graduate of the United States Naval Academy and the United States Navy Strike Fighter Tactics Instructor program, or a TOPGUN graduate as it is more commonly known. During his service, Mixon served as a fighter pilot for 20 years, but this was his first time running for political office.
When asked why he feels he is ready to work on Capitol Hill, Mixon says that he’s never had political aspirations but was always willing to serve.
“That’s part of it. I’m not a career politician. I haven’t spent 30 years in politics. I’m doing this for the same reasons I was a fighter pilot, for the same reasons I served our nation. It’s all about public service.”
Mixon says he is a public servant running for office to represent the majority of Americans who want quality jobs, good roads, a good education for kids, and opportunities for families.
“I believe in Washington right now; we’re seeing too much division and too much partisan politics. That’s not who I am,” Mixon said.
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| 2022-09-20T21:03:29Z
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Ken Starr, a former U.S. solicitor general who headed the Whitewater investigation into former President Clinton that ultimately led to his impeachment, died on Tuesday at the age of 76, his family announced.
Starr’s family said in a statement that he died at a hospital in Houston following complications from surgery. Starr’s wife said he had been in the hospital for the last 17 weeks fighting an undisclosed illness, The New York Times reported.
Starr has been a prominent figure in national politics and the legal field stretching back decades, serving as chief of staff to former Attorney General William Smith for roughly two years beginning in 1981 after a clerkship at the Supreme Court.
Former President Reagan nominated Starr in 1983 as a federal appeals judge for the D.C. Circuit, where he served until becoming the U.S. solicitor general in the first Bush administration.
Starr argued 36 cases before the Supreme Court, including 25 during his time as solicitor general, his family said.
He is best known for leading the Whitewater investigation during the Clinton presidency. The investigation began with a probe of the Clintons’ real estate investments but eventually expanded to include the former president’s affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky.
The Starr Report, which he gave to Congress in September 1998, asserted that Clinton lied to the public and Congress about the relationship. Clinton was later impeached, though was ultimately acquitted in the Senate.
“We are deeply saddened with the loss of our dear and loving father and grandfather, whom we admired for his prodigious work ethic, but who always put his family first,” Starr’s son, Randall Starr, said in the family’s statement.
“The love, energy, endearing sense of humor and fun-loving interest dad exhibited to each of us was truly special, and we cherish the many wonderful memories we were able to experience with him. He is now with his Lord and Savior,” he said.
Starr later served as the dean of Pepperdine University’s law school between 2004 and 2010 before becoming president of Baylor University, where he also served as chancellor beginning part way through his presidency.
After an external investigation found the school mishandled allegations of sexual assault involving its football team players, the school removed Starr as its president in May 2016. He soon after resigned as chancellor and chair of the school’s constitutional law department.
“Judge Starr was a dedicated public servant and ardent supporter of religious freedom that allows faith-based institutions such as Baylor to flourish,” Baylor University President Linda Livingstone said in a statement Tuesday.
Starr later found a welcoming home on Fox News as a contributor, making regular appearances on the cable giant.
In 2020, he joined former President Trump’s defense team during his first impeachment trial.
The House impeached Trump on charges of abuse of power and obstruction of Congress in connection to accusations he withheld U.S. military aid to Ukraine to pressure President Volodymyr Zelensky into investigating Joe Biden and his son, Hunter Biden. The Senate later acquitted Trump on both charges.
Starr is survived by his wife Alice Starr, his three children and nine grandchildren, his family said.
This story was updated at 6:26 p.m.
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SHREVEPORT, La. (KTAL/KMSS) – The Northwest Louisiana Master Gardners are accepting grant applications for gardening projects in the region.
The grants are available to gardeners in Caddo, Bossier, DeSoto, and Red River Parishes and will be accepted until October 14.
Grants will be awarded to projects that promote beautification, provide education in horticulture, showcase sustainable garden practices, or enhance the quality and quantity of publicly accessible green spaces.
NWLA Master Gardeners is looking to fund projects that make a difference in the community and involve collaboration among the organizations. Grant awards will range from $300 to $10,000.
Eligible groups include:
- municipalities
- schools
- garden clubs
- neighborhood associations
- charitable non-profit organizations (with current 501c3 status)
- faith-based (non-denominational) organizations
Grant awards will be decided by December 31, 2022, and winning projects must be completed by the end of 2023. Click the link for more information about the NWLA Master Gardners Grant.
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| 2022-09-20T21:03:42Z
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SHREVEPORT, La. (KTAL/KMSS) – Shreveport police are on the scene of an officer-involved shooting in Twelve Oaks that happened Wednesday.
According to an entry in Caddo 911, a call came at 1:40 p.m., and as many as 13 police units were on the scene near Ormond Drive for the call reporting a prowler or suspicious person.
Caddo Parish Constable Patrick Young says the suspects allegedly resisted and were armed with guns. Officials reported that two officers fired shots, and one person was transported to the LSU Ochsner Health for treatment of what are possibly life-threatening injuries.
Louisiana State Police were called to the scene and will lead the investigation. Neither of the officers was injured in the incident.
This is a developing story
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(The Hill) — Amtrak will cancel all long-distance trains beginning on Thursday to avoid disruptions in advance of a potential rail worker strike later this week.
An Amtrak spokesperson said the changes will ensure trains can reach their destinations before the strike, which could begin as early as Friday, and the adjustments could soon extend to other routes.
Amtrak is not involved in the contract negotiations between rail workers and freight companies, but many of its trains run on railroads owned by third parties that would shut down if a strike takes place.
“While we are hopeful that parties will reach a resolution, Amtrak has now begun phased adjustments to our service in preparation for a possible freight rail service interruption later this week,” the spokesperson said. “Such an interruption could significantly impact intercity passenger rail service.”
More than 115,000 rail workers are legally allowed to strike as of Friday, a deadline that has attracted a great deal of attention in Washington as lawmakers fear price gains and supply chain bottlenecks from the potential shutdown, which would add to already high inflation rates.
The new suspensions, which begin on Thursday, include Amtrak’s Auto Train service, which runs between Lorton, Va. and Sanford, Fla., and its Capitol Limited service, which runs between Washington, D.C. and Chicago.
Amtrak said it will also suspend its Cardinal service, which runs between New York City and Chicago, and its Palmetto service between D.C. and Savannah, Ga.
Palmetto trains north of D.C., which use Amtrak’s Northeast Corridor, have not been suspended.
Amtrak owns that rail line, which runs between Boston and D.C., so the company says “only a small number” of departures on the line as well as branches to Albany, N.Y., Harrisburg, Pa., and Springfield, Ma., will be affected.
The rail service said it will offer customers the ability to either change their travel to another date or receive a full refund.
Amtrak began suspending some of its longest routes on Tuesday and has since added additional cancellations, with 14 total routes now suspended as of Thursday.
The International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers (IAM) on Wednesday became the first union to authorize a strike, with its nearly 5,000 workers rejecting a contract based on a White House-appointed board’s recommendations last month.
The contract proposal would implement 24 percent raises and back pay, but workers are demanding more predictable scheduling and the ability to take time off for doctors’ appointments without being penalized.
Fearing the potential economic fallout of a walkout, lawmakers are preparing to use congressional authority to block a strike.
Some GOP senators have backed a bill that would approve the proposed contract, which is supported by railroads and business interests, and Democratic leaders have suggested they will intervene if no agreement is reached.
“All parties need to stay at the table, bargain in good faith to resolve outstanding issues, and come to an agreement,” White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said on Wednesday. “A shutdown of our freight rail system is an unacceptable outcome for our economy and the American people, and all parties must work to avoid just that.”
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| 2022-09-20T21:03:57Z
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DES MOINES, Iowa (WHO) – A teenage human trafficking victim who was initially charged with first-degree murder after she stabbed her accused rapist to death was sentenced Tuesday in an Iowa court to five years of closely supervised probation and ordered to pay $150,000 restitution to the man’s family.
Pieper Lewis was originally charged with first-degree murder for the stabbing death of Zachary Brooks in 2020. The 17-year-old was charged in the death of 37-year-old Brooks, who she claims raped her multiple times in the weeks before his death. She had faced the possibility of 20 years in prison.
Lewis pleaded last year to involuntary manslaughter and willful injury. Both charges were punishable by up to 10 years in prison.
Polk County District judge David M. Porter on Tuesday deferred those prison sentences, meaning that if Lewis violates any portion of her probation, she could be sent to prison to serve that 20-year term.
As for being required to pay the estate of her rapist, “this court is presented with no other option,” Porter said, noting the restitution is mandatory under Iowa law that has been upheld by the Iowa Supreme Court.
Lewis was 15 when she stabbed Brooks more than 30 times in a Des Moines apartment. Officials have said Lewis was a runaway who was seeking to escape an abusive life with her adopted mother and was sleeping in the hallways of a Des Moines apartment building when a 28-year-old man took her in before forcibly trafficking her to other men for sex.
Lewis said one of those men was Brooks and that he had raped her multiple times in the weeks before his death. She recounted being forced at knifepoint by the 28-year-old man to go with Brooks to his apartment for sex. She told officials that after Brooks had raped her yet again, she grabbed a knife from a bedside table and stabbed Brooks in a fit of rage.
Police and prosecutors have not disputed that Lewis was sexually assaulted and trafficked. But prosecutors have argued that Brooks was asleep at the time he was stabbed and not an immediate danger to Lewis.
Iowa is not among the dozens of states that have a so-called safe harbor law that gives trafficking victims at least some level of criminal immunity.
Lewis, who earned her GED while being held in juvenile detention, acknowledged in a statement prior to her sentencing that she struggled with the structure of her detention, including “why I was treated like fragile glass” or wasn’t allowed to communicate with her friends or family.
“My spirit has been burned, but still glows through the flames,” she read from a statement she had prepared. “Hear me roar, see me glow, and watch me grow.”
“I am a survivor,” she added.
The judge peppered Lewis with repeated requests to explain what poor choices she made that led up to Brooks’ stabbing and expressed concern that she sometimes did not want to follow rules set for her in juvenile lockup.
“The next five years of your life will be full of rules you disagree with, I’m sure of it,” Porter said. He later added, “This is the second chance that you’ve asked for. You don’t get a third.”
Her attorney said after the sentencing that they were extremely happy with the outcome.
“Very pleased at the court decision. Going into this case we assumed the worst she was initially charged with first-degree murder,” said Matt Sheeley.
Lewis’ attorney argued in court that requiring her to pay restitution to the family of the man who raped her was cruel and unusual punishment. Her attorney said that there may be action taken down the line, aimed at the current restitution precedent set at the Iowa Supreme Court. But added that this was a win.
“That is not the most important pressing concern that she has. She wants to move on with her life. She has got her entire life ahead of her. She has all these opportunities ahead of her. So the restitution is not really something she is bothered by at this point,” said Sheeley.
Lewis will be required to undergo mental health and substance abuse evaluation as well as GPS tracking and monitoring. She will not be eligible for early release from probation.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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BALTIMORE (WGN) — Prosecutors have filed a motion in court asking to vacate Adnan Syed’s conviction in the murder of his ex-girlfriend in 1999. The case was featured in the 2014 podcast “Serial,” where its first season became one of the most popular podcast seasons ever.
According to the Wall Street Journal, the Baltimore City state’s attorney conducted nearly a yearlong investigation, along with the defense, which found new evidence.
The outlet reports that the office is recommending Syed be released on his own recognizance, pending the continuing investigation.
Additionally, new evidence found information regarding two alternative suspects. They were known at the time of the first investigation, but were not properly ruled out, prosecutors said. The outlet reported that the identities of the two suspects are being withheld at this time.
Syed is currently serving a life sentence following his 2000 conviction in the death of 17-year-old Hae Min Lee. She was found strangled to death in the woods. Syed and Lee dated while going to Woodlawn High School in 1998.
The Wall Street Journal reports that authorities second investigation also revealed that the grassy lot where Lee’s car was found in Baltimore was located behind a house that belonged to one suspect’s relative.
They also uncovered that one of the suspects attacked a woman while she was in her vehicle. One suspect was later convicted of rape and sexual assault.
Both incidents occurred after Syed’s trial, prosecutors said.
The cell phone tower data and testimony from one key witness have been called into question by the prosecutors, the Wall Street Journal reported.
Syed has maintained his innocence while incarcerated.
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Each week NBC 6 News Salutes the Badge by recognizing a law enforcement officer that stands out in his or her own special way.
Many times we receive help from a given law enforcement agency in getting the telling of those stories coordinated. Tonight we are recognizing a law enforcer we work with on a weekly basis, Sergeant Rod White.
Sgt. White is a nine-year veteran of the Bossier Sheriff’s Office and recently was promoted to the rank of sergeant.
Rod is a integral part of the public information office. He assists NBC 6 News in coordinating the Salute the Badge stories we share on Bossier Sheriff’s office employees.
On behalf of NBC 6 News, congratulations Rod, you’ve earned it.
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(Stacker) — Food insecurity is a widespread problem in the United States, with people experiencing food insecurity in every single county in the nation. The nonprofit Feeding America describes food insecurity as “a lack of consistent access to enough food for every person in a household to live an active, healthy life.”
Food insecurity hits children particularly hard. The USDA estimates that more than 5.5 million children lived in food-insecure households in 2021. Not having consistent access to enough food can affect cognitive abilities, overall health, moods, and attention spans—not to mention the psychological effects of living with scarcity.
Stacker compiled a list of parishes in Louisiana with the highest rate of food insecure children using data from Feeding America. Parishes are ranked by highest percentage of children with food insecurity as of 2020. Louisiana has a child food insecurity rate of 21.5%, which ranks #1 highest among all states.
States with the highest rate of food insecure children
- Louisiana: 21.5%
- New Mexico: 20.5%
- Mississippi: 20.4%
- Alabama: 19.8%
- Arkansas: 19.7%
States with the lowest rate of food insecure children
- North Dakota: 8.1%
- Massachusetts: 8.8%
- New Jersey: 9.0%
- Minnesota: 9.3%
- New Hampshire: 9.5%
The following locations are where food insecurity for children is most prevalent in Louisiana:
50. West Feliciana Parish
- Child food insecurity rate: 18.8% (480 total)
— 2.7% higher than national average - Food insecurity rate: 9.3% (1,440 total)
— 2.5% lower than national average - Annual food budget shortfall: $745,000
— Cost per meal: $3.21
49. Bossier Parish
- Child food insecurity rate: 18.9% (5,950 total)
— 2.8% higher than national average - Food insecurity rate: 13.1% (16,680 total)
— 1.3% higher than national average - Annual food budget shortfall: $8,710,000
— Cost per meal: $3.24
48. East Feliciana Parish
- Child food insecurity rate: 19.3% (660 total)
— 3.2% higher than national average - Food insecurity rate: 11.4% (2,190 total)
— 0.4% lower than national average - Annual food budget shortfall: $1,262,000
— Cost per meal: $3.58
47. Allen Parish
- Child food insecurity rate: 20.4% (1,160 total)
— 4.3% higher than national average - Food insecurity rate: 14.7% (3,760 total)
— 2.9% higher than national average - Annual food budget shortfall: $1,867,000
— Cost per meal: $3.08
46. West Baton Rouge Parish
- Child food insecurity rate: 20.4% (1,290 total)
— 4.3% higher than national average - Food insecurity rate: 11.7% (3,090 total)
— 0.1% lower than national average - Annual food budget shortfall: $1,669,000
— Cost per meal: $3.36
45. Caldwell Parish
- Child food insecurity rate: 20.5% (470 total)
— 4.4% higher than national average - Food insecurity rate: 16.1% (1,600 total)
— 4.3% higher than national average - Annual food budget shortfall: $741,000
— Cost per meal: $2.88
44. Vernon Parish
- Child food insecurity rate: 20.7% (2,540 total)
— 4.6% higher than national average - Food insecurity rate: 15.6% (7,710 total)
— 3.8% higher than national average - Annual food budget shortfall: $4,016,000
— Cost per meal: $3.23
43. Terrebonne Parish
- Child food insecurity rate: 20.9% (5,890 total)
— 4.8% higher than national average - Food insecurity rate: 15.0% (16,690 total)
— 3.2% higher than national average - Annual food budget shortfall: $8,516,000
— Cost per meal: $3.17
42. Winn Parish
- Child food insecurity rate: 21.1% (620 total)
— 5.0% higher than national average - Food insecurity rate: 14.9% (2,120 total)
— 3.1% higher than national average - Annual food budget shortfall: $1,033,000
— Cost per meal: $3.03
41. Calcasieu Parish
- Child food insecurity rate: 21.3% (10,810 total)
— 5.2% higher than national average - Food insecurity rate: 14.2% (28,770 total)
— 2.4% higher than national average - Annual food budget shortfall: $14,353,000
— Cost per meal: $3.10
40. St. Martin Parish
- Child food insecurity rate: 21.6% (2,790 total)
— 5.5% higher than national average - Food insecurity rate: 13.5% (7,220 total)
— 1.7% higher than national average - Annual food budget shortfall: $3,599,000
— Cost per meal: $3.10
39. West Carroll Parish
- Child food insecurity rate: 21.6% (530 total)
— 5.5% higher than national average - Food insecurity rate: 16.0% (1,750 total)
— 4.2% higher than national average - Annual food budget shortfall: $840,000
— Cost per meal: $2.98
38. Rapides Parish
- Child food insecurity rate: 22.0% (7,120 total)
— 5.9% higher than national average - Food insecurity rate: 14.4% (18,720 total)
— 2.6% higher than national average - Annual food budget shortfall: $8,660,000
— Cost per meal: $2.87
37. Acadia Parish
- Child food insecurity rate: 23.4% (3,770 total)
— 7.3% higher than national average - Food insecurity rate: 17.3% (10,790 total)
— 5.5% higher than national average - Annual food budget shortfall: $5,426,000
— Cost per meal: $3.12
36. Jefferson Parish
- Child food insecurity rate: 23.5% (22,610 total)
— 7.4% higher than national average - Food insecurity rate: 13.9% (60,310 total)
— 2.1% higher than national average - Annual food budget shortfall: $32,693,000
— Cost per meal: $3.37
35. St. James Parish
- Child food insecurity rate: 23.5% (1,120 total)
— 7.4% higher than national average - Food insecurity rate: 11.9% (2,530 total)
— 0.1% higher than national average - Annual food budget shortfall: $1,539,000
— Cost per meal: $3.78
34. East Baton Rouge Parish
- Child food insecurity rate: 24.2% (24,380 total)
— 8.1% higher than national average - Food insecurity rate: 12.9% (57,100 total)
— 1.1% higher than national average - Annual food budget shortfall: $33,062,000
— Cost per meal: $3.60
33. Jackson Parish
- Child food insecurity rate: 24.4% (810 total)
— 8.3% higher than national average - Food insecurity rate: 16.0% (2,530 total)
— 4.2% higher than national average - Annual food budget shortfall: $1,338,000
— Cost per meal: $3.28
32. Assumption Parish
- Child food insecurity rate: 24.8% (1,190 total)
— 8.7% higher than national average - Food insecurity rate: 16.4% (3,640 total)
— 4.6% higher than national average - Annual food budget shortfall: $1,939,000
— Cost per meal: $3.31
31. De Soto Parish
- Child food insecurity rate: 24.8% (1,630 total)
— 8.7% higher than national average - Food insecurity rate: 15.5% (4,260 total)
— 3.7% higher than national average - Annual food budget shortfall: $2,066,000
— Cost per meal: $3.01
30. Catahoula Parish
- Child food insecurity rate: 24.9% (520 total)
— 8.8% higher than national average - Food insecurity rate: 16.2% (1,550 total)
— 4.4% higher than national average - Annual food budget shortfall: $746,000
— Cost per meal: $2.99
29. St. Mary Parish
- Child food insecurity rate: 24.9% (2,990 total)
— 8.8% higher than national average - Food insecurity rate: 16.6% (8,310 total)
— 4.8% higher than national average - Annual food budget shortfall: $3,925,000
— Cost per meal: $2.93
28. St. Bernard Parish
- Child food insecurity rate: 25.1% (3,110 total)
— 9.0% higher than national average - Food insecurity rate: 17.4% (8,130 total)
— 5.6% higher than national average - Annual food budget shortfall: $4,403,000
— Cost per meal: $3.36
27. Union Parish
- Child food insecurity rate: 25.3% (1,240 total)
— 9.2% higher than national average - Food insecurity rate: 14.6% (3,250 total)
— 2.8% higher than national average - Annual food budget shortfall: $1,607,000
— Cost per meal: $3.07
26. Lincoln Parish
- Child food insecurity rate: 25.9% (2,440 total)
— 9.8% higher than national average - Food insecurity rate: 16.6% (7,840 total)
— 4.8% higher than national average - Annual food budget shortfall: $4,115,000
— Cost per meal: $3.26
25. Ouachita Parish
- Child food insecurity rate: 25.9% (9,970 total)
— 9.8% higher than national average - Food insecurity rate: 15.7% (24,270 total)
— 3.9% higher than national average - Annual food budget shortfall: $11,697,000
— Cost per meal: $2.99
24. Tangipahoa Parish
- Child food insecurity rate: 25.9% (8,480 total)
— 9.8% higher than national average - Food insecurity rate: 16.3% (21,790 total)
— 4.5% higher than national average - Annual food budget shortfall: $11,686,000
— Cost per meal: $3.33
23. Natchitoches Parish
- Child food insecurity rate: 26.2% (2,350 total)
— 10.1% higher than national average - Food insecurity rate: 16.5% (6,360 total)
— 4.7% higher than national average - Annual food budget shortfall: $3,158,000
— Cost per meal: $3.08
22. Avoyelles Parish
- Child food insecurity rate: 26.3% (2,500 total)
— 10.2% higher than national average - Food insecurity rate: 18.2% (7,350 total)
— 6.4% higher than national average - Annual food budget shortfall: $3,592,000
— Cost per meal: $3.04
21. St. John the Baptist Parish
- Child food insecurity rate: 26.3% (2,820 total)
— 10.2% higher than national average - Food insecurity rate: 12.4% (5,360 total)
— 0.6% higher than national average - Annual food budget shortfall: $2,963,000
— Cost per meal: $3.43
20. Pointe Coupee Parish
- Child food insecurity rate: 26.7% (1,290 total)
— 10.6% higher than national average - Food insecurity rate: 16.8% (3,670 total)
— 5.0% higher than national average - Annual food budget shortfall: $1,881,000
— Cost per meal: $3.18
19. Iberia Parish
- Child food insecurity rate: 26.8% (4,920 total)
— 10.7% higher than national average - Food insecurity rate: 16.6% (11,770 total)
— 4.8% higher than national average - Annual food budget shortfall: $5,820,000
— Cost per meal: $3.07
18. Webster Parish
- Child food insecurity rate: 26.9% (2,360 total)
— 10.8% higher than national average - Food insecurity rate: 17.6% (6,830 total)
— 5.8% higher than national average - Annual food budget shortfall: $3,260,000
— Cost per meal: $2.96
17. St. Landry Parish
- Child food insecurity rate: 27.0% (5,980 total)
— 10.9% higher than national average - Food insecurity rate: 15.8% (13,040 total)
— 4.0% higher than national average - Annual food budget shortfall: $6,210,000
— Cost per meal: $2.96
16. Washington Parish
- Child food insecurity rate: 27.4% (3,020 total)
— 11.3% higher than national average - Food insecurity rate: 17.7% (8,210 total)
— 5.9% higher than national average - Annual food budget shortfall: $4,388,000
— Cost per meal: $3.32
15. Red River Parish
- Child food insecurity rate: 27.8% (560 total)
— 11.7% higher than national average - Food insecurity rate: 16.8% (1,430 total)
— 5.0% higher than national average - Annual food budget shortfall: $714,000
— Cost per meal: $3.10
14. Iberville Parish
- Child food insecurity rate: 29.2% (1,960 total)
— 13.1% higher than national average - Food insecurity rate: 14.2% (4,620 total)
— 2.4% higher than national average - Annual food budget shortfall: $2,368,000
— Cost per meal: $3.18
13. Franklin Parish
- Child food insecurity rate: 29.3% (1,490 total)
— 13.2% higher than national average - Food insecurity rate: 18.0% (3,620 total)
— 6.2% higher than national average - Annual food budget shortfall: $1,661,000
— Cost per meal: $2.85
12. Caddo Parish
- Child food insecurity rate: 29.5% (17,030 total)
— 13.4% higher than national average - Food insecurity rate: 16.0% (39,040 total)
— 4.2% higher than national average - Annual food budget shortfall: $20,001,000
— Cost per meal: $3.18
11. Morehouse Parish
- Child food insecurity rate: 29.6% (1,800 total)
— 13.5% higher than national average - Food insecurity rate: 17.6% (4,440 total)
— 5.8% higher than national average - Annual food budget shortfall: $2,110,000
— Cost per meal: $2.95
10. Evangeline Parish
- Child food insecurity rate: 29.9% (2,450 total)
— 13.8% higher than national average - Food insecurity rate: 20.8% (6,960 total)
— 9.0% higher than national average - Annual food budget shortfall: $3,536,000
— Cost per meal: $3.16
9. Richland Parish
- Child food insecurity rate: 29.9% (1,400 total)
— 13.8% higher than national average - Food insecurity rate: 17.9% (3,620 total)
— 6.1% higher than national average - Annual food budget shortfall: $1,712,000
— Cost per meal: $2.94
8. Concordia Parish
- Child food insecurity rate: 30.4% (1,420 total)
— 14.3% higher than national average - Food insecurity rate: 17.9% (3,490 total)
— 6.1% higher than national average - Annual food budget shortfall: $1,660,000
— Cost per meal: $2.95
7. St. Helena Parish
- Child food insecurity rate: 32.0% (690 total)
— 15.9% higher than national average - Food insecurity rate: 17.5% (1,790 total)
— 5.7% higher than national average - Annual food budget shortfall: $979,000
— Cost per meal: $3.40
6. Bienville Parish
- Child food insecurity rate: 32.5% (990 total)
— 16.4% higher than national average - Food insecurity rate: 19.2% (2,570 total)
— 7.4% higher than national average - Annual food budget shortfall: $1,346,000
— Cost per meal: $3.25
5. New Orleans
- Child food insecurity rate: 33.4% (26,060 total)
— 17.3% higher than national average - Food insecurity rate: 17.3% (67,740 total)
— 5.5% higher than national average - Annual food budget shortfall: $41,636,000
— Cost per meal: $3.82
4. Claiborne Parish
- Child food insecurity rate: 34.6% (970 total)
— 18.5% higher than national average - Food insecurity rate: 19.2% (3,050 total)
— 7.4% higher than national average - Annual food budget shortfall: $1,508,000
— Cost per meal: $3.07
Billy Hathorn // Wikimedia Commons
3. Tensas Parish
- Child food insecurity rate: 35.2% (360 total)
— 19.1% higher than national average - Food insecurity rate: 18.0% (800 total)
— 6.2% higher than national average - Annual food budget shortfall: $374,000
— Cost per meal: $2.90
2. Madison Parish
- Child food insecurity rate: 38.6% (1,030 total)
— 22.5% higher than national average - Food insecurity rate: 20.6% (2,290 total)
— 8.8% higher than national average - Annual food budget shortfall: $1,139,000
— Cost per meal: $3.09
1. East Carroll Parish
- Child food insecurity rate: 46.4% (790 total)
— 30.3% higher than national average - Food insecurity rate: 25.9% (1,800 total)
— 14.1% higher than national average - Annual food budget shortfall: $894,000
— Cost per meal: $3.08
Article has been re-published pursuant to a CC BY-NC 4.0 License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/?ref=chooser-v1
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AUSTIN (KXAN) — A new poll of registered Texas voters shows Gov. Greg Abbott and Democrat Beto O’Rourke within five percentage points of each other.
The Texas Politics Project poll released Wednesday morning shows 45% of voters saying they would vote for incumbent Abbott and 40% of voters favoring O’Rourke. This is the closest the two candidates have been since February in polls conducted by this particular organization.
In recent months, the gap was widest in April, when the two candidates were separated by 11 percentage points, according to data from Texas Politics Project.
The 15% of voters left over said they would either vote for another candidate or they haven’t thought about it enough yet to choose.
The new poll surveyed 1,200 registered Texas voters during a little over a two-week period: Aug. 26 through Sept. 6. The margin of error is +/- 2.83%.
For the Attorney General race, the poll also shows incumbent Attorney General Ken Paxton leading Democrat Rochelle Garza 38% to 33%, another five-percentage-point gap.
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NEW YORK (AP) — California is suing Amazon, accusing the company of violating the state’s antitrust and unfair competition laws by stifling competition and engaging in practices that push sellers to maintain higher prices on products on other sites.
The 84-page lawsuit filed Wednesday in San Francisco Superior Court mirrors another complaint filed last year by the District of Columbia, which was dismissed by a district judge earlier this year and is now going through an appeals process.
But officials in California say they believe they won’t encounter a similar fate, partly due to information collected during a more than two-year investigation that involved subpoenas and interviews with sellers, Amazon’s competitors as well as current and former employees at the e-commerce giant.
In the lawsuit, California Attorney General Rob Bonta’s office said Seattle-based Amazon used contract provisions to effectively bar third-party sellers and wholesale suppliers from offering lower prices for products on non-Amazon sites, including on their own websites. That, in turn, harms the ability of other retailers to compete.
The suit maintains merchants that do not comply with the policy could have their products stripped from prominent listings on Amazon and face other sanctions such as suspensions or terminations of their accounts. It alleges Amazon’s policy essentially forces merchants to list higher prices on other sites, helping it maintain its e-commerce dominance.
Among other things, the California lawsuit seeks to stop Amazon from entering into contracts with sellers that harm price competition. It also seeks a court order to compel Amazon to pay damages to the state for increased prices. State officials did not say how much money they are seeking.
The company has said in the past that sellers set their own prices on the platform. It has also said it has the right to avoid highlighting products that are not priced competitively. In a statement sent Wednesday, Amazon reiterated those points and said Bonta has it “exactly backwards.”
“The relief the AG seeks would force Amazon to feature higher prices to customers, oddly going against core objectives of antitrust law,” the company said. “We hope that the California court will reach the same conclusion as the D.C. court and dismiss this lawsuit promptly.”
Amazon controls roughly 38% of online sales in the U.S., more than Walmart, eBay, Apple, Best Buy and Target combined, according to the research firm Insider Intelligence. About 2 million sellers list their products on Amazon’s third-party marketplace, accounting for 58% of the company’s retail sales.
During a news conference on Wednesday, Bonta said some vendors have expressed they would offer lower prices on other sites with lower seller fees, but don’t do so to avoid punishment from Amazon.
“Amazon has stifled its competition for years, not by successfully competing, but by blocking competition on price,” Bonta said. “As a result, California families paid more, and now Amazon must pay the price.”
He said the lawsuit is also a message to other companies who “illegally bend the market at the expense of California consumers, small business owners and the economy.”
The tech industry’s allies also slammed the lawsuit. Adam Kovacevich, CEO of the industry trade group Chamber of Progress, which receives funding from Amazon and other tech companies, said the case would force Amazon to raise prices.
“That makes no sense while consumers shop for bargains to counter inflation, and it’s based on a legally unsound theory already rejected by federal courts,” Kovacevich said.
Despite that defense, Amazon’s market power has been a subject of scrutiny from lawmakers and advocacy groups calling for stricter antitrust regulations. Earlier this year, congressional lawmakers urged the Justice Department to investigate if the company collects data on sellers to develop competing products and offer them more prominently on its site. Critics have also lambasted the increasing fees imposed on sellers, which makes it more difficult for merchants to enter the market.
Lawmakers on Capitol Hill have been pushing bipartisan legislation aiming to limit Amazon and other Big Tech companies, including Apple, Meta and Google, from favoring their own products and services over rivals. The bill has cleared key committees but has languished in Congress for months amid intense pushback from the companies.
Meanwhile, regulators have also been looking into Amazon’s business practices and deals. In July, the company offered concessions to settle two antitrust investigations in the European Union, including a promise to apply equal treatment to all sellers when ranking product offers on the site’s “buy box,” a coveted spot that makes items more visible to shoppers.
In the U.S., the Federal Trade Commission is investigating Amazon’s $3.9 billion acquisition of the primary health organization One Medical as well as the sign-up and cancellation practices of Amazon Prime, the company’s paid subscription service that offers deals and faster shipping.
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HONG KONG (AP) — China’s second largest gaming firm NetEase has received its first online game license in over a year in a possible sign Beijing is gradually easing a crackdown on the industry.
The National Press and Publication Administration, which issues licenses for video games, on Tuesday published a list of approvals for 73 games, including a mobile game by NetEase called “All-Star Street Ball Party.”
In August 2021, regulators stopped issuing gaming licenses as they tightened restrictions on the tech industry. They resumed approvals in April. Tencent, the country’s biggest gaming company, has not gotten any games approved since then.
However, Nanjing Wangdian Technology, a subsidiary of Tencent, got a license for a health-education mobile game called “Defense of Health.” Tencent first unveiled plans to launch this game in May 2021. But such educational games typically are less lucrative than commercial mobile games.
In cracking down on the technology industry, Beijing implemented a raft of new regulations for online education, e-commerce, online gaming and financial technology.
Online gaming time for minors was limited to just 3 hours a week on most weeks. Officials also said they would supervise and inspect online games more often to ensure that they comply with regulations.
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Chattanooga's Division of Transportation is working to make sure the city’s full Ironman race is ready to go.
Starting Wednesday, September 21 at 9 a.m., the Riverfront will be closed to traffic.
At 7:30 a.m. on Sunday, Ironman participants will begin with a 2.4-mile swim in the Tennessee River.
Afterwards, they will take a 116-mile bike ride through St Elmo and north Georgia before making their way back to the North Shore area for a marathon which is 26.2 miles.
“During the race, particularly Sunday morning there are going to be a couple of places that see the greatest impact. West 20th Street around Board Street, St. Elmo Avenue will also see a little bit of delays, and West 40th Street,” Justin Strickland said.
Justin Strickland is the Public Space Coordinator for the Chattanooga Division of Transportation.
He said days before the race, the Ironman course is inspected multiple times to ensure the safety of racers.
“Both the officials from Ironman and the city like to travel the entire route to inspect road conditions, to make sure there is no work zones taking place where folks will be biking or running. If something as simple as a pot hole, we make sure they are filled before racers get over here,” Strickland said.
If you are headed to church Sunday morning and it is usually a 10 to 15 minutes commute, Strickland suggest people leave out 35 or even 45 minutes earlier.
“When it comes to the amount of traffic expected I would recommend giving yourself some extra time because at all intersection there will be an officer, but it may take time before they allow you through. I would take 27 and 24 to get through town,” Strickland said.
Strickland wants to remind people to be mindful of Ironman participants who are out on the road.
“There is going to be several places where the bikers are going to be riding with traffic. So, just give them plenty of space and give them enough room where they can continue on the side of the lane. Give them a couple of feet if you can, but slow down if you see any of the bikers or runners,” Strickland said.
Closure details:
Riverside Drive/Riverfront Parkway between Aquarium Way and Molly Street, Chestnut Street between Aquarium Way and Riverfront Parkway, Power Alley from the parking lot to Riverfront Parkway, and the southbound Veterans Bridge ramp to Riverside Drive will be closed from 9:00 AM on Wednesday, September 21 until 8:00 PM on Monday, September 26 for the IRONMAN setup, race, and take-down.
The right eastbound lane of Riverfront Parkway between Molly Lane and Market Street, the right southbound lane of Market Street between West 20th Street and West 40th Street (the I-24 on-ramp and off-ramp at Market Street will be closed), West 40th Street between Alton Park Blvd and Tennessee Avenue, and all streets crossing this route will be controlled by CPD officers. The intersections of St Elmo Avenue and Virginia Avenue at West 45th Street will be 4-way stops from 8:00 a.m. until 6:00 p.m. on Sunday, September 25, 2022, for the IRONMAN bike portion. Cyclists will also be on Tennessee Avenue and St Elmo Avenue to the state line, riding with traffic.
The right eastbound lane of Frazier Avenue between Forest Avenue and the Veterans Bridge, the right northbound lane of Barton Avenue between Frazier Avenue and Baker Street, the right northbound lane of the Veterans Bridge between East 3rd Street and Barton Avenue, the right westbound lane of Amnicola Highway between Old Curtain Pole Road and Lindsay Street, Riverside Drive between Lindsay Street and Molly Lane, the Battery Place off-ramp from Riverside Drive, Aquarium Way between Riverside Drive and Walnut Street will be closed and all streets crossing this route will be controlled by CPD officers to give right-of-way to the runners from 12:25 p.m. on Sunday, September 25 until 1:00 a.m. on Monday, September 26 for the IRONMAN run portion.
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| 2022-09-20T21:05:03Z
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LONDON (AP) — A top court largely rejected Google’s appeal of a record European Union antitrust fine imposed for throttling competition and reducing consumer choice through the dominance of its mobile Android operating system. It marks another win for EU regulators taking a global lead in controlling the power of big tech companies.
The European Court of Justice’s General Court mostly confirmed a 2018 decision by the EU’s executive Commission to slap Google with a fine of more than 4 billion euros ($3.99 billion).
“In order better to reflect the gravity and duration of the infringement,” it’s appropriate to give Google a fine of 4.125 billion euros, the court said. That’s slightly lower than the original 4.34 billion euro penalty, with the court saying its reasoning differed “in certain respects” from the commission’s.
“We are disappointed that the Court did not annul the decision in full,” Google said in a statement. “Android has created more choice for everyone, not less, and supports thousands of successful businesses in Europe and around the world.”
The company has previously argued that free and open-source Android has resulted in low-cost phones and driven competition with its chief rival, Apple. Android is the most popular mobile operating system, beating even Apple’s iOS.
The fine is one of three antitrust penalties totaling more than $8 billion that the European Commission slapped on Google between 2017 and 2019, putting the 27-nation bloc at the forefront of the global push to rein in tech giants.
Since then, the commission has widened its crackdown on digital giants with more antitrust investigations targeting Amazon, Apple and Facebook and sweeping new rules aimed at clamping down on the biggest digital companies. Tech companies are now facing tighter scrutiny around the world: Google also got hit with a $50 million fine Wednesday by South Korean privacy watchdogs that also fined Facebook parent Meta $22 million.
In its original decision, the European Commission said Google’s practices restrict competition and reduce choices for consumers.
It determined that Google broke EU rules by requiring smartphone makers to take a bundle of Google apps if they wanted any at all and prevented them from selling devices with altered versions of Android.
The bundle contained 11 apps, including YouTube, Maps and Gmail, but regulators focused on the three that had the biggest market share: Google Search, Chrome and the company’s Play Store for apps.
Google had made some changes after the original ruling to address the issues, such as giving European Android users a choice of browser and search app and charging device-makers to pre-install its apps.
EU consumer group BEUC, which argued for the commission’s case in court hearings, said the decision “confirms that Europe’s consumers must enjoy meaningful choice between search engines and browsers on their phones and tablets.”
Google still has one more chance to appeal the decision — but only on points of law — to the EU Court of Justice, the bloc’s highest court. It didn’t say whether it would do so.
The company has already lost an appeal of its first EU antitrust penalty, which it’s now appealing to the Court of Justice. The General Court last year also sided with the commission, upholding a 2.4 billion-euro fine issued in 2017 by regulators who decided that Google unfairly directed visitors to its comparison shopping service, Google Shopping, to the detriment of rivals.
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See all of AP’s tech coverage at https://apnews.com/hub/technology.
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Follow Kelvin Chan on Twitter at https://www.twitter.com/chanman.
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| 2022-09-20T21:05:04Z
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WASHINGTON (AP) — The Justice Department said Wednesday that three Iranian citizens have been charged in the United States with ransomware attacks that targeted power companies, local governments and small businesses and nonprofits, including a domestic violence shelter.
The charges accuse the hacking suspects of targeting hundreds of entities in the U.S. and around the world, encrypting and stealing data from victim networks, and threatening to release it publicly or leave it encrypted unless exorbitant ransom payments were made. In some cases, the victims made those payments, the department said.
The Biden administration has tried to go after hackers who have held U.S. targets essentially hostage, often sanctioned or sheltered by adversaries. The threat gained particular prominence in May 2021 when a Russia-based hacker group was accused of conducting a ransomware attack on Georgia-based Colonial Pipeline, which disrupted gas supplies along the East Coast.
Iran-based hackers have also been a focus over the last year, with the FBI thwarting a planned cyberattack on a children’s hospital in Boston that was to have been carried out by hackers sponsored by the Iranian government.
“The cyber threat facing our nation is growing more dangerous and complex every day,” FBI Director Christopher Wray said in a statement accompanying the indictment unsealed Wednesday. “Today’s announcement makes clear the threat is both local and global. It’s one we can’t ignore and it’s one we can’t fight on our own, either.”
The hackers named in Wednesday’s indictment are not believed to have been working on behalf of the Iranian government but instead for their own financial gain, and some of the victims were even in Iran, according to a senior Justice Department official who briefed reporters on the case on the condition of anonymity under ground rules set by the department.
But the official said the activity, even if not directed by the Iranian government, exists because the regime permits hackers to largely operate with impunity.
In a related action Wednesday, the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control sanctioned 10 individuals and two entities affiliated with Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps who it says have been involved in malicious cyber activities, including ransomware. The Treasury Department identified the three defendants in the Justice Department case as employees of technology firms it says is affiliated with the Revolutionary Guard.
John Hultquist, vice president for threat intelligence at the cybersecurity firm Mandiant, said his team has been tracking the Iranian actors for some time and assessed they are contractors for the Revolutionary Guard who have been moonlighting as criminal hackers. He said they are especially dangerous because “any access they gain could be served up for espionage or disruptive purposes.
The actions come amid an apparent stalemate in talks between the U.S. and Iran over the possible revival of a 2015 nuclear deal. Israel and some U.S. lawmakers of both parties are pushing the Biden administration to get tougher on Iran, calling the negotiations on Iran’s nuclear program a failure.
The three accused hackers are thought to be in Iran and have not been arrested, but the Justice Department official said the pending charges make it “functionally impossible” for them to leave the country.
The case was filed in federal court in New Jersey, where a municipality and an accounting firm were among the victims.
The alleged hacking took place between October 2020 through last month, when the indictment was issued under seal. The three defendants — identified as Mansour Ahmadi, Ahmad Khatibi Aghda and Amir Hossein Nickaein Ravari — are accused of exploiting known or publicly disclosed vulnerabilities in software applications to break into the victims’ computer networks.
Prosecutors say the victims were seen by the defendants as targets of opportunities.
They included a domestic violence shelter in Pennsylvania, which the indictment says was extorted out of $13,000 to recover its hacked data; electric utilities in Indiana and Mississippi; a county government in Wyoming; and a construction company in Washington state.
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Associated Press writers Fatima Hussein and Ellen Knickmeyer in Washington and Frank Bajak in Boston contributed to this report.
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Follow Eric Tucker on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/etuckerAP.
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| 2022-09-20T21:05:10Z
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Roger Bennett remembers calling his father in Liverpool, England, and having his father hold the phone next to the television so he could experience his beloved Everton in the FA Cup semifinals.
To say those days are long, thankfully gone, is an understatement. Technology, streaming packages, and the value of sports programming have allowed fans to view their favorite teams or leagues live or on demand.
“We are living in a golden age. You could make a case for soccer that there’s nowhere better to follow or be a fan than the United States just because of the sheer volume of games broadcast and accessible,” said Bennett, the co-host of the “Men in Blazers” podcast.
With streaming services eager to acquire live content, professional sports leagues in the U.S. are taking the next steps. The NFL will be the latest with Amazon Prime Video’s debut of “Thursday Night Football” when the Los Angeles Chargers take on the Kansas City Chiefs.
More than half of this season’s 103 games in the Walt Disney Co.’s agreement with the NHL will be exclusively on ESPN+ and Hulu this season. Turner Sports has the option to add games to air on HBO Max as part of its seven-year deal.
MLB began a Friday night doubleheader this year with AppleTV+. A Sunday afternoon slate of games on Peacock ended on Labor Day weekend.
While the NHL and MLB deals were transformative, the NFL’s branching out into streaming has garnered more attention, much like when it signed its first cable deal with ESPN in 1987.
“The NFL deal with Amazon signals what’s ahead for coveted live-action sports content in streaming,” said Jon Christian, the EVP for Qvest, a technology consulting firm specializing in media and entertainment. “Consistent accessibility for desired sports programming on streaming apps is the next step for the large majority of consumers to ‘cut the cord’ from traditional broadcast methods.”
While viewing habits are one reason for the addition of streaming packages, another is technology. The rollout of 5G four years ago made leagues realize that video quality and presentation could be on the same level as what’s found on a linear broadcast.
Brian Rolapp, the NFL’s EVP, Chief Media and Business Officer, looked back on the NFL’s first attempt at streaming seven years ago for a regular season game in London as an example of how much things have grown.
“We didn’t think the internet couldn’t sustain that many users at once and have the high-quality experience that you would expect on television,” he said. “We wanted to make sure that the internet could evolve into where it could support audiences at high quality. And we think it’s there.”
MLB recently celebrated the 20th anniversary of becoming the first pro sports league to live-stream a regular season game. The following year, MLB.TV started as a package for out-of-market games.
MLB’s Advanced Media division branched out to create direct-to-consumer services for HBO, World Wrestling Entertainment and Major League Soccer until it was spun off in 2015 as BAMTech Media and eventually bought by Disney.
“We’ve helped a lot of people in the space and continue to again. We think that it’s in everybody’s best interest to have the best experience out there for fans, regardless of the content that’s being consumed,” Noah Garden, MLB’s Chief Revenue Officer. “There’s enough room for everybody. There always has been.”
Amazon isn’t the only service streaming NFL games. ESPN+ will stream the Oct, 30 Denver-Jacksonville game from London, while Peacock begins next season. The league’s “Sunday Ticket” package of Sunday out-of-market games will be completed by the end of the season.
ESPN+ has been at the center of the sports streaming ecosystem for nearly four years, with more than 22.8 million subscribers. With a full slate of soccer, college football, and the U.S. Open tennis tournament, ESPN said ESPN+ had its most-viewed day on Sept. 3.
Russell Wolff, the EVP & GM of ESPN+ & ESPN Networks Business Operations, said he doesn’t think fans are picky about what is on linear vs. streaming, just as long as they can view it.
“The understanding of where things are is as easy as possible for fans, that’s probably the biggest change for fans. I don’t think you have an issue with fans going, ‘Oh, that’s on streaming? I don’t know how to do that, or I don’t want to do that,’” he said.
Peacock, which carries the Olympics and the Premier League, has 13 million subscribers, while Paramount+, with rights to Champions League soccer, has 43 million in more than 60 countries. Paramount does not break out U.S.-only numbers.
Major League Soccer’s deal with AppleTV+, including the production of games, garnered plenty of headlines, but the next big move could come with college football and basketball. If the NFL is a success on Prime Video, it could allow Amazon and Netflix to become more attractive to the Pac-12 or Big 12, whose rights come up in the next couple of years.
“The NFL deal with Amazon signals what’s ahead for coveted live action sports content in streaming,” Christian said. “The U.S. sports streaming is a bit behind at the moment with tremendous opportunity ahead. Currently, the focus on streaming has been more on episodic and full-length, on-demand, recorded content. It will be interesting to see how this plays out as the rights for major sports leagues are not cheap.”
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More AP sports: https://apnews.com/hub/sports and https://twitter.com/AP_Sports
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| 2022-09-20T21:05:16Z
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SEOUL, South Korea (AP) — Samsung Electronics is shifting away from fossil fuels and aiming to entirely power its global operations with clean electricity by 2050, a challenging goal that experts say could be hampered by South Korea’s modest climate change commitments.
South Korea-based Samsung is a top producer of computer memory chips and smartphones and the second biggest energy consumer behind Walmart among hundreds of global companies that have joined the “RE100” campaign to get 100% of electricity from renewable sources like wind or solar power.
In announcing its target Thursday the company said it aims to achieve net zero carbon emissions across its mobile device, television and consumer electronics divisions by 2030, and across all global operations including semiconductors by 2050.
It plans to invest 7 trillion won ($5 billion) through 2030 on projects aimed at reducing emissions from process gases, controlling and recycling electronic waste, conserving water and minimizing pollutants. It plans to develop new technologies to reduce power consumption in consumer electronics devices and data centers, which would require more efficient memory chips. It also will set long-term goals to reduce emissions in supply chains and logistics.
“Samsung is responding to the threats of climate change with a comprehensive plan that includes reducing emissions, new sustainability practices and the development of innovative technologies and products that are better for our planet,” Jong-Hee Han, the company’s CEO, said in an emailed statement.
Samsung’s plan drew praise from some of its investors, including Dutch pension fund manager APG, which said the company could potentially make a “significant contribution” in cleaning up South Korea’s electricity market, considering its impact and influence on the national economy.
Sam Kimmins, director of energy and head of RE100 at the London-based Climate Group, which leads the clean electricity initiative, said Samsung’s commitment would send a message to others in the market that “it is possible, and critical, to switch to 100% renewable electricity.”
APG expressed concern, however, that Samsung’s announcement comes at a time when South Korea has been dialing back on its climate change goals.
The conservative government of President Yoon Suk Yeol, who took office in May, has focused much of its energy policy on promoting nuclear-generated electricity. Desperate to boost a weak economy, Yoon’s government has also indicated reluctance to sharply reduce the country’s dependence on coal and gas, which generate about 65% of South Korea’s electricity.
South Korea got 7.5% of its electricity from renewable sources in 2021, significantly lower than the 30% average among rich nations making up the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. Yoon’s government recently adjusted the country’s renewable energy target to 21% of the total energy mix by 2030, softening the 30% target announced by his liberal predecessor, Moon Jae-in.
Samsung acknowledged it would have a harder time converting to renewable electricity sources at home than at its foreign operations, where it aims to get to 100% clean energy by 2027. It said renewable energy supplies in South Korea “have begun to expand but remain limited,” while its electricity needs continue to rise as it boosts production at its domestic semiconductor lines to meet global demands.
“As a long-term investor in Korea, we are concerned about how the government plans to reconcile the industry’s desperate need for clean electricity to stay relevant in the long run,” Yoo-Kyung Park, APG’s Asia Pacific head of responsible investment and governance, said in a statement.
Samsung, South Korea’s biggest company, had faced growing pressure to do more to reduce its carbon emissions as it lagged behind some of its peers in climate commitments. Those companies include Apple, a major buyer of Samsung’s chips, which joined RE100 in 2016 and plans to be carbon neutral across its entire business and manufacturing supply chains by 2030, putting the pressure on its suppliers to meet those requirements.
Samsung is the crown jewel of an export-reliant economy driven by manufacturing of semiconductors, cars, display panels, mobile phones and ships, industries that tend to have high energy consumption.
Samsung used 25.8 terawatt hours of electricity for its operations last year, which was nearly twice the amount consumed by all households in the South Korean capital of Seoul and more than other global technology giants like Google, Apple, Meta, Intel, and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company.
Samsung’s embrace of clean electricity could have significant supply chain effects, pushing other companies to boost their renewable energy supplies, said Ousam Jin from the Seoul-based Corporate Renewable Energy Foundation.
“Most meaningfully, Samsung’s RE100 commitment sends a strong signal to the renewable energy market and policymakers to increase the supply of renewable energy considering the company’s massive electricity usage,” Jin said.
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| 2022-09-20T21:05:29Z
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SEOUL, South Korea (AP) — South Korea’s privacy watchdog has fined Google and Meta a combined 100 billion won ($72 million) for tracking consumers’ online behavior without their consent and using their data for targeted advertisements.
South Korea’s Personal Information and Protection Commission said it fined Google 69.2 billion won ($50 million) and Meta 30.8 billion won ($22 million) after a meeting where officials agreed that the companies’ business practices might cause “serious” privacy infringements.
The fines were the biggest ever penalties imposed by South Korea for privacy law violations, the commission said in a press release.
Both companies refuted the commission’s findings and Meta indicated it could challenge its fine in court. The fines can be appealed through administrative lawsuits, which must be filed within 90 days after the companies are formally notified of the commission’s decision.
According to the commission, Google and Meta, which operates Facebook and Instagram, didn’t clearly inform users or obtain their consent as they collected information about their online activities when they used other websites or services outside their own platforms. Such data was used to analyze their interests and create individually customized advertisements, the commission said.
The commission ordered the companies to provide an “easy and clear” process of consent giving people more control over whether to share information about what they do online.
“Google did not clearly inform consumers that it would collect and use their behavioral information about their use of other companies’ (services) when they signed up,” the commission said.
“Meta did not present the content of consent in way that could be easily seen by consumers when they signed up, and just included the content in their full data policy statement. It did not specifically inform consumers of the legally required notifications and did not obtain their consent.”
The commission said the companies’ practices seriously threatened privacy rights as more than 82% of South Koreans using Google and more than 98% using Meta have let the companies track their online activities.
Google, a search and email giant that also operates the YouTube video platform, disagreed with the commission’s findings. It said in a statement that it has always demonstrated a commitment to “making ongoing updates that give users control and transparency.” The company said it will review the commission’s findings once it receives the fully written decision.
Meta said it will consider “all options,” including seeking a court ruling.
“We are confident that we work with our clients in a legally compliant way that meets the processes required by local regulations,” Meta said in an emailed statement.
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| 2022-09-20T21:05:35Z
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(NEXSTAR) – This is how you Sonic?
The hardcore punk scene and the fast-casual dining scene have continued to inch closer and closer in recent years, first after two viral concerts at Denny’s restaurants in California and Texas, and now after a hardcore show at a Sonic Drive-In.
The Sonic restaurant, located in Hainesport, New Jersey, played host to the concert on Saturday night, with bands rocking out beside the intercoms and fans moshing in the drive-in stalls, according to photos and video shared to social media.
“Well that s— was crazy,” tweeted one of the bands, seemingly accurately, after the show concluded early on Sunday morning.
According to a flyer for the concert — which featured performances by hardcore bands Gel, Scowl, Exhibition, Chemical Fix and Phantom — the show was scheduled to begin immediately after the restaurant closed at 10 p.m. Even still, one of the attendees appeared to be eating a Sonic corn dog during Exhibition’s set, as seen in footage shared by live-music archivist Sunny Singh of the website hate5six.
Images taken by South Suburbia Photo also show fans dancing, lighting off fireworks and generally having a fantastic time in what would otherwise be an empty Sonic parking area off Route 38 East in New Jersey.
“It was wild, hands-down one of the best shows I’ve ever been to,” the photographer told Nexstar.
It’s unclear how the event came to be, though it was organized by the Philadelphia-based 4333 Collective, according to the flyer. A representative for the group was not immediately available to comment.
A manager at the Sonic Drive-In who knew more about the booking arrangements was said to be unavailable until later this week, an employee at the restaurant told Nexstar.
Sonic’s corporate headquarters, meanwhile, did not respond to requests for further information.
Saturday night’s concert comes nearly three years after a band called Wacko staged a similarly odd concert at a Denny’s in Santa Ana, California, where the attendees reportedly caused more than $1,000 in damages. Fortunately, Green Day — yes, Green Day — graciously offered to cover the costs, Loudwire reported at the time.
But both Wacko and the bands in the lineup at Sonic likely owe a debt of gratitude to a Texas band called Live Without, which staged a 2013 concert inside a shuttered Denny’s location in Houston. To date, a four-minute video clip of that concert — titled “The Denny’s Grand Slam” — has amassed over 3 million views on YouTube alone.
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MADRID (AP) — Oscar-winning director Pedro Almodóvar says that he is withdrawing from his first English-language feature, “A Manual for Cleaning Women” produced by and starring Cate Blanchett.
Almodóvar, 72, told entertainment news website Deadline Hollywood that he was unable to handle the commitment.
“It has been a very painful decision for me,” Almodóvar told Deadline Hollywood. “I have dreamt of working with Cate for such a long time. Dirty Films has been so generous with me this whole time and I was blinded by excitement, but unfortunately, I no longer feel able to fully realize this film.”
A new director hasn’t been announced yet by Blanchett’s Dirty Films production company.
Almodóvar’s brother and business partner confirmed the decision in a social media post on Wednesday.
“Pedro Almodóvar is leaving the ‘A Manual for Cleaning Women’ project, which will continue forward with Cate Blanchett,” Agustin Almodóvar, who helps his sibling run their El Deseo production company, wrote on Twitter
“A Manual for Cleaning Women” is an adaptation of the eponymous collection of short stories by American author Lucia Berlin.
Pedro Almodóvar won Oscar awards for best foreign language film for “All About My Mother” (1999) and for best original screenplay for “Talk To Her” (2002). He made his first short in English, “The Human Voice,” featuring Tilda Swinton, in 2020.
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| 2022-09-20T21:06:01Z
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NUR-SULTAN, Kazakhstan (AP) — Pope Francis told the Russian Orthodox hierarchy and other faith leaders Wednesday that religion must never be used to justify the “evil” of war, and asked at an outdoor Mass in Kazakhstan, “How many deaths will it take?” for peace to prevail in Ukraine.
An increasingly frail Francis made the appeal during his first full day in the former Soviet republic of Kazakhstan, where he opened a global interfaith conference and ministered to the tiny Catholic community in the majority Muslim country.
In the conference audience of imams, patriarchs, rabbis and muftis was Metropolitan Anthony, in charge of foreign relations for the Russian Orthodox Church, which has firmly backed Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. His boss, Patriarch Kirill, was supposed to have participated in the congress but canceled last month.
Kirill has supported Russia’s invasion on spiritual and ideological grounds, calling it a “metaphysical” battle with the West. He has blessed Russian soldiers going into war and invoked the idea that Russians and Ukrainians are one people.
Francis didn’t mention Russia or Ukraine in his remarks to the Kazakh conference. But he insisted that faith leaders themselves must take the lead in promoting a culture of peace, since it would be hypocritical to expect that non-believers would promote peace if religious leaders don’t.
“If the creator, to whom we have devoted our lives, is the author of human life, how can we who call ourselves believers consent to the destruction of that life?” he asked. “Mindful of the wrongs and errors of the past, let us unite our efforts to ensure that the Almighty will never again be held hostage to the human thirst for power.”
Francis then laid down a challenge to all those in the room to commit themselves to resolving disputes through dialogue and negotiation, not with arms.
“May we never justify violence. May we never allow the sacred to be exploited by the profane. The sacred must never be a prop for power, nor power a prop for the sacred!”
He made the appeal more explicit in an afternoon outdoor Mass for Kazakhstan’s tiny Catholic community, in which he asked for prayers for “beloved Ukraine.”
“How many deaths will it still take before conflict yields to dialogue for the good of people, nations and all humanity?” he asked. “The one solution is peace and the only way to arrive at peace is through dialogue.”
Kirill sent a message to the congress read aloud by Anthony. In it, the Russian patriarch didn’t refer to the war but in general to problems over the past two decades caused by “attempts to build a world without relying on moral values.”
The Russian patriarch has blasted the West’s secular mentality and claimed the seeds of the Ukraine conflict were sown by foreign threats to Russia’s borders. He has depicted the conflict as a struggle against a foreign liberal establishment purportedly demanding countries hold “gay parades” as the price of admission to a world of excess consumption and freedom.
“These attempts have led not only to the loss of the concept of justice in international relations, but also to brutal confrontation, military conflicts, the spread of terrorism and extremism in different parts of the world,” Kirill said in his message.
Suggesting he felt Russia was the victim of a smear campaign, he denounced the spread of misinformation and the “distortion of historical facts” and “manipulation of mass consciousness” to spread messages of “hatred towards entire peoples, cultures and religions.”
In addition to the Russian Orthodox delegation, the religious leaders included Sheikh Ahmed al-Tayeb, the grand imam of Al-Azhar, the seat of Sunni learning in Cairo, who warmly greeted Francis with a kiss on the cheek when the pope arrived in a wheelchair.
Al-Tayeb used his speech to the conference to complain that traditional religions had been replaced by a culture of lust and gay marriage. “This is not acceptable, not even for animals and beasts, let alone for people with pure hearts and sound minds,” he said.
The Right Rev. Jo Bailey Wells, the Anglican bishop of Dorking and one of only a half dozen women heading delegations, lamented that women represent half the world’s population but are hardly represented in religious leadership.
“My expectation is it will be a challenge to those present to empower women in the family context and in public society,” she told reporters.
Before Kirill bowed out, there had been speculation that Francis could meet with Kirill on the sidelines of the congress. The two met for the first time in 2016 in Cuba — the first-ever meeting of a pope and Russian patriarch — and spoke by videoconference in the early weeks of the war.
Francis afterward publicly criticized Kirill’s justification of Russia’s invasion and warned that he mustn’t become “Putin’s altar boy.”
Speaking to reporters after he met with Francis, Anthony said Francis’ “altar boy” comment didn’t go over well in Moscow. “It wasn’t expected and clearly it’s not useful for the unity of Christians,” he said. “It was a surprise. But we know we have to move on.”
He said a Kirill-Francis meeting is still possible, but insisted it had to be well-prepared ahead of time and must produce a concrete joint statement, as was issued after the Havana meeting.
In addition to the meeting with Anthony, Francis also was meeting with al-Tayeb, the head of Russia’s religious council of Muslims and other Orthodox, Jewish, Lutheran and Muslim leaders.
Another visitor in Kazakhstan on Wednesday was apparently not on Francis’ agenda. Chinese President Xi Jinping arrived in Nur-Sultan on his first state visit outside China since early in the coronavirus pandemic. Vatican and Kazakh officials said they didn’t expect Xi would meet with the pope during his brief visit to a key economic and political ally in the region.
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Associated Press religion coverage receives support through the AP’s collaboration with The Conversation US, with funding from Lilly Endowment Inc. The AP is solely responsible for this content.
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| 2022-09-20T21:06:09Z
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YEREVAN, Armenia (AP) — Armenia and Azerbaijan negotiated a cease-fire to end a flare-up of fighting that has killed 155 soldiers from both sides, a senior Armenian official said early Thursday.
Armen Grigoryan, the secretary of Armenia’s Security Council, announced the truce in televised remarks, saying it took effect hours earlier, at 8 p.m. (1600 GMT) Wednesday. A previous cease-fire that Russia brokered Tuesday quickly failed.
Several hours before Grigoryan’s announcement, Armenia’s Defense Ministry reported that shelling had ceased but it didn’t mention the cease-fire deal.
There was no immediate comment from Azerbaijan’s government.
The cease-fire declaration followed two days of heavy fighting that marked the largest outbreak of hostilities between the two longtime adversaries in nearly two years.
Late Wednesday, thousands of protesters took to the streets of Armenia’s capital accusing Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan of betraying his country by trying to appease Azerbaijan and demanding his resignation.
Armenia and Azerbaijan traded blame for the hostilities, with Armenian authorities accusing Baku of unprovoked aggression and Azerbaijani officials saying their country was responding to Armenian shelling.
Pashinyan said 105 of his country’s soldiers had been killed since fighting erupted early Tuesday, while Azerbaijan said it lost 50. Azerbaijani authorities said they were ready to unilaterally hand over the bodies of up to 100 Armenian soldiers.
The ex-Soviet countries have been locked in a decades-old conflict over Nagorno-Karabakh, which is part of Azerbaijan but has been under the control of ethnic Armenian forces backed by Armenia since a separatist war there ended in 1994.
During a six-week war in 2020, Azerbaijan reclaimed broad swaths of Nagorno-Karabakh and adjacent territories held by Armenian forces. More than 6,700 people died in the fighting, which ended with a Russia-brokered peace deal. Moscow deployed about 2,000 troops to the region to serve as peacekeepers under the deal.
Pashinyan said Wednesday that Azerbaijani forces have occupied 10 square kilometers (nearly 4 square miles) of Armenia’s territory since the fighting began.
He told lawmakers that his government has asked Russia for military support under a friendship treaty between the countries, and also requested assistance from the Collective Security Treaty Organization.
“Our allies are Russia and the CSTO,” Pashinyan said, adding that the collective security pact states that an aggression against one member is an aggression against all.
“We don’t see military intervention as the only possibility, because there are also political and diplomatic options,” Pashinyan said, speaking in his nation’s parliament.
He told lawmakers that Armenia is ready to recognize Azerbaijan’s territorial integrity in a future peace treaty, provided that it relinquishes control of areas in Armenia its forces have seized.
“We want to sign a document, for which many people will criticize and denounce us and call us traitors, and they may even decide to remove us from office, but we would be grateful if Armenia gets a lasting peace and security as a result of it,” Pashinyan said.
Some in the opposition saw the statement as a sign of Pashinyan’s readiness to cave in to Azerbaijani demands and recognize Azerbaijan’s sovereignty over Nagorno-Karabakh. Thousands of angry protesters quickly descended on the government’s headquarters, accusing Pashinyan of treason and demanding he step down.
Pashinyan angrily denied reports alleging that he had signed a deal accepting Azerbaijani demands as an “information attack.” Grigoryan, the Security Council’s secretary, denounced the protests in Yerevan, describing them as an attempt to destroy the state.
Arayik Harutyunyan, the leader of Nagorno-Karabakh, reacted to the uproar by saying that the region will not agree to come into the Azerbaijani fold and will continue pushing for its independence.
As tensions rose in Yerevan, Moscow has engaged in a delicate balancing act in seeking to maintain friendly ties with both nations. It has strong economic and security ties with Armenia, which hosts a Russian military base, but also maintains close cooperation with oil-rich Azerbaijan.
Some observers saw the outbreak of fighting as an attempt by Azerbaijan to force Armenian authorities into faster implementation of some of the provisions of the 2020 peace deal, such as the opening of transport corridors via its territory.
“Azerbaijan has bigger military potential, and so it tries to dictate its conditions to Armenia and use force to push for diplomatic decisions it wants,” Sergei Markedonov, a Russian expert on the South Caucasus region, wrote in a commentary.
Markedonov noted that the current flare-up of hostilities comes just as Russia has been forced to pull back from areas in northeastern Ukraine after a Ukrainian counteroffensive, adding that Armenia’s request for assistance has put Russia in a precarious position.
Russian President Vladimir Putin and leaders of other CSTO members discussed the situation in a call late Tuesday, urging a quick cessation of hostilities. They agreed to send a mission of top officials from the security alliance to the area.
On Friday, Putin is set to hold a meeting with Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev in Samarkand, Uzbekistan, where they both plan to attend a summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, a security grouping dominated by Russia and China. The Armenian government said that Pashinyan, who also was due to attend the summit, would not show up because of the situation in the country.
In Washington, a group of lawmakers supporting Armenia lobbied the Biden administration. U.S. Rep. Adam Schiff, the influential Democratic chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, and four other members of Congress called on the White House and State Department to “unequivocally condemn Azerbaijan’s actions and cease all assistance” to Azerbaijan.
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Aida Sultanova in London, Vladimir Isachenkov in Moscow, Nomaan Merchant in Washington and Kirsten Grieshaber in Berlin contributed to this report.
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| 2022-09-20T21:06:23Z
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AMMAN, Jordan (AP) — Jordanian teams on Wednesday rescued an infant and worked to save others from the rubble of a collapsed building, as officials said they had arrested three people in connection to the disaster.
State media said at least nine people were killed and others remained missing Wednesday, a day after the four-story building fell in Jordan’s capital, Amman. Authorities said 10 other people were injured. It remained unclear what caused the collapse.
Nisreen al-Hmoud said she was at home with her two sons when the building collapsed.
“The first thing I saw was the ceiling when it fell on my head. After that the floor split, and my children and I fell into it,” she said. “The sofa flew toward my son and protected him from the rubble that fell on us.”
Her 13-year-old son, Nour, speaking from a hospital room, said he remembered his mother telling him to move quickly and then the floor opening up before he lost consciousness.
Amman public prosecutor Hassan Al-Abdallat told the official Petra News Agency that three people had been charged with multiple counts of causing death and harm. He said his office would form a technical committee to determine the cause of the collapse and identify those responsible.
State media identified the suspects as one of the building’s owners, its maintenance contractor and its maintenance technician.
Rescue crews, meanwhile, continued to dig through the ruins in hope of finding survivors. The Petra agency said an infant had been rescued and evacuated.
Brig. Gen. Hatem Jaber, director of the civil defense department, said rescuers were working on the assumption that everyone trapped inside is still alive. “We work with cautious optimism,” he said.
The building was located in Jabal al-Weibdeh, an older district of the Jordanian capital that is popular among wealthier residents and expatriates but also includes some poorer areas.
Jordan is a close Western ally that has long been seen as a bastion of stability in the volatile Middle East.
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| 2022-09-20T21:06:31Z
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OAK GLEN, Calif. (AP) — Rescuers searched Wednesday for a person missing in a mudslide that swept boulders down fire-scarred slopes and damaged or destroyed 30 homes in the Southern California mountains as firefighters in the northern part of the state tried to contain an explosive week-old blaze.
Dogs aided the hunt for a person missing in a heavily damaged area of the San Bernardino Mountains east of Los Angeles where thunderstorms unleashed rocks, trees and earth that washed away cars, buried homes and affected 3,000 residents in two remote communities.
The force of mud barreling down the mountain late Monday drove a dumpster through the walls of the Oak Glen Steakhouse and Saloon. A massive tree lodged in the dining room, muck was waist-deep in the kitchen and wine bottles were slathered in mud.
“We have trees in there … 30 feet long that came straight through our building,” said Brandon Gallegos, whose family owns the restaurant. “It’s crushing.”
As the search, cleanup and damage assessment continued, firefighters in Northern California tried to tamp down a fire that flared up Tuesday and jumped a fork of the American River and on Wednesday became the largest blaze in the state this year. Evacuations were increased to more than 11,000 people as the fire threatened over 9,000 structures.
The muddy damage in Oak Glen and Forest Falls served as a powerful warning to residents of areas that have burned or are facing high fire danger of the damage wildfires can cause months or even years after flames are extinguished and the smoke clears.
An intense amount of rain even over a short period of time can have catastrophic effects on hillsides where fire has stripped vegetation that once held the ground intact.
In January 2018, mudslides thundered down a steep mountainside that burned a month earlier and killed more than 20 people in the tony beachside town of Montecito near Santa Barbara. The worst of the rain fell in a 15-minute span with Montecito getting little more than a half-inch (1.25 centimeter) in five minutes.
Jim Topelski, a San Bernardino County fire chief, said mudslides had been a concern in the area burned by the deadly El Dorado Fire that was sparked two years ago when a couple used a smoke device to reveal their baby’s gender. The couple was charged with involuntary manslaughte r in the death of a firefighter.
On Monday, nearly 2 inches (5 centimeters) of rain fell top Yucaipa Ridge between Oak Glen, home to apple orchards that are a fall tourist destination, and Forest Falls, once a summer getaway for cabin owners that has become a bedroom community.
“The mud and debris flow came down through the high steep terrain,” Topeleski said. “This entire area is blanketed with up to 6 feet (1.83 meters) of mud, debris, large boulders.”
Mudflows had washed into Forest Falls a month ago, closing roads, but damaging no homes.
Residents in the area had been warned of the danger lurking above them, so they were dismayed but not surprised, Gallegos said.
“We were just hoping and praying that it wouldn’t happen, but it did happen,” he said.
A video captured the spectacle of mud flowing like lava past the sign for Gallegos’ restaurant under sunny skies. It was followed seconds later by a faster-moving and deeper surge of sludge carrying logs and sweeping across a road.
Out of view in the video was the damage being done as tons of mud poured into the tavern.
Evacuation orders remained in two areas over possible mudslides as well as to help workers clear roads buried in muck and restore water and power.
The burst of rain followed a rare tropical storm that ended a lengthy statewide heat wave last week that had pushed electrical supplies to the brink of power outages.
While the temporary relief was welcome in the drought-stricken West, a spate of flash floods that followed have wreaked havoc in many places.
Cars were marooned over the weekend in Death Valley National Park and new flooding again Tuesday closed all entrances into the park. Only the east entrance was open Wednesday and the western entrance is closed indefinitely because of extensive road damage.
In a desert area outside Las Vegas, a stranded truck driver and two people in a van had to be rescued after thunderstorms dumped more than 2 inches (5.1 centimeters) of rain within three hours early Wednesday and washed basketball-sized rocks onto roads in Valley of Fire State Park.
It was a different story in Northern California, where the Mosquito Fire burned more buildings Tuesday afternoon, just hours after officials reported making “great strides.” The blaze on Wednesday surpassed the size of the previous largest fire in 2022, the McKinney Fire, although this season has seen a fraction of last year’s fire activity so far.
Stronger winds pushed out a smoke inversion layer Tuesday that had been stifling the blaze and gave fresh oxygen to the flames, McLean said. The area is full of extremely dry vegetation that was rapidly igniting, challenging both firefighters on the ground and air.
Scientists say climate change has made the West warmer and drier over the last three decades and will continue to make weather more extreme and wildfires more frequent and destructive. In the last five years, California has experienced the largest and most destructive fires in its history.
Firefighters were able to keep flames from crossing a key road and entering the town of Foresthill and cooler temperatures overnight helped keep it in check, fire spokesperson Scott McLean said Wednesday. He said some buildings burned, but the exact number won’t be known until damage assessment teams were able to canvas the area.
Breezes were calmer on Wednesday afternoon and crews and helicopters knocked down hotspots.
“It’s trying to come back to life,” McLean said from his perch overlooking the fire. “But nothing like yesterday.”
He said evacuations remain in place because of the unpredictable nature of the winds, which typically blow in the direction of several canyons in the area, which could rapidly spread flames if gusts pick up.
The blaze 110 miles (177 kilometers) northeast of San Francisco was one of three large fires in the state and had grown to roughly 100 square miles (258 square kilometers), with 20% containment Wednesday, according to the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, or Cal Fire. At least 64 homes and other buildings have been destroyed.
The Fairview Fire was burning about 75 miles (121 kilometers) southeast of Los Angeles. The 44-square-mile (114-square-kilometer) blaze was 75% contained by Wednesday night. Two people died fleeing the fire, which destroyed at least 35 homes and other structures in Riverside County.
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Melley reported from Los Angeles. Associated Press writers Christopher Weber and Stefanie Dazio in Los Angeles and Ken Ritter in Las Vegas contributed to this report.
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For more AP coverage of the climate and environment: https://apnews.com/hub/climate-and-environment.
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| 2022-09-20T21:06:38Z
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NUR-SULTAN, Kazakhstan (AP) — Chinese President Xi Jinping on Wednesday started his first foreign trip since the outbreak of the pandemic with a stop in Kazakhstan ahead of a summit with Russia’s Vladimir Putin and other leaders of a Central Asian security group.
Wearing a blue suit and a face mask, Xi was met on the airport tarmac by President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev and an honor guard, all of whom wore masks.
Xi’s trip underlines the importance Beijing places on asserting its role as a regional leader amid tension with Washington, Japan and India.
Tokayev’s government said the two leaders would discuss energy and trade. Kazakhstan, a sparsely populated country of 19.4 million people and sprawling grasslands, is a major oil and gas producer. China is a leading customer.
Tokayev thanked Xi for his visit, which he said was of “historic significance” and came at a time of “unprecedented, after the end of the Cold War, escalation of international tensions.” He also hailed China’s support of “the economic development of Kazakhstan and our international initiatives.”
The Chinese leader promised to resolutely support Kazakhstan “in protecting its independence, sovereignty and territorial integrity, firmly support your ongoing reforms to ensure stability and development, and categorically oppose the interference of any forces in the internal affairs” of the country “no matter how the international situation changes.”
Chinese state broadcaster CCTV reported that after his visit to Kazakhstan, Xi flew to Samarkand in neighboring Uzbekistan for a summit of the eight-nation Shanghai Cooperation Organization, led by China and Russia.
Beijing and Moscow see the SCO as a counterweight to U.S. alliances in East Asia.
Other SCO governments include India, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Pakistan and Tajikistan. Observers include Iran and Afghanistan.
The Chinese leader is promoting a “Global Security Initiative” announced in April following the formation of the Quad by Washington, Japan, Australia and India in response to Beijing’s more assertive foreign policy. Xi has given few details, but U.S. officials complain it echoes Russian arguments in support of Moscow’s attack on Ukraine.
Xi and Putin plan to hold a one-on-one meeting and discuss Ukraine, according to the Russian president’s foreign policy adviser Yuri Ushakov.
Kazakhstan is part of China’s multibillion-dollar Belt and Road Initiative to expand trade by building ports, railways and other infrastructure across an arc of dozens of countries from the South Pacific through Asia to the Middle East, Europe and Africa.
The initiative and China’s economic inroads into Central Asia have fueled unease in Russia, which sees the region as its sphere of influence. Kazakhstan and its neighbors are trying to attract Chinese investment without upsetting Moscow.
“This visit is extremely important,” said Deputy Foreign Minister Roman Vassilenko this week ahead of Xi’s arrival. “We certainly hope that it will advance political and economic and commercial relations with China.”
Pope Francis was in Kazakhstan at the same time as Xi, but there was no indication they might meet. Aboard his flight, the pope was asked about a possible meeting and replied, “I don’t have any news about this. But I am always ready to go to China.”
Xi’s trip — at a time when his government is urging the Chinese public to avoid foreign travel under its “zero-COVID” strategy — underlines the importance to the ruling Communist Party of asserting China’s strategic ambitions.
Relations with Washington, Europe, Japan and India are strained by disputes over technology, security, human rights and territory.
The summit takes Xi abroad while the party prepares for an October congress at which he is expected to break with political tradition and try to award himself a third five-year term as leader.
That suggests Xi, China’s most powerful leader since at least the 1980s, is confident his third term is secure and he doesn’t need to stay home to make last-minute political deals. His trip also might help to promote his standing with nationalists in the ruling party.
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| 2022-09-20T21:06:45Z
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COLUMBUS, Ohio (AP) — A federal appeals court ruling Wednesday revives unsettled lawsuits against Ohio State University over decades-old sexual abuse by the late team doctor Richard Strauss.
A district judge in Columbus had dismissed most of the unsettled cases, acknowledging that hundreds of young men were abused but agreeing with the university’s argument that the legal time limit for the claims had long passed. The plaintiffs argued that the clock didn’t start until the allegations came to light in 2018, and that their cases should be allowed to continue.
Two of the three judges on the Sixth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals panel that heard the case concluded in Wednesday’s ruling that the men “plausibly allege a decades-long cover up” and “adequately allege that they did not know and could not reasonably have known that Ohio State injured them until 2018.”
“Ohio State is a vast institution, and the plaintiffs’ allegations underscore how difficult it is for a student to know what appropriate persons within the Ohio State administration knew” about abuse allegations, Judge Karen Nelson Moore wrote in the decision.
Lead plaintiff Steve Snyder-Hill said it’s a huge ruling for the survivors, who believe it could influence other sexual misconduct cases at universities.
“Our lawyer argued that if OSU had gotten away with what they were trying to do here, with getting this motion thrown out on the statute of limitations, then they would have paved the way and given a playbook for all these other universities to do the same thing that they’ve done, and I’m glad that this court saw through it and didn’t let it happen,” Snyder-Hill said.
Judge Ralph B. Guy Jr. dissented with the decision, writing that the clock on the claims ran out decades ago and that the court’s decision “effectively nullifies any statute of limitations for Title IX claims based on sexual harassment.”
Ohio State is reviewing the ruling, university spokesperson Benjamin Johnson said by email.
Hundreds of former student-athletes and other alumni say they were abused by Strauss during his two decades at the school, and that Ohio State officials failed to stop him despite knowing about complaints. The men alleged Strauss abused them during medical exams, required physicals and other encounters at campus athletic facilities, a student health center, his home and an off-campus clinic.
The doctor died in 2005. No one has publicly defended him.
The university has reiterated apologies for anyone he harmed, and it has reached over $60 million in settlements with at least 296 survivors.
The school sought to dismiss remaining cases, saying it didn’t intend to disrespect the men or their allegations but the claims were made years too late. OSU’s lawyer has argued that if the doctor’s behavior and Ohio State’s inaction during his tenure were as egregious as alleged, the students knew enough that, legally speaking, they should have started inquiring about possible recourse back then.
Wednesday’s ruling said the appeals court can’t say whether the plaintiffs’ “snippets of knowledge” should have prompted them to investigate further. That, the ruling said, “is a question of fact — one that is improper to resolve at the motion-to-dismiss stage.”
Two groups totaling more than 100 survivors appealed the dismissal, contending the two-year window for the claims didn’t start until 2018, when the men began to speak out and the school hired a law firm to investigate. Until then, most of the plaintiffs didn’t recognize their experiences as abuse, and they didn’t know that OSU’s indifference to students’ concerns allowed the abuse to continue for years, an attorney for the men said during arguments on the appeal.
Strauss joined Ohio State in 1978 and was on the faculty and medical staff. He was able to retire in 1998 with emeritus status. School trustees revoked that mark of honor three years ago.
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LONDON (AP) — The coffin of Queen Elizabeth II left Buckingham Palace for the last time Wednesday, borne on a horse-drawn carriage and saluted by cannons and the tolling of Big Ben, in a solemn procession through the flag-draped, crowd-lined streets of London to Westminster Hall. There, a steady stream of mourners paid their respects to Britain’s longest-reigning monarch.
As the cortege left the palace, her son, King Charles III, and his siblings and sons marched behind the coffin, which was topped by a wreath of white roses and her crown resting on a purple velvet pillow.
The military procession underscored Elizabeth’s seven decades as head of state as the national mourning process shifted to the grand boulevards and historic landmarks of the U.K. capital.
At 900-year-old Westminster Hall, where the queen will lie in state until her funeral Monday, crowds shuffled past her coffin well into the night. They moved silently down the steps of the hall under a great stained glass window, then past the coffin that was covered with the Royal Standard and had been placed on a raised platform known as a catafalque by eight pallbearers.
There were couples and parents with children, veterans with medals clinking on navy blue blazers, lawmakers and members of the House of Lords. Some wore black or suits and ties, others jeans and sneakers, and all had waited hours to stand in front of the coffin for a few moments
Many bowed or curtseyed and some were in tears.
Thousands who had waited for the procession for hours along The Mall outside the palace and other locations along the route held up phones and cameras, and some wiped away tears, as the casket rolled by. Applause broke out as it passed through Horse Guards Parade. Thousands more in nearby Hyde Park watched on large screens.
The coffin was topped with the Imperial State Crown — encrusted with almost 3,000 diamonds — and a bouquet of flowers and plants, including pine from the Balmoral Estate, where Elizabeth died on Sept. 8 at the age of 96.
Two officers and 32 troops from the 1st Battalion Grenadier Guards in red uniforms and bearskin hats walked on either side of the gun carriage. The 38-minute procession ended at Westminster Hall, where Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby led a service attended by Charles and other royals.
“Let not your heart be troubled: ye believe in God, believe also in me. In my Father’s house are many mansions: if it were not so, I would have told you,” Welby read from the Book of John.
After a short service, the captain of The Queen’s Company 1st Battalion Grenadier Guards, assisted by a senior sergeant, laid the royal standard of the regiment on the steps of the catafalque.
Four officers from the Household Cavalry -– two from the Life Guards and two from the Blues Royals -– began the vigil, taking their places at each corner and bowing their heads.
Thousands had queued up along the banks of the River Thames, waiting to enter the hall and pay their respects to the only monarch most Britons have ever known after her 70 years on the throne.
Esther Ravenor, a Kenyan who lives in the U.K. said she was humbled as she watched the procession.
“I love the queen, I love the royal family, and you know, I had to be here,” she said. “She is a true role model. She loved us all, all of us. Especially someone like me, a migrant woman coming to the U.K. 30 years ago, I was allowed to be here and to be free and safe, so I really honor her. She was a big part of my life.”
Maj. Gen. Christopher Ghika, of the Household division, who organized the ceremonial aspects of the queen’s funeral, said it was “our last opportunity to do our duty for the queen, and it’s our first opportunity to do it for the king, and that makes us all very proud.”
Troops involved in the procession had been preparing since the queen died. So had the horses of the King’s Troop Royal Horse Artillery.
Sgt. Tom Jenks said the horses were specially trained, including how to handle weeping mourners, as well as flowers and flags being tossed in front of the procession.
Heathrow Airport temporarily halted flights, saying it would “ensure silence over central London as the ceremonial procession moves from Buckingham Palace to Westminster Hall.”
President Joe Biden spoke Wednesday with Charles to offer his condolences, the White House said.
Biden recalled “the Queen’s kindness and hospitality” she hosted them and the first lady at Windsor Castle in June, the statement said. “He also conveyed the great admiration of the American people for the Queen, whose dignity and constancy deepened the enduring friendship and special relationship between the United States and the United Kingdom.”
Crowds have lined the route of the queen’s coffin whenever it has been moved in its long journey from Scotland to London.
On Tuesday night, thousands braved a typical London drizzle as the hearse, with interior lights illuminating the casket, drove slowly from an air base to Buckingham Palace.
Earlier, in Edinburgh, about 33,000 people filed silently past her coffin in 24 hours at St. Giles’ Cathedral.
The line of people snaking along the banks of the River Thames to enter Westminster Hall, the oldest building in Parliament, was nearly 3 miles long in the afternoon, according to a government tracker.
The hall is where Guy Fawkes and Charles I were tried, where kings and queens hosted magnificent medieval banquets, and where ceremonial addresses were presented to Queen Elizabeth II during her silver, golden and diamond jubilees.
Chris Bond, from Truro in southwest England, was among those waiting to see the queen’s coffin. He also attended the lying in state of the queen’s mother in 2002.
“Obviously, it’s quite difficult queuing all day long, but when you walk through those doors into Westminster Hall, that marvelous, historic building, there was a great sense of hush and one was told you take as much time as you like, and it’s just amazing,” he said.
“We know the queen was a good age and she served the country a long time, but we hoped this day would never come,” he added.
Chris Imafidon, secured the sixth place in the queue.
“I have 1,001 emotions when I see her,” he said. “I want to say, God, she was an angel, because she touched many good people and did so many good things.”
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Associated Press writer Sylvia Hui contributed.
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Follow AP coverage of Queen at https://apnews.com/hub/queen-elizabeth-ii
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| 2022-09-20T21:07:00Z
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PESHAWAR, Pakistan (AP) — Eight people have been killed in a roadside bombing that targeted an anti-Taliban village elder’s vehicle in northwestern Pakistan, police said.
Saeed Khan, a senior police official in Swat, said the slain head of a village peace committee, Idrees Khan, was traveling in the area when the roadside bomb hit his vehicle. He said that initial reports suggested the bombing killed five but later they concluded eight people had died, including two policemen.
In a statement, Mohammad Khurasani, the spokesman for the Pakistani Taliban militant group — known as Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan — claimed responsibility. He said that the slain head of the peace committee had been supporting security forces for the past several years.
The Pakistani Taliban have been holding peace talks since May in Kabul, Afghanistan. But isolated militant attacks and security raids on militant hideouts have continued, raising fears these talks could break in the coming months, if not weeks.
A formal cease-fire between Pakistan and the TTP is still in place.
The talks in Kabul are hosted by the Afghan Taliban, a separate group allied with the Pakistani Taliban. The Taliban seized power in Afghanistan a year ago. That takeover has emboldened the Pakistani Taliban, whose fighters and leaders, officials say, have been hiding in Afghanistan.
Islamabad has demanded that the new Taliban rulers in Afghanistan prevent militant groups, including TTP, from using Afghan territory for attacks inside Pakistan. Before the Taliban takeover next door, Islamabad and Kabul had often traded blame and accused each other of sheltering militants.
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| 2022-09-20T21:07:07Z
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BRUSSELS (AP) — European Union Commission Chief Ursula von der Leyen announced a visit to Kyiv later Wednesday to show the bloc’s support for Ukraine as it fights back against the Russian invasion.
Dressed in the colors of Ukraine, von der Leyen said in her State of the European Union address that the bloc would come to the aid of Ukraine by opening its seamless single market more to Ukrainian products and said she would “discuss all this with President (Volodymyr) Zelenskyy.”
Von der Leyen’s trip symbolize the EU’s increasing opposition to Russia’s actions, which she called a war of “autocracy against democracy,” pushed by Russian President Vladimir Putin.
“And I stand here with the conviction that with the necessary courage and necessary solidarity, Putin will fail and Europe will prevail,” she told the plenary of the European parliament in Strasbourg, France.
As Ukraine is pushing Russian troops back in the east with a lightning fast counteroffensive, von der Leyen took heart. “We have seen in the last days the bravery of Ukrainians paying off,” she said.
At the same time, she claimed there were increasing indications that Russia was suffering ever more from EU and other international sanctions — and certainly more that some critics of Western sanctions acknowledge.
“Russia’s financial sector is on life support. We have cut off three-quarters of Russia’s banking sector from international markets,” she said, adding that almost 1,000 companies had left Russia.
She said car production fell by three-quarters compared to last year and that the national airline Aeroflot was forced to ground planes
because of lack of spare parts. “Russia’s industry is in tatters,” she sai.
The EU has already committed billions in aid to Ukraine since the Feb. 24 invasion by Russia. Von der Leyen announced Wednesday that the bloc will provide 100 million euros to build up schools destroyed during the invasion.
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| 2022-09-20T21:07:15Z
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NEW YORK (AP) — A onetime aide to former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo sued him Wednesday, saying he sexually harassed her and then smeared her reputation after she became the second woman to publicly accuse him of misconduct.
Charlotte Bennett’s lawsuit, filed in a federal court in New York City, repeats many of the allegations she has talked about publicly in the year and a half since she first began telling her story.
She said the governor subjected her to unwanted advances, including telling her he was “lonely” and on the hunt for a girlfriend and asking her if she would be open to sex with an older man.
The lawsuit is at least the second to be filed by one of the multiple women who accused Cuomo of sexual harassment before the scandal led to his resignation last summer. Bennett has also sued three Cuomo aides.
The lawsuit seeks unspecified damages, saying Bennett experienced near-debilitating anxiety, symptoms of depression and a neurological disorder after a barrage of inappropriate comments by the governor spoiled her job as a health policy adviser in the governor’s administration.
In a statement, Cuomo attorney Rita Glavin said Cuomo “has always said he didn’t harass anyone and with each day that goes by more and more information is uncovered showing how evidence favorable to the Governor was suppressed and crucial facts ignored or omitted that undermined witness credibility.”
“We’ll see them in court,” she added.
Debra Katz, a lawyer for Bennett, said Cuomo continues to attack women who came forward “in a desperate effort to rehabilitate his political career.”
“Instead of apologizing and making things right with the women he harmed, he’s now on a campaign to try to smear everyone,” Katz said. “These attacks will not be successful.”
Cuomo resigned after New York’s attorney general released the results of an investigation that concluded Cuomo had sexually harassed at least 11 women, including Bennett.
Those women had told of being subjected to unwanted kisses and touches, or inappropriate comments about their looks and their sex lives. One aide filed a criminal complaint alleging that Cuomo had groped her breast. The charge was later dropped by the Albany district attorney, who cited a lack of proof. Cuomo denied the allegation.
Bennett, 27, played a critical role in Cuomo’s downfall. At the time she came forward with her accusations, only one other woman, Lindsey Boylan, had spoken publicly about being harassed by the governor.
By adding her voice, Bennett emboldened other women to speak up.
“I was really scared to come forward,” Bennett later told The Associated Press. “But something that reassured me even in that moment of fear was that there were women before me … (it wasn’t) Charlotte versus the governor, but a movement, moving forward. And I am one small event and one small piece of reckoning with sexual misconduct, in workplaces and elsewhere.”
When Bennett initially told her story to The New York Times, Cuomo appeared to acknowledge that he had hurt her with comments inappropriate for a workplace, but denied that he was making sexual advances. He claimed Bennett had misinterpreted his comments.
Bennett, who turned 25 when she worked for Cuomo, said she had no doubt that Cuomo’s comments — some of which were delivered in a whisper — were intended to probe her interest in a sexual relationship.
Bennett’s lawsuit came a day after Cuomo filed an ethics complaint against New York Attorney General Letitia James, claiming the sexual harassment investigation she launched against the governor was biased and intended to drive him from office.
In February, Cuomo was sued by a New York State Police trooper who said Cuomo subjected her to sexual remarks and on occasion ran his hand or fingers across her stomach and her back.
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| 2022-09-20T21:07:22Z
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AUSTIN, Texas (AP) — A former Texas sheriff’s deputy has been sentenced to life imprisonment without parole for killing his ex-wife, teenage stepdaughter and the stepdaughter’s boyfriend.
Former Travis County sheriff’s deputy Stephen Broderick, 42, was automatically sentenced after pleading guilty to capital murder Tuesday in Austin in the 2021 deaths of ex-wife Amanda Broderick, 35; stepdaughter Alyssa Broderick, 17; and Willie Simmons III, 18. Broderick rammed his vehicle into his ex-wife’s house and shot dead all three people inside.
Prosecutors set aside a possible death penalty in exchange for the guilty plea.
The ex-deputy killed the three during a custody visit with his son, whom he didn’t shoot. Stephen Broderick was free on bond at the time of the shooting after being charged the year before with the sexual assault of a child and losing his job as a result.
Stephen Broderick was ordered to wear a GPS tracking device, but state District Judge Karen Sage ordered the removal of the device five months after his release, the Austin American-Statesman reported. Prosecutors dropped the sexual assault charge as part of Broderick’s plea deal. Amanda and Alyssa Broderick’s family said the dismissal denied justice to Alyssa, who was the victim of the sexual assault.
But prosecutors said they doubted they could obtain a conviction on the charge because the victim was dead.
Sage, who passed the sentence on Broderick, expressed sympathy with their anger.
“I wish I could bring you justice,” Sage said. “But the truth is, the loss you’re suffering, there’s nothing I can do to make that loss go away. It’s the best we can do in the system we have, and it’s never enough. My heart goes out to you. Three beautiful, wonderful people — I see their lives shine on through all of you. I hope that at some point you can find some peace.”
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EDGARTOWN, Mass. (AP) — Republican governors are escalating their partisan tactic of sending migrants to Democratic strongholds without advance warning, including a wealthy summer enclave in Massachusetts and the home of Vice President Kamala Harris, to taunt leaders of immigrant-friendly “sanctuary” cities and stoke opposition to Biden administration border policies.
The governors of Texas and Arizona have sent thousands of migrants on buses to New York, Chicago and Washington, D.C., in recent months, but the latest surprise moves — which included two flights to Martha’s Vineyard Wednesday paid for by Florida — reached a new level of political theater that critics derided as inhumane.
Upon arrival in Martha’s Vineyard, where former President Barack Obama has a home, the migrants who are predominantly from Venezuela were provided with meals, shelter, healthcare and information about where to find work.
The vacation island south of Boston, whose year-round residents include many blue-collar workers, appeared to absorb the dozens of arrivals without a hitch.
“We are a community that comes together to support immigrants,” said State Rep. Dylan Fernandes, who represents the area, whose year-round residents include many blue-collar workers.
Lawyers for Civil Rights, based in Boston, said it was providing free legal services — and investigating whether Florida’s governor may have violated human trafficking laws if it turns out any migrants were sent against their will or duped into taking the flights.
The president of the League of United Latin American Citizens, Domingo Garcia, said that some of the migrants sent on buses from Texas to Washington, D.C. were “tricked” — an allegation that AP has not confirmed and that officials in Texas and Arizona have denied.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said the flights to Martha’s Vineyard were part of an effort to “transport illegal immigrants to sanctuary destinations.” The Florida Legislature has earmarked $12 million to transport “unauthorized aliens” out of state.
DeSantis’ office didn’t answer questions about where migrants boarded planes and how they were coaxed into making the trip.
Massachusetts state Sen. Julian Cyr told The Vineyard Gazette that one plane originated in San Antonio, raising questions about whether migrants ever set foot in Florida. Flight tracking data shows a flight originated in San Antonio, stopped in Crestview, Florida, and Charlotte, North Carolina, before landing in Martha’s Vineyard.
The two buses of migrants from Texas that arrived early Thursday outside Harris’ residence at the United States Naval Observatory carried more than 100 migrants from Colombia, Cuba, Guyana, Nicaragua, Panama and Venezuela.
“The Biden-Harris administration continues ignoring and denying the historic crisis at our southern border, which has endangered and overwhelmed Texas communities for almost two years,” said Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, who has poured billions of taxpayer dollars into making border security a signature issue.
After migrants seeking asylum cross the U.S.-Mexico border, they spend time in a U.S. Customs and Border Protection facility along the border until they are generally released into the U.S. to wait out their cases. Republicans say Biden’s policies encourage migrants to vanish into the U.S.; Democrats argue the Trump-era policy of forcing migrants to wait out their asylum cases in Mexico was inhumane.
White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said Thursday that federal officials were not told in advance by the Republican governors who sent the migrants to Massachusetts and Washington.
“We’re talking about children, we’re talking about families who were promised a home, promised a job, put on a bus and driven to a place that they do not know,” said Jean-Pierre, who called the governors’ actions a “cruel, premeditated political stunt.”
Abbott has bused 7,900 migrants to Washington since April, later sending 2,200 to New York and 300 to Chicago. Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey has bused more than 1,800 migrants to Washington since May. Passengers must sign waivers that the free trips are voluntary.
DeSantis appears to be taking the strategy to a new level by using planes and choosing Martha’s Vineyard, whose harbor towns that are home to about 15,000 people are far less prepared than New York or Washington for large influxes of migrants.
Texas and Florida have infuriated officials in destination cities by failing to provide passenger rosters, estimated times of arrival and other information that would make it easier to prepare. In contrast, Arizona has coordinated with officials in other cities.
President Joe Biden is facing the same challenges that dogged his predecessor, former President Donald Trump: a dysfunctional asylum system in the United States, and economic and social conditions that are prompting people from dozens of countries to flee.
U.S. authorities stopped migrants crossing from Mexico about 2 million times from October through July, up nearly 50% from the same period a year earlier. Many are released in the United States to pursue their immigration cases because U.S. authorities have struggled to expel them to their countries under a pandemic-era rule that denies them a chance to seek asylum.
Some Republicans celebrated the latest delivery of migrants from border states.
“Welcome to being a state on the Southern border, Massachusetts,” tweeted DeSantis spokesman Jeremy Redfern.
Stephen Miller, a chief architect of Trump’s immigration policies, said bringing “a few million” migrants to Martha’s Vineyard should transform the island of about 15,000 people into “a modern Eden.”
Florida Democratic gubernatorial nominee Charlie Crist said DeSantis is treating the migrants inhumanely. “It’s amazing to me what he’s willing to do for sheer political gain,” Crist said.
Talia Inlender, deputy director of UCLA’s Center for Immigration Law and Policy, said the flights to Martha’s Vineyard appear to violate Florida law that they be limited to “unauthorized aliens.”
“These folks are not unauthorized,” she said. “They aren’t flying under the radar in any way.”
___
Associated Press writers Steve LeBlanc in Boston, Seung Min Kim in Washington, Brendan Farrington in Tallahassee, Florida, Gisela Salomon in Miami, Anita Snow in Phoenix and Paul Weber in Austin, Texas, contributed.
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| 2022-09-20T21:07:35Z
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HRAKOVE, Ukraine (AP) — There’s not much left of Hrakove. Its houses and shops lie in ruins, its school is a bombed-out hull. The church is scarred by rockets and shells, but the golden dome above its blasted belfry still gleams in the fading autumn light.
Only about 30 people remain, living in basements and gutted buildings in this small village southeast of Ukraine’s second-largest city, Kharkiv, according to resident Anatolii Klyzhen. About 1,000 lived here when Russian troops rolled over the border in February, occupying the village shortly after.
Those forces abandoned Hrakove around Sept. 9 as Ukrainian soldiers advanced in a lightning counteroffensive. That blitz could be a turning point, setting the stage for further gains in the east and elsewhere — but it could also trigger a violent response from Moscow, leading to a new and dangerous escalation in the war.
There were no signs the Russian soldiers were about to leave. “Nobody knew anything. They left very quietly,” said Viacheslav Myronenko, 71, who has lived in the basement of his bombed-out apartment building with three neighbors for more than four months.
The detritus of a fleeing army still litters the village: packs of empty Russian army food rations, abandoned crates with instructions for using grenades, a gas mask dangling on a tree, an army jacket trampled into the mud. Just outside the village by the bus stop, a Russian tank lies rusting on a road pockmarked with craters from shells, its turret and cannon blown off its body.
Feral dogs roams the mud-rutted streets, and authorities warn of mines and booby-traps in the weeds.
“Before, the village looked really beautiful,” said Klyzhen, who spent 45 days living in his building’s basement while Russian soldiers occupied his now-trashed apartment on the second floor. He eventually managed to flee, deciding to take his chances at checkpoints.
The Russian soldiers were both frightened and paranoid, he said, and would check residents’ mobile phones for anything anti-Russian or anything they thought might give away their positions. Some people were taken away, and he never saw them again.
“I figured I could die at home or die at the checkpoint,” the 45-year-old said Tuesday. But he made it through, and returned after Hrakove was retaken to see what remained of his home. He found the windows blasted out and Russian army food packets, clothes and boxes strewn around. In one room lay a pile of TVs that he thinks soldiers may have stolen.
After retaking the village, Ukrainian authorities removed abandoned Russian military vehicles, and exhumed the bodies of two men who had been buried by the side of a road after being shot in the head, Klyzhen said. He thinks they were Ukrainian soldiers, but he’s not sure.
“They were killing locals, shooting them,” he said. “There was nothing good in here.”
Serhii Lobodenko, head of the Chuhuiv district that includes Hrakove, said the area saw fierce battles during six months of occupation.
“There were a lot of destroyed roads, private houses, a lot of people dead and a lot of people missing, both military and civilians,” he said, as residents in nearby Chkalovske gathered to receive food and water. “Now we are trying to repair the infrastructure, the electricity and gas. The food is brought in because people did not have food.”
Images of devastation and stories of hardship are emerging from other places recaptured in the Ukrainian advance, including Izium, a strategic city also recently retaken that President Volodymyr Zelenskyy visited Wednesday in a rare foray outside the capital.
A few weeks into Russian occupation in Hrakove, Myronenko and his neighbors banded together to clear junk out of the basement of their apartment building and turn it into a shelter. With their apartments destroyed, it remains their home.
They found a couple of metal pipes and wedged them between the floor and the ceiling, hoping that would keep it from caving in as the building shook from explosions, said one of the four, 70-year-old Oleh Lutsai. They ventured outside to plant potatoes despite the incessant shelling, knowing they needed food to survive.
“Of course it was scary, it is very scary for everyone, when everything is shaking in here,” said Lutsai. An oil lamp hung on the wall, casting a soft glow over the cramped room. A kettle whistled softly on a wood-burning stove that Lutsai and his neighbors built.
Leaving wasn’t an option for him. “I’m 70 years old, I was born here,” he said. “Even if I had to die here — but obviously I want to live — I just want to die in Ukrainian Ukraine, not (Russian President Vladimir) Putin’s one. … So why should I run away from here?”
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Follow AP war coverage at https://apnews.com/hub/russia-ukraine
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| 2022-09-20T21:07:41Z
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LONDON (AP) — When Rachel Brading was a child she waited hours to see Queen Elizabeth II pass by her hometown in the midlands of England. Forty years later she was waiting again, one among a crowd of thousands hoping to catch one last glimpse of the late monarch’s coffin before her burial.
With tears in her eyes, Brading, now in marketing, recalled how the queen had waved to her that day decades ago. On Tuesday, her coffin whizzed passed, heading toward Buckingham Palace, the queen’s official London residence, in a blink of an eye. “It was surreal, just surreal,” she said.
Her daughter, Ella, said they had come and waited in the rain to witness history. “This is something I will tell my children about,” she said.
The coffin will be taken by horse-drawn gun carriage Wednesday to the Houses of Parliament to lie in state for four days before Monday’s funeral at Westminster Abbey. Many are already queuing up to pay their last respects, erecting tents and preparing for many hours of waiting. Many thousands are expected.
Thousands have already come to the park adjacent to the palace to pay their respects with flowers and written notes for the queen. One read: “We have loved you, as you have loved us. Off to your next mission.”
For Steven Bazell, it was a strange way to celebrate a birthday.
The accountant turned 43 the same day the queen’s coffin was due to arrive to London. Instead of celebrating, he brought his four children to wait on the Mall, the grand processional route that leads toward the palace.
“I want my kids to understand their country,” he said. “This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.”
Bobby Cunsden, 31, held a large bouquet of flowers and waited for hours to say her final goodbyes to the late monarch. “She is the only queen I have ever known,” Cunsden said of Elizabeth whose rule spanned 70 years.
Marie Ward, 62, came from Australia to visit her grandchildren living in the U.K but stayed to mourn the queen. “I will always appreciate her gentle guidance,” Ward, a nurse, said. “She’s a grandma, and I am a grandma.”
Despite the distance from most of English society, many in the crowd professed to feeling a strange familiarity with the royal family, knowing the innermost details of their lives.
Some gossiped about whether there had been a reconciliation between brothers Prince William and Harry, days after they had greeted the public outside Windsor Castle in a show of unity. Others begrudgingly accepted that King Charles III’s wife, Camilla, now the queen consort, had managed to win over public opinion after the death of the nation’s beloved Princess Diana.
“They are like part of our family,” said Ward.
The crowd was heavy with anticipation in the moments before the queen’s hearse finally arrived at the palace after a long journey from Balmoral in Scotland. They cheered as the car drove past, with many crying out “God save the Queen!” and clapping.
Steve Watson, a police officer, was speechless in the moments that followed. “Blimey,” was all he could muster.
“That was impressive. She was an impressive lady,” he said.
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| 2022-09-20T21:07:49Z
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JERUSALEM (AP) — Palestinian gunmen opened fire on Israeli troops near a checkpoint in the occupied West Bank Wednesday, killing an Israeli army officer, the Israeli military said. Palestinian officials said that troops killed the gunmen.
The Palestinian Health Ministry said that two Palestinians were killed by the Israeli army, without providing additional details.
The military said soldiers spotted two individuals approaching the separation barrier in the northern West Bank and that it dispatched soldiers to the area. It said the two suspects were armed with automatic weapons and began shooting at troops, who returned fire.
The Israeli army confirmed that Maj. Bar Falah, 30, was killed by the gunmen in the shootout.
The official Palestinian news agency Wafa reported that the Israeli army was holding the bodies of the two men. It identified them as Ahmad Abed, 23, and Abd al-Rahman Abed, 22, both from a village near the city of Jenin.
The Israeli military confirmed that Ahmad Abed was a member of the Palestinian Authority security services.
The Palestinian militant group Hamas praised the attack, hailing the two gunmen as “heroic martyrs.”
Wednesday’s violence was the latest in a long string of incidents involving deadly confrontations between soldiers and Palestinians in the West Bank in recent months, particularly around the city of Jenin, which has become a bastion for armed struggle against Israel.
Israel has been carrying out nightly arrest raids in West Bank cities, towns and villages since a spate of attacks against Israelis in the spring killed 19 people.
Israeli fire has killed scores of Palestinians during that time, making it the deadliest year in the occupied territory since 2016.
The Israeli military says the vast majority of those killed were militants or stone-throwers who endangered the soldiers. But several civilians have also been killed during Israel’s monthslong operation, including a veteran journalist and a lawyer who apparently drove unwittingly into a battle zone. Some local youths who took to the streets in response to the invasion of their neighborhoods have also been killed.
Israel says the arrest raids are meant to dismantle militant networks that have embedded themselves. The Palestinians say the operations are aimed at maintaining Israel’s 55-year military occupation of territories they want for an independent state.
Israel captured the West Bank, along with east Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip, in the 1967 Mideast war and the Palestinians seek those territories for a future state.
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LONDON (AP) — Reports that up to 100 staff at King Charles III’s former residence could lose their jobs have drawn criticism of the British monarchy, within days of his accession to the throne.
The Guardian newspaper reported Tuesday that dozens of staff at Clarence House, Charles’ former official residence, were given notice that their jobs were on the line. The report said the notices came in the midst of a busy period of transition as Charles and his wife Camilla, the queen consort, move to Buckingham Palace after Queen Elizabeth II’s death on Thursday.
The Public and Commercial Services Union called the royals’ decision to inform staff of job cuts during a period of mourning “nothing short of heartless.”
“While some changes across the households were to be expected, as roles across the royal family change, the scale and speed at which this has been announced is callous in the extreme,” the union’s general secretary, Mark Serwotka, said
Britain is in a national period of mourning until Monday, when the queen’s state funeral will be held.
In a statement, Clarence House said that following Charles’ accession, operations of his and Camilla’s household “have ceased” and “as required by law, a consultation process has begun.”
“Our staff have given long and loyal service and, while some redundancies will be unavoidable, we are working urgently to identify alternative roles for the greatest possible number of staff,” the statement added.
The Guardian said one unnamed member of Charles’ staff told the newspaper that “everyone is absolutely livid … people were visibly shaken by it.”
The criticism added to negative press for the 73-year-old monarch after two videos showing him visibly irritated by a leaky pen and a pen holder went viral on social media in recent days.
In one video, Charles was seen losing his temper at a leaking pen while he was signing a visitors’ book in front of cameras in Northern Ireland, where he was visiting Tuesday on the latest leg of his royal tour of the U.K.’s four nations.
Charles was heard exclaiming “Oh god I hate this!” and muttering “I can’t bear this bloody thing … every stinking time.”
The video came after another pen-related incident on Saturday, when the new monarch was seen gesturing in irritation at his staff when a pen holder got in his way as he signed a document during his accession ceremony.
Charles has been under intense media scrutiny and had a grueling schedule since his mother’s death in Scotland on Thursday. He and Camilla flew from Scotland to London for his accession ceremony and a visit to Parliament to address legislators, before flying back to Scotland where he walked behind the queen’s coffin.
He then jetted to Northern Ireland on Tuesday and returned to London the same night, in time for the procession of the queen’s coffin from Buckingham Palace to Westminster Hall on Wednesday.
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Follow AP coverage of Queen Elizabeth II at https://apnews.com/hub/queen-elizabeth-ii
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| 2022-09-20T21:08:04Z
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LONDON — Members of the public who waited outside for many hours are filing through Westminster Hall to pay their respects at the queen’s coffin, which is lying in state there.
People are filing past each side of the coffin, most pausing for a brief moment to bow their heads. Some wiped their eyes while others made the sign of the cross.
Soldiers in ceremonial uniform, their heads bowed, are guarding the coffin in the ancient, tall-ceilinged building.
A huge line of mourners began lining up earlier this week, some as early as Monday, along London’s River Thames.
On Wednesday, when the doors opened, a government tracker said the line was almost 3 miles (5 kilometers) long.
Hundreds of thousands of people are expected to join the line to pay their respects to the long-reining monarch before her state funeral on Monday.
___
KEY DEVELOPMENTS:
— London diaspora district remembers a queen — ambivalently
— Huge line to view monarch’s coffin is queue fit for a queen
— Leaky pen and staff job cuts: King Charles III under scrutiny
— What to know about the queen’s lying in state
— Renewed interest in UK memorabilia in Hong Kong
— A piece of the queen: New souvenirs mark monarch’s death
— Anger over past, indifference meets queen’s death in India
— Former British colonies are conflicted over Queen Elizabeth II’s legacy
— Find more AP coverage here: https://apnews.com/hub/queen-elizabeth-ii
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OTHER DEVELOPMENTS:
NAIROBI, Kenya — Kenya’s new president says the fact that Queen Elizabeth II assumed the role of Britain’s monarch while visiting Kenya 70 years ago is “very sentimental” for the people of his country.
William Ruto spoke while signing a condolence book for the queen at the British High Commission in Nairobi. He congratulated King Charles III, who assumed the throne after the death of his mother the queen.
Ruto was inaugurated on Tuesday. At Wednesday’s the signing, he also spoke of the evolving role of the Commonwealth, a political association made up primarily of former British colonies.
The 56-member association “is going to play a much more central role in the economies of our countries and making sure that we leave nobody behind,” Roto said.
As monarch, Elizabeth also served as head of the Commonwealth, a role that also hasnow passed to Charles.
—-
WARSAW, Poland – Poland’s lawmakers have honored Queen Elizabeth II with a resolution that describes her as a “meaningful figure for the reborn, democratic Poland.“
The queen, who died last week at age 96, visited Poland in 1996 and addressed the country’s parliament. She was awarded Poland’s highest distinction, the Order of the White Eagle.
The resolution approved on Wednesday noted that she supported the nation’s accession to NATO in 1999 and to the European Union in 2004.
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LONDON — Four soldiers in red and gold ceremonial uniform have taken their positions at the four corners of Queen Elizabeth II’s coffin, with their heads bowed.
That began a vigil Wednesday which will be held for four days while the late monarch lies in state at Westminster Hall in London.
Royal bodyguards and other royal military units, including the Household Cavalry, the Grenadier Guards and the Coldstream Guards, will take turns guarding the coffin. Each period of 24 hours will be divided into four watches.
The queen’s coffin was placed on a catafalque, or a raised platform, in Westminster Hall following a solemn procession from Buckingham Palace.
King Charles III and other senior royal family members then left Westminster Hall, to shouts of “God save the king!” from people gathered outside.
From later Wednesday afternoon, members of the public can enter Westminster Hall and file past the queen’s coffin to pay their respects.
The queen’s state funeral takes place on Monday.
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WASHINGTON — U.S. President Joe Biden has spoken with King Charles III to offer his condolences on the death of his mother, Queen Elizabeth II.
The White House said Wednesday that Biden ” recalled fondly the Queen’s kindness and hospitality.”
Biden and the First Lady, Jill Biden, stayed with the queen at Windsor Castle in June.
The White House said Biden ”also conveyed the great admiration of the American people for the queen, whose dignity and constancy deepened the enduring friendship and special relationship between the United States and the United Kingdom.”
Biden is to join other world leaders next week at the queen’s state funeral in London.
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LONDON — The choir of Westminster Abbey and the choir of St. James’s Palace are singing as Queen Elizabeth II’s coffin arrives at Westminster Hall to lie in state before her funeral next week.
The service begins with a prayer from Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby and includes a reading from the Book of John, as well as the Lord’s Prayer.
The late monarch, who died last week after 70 years on the throne, was also the head of the Church of England.
Members of the public will be able to file past the coffin and pay their respects to the queen from Wednesday afternoon through early Monday morning.
The coffin will then be moved to Westminster Abbey for a state funeral.
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LONDON — King Charles III and Camilla, the Queen Consort, are leading the procession into Westminster Hall for a service marking the arrival there of Queen Elizabeth II’s coffin.
Princess Anne and her husband, retired Vice Admiral Timothy Laurence, and Prince Edward and his wife Sophie, the Countess of Wessex, are following behind.
Prince William and his wife Kate, the Princess of Wales, and Prince Harry and his wife Meghan, the Duchess of Sussex, appear next in the royal entourage.
Camilla, Sophie, Kate and Meghan did not take part in Wednesday’s procession through part of London, but they joined their spouses as the group entered Westminster Hall.
The procession comes before a short service of prayer for the monarch, who died last week after 70 years on the throne.
The queen will lie in state at Westminster Hall, part of the Houses of Parliament, until early Monday morning when her funeral is held.
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LONDON — King Charles III is wearing a full day ceremonial uniform with the rank of Field Marshal as he walks behind the coffin of his mother, Queen Elizabeth II, in its solemn procession from Buckingham Palace to Westminster Hall.
Charles is carrying a Field Marshal baton that was presented to him by the late queen in 2012. He also is wearing the Order of Merit with the Order of the Garter Sash and Star.
Next to him, the Prince of Wales is wearing a Royal Air Force No. 1 uniform, Garter Sash with RAF Pilot Wings and Garter Star Chest Order.
The Duke of York, meanwhile, is wearing a morning suit with medals and decorations.
Both Andrew and Harry are wearing morning suits at Wednesday’s procession.
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LONDON — The King’s Troop Royal Horse Artillery are marking Queen Elizabeth II’s final departure from Buckingham Palace.
Their guns are sounding at one-minute intervals as her coffin travels to Westminster Hall, where it will lie in state.
Big Ben, the great and fabled bell housed in the Elizabeth Tower, also tolled at one-minute intervals during the procession Wednesday. The bell and its tower have been undergoing restoration, and the tolling was the most sustained since that work.
Britain is mourning for Elizabeth, who died last week at her summer retreat in Scotland at age 96 after 70 years on the throne. King Charles III is the new monarch.
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LONDON — Walking behind the gun carriage bearing Queen Elizabeth II’s oak coffin from Buckingham Palace to Westminster Hall are her children: King Charles III, the country’s new sovereign, with Princess Anne, Prince Andrew and Prince Edward.
The second row is made up of Charles’ two sons: Prince William, the Prince of Wales, and Prince Harry, the Duke of Sussex. To Harry’s left is Anne’s son, Peter Phillips.
Behind them are the Earl of Snowdon, the Duke of Gloucester and Vice Admiral Sir Tim Laurence, who is Princess Anne’s husband.
Behind the royals are four key members of Charles’ staff: the Master of the Household, the Principal Private Secretary, the Equerry and the Treasurer. Prince William’s equerry walked behind them.
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LONDON — Troops from the Household Cavalry Mounted Regiment, military bands and mounted police are leading the procession of Queen Elizabeth II’s coffin from Buckingham Palace to Westminster Hall.
Also walking in front of the coffin Wednesday are the household, or staff members, who worked for the queen. They include her private secretary, her pages and stewards.
The coffin is on a gun carriage from the King’s Troop Royal Horse Artillery. It is flanked by 10 pallbearers and Grenadier Guards.
The coffin is draped with the royal standard and adorned with the Imperial State Crown, which the queen wore for her coronation 70 years ago, resting on a velvet cushion and a wreath of flowers.
The flowers include white roses, dahlias, pine from the gardens at the queen’s Balmoral estate in Scotland, and lavender and rosemary from the gardens at Windsor Castle.
Meanwhile, a Guard of Honor is in position in Parliament Square near Westminster Hall. The guards are accompanied by a Royal Marines Band which will have their drums draped and muffled.
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LONDON — The line to view the coffin of Queen Elizabeth II is likely to be one of the longest that London has ever seen.
The line already stretches from Parliament, across nearby Lambeth Bridge and along the opposite bank of the River Thames.
Authorities have planned for a 10-mile (16-kilometer) route, with 1,000 marshals, stewards and police officers on hand at any given time to help manage it. An army of other volunteers includes multi-faith pastors and sign-language interpreters.
People are being warned they may have to wait for hours, but they are being given numbered wristbands so they can take food and bathroom breaks without losing their place in line.
When they get to Parliament mourners must pass through airport-style security screening. Prohibited items include liquids, spray paint, knives, fireworks, flowers, candles, stuffed toys and “advertising or marketing messages.”
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LONDON — Lines are forming along the bank of the River Thames in anticipation of seeing Queen Elizabeth II lying in state, even though authorities warn the wait could be up to 30 hours.
The public will be able to pay their respects to the deceased monarch at Westminster Hall from 5 p.m. (1600 GMT) Wednesday, after a procession bearing her coffin on a gun carriage from Buckingham Palace to Parliament.
The line starts near Lambeth Bridge and officials say it could eventually stretch several miles (kilometers) to Southwark Park in southeast London.
Some were so keen they started waiting early.
Vanessa Nathakumaran is first in line after turning up at 11:30 a.m. on Monday.
“It’s going to be an emotional one, and when you go in there, my main aim is to show respect,” she said.
Chris Imafidon is sixth in line and said, “I have 1,001 emotions when I see her. I want to say, God, she was an angel, because she touched many good people and did so many good things.”
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LONDON — Horses, troops and military bands performed a full dress rehearsal before daybreak for the procession that will take Queen Elizabeth II’s coffin from Buckingham Palace to Parliament’s Westminster Hall.
Officials say the horses taking part have undergone special training for the Wednesday afternoon event, including how to handle mourners and flowers and flags being thrown toward the procession.
“They get exposure to loud noises, crowds, flags, flowers, people sobbing, even to the point of banging lots of drums and making aggressive noises,” said Sergeant Tom Jenks, who will be leading the gun carriage that carries the queen’s coffin.
Among the horses is Cassius, an 18-year-old horse who participated in former U.K. Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s funeral in 2013.
The procession on Wednesday afternoon will feature King Charles III and other royals walking behind the queen’s coffin to Westminster Hall in Parliament. The queen’s coffin will lie in state for four days for people to pay their respects.
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LONDON — Crowds are gathering in London as the city prepares for a somber procession taking Queen Elizabeth II’s coffin from Buckingham Palace to the Houses of Parliament.
There, the late monarch will lie in state for four days before her funeral next Monday.
Huge crowds are expected for Wednesday’s somber afternoon procession, and long lines are also predicted to view the coffin at Parliament’s Westminster Hall.
People are standing behind metal barriers or sitting on folding chairs. Under gray skies hours before the coffin was scheduled to leave the monarch’s official London residence, they have umbrellas at the ready and takeout coffees in hand.
The coffin will be taken on a horse-drawn gun carriage past the crowds of mourners, with the queen’s son and heir King Charles III and other royals walking behind.
The queen died in Scotland last Thursday at age 96, ending a 70-year reign.
Crowds have lined the route of the queen’s coffin whenever it has been moved on its journey from Scotland back to London.
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